Narrative – narrations

Transdisciplinary exploration of narratives of transformations in the Anthropocene-Capitalocene

Narrativa – narraciones
Exploración transdisciplinaria de narrativas de transformaciones en el Antropoceno-Capitaloceno

CCCLab is an international project that began as a joint collaboration between artists*, scientists*, and practitioners in Europe and South America.

CCCLab is an open, transnational network on transdisciplinary research, coordinated by the secretariat at KMGNE.

CCCLab shares its information with a worldwide community of researchers and educators through conferences, publications, and a website. The annual International Summer University “Transmedia Storytelling – Climate Culture/Transformation” plays an essential role.

The questions, assumptions and methods of the CCCLab

1. if man can only think what and how is thought in his epoch (Foucoault), how can future designs emerge that go beyond the epoch? So how can cultural processes of change, which have the potential of metamorphoses and go beyond the game rule system of the present, be represented – ideally guiding action, orienting.

2. although the empirical conditions (overshootday, planetary guard rails etc.) are pushing for a radical “great transformation”, the deep stories (Tiefengeschichten/Hochschild) about the human-nature-relationship seem to be so manifest that adequate problem solutions are hardly addressed. Is it also because plausible new narratives are missing?

3. The discourse on the cultural dimension of the Anthropocene is a global one, which gets its essential imprint from the Western understanding of the world. Besides the question of parity of other world views, cultural transformations always have regional connotations.

4. can methodical approaches of artistic research, such as “design fiction” reduce the dilemma of future narratives?

This breadth of questions is the background, is the “real-world” questioning of arts and sciences equally facing the metamorphoses in the Anthropocene-Capitalocene.

Summer University – Transmedia Storytelling Anthropocene – Metamorphoses

In 2003, the KMGNE, together with the Grimme Institute, the Wuppertal Institute, the Goetheinstitut, the Escuela de Cine and Canelo de Nos in Chile, founded the first version of the International Summer University in San Bernardo/Santiago. The directors Gregory Cohen, Dieter Schumann (whisper and scream) and Linda Barutzki, the actresses Marcela de la Carrera, Ale Mendoza, the film scholars Carlos Flores and Ephraim Broschkowski (climate media factory) joined the initiative of Gabriel Sanhueza (journalist) and Joachim Borner (scientist) to test an explorative learning project: “audiovisual narration of sustainability” and to invite artists* and scholars* to this annually. From 2006 onwards, the summer university was established in Germany, with a temporary branch in Sao Paulo.

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In the first few years, the work was dominated by the narrative, pictorial interpretation of scientific findings on climate change and sustainable development. Then aesthetics – as the science of perception (episteme aestetic) – became important. This raises the possibility that there could be a form of knowledge that does not come about primarily through concept, judgement and conclusion, but through (sensual and mental) perception: a form of knowledge that would be aesthetic in itself and thus similar in nature to art.

In recent times, the focus has been on coherence in the narrative line: story – narrative – meta-narrative – narrative. Which story is chosen, which framing it is equipped with, which metaphors are used and which symbols are employed – that points to the narrative behind it. And vice versa: what language, what terms are to be used anew in order to steer towards narratives of metamorphoses?

Summer University 2023