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... transdisciplinary research. Since then it addresses the question of how narratives across scientific and artistic disciplines might emerge, be developed, look like, be retold. Our goal has been to develop more plausible explanations of the world than the existing "utopian" myths of capitalism and to create alternative ways of artistic representation for a more culturally rich future of global-local humanity.
In the back of my mind I have had the idea that artistic narratives could help to create global socio-cultural options for the survival of humanity. Art works could serve as alternative, narrative tools of perception and cognition. They may be able to contribute more intensely to the (urgently needed) change or transformation of world views and perspectives - including the human-nature metabolism and including the human-nature divide. Perhaps purely rational empiricisms of the sciences cannot deliver this. It is about a "grand narrative" that lies after or in the ruins of global modernity.
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Some episodes from the residency in August 2022, when narratives were searched for and worked on, when they were created step by step:
- The video: a river laid in a dry field and people washed it,
- a well speaked that tomorrow is not for sale,
- water resources were packed and privatized behind barbed wire,
- refugees with no ground under their feet had nothing but the useless junk from discount stores - and that had always been for the poor,
- the apocalyptic pianist ...
In the short time we were together I could cook for all of us - which is a damn good role to listen and to watch by being nearly "invisible". To be there and yet not. To sympathize but not participate, to be near and to be distant. This role leads to cross thoughts.
I saw and heard the nine artists working on their narratives about the anthropocene. What I could see, they obviously "struggled" with two main questions - namely, what is the anthropocene and what are narratives in and for it.
There, I experienced two provocations for me: I have never seen that before and I have never seen it like that before. What happened?
- A "changing of your mind" happened, a "conceptual breakthrough", an unexpected understanding. It was not simply a surprise, but a kind of surprise that made comprehensible what was previously inscrutable or hidden in the blind spot of attention. And it was a surprise that involved a new kind of understanding. Understanding that one does not know exactly what has been understood, but that is based on trust.
- Through their artistic way (I assume that this can also happen in the sciences), the artists became "conceptual poets" who narrate in a way that has never been narrated before. Through their narratives ideas emerge and take shape.
- By the way, when I narrate, I am more easily able to express not only what I think about the world - and about myself - but above all to make visible HOW I think. I have to connect with my own narrative (my understanding of the world, how it ticks, how it works, and through this giving me orientation. In turn, this enables me to make contact with the narratives of others around me. These narratives (or mental images) are the key for mutual understanding and also for accepting changes in the co-world. Art appears in the interaction between the artist, the creation and reception.
- When we tell each other stories, what makes up our view of the world? Our individual-specific patterns of explanation of the world, their conclusiveness - repeatedly assured in conversations - dominates our storytelling: the selection of facts and metaphors, of heroes and anti-heroes, the ways of describing conflicts, and so on.
- In the individual case, it is mainly the emotional patterns of our explanations of the world that tell us how the world works out of our own logic of action. We act according to these patterns. This becomes relevant when many people choose a similar narrative, i.e. when a societal orientation result from collective narratives leading to collective actions. In this sense, narratives become established "grand narratives" giving coherent, meaningful orientation, endowed with "legitimacy".
- Something else - on another level: The Global North has shaped the global reference system in art, science, economy and politics. Thus, the socio-cultural narratives have initiated and are permanently renewing the existential planetary metamorphoses. The exclusion of societies from the Global South have played a fundamental role in this. A new concept of dialogue is urgently needed.
When I wander through the virtual exhibition, Esther, Christian, Thaís, Theophilus, Shoni, Constant, Hugo, Isidora, Liz appear through their works, telling me these six narratives about the anthropocene without using this term.