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Liebe Kommilitonen companeros de estudios, – Mitstreiter  fellow student  comrades in arms, companeros de armas

This term fellow student is fitting for our summer university.

After all, its title and task is to create narratives about the Anthropocene. We don’t really know anything about either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene and how to tell the story so that we survive as a culture.
So we want to and have to learn by researching, that is, searching and thinking. Because what we want to think and tell about means a breakthrough in the perception and understanding of the whole world. This breakthrough has the effect of an unexpected understanding. It is not simply a surprise, but a kind of surprise that makes comprehensible what was previously inscrutable or hidden in the blind spot of attention. And it is a surprise that involves a kind of understanding that one does not know exactly what one has understood and yet trusts.

We are in the middle of a run-up to a change of epoch.

For me, there are associations: For example, homesickness for the future, as David Bowie put it. Or shedding the same old image of history or awakening from the history of progress. – I would need a lot of time now to explain what I mean by this.
But one thing is clear: if we want to even begin to think and tell about epochal change, we need a conceptual breakthrough. We need words, images, symbols, metaphors that serve epochal change, that make it speak. – So far, we only use the language of critique in and of capitalism. This is necessary, but not sufficient. Understanding language as a performative act or as doing – as Judith Butler says – needs the appropriate terms and images, that is, artefacts that embody interpretations. Language forms itself on reality, but language also forms (future) reality for us.

With this philosophical and epistemological “hammer” I would like to welcome you warmly on behalf of the KMGNE to the Summer University in Santiago.

Almost 20 years ago, we started the Summer University here in Chile, in San Bernardo.

The idea back then was very simple: we wanted to “educate” about sustainability and climate change, to educate the people and to use visual techniques to do so. Because climate change did not exist in the public eye.
Whether that was enough – we also had our stomachaches with this question back then.

Many institutions and, above all, alert, smart people accompanied and supported us at the Summer University: the Escuela de Cine with Carlo Flores -now Universidad de Chile, Canelo de Nos with Gabriel Sanhueza (!), Antonio Elisalde (Universidad Bolivariana), the actresses Marcela de la Carrera, Alexandra Jarra and Gregory Cohen, colleagues from the Universidad las Americas, Wilfredo Alvaro (UN Desert Convention) and many others. – The same is true for institutions in Germany and Europe: Humboldt University Berlin, Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development, Grimme Institute, Wuppertal Institute, Ecomove, etc. -.

I think we have been cooperating with the UAHC for 13 years. The Summer University is connected here, is welcome and needed. And through this stable and trusting cooperation, this special education has been able to establish itself. This is also reflected in the fact that the joint institute NIDAS has established the Diplomado (DIV).
The summer university is a UNESCO place of learning, has received awards and is discussed in a number of books regarding the. That sounds good, and it certainly is good!
But – when one speaks so highly of oneself and is not too vain – then always comes the but: So but: I think that in spite of everything, we are not up to par


When I say it like this, it’s a soliloquy, a reflection of our work under the existential challenges of the Capitalocene (as a disastrous dying destructive event)

  • Transdisciplinarity – types of knowledge
  • Bringing together techniques of knowledge (art, science, philosophy)
  • The western reference systems … (documenta 15)

We need to come together in terms of content and structure.

Our scientific self-image

In this sense, the summer university, with its cultural diversity and its different ways of thinking, can contribute – if we see ourselves as fellow students.

Bild von Sergio Cerrato – Italia auf Pixabay