Tackling the Polycrisis

Artwork by Martha Maya, screencap of the piece Desintegración corporal (Bodily Disintegration), 2015. — Artist: Martha Maya, screencap of the piece Desintegración corporal (Bodily Disintegration), 2015.

Global challenges cannot be seen in isolation; they cross-affect each other and what we are dealing with is a polycrisis. Real change, i.e. a move beyond extractivist, exploitative global governance, must be systemic change. This interconnected problem seems so enormous and the global socio-cultural, politico-economic organization so resilient, that systemic change sometimes feels out of reach. From that starting point, the Incubator team proposes to focus on three socio-economic, cultural-symbolic vectors that continue to drive and uphold the polycrisis: (racial) capitalism, patriarchy, and (neo)colonialism (CPC). The challenge they want to tackle is twofold: (a) how can these interlocking systems of socio-economic and cultural-symbolic power come into view as intersecting and as perpetuating the conditions for climate collapse? and (b) what obstacles hinder moving from understanding CPC to effecting (policy or behavioral) change beyond CPC? The incubator thereby reverses the question of sustainability: what makes CPC so ‘sustainable’ as a system and enables it to block real transformation?