On Wednesday 12 December 2018, the British Council, in partnership with Natural History Museum Rotterdam, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and Codarts, will present the eighth Hoboken Lecture by renowned British writer, traveller, veterenarian, taxidermist, barrister and philosopher Professor Charles Foster 'Being a Beast'. Tickets are available on the Hoboken lecture website.
'Being a Beast'
Musical prelude (Haydn's Hoboken Verzeichnis) by students of Codarts - (Rotterdam) University of the Arts.
The venue of the Hoboken Lecture is the auditorium of the Kunsthal, directly opposite the Natural History Museum. We make use of only 200 seats, so sound and view is excellent for all.
About the Lecture: In his lecture, Charles Foster looks at the extent to which it is possible for humans to enter the experiential worlds of non-human species, and hence the extent to which it is possible to know anything outside one’s own head. Charles Foster approached this question by an elaborate piece of zoological method-acting – by trying to live as nearly as possible as a badger (under the ground and in the dense woods of mid-Wales, as an urban fox (prowling around the dustbins of the East End of London), as an otter (in the rivers of Exmoor), as a red deer (on the mountains of the Scottish West Highlands and of upland Devon), and as a swift (in the air between Oxford and West Africa). His conclusions are strange, tentative, and aim to inform the age-old question: ‘How best can we thrive as human beings?’
The book that resulted from his experiment (‘Being a Beast ’ [’Leven als een beest’]) is a New York Times Bestseller, won an Ig Nobel Prize, and is the subject of a forthcoming feature film from Sovereign Films.