esc return ↩ : Scripts for Degrowth, Buen Vivir and living otherwise
The symposium takes place at the 1st + 2nd of June and is part of our project „find.select.transform – Resiliente Netzwerke in einer verletzten Welt“.
find.select.transform
About the event
What does growth mean nowadays? In an era of planetary emergency, voices for scaling down and changing pace multiply. Terms like ‘degrowth’ –, post development and ‘buen vivir’ (well living) are used more and more to highlight the need to acknowledge planetary interdependencies and set boundaries to the use of earth’s limited resources. At the same time, people and states around the world do not hold the same responsibility with regard to the issue. How can we articulate responses together and establish dialogues across geographies, discourses and practices that are committed to living otherwise?
Esc return addresses these topics through a gathering of diverse practitioners from the fields of art, design and architecture. Discussions will unfold around: the possibilities of traditional knowledges and low tech; the urge for practices of care, repair and maintenance; the empowerment of commons - and community based economies ; the importance of situated, land practices. Esc return is not an escapism action or a coming back measure. It it is rather a call for a constant re·calibration process, a termination of a given script based on economic growth and a collective re·execution: A constant, yet still dynamic UnReLearning process.
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Program
detailed schedule infos please find here: findselecttransform.world
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DAY 1
14:00 - 16:00
Energetic Maneuvering: low and social tech
with !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Kris de Decker, Valentina Karga, Joana Moll & Daphne Dragona
When imagining a more sustainable future, the role of technology in it comes to the foreground. Green tech solutions have their limitations and contradictions given the fact that their manufacturing depends on earth resources exploitation, and their eventual disposal is unavoidable. Living sustainably signifies a radical re-imagining of how to live, how to consume and how to be attentive to the impact anthropogenic activity has on the environment. This discussion brings together practitioners from the field of art and design working on and with relevant infrastructures, tools and ideas. Low tech solutions, traditional knowledges, radical prototypes, and forms of social relationship will be discussed as starting points for building, understanding and/or using technologies of different scope and scale.
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16:00 : 17:00
‘One for you, one for me.’ Fast/Slow — Food Contribution
by Gosia Lehmann
Food production, distribution, and culture are crucial aspects that need to be reimagined in order to make degrowth come true. How can we cultivate new ways of sharing food? What rituals and habits could be helpful to enjoy more considerate consumption? How should we change our relationship with 'More-Than-Human' agents within the agricultural context? How can we shift our food habits from individualistic cravings to collective caring? And what ingredients could help us to taste the idea of degrowth?
Gosia Lehmann is going to set-up culinary experiments and develop flavourful interventions as conversation starters for the debate on how to eat to reconceptualize our flawed food system.
17:00 - 19:00
LAN•DING Practices: Sowing Local Area Networks
with Fernando García Dory (INLAND), Nidia Catherine González, Daniela Medina Poch (embodied climate agency - eca), Plateau Residue & Hajra Haider Karrar
Repeated as a mantra of the new world, “DATA is the new oil” has been the dominant logic driving our relationships in our natural and artificial environments. This has led to the orchestration and fabrication of physical and digital extractivist systems. If we are to overcome the othering provoked by binary thinking, what other vocabularies, lexicons and grammar can we learn from languages attuned with the rhythms of the planet? What logic is to be found embedded in the very constructs of nature, territory, environment, landscape, field or Umwelt? What possibilities are offered to situate ourselves in ecologies of interdependence and not merely of opposition? The practitioners of this group will offer diverse angles for situated grounding through land and climatic practices, approached as learning spaces. If we have been aspiring to the cloud of globalism, what can we spark when we connect through our roots? How can we break digital and physical monoculture and expand permacultural relational practices? How does the notion of response-ability change?
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DAY 2
14:00 - 16:00
Governance and Re·Assembly: shuffling community economies
with María Belén Mora (Moneda Social Muyu - Ecuador), Yin Aiwen, Laura Lotti, Pablo Somonte Ruano & Juan Pablo García Sossa / jpgs
If growth at all costs is to be challenged, other assemblies and understandings of governance and economies are needed, such that would relate to the specificities of place and take in mind societal and environmental impacts. With the imposition of a single global system, the logic underneath the import / export of goods turned pervasive. This dis·location has rendered contexts meaningless, supporting the illusion that things will work in the same way no matter where they take place. How can we de·link from the dominant matrix of power? How can we re·assemble relations in the form of other governance models, exchange systems and relational economies? What does an economy following degrowth or embracing buen vivir look like? And how sustainable or resilient are the communities that support it? The practitioners of this cluster will offer stories, reflections and visions around situated distributed systems, commons-based initiatives, social coins and systemic relational design.
16:00 : 17:00
‘One for you, one for me.’ Fast/Slow — Food Contribution
by Gosia Lehmann
Food production, distribution, and culture are crucial aspects that need to be reimagined in order to make degrowth come true. How can we cultivate new ways of sharing food? What rituals and habits could be helpful to enjoy more considerate consumption? How should we change our relationship with 'More-Than-Human' agents within the agricultural context? How can we shift our food habits from individualistic cravings to collective caring? And what ingredients could help us to taste the idea of degrowth?
Gosia Lehmann is going to set-up culinary experiments and develop flavourful interventions as conversation starters for the debate on how to eat to reconceptualize our flawed food system.
17:00 - 19:00
Nets of Interdependence: practices of healing, recovery and repair
with Elke Krasny, Kathleen Bomani, Cristina Flores Pescorán, Teresa Dillon & Gilly Karjevsky
The call for a continuous acceleration and optimisation that supports the imaginary of economic progress has led to an exhaustion of both bodies and resources, hitting some territories more than others. Which practices can assist in healing wounds caused by a legacy of exploitation? How possible is it to restore broken societal systems and human to nature bonds, in order to face the asymmetries and forms of injustice of the western patriarchal world? The speakers of this panel will discuss feminist practices pointing towards infrastructures of interdependence and co-existence, care and maintenance. With examples from the fields of architecture, design and art, emphasis will be placed on the possibilities to claim agency in the building offutures and the remembrance of the past.
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19:30 - 20:10
Screening: Turning The Collar, 40 min (2022)
Reflecting on our material relations with objects, through processes of fixing and mending.Turning the Collar takes the form of a road trip around the rural county of Westmeath, Ireland. On the journey craft, restoration, and repair professionals speak about their work. Touching on the values that underpin what we choose to care for and mend, the 'Turning the Collar’ highlights the poetic and situated nature of such work and the joys and struggles that skilled trade professions now face.
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Credits
the symposium is curated by Daphne Dragona and Juan Pablo García Sossa, coordinated by Waylon D'Mello and funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion
