Prospecting otherwise : stirring culture´s role in tackling the climate emergency

• Autor(a) principal: Antunes, Clara Raquel Mealha
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/40075
• topic: Cultural programming; Arts management; Arts & climate change; Climate grief; Eco-anxiety; Matters of concern; Ecocentric awareness building; Alter-politics; Ethics of possibility; Nonhuman agency; Imagining futures; Prospecting otherwise; Programação cultural; Gestão cultural; Artes & alterações climáticas; Luto pelo clima; Ecoansiedade; Assuntos críticos; Sensibilização ecocêntrica; Alter-políticas; Ética de possibilidade; Agência não-humana; Imaginar futuros; Prospectar outro devir; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Sociologia

As humans reach the peak of modernity’s achievements, anthropocentric worldviews have become “hypernormalised” (Yurchak 2006). However, nonhuman critical voices are louder than ever: eminently facing a frontal collision with “Gaia” (Lovelock and Margulis 1974), humankind may soon witness an end to an all-too-human world. Climate change and the unbalances imposed on the Earth’s Planetary System loom as an “hyperobject” (Morton 2013). The present research intends to deepen the understanding of the cultural implications of the current climate crisis and explore the role of contemporary artistic practices in countering trends of denialism, disengagement, and unknowingness. This endeavour takes the form of a performing and visual arts programme unfolding in eleven different venues across Portugal and throughout one season (2023/2024) – Prospecting Otherwise (PO) –, grounded in a process of “deep listening” (Oliveros 2005) to Portuguese societal concerns regarding climate change and inspired in preceding cultural programming initiatives echoing these topics. PO sets to contribute to an imperative cultural paradigm shift: it aims at reconfiguring, through the experience of art, means of knowing and making sense of impending collapse, towards an alternative, “ecocentric” (Curry 2006), “ethics of possibility” (Appadurai 2013). This project aims at discussing and practising modes of catalysing shared capacity for radical change, which might enable gearing away from the anticipated planetary “extinction as usual” (Rowan 2015).