Tackling the Polycrisis

During the first meeting at Casco Art Institute, we discussed ‘We must learn to sit down together and talk about a Little Culture’ (1968) by Sylvia Wynter, and the text ‘Perennial crisis and the loss of flexibility’ (2023) by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. We identified their different approaches to the polycrisis, discussed their different treatments of power, and got inspired to move toward possible case studies to approach the sustainability of CPC.

For our second meeting we participated in the film screening organized by the Green Office, along with the Critical Pathways community. We watched the documentary ‘Outgrow the System’ (2023) which is about transitioning to a sustainable economic system. Our team member dr. Giuseppe Feola had organized the screening and led the discussion afterwards. The documentary, directed by Cecilia Paulsson & Anders Nilsson, showcases transformative ideas on how we can reorganize our production and consumption, to ensure our survival as a species on this planet.

During this meeting we have all been led by our team member dr. Diana Vela Almeida in recollecting and tracing our own genealogies and how they have been touched by CPC. Many different positionalities and considerations of own politicized histories and geographies emerged. Below are some of the cartographic mappings that we made during the workshop. We discussed how CPC is rooted and concretely manifests itself in everyone’s life experiences, in different ways.

During this session we again discussed two readings. One by Malcom Ferdinand: “Colonial Inhabitation: An Earth without a World” in Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022) and one by Kathryn Yusoff: “Golden Spikes and Dubious Origins” in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018). We brought the two authors in communication and found both the notion of colonial inhabitation (which Ferdinand intersects with patriarchal and capitalist modes of living) and their critiques of the term “Anthropocene” very helpful for our CPC research.