Guests: Rupa Marya
Moderation: Ilga Minjon

The burning of our planet, the fracturing of societies and the unrelenting rise of chronic inflammatory illness have a common root cause. Physician, composer, author, mother and activist Rupa Marya will describe the damaging impact of modern socioeconomic forces on human bodies, the social body and the earth's body. Weaving together story, science, ecology, and medicine, Marya will share how a reckoning with history and power through the Care Revolution is necessary to advance a world where health can be possible for the human and the more than human world around us.

Bio: A child of Indian immigrants, Dr. Marya took a less-than-traditional route to study medicine — earning undergraduate degrees in Theater and Molecular Biology at the University of California San Diego before heading to medical school at Georgetown University.

It was during her residency at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), that music also began tugging at her heart. Dr. Marya began performing with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes. Today, she is an Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. She’s also toured 29 countries with her band.

Dr. Marya founded and directs the Deep Medicine Circle, a women-of-color-led, worker- directed nonprofit committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story and learning. Together with the Muchia Te Indigenous Land Trust, she is piloting the Farming is Medicine project on land that was returned to Indigenous leadership, where farmers are recast as ecological stewards, and food is liberated from the market economy.

Marya is a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. At the invitation of Lakȟota health leaders, she has helped support the Mni Wiconi Health Circle at Standing Rock Reservation to decolonize medicine and food.

Stroom Den Haag is an arts center dedicated to platforming contemporary art practices to questions of public space and society. Stroom mediates, advises and offers support to artists practices and local initiatives with funding, network opportunities and programs. We have a library and a public program that highlight experimental arts in relationship to questions of society and ‘being public’.

From the Sea to the Clouds to the Soil is a group exhibition with new works by Risk Hazekamp + Scape Agency, Femke Herregraven, Urok Shirhan, Yeon Sung and Natasha Tontey. It presents unexpected perspectives to make us (more) aware of the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature and asks how the two have become separated to begin with.

To experience the world around us from a sense of connection between all beings and times, may be essential to our survival as a species, against the backdrop of immanent climate change. This connection, or existential kinship, is the vantage point of the exhibition, and at the same time a speculative question to investigate how we nurture resilience, symbiosis, connectedness, and embodied experiences in relation.

The exhibition offers a space to connect with different artists’ approaches to highlight the deep links between our human senses, technologies and ecology.

Ilga Minjon works at Stroom Den Haag and is curator of From the Sea to the Clouds to the Soil. Former projects include Uncertainty Seminars. She is also a dj, moderator, and gardener and teaches the programme ‘Critical Fabulations’ at Design Academy Eindhoven.

In addition to the nourishment of ideas, we provide a season-centered, vegan meal, home-cooked in Stroom’s kitchen by Annechien Meijer. She is an artist, gardener and chef based in The Hague, and is part of the collective Microclimates.nl