Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence

#12 Strategies on Fire: What Next for the Climate Movements / With Franziska Heinisch (Justice is Global), Lea Main-Klingst (ClientEarth), Amelie Meyer (Extinction Rebellion), Tonny Nowshin, Carla Reemtsma (Fridays for Future), Esteban Servat (Shale Must Fall), Louise Wagner (Ende Gelände) “Blah, blah, blah” – that was Greta Thunberg's comment on what was happening at COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow 2021. Climate activists accuse politicians and corporations of repeatedly making verbal promises to reduce CO2 emissions, but not consistently keeping them. After years of appeals and protests, the climate movement faces a strategic challenge: how to continue fighting for the climate without being fobbed off with lip service? With this in mind, the 12th edition of the HAU podcast and discourse series “Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence” ushers a debate on the scope of different strategies: lawsuits against climate sinners, environmental organising, media campaigns, civil disobedience, strikes, militancy, transnational networking and the construction of autonomous ecological habitats. In “Strategies on Fire: What Next for the Climate Movements”, activists Franziska Heinisch, Lea Main-Klingst, Amelie Meyer, Tonny Nowshin, Carla Reemtsma, Esteban Servat and Louise Wagner examine and reflect on their practices.

#11 Climate Crisis, Planetary Justice and the Problem of the Capitalocene: With Jason Moore With the concept of the Capitalocene, Jason Moore formulates a revolutionary thesis against the discourses of the Anthropocene: it is not humans per se that are responsible for environmental destruction and global warming but rather the capitalist mode of production – that only some humans profit from. Ever since Columbus's invasion of the Americas, global extractive capitalism has been turning the planet as a resource into ‘cheap nature' and into a global waste dump. The Capitalocene is, according to Moore, a world ecology of power, production and reproduction, carried out through the exploitation of the ‘web of life'. But this logic is reaching its natural limits. The Capitalocene – including class rule, colonialism, patriarchy and fossil-fuelled production – will not survive climate change. Can we therefore hope for a moment of epochal political possibility, for a new ‘planetary justice'? The 11th edition of “Burning Futures” will first be shown as a livestream on HAU4 and will later be released again as a podcast.

“Burning Futures” bringt die Politökonomin, Expertin für Nachhaltigkeitspolitik und Transformationsforschung und Mitbegründerin von “Scientists for Future” Maja Göpel und die Revolutionsphilosophin und Feministin Eva von Redecker ins Gespräch. Beide haben in jüngster Zeit ihre Stimmen prominent für tiefgreifende Veränderungsprozesse im Kontext von Kapitalismus, Wachstumslogik, Nachhaltigkeit und Autoritarismus erhoben. Neben ihrer beider Kritik an der Verteilung und Funktion von Eigentum entwickeln sie Visionen von Zukünften – ob durch politisch-ökonomische Transformation bei Göpel oder durch die Kraft einer “Gemeinschaft der Teilenden” der jüngsten Protestbewegungen bei von Redecker. Sie diskutieren über ihre gemeinsamen, aber auch differierenden Vorstellungen für einen notwendigen Wandel, der im Regenerieren statt im Erschöpfen von Ressourcen, Naturkulturen und Menschen begründet sein muss.

#9 Future Ecologies: Compounds, Breakdown, Reparation with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Dimitris Papadopoulos, a Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). Burning Futures enters into conversation with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Dimitris Papadopoulos, two people who have focused their research and work on ecological philosophy and transformative practice between natural history and techno science for years. In her much read book “Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds” (Minnesota University Press, 2017), Bellacasa examines the feminist tradition of care work in planetary dimensions while Papadopoulos brings together new green chemical innovations with the formation of social movements in “more-than-human-worlds”. In the podcast, they discuss the tension between ecological collapse and the reparability of the world with Maximilian Haas and Margarita Tsomou.

#8 The Micropolitical Combat with Suely Rolniki, a Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). Consciousness of the fact that we are part of an ecosystem does not guarantee that this condition will guide our actions. Our access to this condition tends to be blocked in the dominant mode of subjectivation under the colonial-racializing-capitalist unconscious regime, which allows life to be turned away from its ethical destiny in our own actions, to be placed instead at the service of capital accumulation, economic as well as political and narcissistic. Resistance to this depends on a subtle labor to dismantle the colonial-racialising-capitalistic unconscious regime that conducts our subjectivities, a labor that leads to transforming ourselves, which implies the whole weave of our relationships, not only with humans. In this process, the borders between art, therapeutics and politics become permeable. Suely Rolnik is a Brazilian psychoanalyst, writer, sometimes curator (when it is the best way to make sensible some of her ideas) and Full professor at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (since 1979) and guest professor of the Interdisciplinary Master of Theatre and Living Arts at the National University of Colombia (since 2013).

#7 Becoming Land with Angela Melitopoulos and Barbara Glowczewski, a Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). In her work, artist Angela Melitopoulos questions the ways we observe and perceive landscapes. Unlike the colonial legacy of anthropology and the positivism of natural sciences, she advocates an understanding of the earth's surface as a 'speaking landscape', an agent of a statement. In this podcast issue of “Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence”, Melitopoulos and anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski look into the method of affective cartography as well as resistant cultures of the perception of land – including those of the indigenous cosmologies central to Glowczewski's activist and scholarly work for the past 40 years. In the face of ecosystem destruction through extractivism and climate change, they ask how to accept and appreciate heterogeneity and the revitalisation of existential territories.

In the debates about climate change or the “Anthropocene”, voices from the global south, the primary victim of these phenomena, have developed an analysis that brings together racism, capitalism, imperialism and gender. In doing so, environmental catastrophes are not made the subject of discussion as an unintended by-product of the production methods of a universal humanity, but instead traced back to the extractionist logic of colonialism and the continuous exploitation of people and resources from the global south. Proceeding from this context, the decolonial and feminist theorist Françoise Vergès and the historian Edna Bonhomme discuss the role of women of colour in the removal of global waste, search for forms of healing and ask how a different relationship between humanity and nature can be conceived.

#5 Beyond The End Of The World? with T.J. Demos and The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun), A Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) Art theorist T.J. Demos, author of “Against the Anthropocene” and “Decolonizing Nature”, engages in this podcast edition of “Burning Futures” in a discussion with the artist collective The Otolith Group, founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. Taking their recent film “INFINITY Minus Infinity” - that we show at HAU 3000 - as point of departure, the discussion touches on genocide and ecocide at the origins of what is now called the Anthropocene, the biopolitics of citizenship and deportation, and the loss around which the Black Lives Matter movement assembles, as well as on art as a means to imagine eco-fictional and afrofuturist futures that go beyond the end of the world. Until 28 July, you can watch the film “INFINITY Minus Infinity” here: https://www.hebbel-am-ufer.de/en/podcast-burning-futures-5/

Burning Futures #4: Coexistence, Planetarity and Uncertainty A Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) The situation of our present can be seen as an historic consequence of emphasizing “existence” over “coexistence” - a picturing of the human motivated only by securing its own existential material wants, being but one example as Sylvia Wynter has noted. Although the case for some time, at the level of lived experience the current corona crisis shows the magnitude of our entanglement, a condition of coexistence that is irreducible to exclusively interhuman relations. In her lecture, Patricia Reed examines the term “planetarity” (coming from Earth System sciences) as a demand for a perspectival shift to coexistence, in order to be able to access different scales of reality – including more-than-human interdependencies. How does “planetarity” recondition our understanding of the “local”, how do picturings of the human change when upheld relationally, and how are linkages to be built between scientific knowledge and socio-political responsibilities? Patricia Reed is an artist, designer and writer based in Berlin. She has published and lectured on issues such as on (techno)feminism, situated knowledge within planetary dimensions, entanglement and systems of care, xenofeminism, architecture and computation, aesthetics and politics. In her recent work, ecological crises are an important framework for these discussions.

“Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence” A Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) In search of explanations for the spread of the coronavirus, the discussion is increasingly turning to the relationship between industrial agriculture and livestock farming, ecological degradation and viral epidemiology. In the coming episodes, “Burning Futures” would like to focus on precisely these links between the ecological macrocosm and the microcosm of the virus. In “Big Farms Make Big Flu”, Rob Wallace, evolutionary biologist and author, investigates how endless human intervention in nature causes the spread of deadly infectious diseases. In doing so, he shows that many of the most dangerous new diseases can be traced back to the structure of our food systems, including the Nipah virus, Q fever, hepatitis E and a large number of new flu strains. In his lecture for “Burning Futures”, he will combine his arguments on the political ecology of epidemics with the theoretical and practical consequences of Covid-19. For futher information and upcoming dates and episodes please check our website: https://www.hebbel-am-ufer.de/en/burning-futures/ or follow the hashtag #burningfutures on twitter. “Burning Futures” is an event series by HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Supported within the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. With kind support by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Initiated by Margarita Tsomou (HAU Hebbel am Ufer) and curated by Maximilian Haas. Podcast Production: Fritz Schlüter. Speaker: Orlando de Boeyken. Jingle: Sonja Deffner

“Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence” A Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) Welcome to the podcast of the HAU discussion series “Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence” – the series on ecological questions and their intersections with political, economical and cultural dimensions. The second edition of the series had the title: “Fossile Economies, Degrowth Economies” and focused on the dependency of capitalist production on fossil fuels and our belief in endless economic growth: Why are we so dependend on fossils? What roles do they play in our growth centered economies? Can there be green, ecologically sustainable growth? And finally, is it too late to introduce a transformation to prevent climate catastrophe? The invited experts were: Andreas Malm, Associate Senior Lecturer in Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden the author of the books “Fossil Capital” and “The Progress of This Storm. Nature and Society in a Warming World”. Andrea Vetter is the co-author of “Degrowth/Postwachstum. An Introduction” (Junius, 2019), transformation-researcher, a journalist and the spokeswoman of the NGO and think tank “Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie”. Tadzio Müller is a political scientist, climate justice activist and consultant for climate justice and energy democracy at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin. For futher information and upcoming dates and episodes please check our website: https://www.hebbel-am-ufer.de/en/burning-futures/ or follow the hashtag #burningfutures on twitter. “Burning Futures” is an event series by HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Supported within the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. With kind support by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Initiated by Margarita Tsomou (HAU Hebbel am Ufer) and curated by Maximilian Haas. Podcast Production: Fritz Schlüter. Speaker: Orlando de Boeyken. Jingle: Sonja Deffner

“Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence” A Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) Too little, too late: The current ecological catastrophes are just as real as they are no longer stoppable. How do we deal with being too late to reverse them? What would it mean to think from the end and deal with the catastrophe responsibly? And what exactly is ending: the world, humankind, the biodiversity of species or the belief in the western way of life? The discussion series “Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence” looks at the escalating and indeed apocalyptic discourses of the coming end against the background of a growing ecological crisis and asks about opportunities for action. It is initiated and conceived by HAU´s curator for Discourse, Margarita Tsomou, and curated in cooperation with the theorist and dramaturg Maximillian Haas. With the series, we aim to take an intersectional perspective on ecological questions. The first event took place at HAU1 (Berlin) in the evening of the 4th of November 2019 and had the title: “# 1 Facing Extinction“. In a full theatre the two curators introduced the evening before we listened to the contribution of the guests, which were: Franco Berardi Bifo, philosopher, critic of capitalism and theorist of the Italian Postoperaismo, Marcela Vecchione, professor at the Institute for Advanced Amazonian Studies, which is situated in the middle of the Amazon forest in Brazil and Antonia Majaca, feminist theorist working at IZK – Institute for Contemporary Art, Graz University of Technology. For futher information and upcoming dates and episodes please check our website: https://www.hebbel-am-ufer.de/en/burning-futures/ or follow the hashtag #burningfutures on twitter. “Burning Futures” is an event series by HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Supported within the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. With kind support by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Initiated by Margarita Tsomou (HAU Hebbel am Ufer) and curated by Maximilian Haas. Podcast Production: Fritz Schlüter. Speaker: Orlando de Boeyken. Jingle: Sonja Deffner