Premiere

A Participatory Planet / UNEARTHING

Relational Paths Towards Environmental Justice

What should we do with a world in decline whose environmental hold seems close to collapse? As temperatures rise and rivers run dry, we seek to engage with the planet as an active entity.  We begin the series with Unearthing – turning over traditional knowledge and approaches to create fertile ground for exploring participatory ways of living on and with the earth.

The first live performance in Germany by the artist Seba Calfuqueo will get us started. With "Flowing like waterfalls", she tells the story of Copihue and Llancalahuen, two closely connected plants that grow in the humid rain forest. Seba Calfuqueo understands herself as the incarnation of the indigenous bodies murdered by the colonial reign of violence and the embodiment of Mapuche resistance.

In the panel discussion that follows, we will address the personal rights of nature, the interwovenness of flight and environmental crises as well as protecting our ecosystems from exploitation. The conversation between Seba Calfuqueo, the philosopher and jurist Maria Teresa Vincente Gimenéz, environmental historian and author Jessica J. Lee, and journalist and activist Peter Emorinken-Donatus addresses questions like: What can we learn from the past to inform future struggles for environmental justice? Can the poetics of non-human life unleash new possibilities and combat the ecological crisis? And how can alliances be formed between the Global North and the Global South, human and non-human life?

The evening launches the series A Participatory Planet that negotiates pathways towards environmental justice in four interconnected phases: Unearthing, Growing, Consuming, Discarding. The evening introduces the conceptual Unearthing phase, problematizing the central questions of contemporary ecological (in)justice.

The project is a partnership between Allianz Foundation and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb).