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.

Programme of EarthCraft's Kindred Soils session #5

Location: Auditorium, KABK, The Hague

17:00 - 18:30
~ Food & film hosted by KABK students, under the guidance of Müge Yilmaz

18:30 - 19:30
~ Lecture Rupa Marya (zoom)

19:30 - 20:30
~ Ilga Minjon in conversation with Rupa Marya (zoom)

Bio Dr. Marya
A child of Indian immigrants, Dr. Marya (she/her) 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.

Bio Ilga Minjon
Based in Amsterdam Bijlmer, Ilga Minjon (she/her) is a curator, researcher and advisor working at Stroom Den Haag and Design Academy Eindhoven, with interests spanning public space, ecology, and technology. She aims to weave together or co-facilitate future imaginaries from artistic practices that speculate upon sensing and (networked) relations, as well as queer, decolonial and feminist re-writings of belonging.

At Stroom Den Haag she has curated Attempts to Read the World (Differently): Three Exhibitions in Five Acts, with Max de Waard, Monira al Qadiri and Jean Katambayi Mukendi, and Uncertainty Seminars, an ongoing cycle of experimental events, platforming interdisciplinary ways to imagine doubt and uncertainty as a potential cultural strategy. At Design Academy Eindhoven, she has developed numerous courses about the intersections of art, technology, and society, currently in the Fundamentals | Contextual. Most recently Ilga curated From the Sea to the Clouds to the Soil, a group exhibition at Stroom, mapping kinship relations across time and technologies with Femke Herregraven, Risk Hazekamp, Urok Shirhan, Yeon Sung and Natasha Tontey. One of the most impactful reads in her current research, on the enmeshment and politics of our surroundings in regard to the collective, ecological and personal body, has been Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (2021). Next to work, Ilga is trying to learn Dutch sign language, and how to drive a car. She loves (science) fiction, DJ-ing, collective gardening, sewing, and being a parent.