#12 Strategies on Fire: What Next for the Climate Movements / With Franziska Heinisch (Justice is Global), Lea Main-Klingst (ClientEarth), Amelie Meyer (Extinction Rebellion), Tonny Nowshin, Carla Reemtsma (Fridays for Future), Esteban Servat (Shale Must Fall), Louise Wagner (Ende Gelände)

“Blah, blah, blah” – that was Greta Thunberg’s comment on what was happening at COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow 2021. Climate activists accuse politicians and corporations of repeatedly making verbal promises to reduce CO2 emissions, but not consistently keeping them. After years of appeals and protests, the climate movement faces a strategic challenge: how to continue fighting for the climate without being fobbed off with lip service? With this in mind, the 12th edition of the HAU podcast and discourse series “Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence” ushers a debate on the scope of different strategies: lawsuits against climate sinners, environmental organising, media campaigns, civil disobedience, strikes, militancy, transnational networking and the construction of autonomous ecological habitats. In “Strategies on Fire: What Next for the Climate Movements”, activists Franziska Heinisch, Lea Main-Klingst, Amelie Meyer, Tonny Nowshin, Carla Reemtsma, Esteban Servat and Louise Wagner examine and reflect on their practices.

#11 Climate Crisis, Planetary Justice and the Problem of the Capitalocene: With Jason Moore

With the concept of the Capitalocene, Jason Moore formulates a revolutionary thesis against the discourses of the Anthropocene: it is not humans per se that are responsible for environmental destruction and global warming but rather the capitalist mode of production – that only some humans profit from. Ever since Columbus's invasion of the Americas, global extractive capitalism has been turning the planet as a resource into ‘cheap nature’ and into a global waste dump. The Capitalocene is, according to Moore, a world ecology of power, production and reproduction, carried out through the exploitation of the ‘web of life’. But this logic is reaching its natural limits. The Capitalocene – including class rule, colonialism, patriarchy and fossil-fuelled production – will not survive climate change. Can we therefore hope for a moment of epochal political possibility, for a new ‘planetary justice’? The 11th edition of “Burning Futures” will first be shown as a livestream on HAU4 and will later be released again as a podcast.

“Burning Futures” bringt die Politökonomin, Expertin für Nachhaltigkeitspolitik und Transformationsforschung und Mitbegründerin von “Scientists for Future” Maja Göpel und die Revolutionsphilosophin und Feministin Eva von Redecker ins Gespräch. Beide haben in jüngster Zeit ihre Stimmen prominent für tiefgreifende Veränderungsprozesse im Kontext von Kapitalismus, Wachstumslogik, Nachhaltigkeit und Autoritarismus erhoben. Neben ihrer beider Kritik an der Verteilung und Funktion von Eigentum entwickeln sie Visionen von Zukünften – ob durch politisch-ökonomische Transformation bei Göpel oder durch die Kraft einer “Gemeinschaft der Teilenden” der jüngsten Protestbewegungen bei von Redecker. Sie diskutieren über ihre gemeinsamen, aber auch differierenden Vorstellungen für einen notwendigen Wandel, der im Regenerieren statt im Erschöpfen von Ressourcen, Naturkulturen und Menschen begründet sein muss.

#9 Future Ecologies: Compounds, Breakdown, Reparation with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Dimitris Papadopoulos, a Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin).

Burning Futures enters into conversation with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Dimitris Papadopoulos, two people who have focused their research and work on ecological philosophy and transformative practice between natural history and techno science for years. In her much read book “Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds” (Minnesota University Press, 2017), Bellacasa examines the feminist tradition of care work in planetary dimensions while Papadopoulos brings together new green chemical innovations with the formation of social movements in “more-than-human-worlds”.

In the podcast, they discuss the tension between ecological collapse and the reparability of the world with Maximilian Haas and Margarita Tsomou.

#8 The Micropolitical Combat with Suely Rolniki, a Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin).

Consciousness of the fact that we are part of an ecosystem does not guarantee that this condition will guide our actions. Our access to this condition tends to be blocked in the dominant mode of subjectivation under the colonial-racializing-capitalist unconscious regime, which allows life to be turned away from its ethical destiny in our own actions, to be placed instead at the service of capital accumulation, economic as well as political and narcissistic. Resistance to this depends on a subtle labor to dismantle the colonial-racialising-capitalistic unconscious regime that conducts our subjectivities, a labor that leads to transforming ourselves, which implies the whole weave of our relationships, not only with humans. In this process, the borders between art, therapeutics and politics become permeable.

Suely Rolnik is a Brazilian psychoanalyst, writer, sometimes curator (when it is the best way to make sensible some of her ideas) and Full professor at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (since 1979) and guest professor of the Interdisciplinary Master of Theatre and Living Arts at the National University of Colombia (since 2013).

#7 Becoming Land with Angela Melitopoulos and Barbara Glowczewski, a Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin).

In her work, artist Angela Melitopoulos questions the ways we observe and perceive landscapes. Unlike the colonial legacy of anthropology and the positivism of natural sciences, she advocates an understanding of the earth's surface as a 'speaking landscape', an agent of a statement. In this podcast issue of “Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence”, Melitopoulos and anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski look into the method of affective cartography as well as resistant cultures of the perception of land – including those of the indigenous cosmologies central to Glowczewski's activist and scholarly work for the past 40 years. In the face of ecosystem destruction through extractivism and climate change, they ask how to accept and appreciate heterogeneity and the revitalisation of existential territories.

#6 What makes people sick? Racial Capitalism and the Politics of Suffocation, with Françoise Vergès and Edna Bonhomme, A Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin).

The current environmental crises are rooted in racial capitalist exploitation of both humans and nature. The basic elements of life such as water and fire are violently turned into ‘cheap’ commodities and weaponised against unprivileged communities. “I can’t breathe” , echoed by Black communities around the planet, speaks to a politics of suffocation that works both through social oppression and environmental devastation. Activist and theorist Françoise Vergès engages in a discussion with writer and science historian Edna Bonhomme around the feminist and decolonial aspects of the question of what makes people sick, the racially differentiated exposition to environmental risks, the relation between cleaning and care, and the revolutionary potential of dreaming.

#5 Beyond The End Of The World? with T.J. Demos and The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun), A Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin)
Art theorist T.J. Demos, author of “Against the Anthropocene” and “Decolonizing Nature”, engages in this podcast edition of “Burning Futures” in a discussion with the artist collective The Otolith Group, founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. Taking their recent film “INFINITY Minus Infinity” - that we show at HAU 3000 - as point of departure, the discussion touches on genocide and ecocide at the origins of what is now called the Anthropocene, the biopolitics of citizenship and deportation, and the loss around which the Black Lives Matter movement assembles, as well as on art as a means to imagine eco-fictional and afrofuturist futures that go beyond the end of the world. Until 28 July, you can watch the film “INFINITY Minus Infinity” here: https://www.hebbel-am-ufer.de/en/podcast-burning-futures-5/

#4: Coexistence, Planetarity and Uncertainty with Patricia Reed, A Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin)
The situation of our present can be seen as an historic consequence of emphasizing “existence” over “coexistence” – a picturing of the human motivated only by securing its own existential material wants. In her lecture, artist, designer and writer Patricia Reed examines the term “planetarity” (coming from Earth System sciences) as a demand for a perspectival shift to coexistence, in order to be able to access different scales of reality – including more-than-human interdependencies. How does “planetarity” recondition our understanding of the “local”, how do picturings of the human change when upheld relationally, and how are linkages to be built between scientific knowledge and socio-political responsibilities?

#3 Big Farms Make Big Flu, The Political Ecology of Epidemics with Rob Wallace, A Podcast by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin)
In search of explanations for the spread of the coronavirus, the discussion is increasingly turning to the relationship between industrial agriculture and livestock farming, ecological degradation, and viral epidemiology. In “Big Farms Make Big Flu”, Rob Wallace, evolutionary biologist and writer, investigates how endless human intervention in nature causes the spread of deadly infectious diseases. In his lecture for “Burning Futures”, he will combine his arguments on the political ecology of epidemics with the theoretical and practical consequences of Covid-19.