RELATE

Finding Stories to Embrace our Planet´s Limits

A transcultural project with participants from Greece, Germany, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico – with guests from Cameroon, Brasil, Ghana, Kenia and South Africa.

Young artists, students, workers – mostly familiar with socio-ecological issues – from five countries with temporary guests from another five countries meet virtually, in Chile and Germany, and collaboratively search for words, terms, symbols, metaphors to narrate the Anthropocene.

3 work stages

• Experimental form (test): June-August-October 2021 in Karnitz: testing narrative formats of the Anthropocene – Blended learning programme: the action messages of the Anthropocene – Options. An artistic youth research project.
• Researching and making capacity building: May – October 2022 in Karnitz and in virtual space (blended learning) and November- January-March in Santiago de Chile.
• Initiation of transcultural follow-up projects and networking in the participating countries.

Seeking and presenting narratives on the Anthropocene is the aim of the “Relate” project. It has an essential, generational purpose: to seek, construct, stage images, scenarios, symbols … from the perspective of this century that radically transgresses planetary boundaries “illegally”; of a “miracle” of transformations and metamorphoses, in other words, that describe a plausible cultural change or make cultural metamorphoses plausible. Before and during this, it was the process of empowerment with which narrative skills, fictional storytelling had to be tested. In the process – and this is the challenge – it is about a new, elusive range of truth. The cursed tipping points in the ecological but also in the social create pressure on fictional orientations that are supposed to withstand future reality. How far can art – because that is what narrative is – be close to the modes of cognition and commodity production without giving up its own form of cognition? What is meant here is that with fictional narration, things and relationships are thought that would have to remain unthought without it. Art creates cognition by exciting feelings we would have if we knew. It shows nothing of how the world is, but what to think of the world. The intercultural, non-extractivist composition and working method of the group tested a sharing of world attitudes among themselves in blended learning systems.

Work was done virtually, in the Flippclassroom www.transformation-k.de and in residence in Karnitz (Germany) and Santiago/Marchigue (Chile).

Nightmare on Anthropocene Island

Serial, transmedial storytelling about the world beyond the planetary boundaries is a “recognition game”, is multi-perspectival. Once in terms of the starting point of the narrative and the storylines. Serial narration allows one to start again and again without being pinned down to the other attempts. Serial narratives are scenarios. They hint at future possibilities, bring into play the subjects who could be responsible for alternatives. They are suitable for making it possible to experience what life might be like “up ahead”, at the end of the tunnel, how it might (or might not) be possible to coordinate normality with imminent disruptions.

One island in the RELATE Storyworld is the series “Nightmare on Anthropocene Island”. Here you can find both seasons that were created in the course of this project. Have a good journey!

Season 1

Season 02

With the concept of transmedia and serial storytelling, RELATE pursues the strategy of telling the content of the Anthropocene concept across several media. (Media convergence) In RELATE, this approach was combined with the concept of the “storyworld”, according to which a multitude of episodes and short stories trigger a larger narrative in the mind of the reader or viewer. The aim of the strategy is to create a unique complex of narrative structures and thereby make the reception a special experience. The stories or episodes are thus “fragmentary” from the point of view of narrative and the various media (https://transmedia-manifest.com/).

There is not much hope left in the long-routinised way of talking of the IPPC’s climate reports or climate science prose. In any case, this way of talking is not enough. We need our own aesthetics and also a serious intellectualisation of climate issues in order to not only inform people, especially young people. RELATE believes that their interest in a habitable Earth must be expressed in an intellectually appropriate and aesthetically appealing way. There is not only a young generation, but a large majority of people who feel uncomfortable, at the same time paralysed, guilty in a diffuse way and at a loss. It is probably important to lend them concepts for their self-understanding as an ecological class: for example, the claim to be heirs to the values of freedom and emancipation, in order to grasp them anew so that the earth can be preserved. Those who see themselves as dependent on the earth also gain a new freedom to act and come alive.

Narratives are needed. Liberalism, conservatism or socialism have created their own concepts and given direction to their political path. Their horizons of values have inspired poems and tragedies, they have produced standard works of thought, they have in any case not stopped at dull science reports, which are of course important but do not achieve enough on their own. Pedagogical talk about necessities leads nowhere. Purely ecological scenarios send people into panic or, for lack of concern, into boredom, and both have a paralysing effect. Political work needs images, visions and ideas to unfold and mobilise people. Affects need a productive, problem-adequate direction and, for that, breaks in world views and world images.

Islands of Resistance

Sustainable transformations are learning processes. Individual and institutional. Just as European climate policy has a learning history and is a future-oriented searching process, the same applies to different cultural areas, regions and individuals.
Resilience is a specific goal for action – but always unique in its regional or individual form. In this search, which began on the island of the Anthropocene, we encountered islands of resistance and built stories that we want to share with you. In the transformative searching process, the form of the essay is a specific reflective approach that helps the searchers not to lose the thread.

Islands of Resistance in our Partner Countries

Greece

Germany

Ecuador

Mexico

Chile

We apply for the CMCC Climate Communication Award

Project Partners: