The Anthropocene Project
A REPORT
October 16–December 8, 2014
Opening: October 16, 6pm
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin
Germany
A new sense of amazement at the wonder of planet earth is required: What can we do, how can we know—and to what extent are the two connected?
The indivisible concatenation of industrial metabolism, climate change, urbanisation, soil erosion and the extinction of species, as well as a new social (self-)consciousness have shown: The rapid reformation of cause and effect, means and end, quality and quantity requires a new approach to the world which is not governed by postmodern discourse, but material interconnections and processes—from the accumulation of plastics into artificial islands in the ocean, to the particularity of a speck of dust on its way from the Sahara to the Brazilian rainforest.
In A REPORT, an extensive program of events in conclusion to The Anthropocene Project, the HKW will be exploring precisely these questions. The core of the program is the long opening weekend with A Matter Theater (curated by Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol and Janek Müller) and exhibitions by Adam Avikainen, The Otolith Group and Anthropocene Observatory, all of which are curated by Anselm Franke. However, A REPORT includes more: The four-volume publication Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray takes the materiality of the world at its word—in the form of the Particular (Grain), the Volatile (Vapor) and the Radiant (Ray): A selection of historic texts from Hippocrates to Borges, an archive of reflections on materialities and their constant transformation, commented on and extended by contemporary authors. The book forms one theoretical framework for A REPORT and will be presented here for the first time.
The Anthropocene Working Group, established by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, is contributing to science history by developing a proposal for the ratification of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. It will hold its first official meeting on this weekend at the HKW, its forum event will be open to the public.
The media competition Future Storytelling is looking for cross-media narrative strategies which do justice to the Anthropocene thesis; the best projects will be premiered as part of A REPORT. An online Encyclopedia provides a list of the most important terms of the Anthropocene Project and its online material.
The publication series intercalations: a paginated exhibition, initiated by the curators’ network Synapse, examines the potential of the book as a form of exhibition, questioning traditional dialectical categories such as man/nature, human/non-human, subject/object.
In November the Anthropocene Campus will be launched, an experiment on knowledge production in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. More than 30 international university teachers and researchers from the natural, environmental, and social sciences, humanities, art, and architecture explore together with a group of 100 post-graduates a collaboratively designed Anthropocene Curriculum.
With Adam Avikainen, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Torsten Blume, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Rana Dasgupta, Matt Edgeworth, Michael Ellis, Joyeeta Gupta, Peter Haff, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Yannis Hamilakis, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Alan Haywood, Erich Hörl, Franck Leibovici, Armin Linke, Flora Lysen, Margarida Mendes, Molly Nesbit, Naomi Oreskes, The Otolith Group, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Simon Price, Jürgen Renn, Daniel D. Richter, Tomás Saraceno, Benjamin Steininger, STRATAGRIDS, Colin P. Summerhayes, James Syvitski, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Territorial Agency (John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog), John Tresch, Etienne Turpin, Bettina Vismann, Colin Waters, Allen S. Weiss, Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz and others
The Anthropocene Project is an initiative of Haus der Kulturen der Welt in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Deutsches Museum, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam. intercalations: a paginated exhibition is published in cooperation with Anna-Sophie Springer/K.Verlag and supported by the Ernst Schering Foundation. Haus der Kulturen der Welt is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as by the Federal Foreign Office.
Press contact:
Anne Maier, Haus der Kulturen der Welt
anne.maier [at] hkw.de / T +49 (0) 30 397 87 153/196
