Creativity against the climate crisis. #ourtimeonearth opened its doors this week! Here's a snippet of what's on display... [Caption courtesy of the Barbican Centre Facebook]

Newly commissioned for Our Time on Earth, a major new exhibition at the Barbican Centre, the immersive installation The Symbiocene was revealed recently. Working with architect and sustainability expert Smith Mordak and Buro Happold, artist Julia Watson invited friends from three Indigenous communities to share their knowledge of building technologies that work with nature. The installation was created through an iterative series of exchanges with members of the War Khasi community in the north-eastern Indian state of Meghalaya, the Subak community of farmers in Bali, and the Ma’dan community of southern Iraq. Using these talks and projection mappings, the exhibition demonstrated how learnings from Indigenous cultures could tackle upcoming climate issues including rising sea levels, rising temperatures in urban communities and water scarcity. [Caption courtesy of the Buro Happold Linkedin Page]

Within a mere two hundred years, the capitalist way of running the economy has revealed itself as unsustainable: it is destroying its own ecological and social foundations. Indigenous economies, on the other hand, have worked for millennia – and are increasingly being discussed as solutions for coping with climate change. Studio Bonn presents three models of global cooperation that combine sustainability and social justice. The design expert Julia Watson, author of Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism, Taschen 2021, has researched indigenous architectures all over the world. To ensure that the transfer of knowledge does not lead to one-sided exploitation, she has developed a new business model: An oral smart contract, developed with experts in indigenous law, allows companies that use indigenous knowledge to share profits with the indigenous communities that originated it via blockchain. The initiative, named The Symbiocene, is currently being presented in the exhibition Our Time on Earth at the Barbican in London The diplomat and computer scientist Youssef Nassef has coordinated resilience work in the United Nations system for 23 years, after having served as a diplomat and climate change negotiator for ten years before that. Disillusioned with the impact of the post industrial-revolution war on the biosphere, he and the new Bonn-based UN initiative Resilience Frontiers are using the knowledge of writers, film directors and data analysts to gear our attitudes, thoughts and actions towards the impending destruction of the planet. On a former palm oil plantation in Lusanga, Congo, Ced’Art Tamasala and Mathieu Kasiama and the Congolese Plantation Workers’ Art League (Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise, CATPC) engage with the history of the colonial exploitation of palm oil and cocoa plantations. CATPC’s chocolate sculptures have been exhibited at the SculptureCenter in New York and elsewhere. The day before the Studio Bonn event, at Art Basel, CATPC and artist Renzo Martens will sell 300 NFTs of a Diviner’s Figure carved in 1931 during the Pende uprising against Belgian colonial rule and now preserved at the Virginia Museum of Art. The proceeds will be used to buy back land and revitalise cultural traditions and sustainable agriculture. In the documentary series Plantations and Museums, Tamasala and Mathieu explore the history of the sculpture and of cultural exploitation in general. STUDIO BONN. Listening to the Future Exchange Values CONTRACTS FOR EARTH with JULIA WATSON CATPC (Ced’Art Tamasala und Mathieu Kasiama with Renzo Martens) YOUSSEF NASSEF Chair: Kolja Reichert The video is a recording of Studio Bonn from 15 June 2022.