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Climate Forum II – Readings

Nkule Mabaso, Nick Aikens
 

In the context of ‘Climate Forum II’, the second in a series of online events hosted by HDK-Valand as part of the Museum of the Commons (2023–2027), we revisit two texts published by L’Internationale Online, by artist Ursula Biemann and artist and researcher Mônica Hoff.

The Climate Forum is conceived as a space of dialogue and exchange responding to climate change and ecological degradation. It builds on earlier research and commissioning that resulted in the publication Climate: Our Right to Breathe (2022) and focuses on changing practices. It is driven by a wish to understand how the speculative and critical insights framed within the registers of the discursive, the affective, and the symbolic might be operationalised within everyday working.

For Climate Forum II we, the organisers, select two texts from the archive of L’Internationale Online that speak to the very dynamic of the affective and the operational, and that press for a reconfiguration of the art system's relationships to past, present and future, that appear rhetorically enticing but in fact demand systemic and epistemic change. These dynamics will undoubtedly straddle the historical reflections and present demands for action that permeate Climate Forum II.

In her contribution to Climate: Our Right to Breathe, Mônica Hoff lays out with fierce clarity the contradictions embedded within the art system's thematising of the climate “crisis”, that itself calls for a fundamental shift in how it engages and captures temporalities. In the pointedly titled essay ‘How to keep on without knowing what we already know, or what comes after magic words and salvation’ she asks:

Wouldn’t thinking about the future as something behind us, and the past as something ahead, as the Aymara people suggest, be a way to learn everything we need to unlearn, in order to stop knowing what we already know?

In the second text, written for the 2016 publication Ecologising Museums, edited by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez – also a contributor to Climate Forum II – artist Ursula Biemann describes her film Subatlantic (2015); the story of a female scientist on the North Atlantic making observations on glacial metals that took place thousands of years ago. The film and essay point to the meeting of temporalities and types of knowledge – scientific, artistic and poetic – required to engage with climate breakdown beyond representational gesture or discursive signalling. The moment she writes:

… urges art and art institutions to get involved in dynamics that are not comfortably located in the designated human-centric field of cultural inquiry, although altogether disturbingly concrete and pertinent for human continuation. These efforts would not simply seek to ground scientific knowing differently or to draw physical and biological phenomena into a cultural discourse from where they have been effectively discouraged or entirely left out. These efforts aim at breaking down the opposition between science and poetry and instead offer a diverse configuration of that encounter.

Mônica Hoff, ‘How to keep on without knowing what we already know, or what comes after magic words and salvation’, in Hiuwai Chu, Meagan Down, Nkule Mabaso, Pablo Martínez, and Corina Oprea (eds.) Climate: Our Right to Breathe, Berlin, L’Internationale Online and K. Verlag, 2022, pp.281-295.

Ursula Biemann, ‘Late Subatlantic. Science Poetry in Times of Global Warming’, in Ecologising Museums, L'Internationale Online, 2015.



Ursula Biemann, Subatlantic, 2015

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