Headline:
A REPORT – The Concluding Programme of the HKW’s Anthropocene Project
Since the beginning of 2013, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) has been under the sign of the Anthropocene, the scientific hypothesis that our planet has left the Holocene and entered an epoch formed by human beings. According to this view, the notion of an original nature is outdated: humanity shapes nature. This necessitates a new interpretation of the world, not just in the natural sciences, but also in culture, politics and everyday life. The IASS supports the Anthropocene Project as a partner of the HKW.
By what means, and with what methods and senses can we approach the world we ourselves make? What can we do, how can we know what to do – and how are action and knowledge connected? A REPORT – the wide-ranging concluding programme of the Anthropocene Project will explore these and other questions from 16 October to 8 December. With performances by “A Matter Theater” and exhibitions by Adam Avikainen, the Otolith Group, and the Anthropocene Observatory, the long opening weekend (16–19 October) is the highlight of the programme. “A Matter Theater” turns the spotlight on practices of knowledge and perception. International artists, theorists and scientists locate the consequences of human action within the complex fabric of material cycles, Earth states and geo-historical events.
Yet A REPORT encompasses much more than that. The four-volume publication “Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray” takes the world’s materiality at face value – in the form of the particular (grain), the fleeting (vapour), and the radiating (ray). This is a selection of historical texts by authors ranging from Hippocrates to Borges, an archive of reflections on things and their transformation, commented on and reinterpreted by contemporary authors. The book, which forms the material and theoretical foundations of A REPORT, will be presented here for the first time.
In a new chapter in the history of science, the Anthropocene Working Group founded by the International Commission on Stratigraphy is currently preparing a proposal for the ratification of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. It will meet formally for the first time on the opening weekend in a session that is open to the public.
The Future Storytelling competition looks for narrative strategies across a range of different media that can do justice to the Anthropocene thesis. The best projects will be awarded during A REPORT. The most important terms and all online materials of the Anthropocene Project will be gathered in one place in an online encyclopaedia.
The publication series “intercalations: a paginated exhibition”, which emerged from the Synapse curators network, investigates the possibilities of the book as an exhibition form and calls conventional binary categories such as man/nature, human/non-human and subject/object into question. The first volume in this series will be published in October.
November will see the launch of the Anthropocene Campus, a pilot project on the production of knowledge in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. It will present the current status of the Anthropocene Curriculum.
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