10 years of the Anthropocene at HKW

Onboarding and exchange: Anthropocene Commons 
An open network for transformative pedagogies and collective action
February 9, 2023

Public press conference: A “Golden Spike” for the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene Working Group announces the candidate site for the lower boundary—or “Golden Spike”—of the proposed new geological epoch
Spring 2023

10 Years of Anthropocene collaboration
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) looks back at ten intense years of exploring the Anthropocene. What started as an experimental two-year project in 2013 developed into an entire decade of events, exhibitions, campuses, publications, and research projects. These projects shared a conviction that understanding, experiencing, and shaping the new earth epoch demands novel forms of collaborative knowledge production and dissemination.

This winter marks the conclusion of the Anthropocene projects at HKW. We want to express our gratitude to our close collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), to numerous collaborating institutions around the world, and to the hundreds of independent researchers, artists, and activists that have made these ten years possible – and whose work will continue to thrive! We want to use this opportunity to point to the ongoing work of the Anthropocene Commons network (the successor to HKW’s Anthropocene Curriculum), as well as to the upcoming announcement of a candidate Anthropocene lower boundary by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG). The AWG is a group of geologists, earth system scientists, and other scholars tasked with working towards the geological formalization of the Anthropocene. Their work has been accompanied and queried by a series of experimental projects carried out by HKW and MPIWG. You can watch a short retrospective video that documents the past decade of work here: The Anthropocene at HKW—10 Years of Culture and Science in a New Geological Epoch

Anthropocene Commons is an open community of researchers, educators, activists, artists, and scientists who, over the last decade, have collaborated closely with HKW under the Anthropocene Curriculum umbrella and will now continue to take the work in new directions. By sharing or “commoning” skills, creativity, and knowledge resources, the Anthropocene Commons (AC) imagines and explores transformative pedagogies and collective action for the planetary emergency. The AC understands the act of “commoning” in three ways: 1) creating shared spaces; 2) collaborating on pedagogies from diverse perspectives; and 3) turning institutions inside-out to make research available to frontline communities. The network is an emerging constellation of initiatives that bridge academic, artistic, and activist contexts from around the world, with nodes in Bengaluru, Cape Town, Chiang Mai, Chicago, Daejeon, Lisbon, Porto Alegre, and along the Mississippi River, among many others. The online platform anthropocene-curriculum.org will be maintained as an archive of ten years of Anthropocene research and pedagogy, including the experimental educational resource AC Courses.

Updating the Geological Time Scale? Since 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) has worked towards having the Anthropocene officially recognized as a new geological epoch and thus included in the International Chronostratigraphic Chart. The precondition for this inclusion is the identification of a so-called “Golden Spike”: a specific location in the world where the transition from one geological epoch to the next is clearly recorded in the stratigraphic record. Investigating twelve sites around the globe for such stratigraphic evidence, they have found traces of fossil fuel burning suspended in Antarctic ice, pesticides and microplastics buried in ocean sediments, and radionuclides from bomb testing lodged in the skeletons of tropical corals. In early 2023, the AWG will announce which site they have chosen to best represent the start of the geological Anthropocene.

For those interested in the Anthropocene Commons, an initial onboarding and exchange event on February 9, 2023 will offer an opportunity to engage with the network. For further information, please visit anthropocene-curriculum.org.

Press contact: Jan Trautmann, Head of Press and PR, presse [​at​] hkw.de