Program 2022

“PASS THE MIC!” - REVERSING THE GAZE

Climate activist Vanessa Nakate from Uganda has long been calling for the microphone to be passed on to climate activists from the South. We will do just that and are curious to see how the perspective shifts.

With Vanessa Nakate/ Uganda (video), Martin Zähringer/ CCnetwork berlin

The Green New Deal is one of the few political programs that offers a concrete vision for the post-fossil capitalist era. A comprehensive governmental project should simultaneously fight the climate crisis and social inequality. Which cultural elements must the Green New Deal incorporate in order to make it the global driving force toward a more equitable future?

With Ann Pettifor/ UK, Awande Buthelezi/ South Africa, Juliane Schumacher/ Berlin

Esther Figueroa and Imani Tafari discuss causes of the climate crisis in which Jamaica plays a central role, such as plantation capitalism/ plantationocene, tourism and extractive industries. In their work and conversation, they shed light on the impacts of climate change, sea level rise, extreme weather events, unpredictable seasons, water and food shortages, as well as active stances of collective resilience.

With Esther Figueroa/ Jamaica, Imani Tafari-Ama/ Jamaica

Short film: “Plastic, pollution and survival strategies”
Director Imani Tafari-Ama in conversation with Esther Figueroa

The Rastafari movement established its own worldview (Livity) as a decolonial counter-discourse to Eurocentric norms, institutions, and perspectives (Babylon). Imani Tafari-Ama's 9-minute film on plastic looks at Jamaican strategies of survival in the face of Babylonian garbage. Following the film, she will join Esther Figueroa to discuss topics of food security and reproduction relations in a sustainable climate future. How can the connection between spiritual and material approaches work toward a holistic life?

With Imani Tafari-Ama/ Jamaica, Esther Figueroa/ Jamaica

As seismographs of society, artists expose grievances through their vision, discourse and work, develop new forms and ways of thinking, stir things up and thereby raise social awareness. But can civic engagement through art and traditional know-how achieve change, i.e., a profound social, gender and ecological transformation — as is called for by the Green New Deal — or even simply participate in it?

Cooperation Heinrich Böll Foundation + Le Cube/ Rabat

With Fatim-Zahra Benhamza/ Morocco, Younes Ben Slimane/ Tunisia, Adesokan Adedayo/ Nigeria, Hicham Houdaifa/ Morocco, Elisabeth Piskernik/ Morocco/ Austria

“ECHOS” is open for free on all three days.

Persistent droughts, water scarcity and ever more natural disasters — these effects of climate change are experienced by Europe as well as by (North) African countries. In the exhibition “ECHOS”, artists from Morocco, Nigeria and Tunisia address environmental problems in their own respective contexts, their causes, the consequences and the role of humans in this globalized web and reveal how people in these countries experience the challenges posed.

Cooperation Heinrich Böll Foundation + Le Cube/ Rabat

With works by Aàdesokan Adedayo/ Nigeria, Younes Ben Slimane/ Tunisia, Fatim Benhamza/ Morocco, Mohamedali Ltaief/ Tunisia, Amine Oulmakki/ Morocco

“Fly Me to the Moon” (2019), is a feature documentary by Jamaican independent filmmaker Esther Figueroa, that takes us on a journey into the unexpected ways we are all connected on Planet Earth, by following aluminum – the metal of modernity – around the world and into space. We travel for over a hundred years, visiting places as disparate as the moon, Jamaica, India, Suriname, Canada, Cuba, Japan, Hungary, Iceland, Australia, Vietnam, and the United States.

Q&A with Esther Figueroa/ Jamaica, Tobias Gralke/ Berlin

The Klanglandschaften Mühlenbeck is a new music festival north of Berlin, which took place in June 2022 for the third time and focused explicitly on the subject of climate change. Gisela Nauck aims to discuss how new music can be updated in the context of climate cultures. Kirsten Reese presents an example of eco-aesthetics with a sound installation featuring insects from the animal voice archive, some of which were electronically transformed and mixed with real natural sounds from a meadow in Mühlenbeck.

With Gisela Nauck/ Berlin, Kirsten Reese/ Berlin, Martin Zähringer/ Berlin

While the Mühlenbeck soundscapes explore a new connection between sound-culture and sound-nature by way of music, the “Sound Atlas” is a written approach to the phenomena of sound. The authors come from the nature writing field and describe and present unique soundscapes as well as bring a new attention to the sound space of nature. In the wake of species extinction and the threat posed by the climate, the world of what is heard is also changing.

With Michaela Vieser/ Berlin, Isaac Yuen/ Canada/ Berlin, Petra Ahne/ FAZ

A climate crisis culture from the margins shows itself to us in Nigerian Afrofuturist and Afrospeculative literature. In the future: the climate crisis is contained, but Nigeria continues to suffer from a quasi-colonialist exploitation of its nature — after all, the raw materials to produce solar panels and wind turbines must come from somewhere. In the present: as a literary processing of the many severe floods Lagos has experienced in recent years. Literary counterviews of the dominant, seemingly universal climate crisis culture of the global North.

With Chinelo Onwualu/ Nigeria/ Canada (online), Osahon Ize-Iyamu/ Nigeria/ USA/ UK, Simon Probst/ Berlin

This panel will present 10 short video works by young Russian artists and activists created in the summer of 2022, which reflect on the relationship between climate and war in the country and from the perspective of exile. The works will be framed by a conversation on artistic anti-war positions and the role of climate activism in Russian regions.

Cooperation EU-Russia Civil Society Forum e.V.

With Angelina Davydova/ St. Petersburg/ Berlin, anonymous artists from Russia

For the first time in Taiwan's film history, this film shows the island from above: the beauty of peaks and cedars in a sea of fog, of winding rugged coasts and bustling cities. Until the view becomes sharper and sharper, and thus is revealed the impact of man on nature, urbanization, industrialization… In a word: the whole scale of environmental destruction in a dramatic-bizarre aesthetic deeply disturbing.

Introduction: Tobias Gralke/ Berlin

Alice Grünfelder has experience with peripheral cultural contact against the larger backdrop of China. She has published books from and about Tibet, a novel about Uyghur Xinjiang, and was editor of the Türkische Bibliothek at Unionsverlag. Alice Grünfelder's counterviews from Taiwan take the form of notes and reflections, reportages and essayistic miniatures. In the context of Climate Cultures, we are particularly interested in interior views from a precarious climatic zone.

With Alice Grünfelder/ Switzerland, Martin Zähringer/ Berlin

Jessica Lee aspires to understand the trauma that first brought her family from China to Taiwan (and eventually to Canada); on the island with its high mountains, open lowlands, and dense forests, she traces the migration history of her ancestors. Alice Grünfelder will discuss with Jessica Lee literary-aesthetic balancing acts between subjective self-exploration and geographical description.

With Jessica Lee/ Taiwan/ Canada/ UK/ Alice Grünfelder/ Switzerland

PREMIERE OF THE GERMAN EDITION

Wu Ming-Yi brings a new style to global writing: visionary fantasy in climate collapse, subjective alienation and harsh ecorealism, individual grief and ecocritical counterattack. The plot: a second-born from an original island society is cast out to sea in line with tradition, lands on a giant plastic vortex and creates his own civilization by recycling the trash. And so a literary tsunami rises, deeply grounded in universal ecological concerns and contemporary issues of indigenous identity.

With Wu Ming-Yi/ Taiwan, Johannes Fiederling/ Taiwan/ Germany, Alice Grünfelder/ Switzerland

The environmental movements of the 1980s were asking the same systemic question: environment or growth? In the 1990s came the concept of "sustainable development": "Green growth" helps the economy, ecology and social welfare in equal measure. But what does that mean in concrete terms? Fossil-fueled private transport is being replaced by electricity; instead of oil, lithium and other raw materials are being imported for battery production; and the health, environmental and social costs continue to be passed down to the poorer parts of society and to the Global South. What are the alternatives to green growth?

With Niko Paech/ Germany, Friederike Habermann/ Germany, Florian Schlederer/ Austria, Juliane Schumacher/ Berlin

“Smog”, 1973, Film with Discussion

The highly acclaimed docudrama from the 1970s is a masterpiece of TV dramaturgy and, from today's perspective, a historical milestone of petro-criticism. It is the cinematic staging of radically acted-out male power on the edge of the abyss. In it appears unmasked the motif of a hegemonic petromasculinity, as it is discussed from a feminist perspective. “Smog” is the primal, masculine setting of car mania.

With Kilian Jörg/ Austria/ Berlin, Katja Diehl/ Germany, Tobias Gralke/ Berlin

Johan von Mirbach's documentary #dieselgate depicts a corrupted male society inside the German car industry which refuses to expose fraud and knows no sense of guilt. There are victims but no perpetrators; responsibility is shifted downwards and presented as a problem of overambitious engineers. Trust in the auto industry elite has been severely shaken, but has the “car system” hit the brakes at all? Are we any closer to a transportation turnaround? What can activism from below achieve if the climatic subject made in Germany is still the car?

With Winfried Wolf/ Germany, Johan von Mirbach/ Germany, Anna Baatz/ “Berlin autofrei”, Tobias Gralke/ Berlin

The concluding discussion will take stock of the counterviews that become possible when one's own cultural "self-evident facts" move into the field of vision of other perspectives. How does a young climate activist from North Rhine-Westphalia experience the police assault on him in Berlin-Kreuzberg? What does our self-critique of automobile culture mean to the South African climate activist? What does the Taiwanese novel about the strange resurrection of civilization from the garbage vortex on the Atlantic Ocean say to the Jamaican filmmaker concerned with recycling plastic? A conversation somewhere between global perspective and local action.

With Rafid Kabir/ Germany, and all those present, Juliane Schumacher/ Berlin, Martin Zähringer/ CCnetwork berlin