Anthropo-scenes:
Restaging climate dramas for environmental justice
| Press release in Greek |
This year’s lab, Anthropo-scenes, will be an experiment in ecodramaturgy, bringing together speculative ethnography, Black geographies, decolonial thought, landscape architecture, and community-based theater to reimagine forms of agency and relationality in the wake of climate collapse. As anthropologist, novelist and decolonial theorist Amitav Ghosh has argued, the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. Recognizing the urgency of moving beyond dominant narratives of crisis and recovery, this year’s lab will experiment with new ways of staging, witnessing, and engaging with climate realities. We will explore creative forms of non-extractive relationality that respond to the everyday challenges—and anticolonial histories—of living otherwise on a damaged planet.
On our screens, we regularly witness climate crises around the world as media events aestheticized via familiar cinematic phantasmagorias and as challenges to be strategized through survivalist gameplay. These dominant techniques of representation and simulation mask ordinariness and predictability in extraordinariness (Mike Davis), the actual imperceptibility -by humans- of the scale, temporality and interactional complexity of anthropogenic climate change and, of course, the continuous predicament of their aftermath. Climate drama also sets up a repertoire of responses that - in the so-called West - seems to inevitably prioritize certain kinds of expertise (bring in the engineers, not the social researchers, the artists, the movements), priorities (back-to-business, rebuilding rather than unbuilding), infrastructure (‘gray’ rather than ‘green’ or ‘blue’, technologies rather than technics of commoning) and timeframes (immediate action rather than pausing, moving on rather than re-collecting).
How might we restage contemporary climate dramas? What would this entail? Could we flip the script from ecocide to ecojustice? Might such exercises in living-otherwise ‘make a difference’ toward en-acting more livable, inhabitable, inclusive futures?
On our screens, we regularly witness climate crises around the world as media events aestheticized via familiar cinematic phantasmagorias and as challenges to be strategized through survivalist gameplay. These dominant techniques of representation and simulation mask ordinariness and predictability in extraordinariness (Mike Davis), the actual imperceptibility -by humans- of the scale, temporality and interactional complexity of anthropogenic climate change and, of course, the continuous predicament of their aftermath. Climate drama also sets up a repertoire of responses that - in the so-called West - seems to inevitably prioritize certain kinds of expertise (bring in the engineers, not the social researchers, the artists, the movements), priorities (back-to-business, rebuilding rather than unbuilding), infrastructure (‘gray’ rather than ‘green’ or ‘blue’, technologies rather than technics of commoning) and timeframes (immediate action rather than pausing, moving on rather than re-collecting).
How might we restage contemporary climate dramas? What would this entail? Could we flip the script from ecocide to ecojustice? Might such exercises in living-otherwise ‘make a difference’ toward en-acting more livable, inhabitable, inclusive futures?
