HAU: Burning Futures Podcast

6 June 2020

“Coexistence, Planetarity and Uncertainty,” a talk and discussion with Margarita Tsomou and Maximilian Haas as part of the Burning Futures: Ecologies of Existence series – Podcast can be heard here.

The situation of our present can be seen as an historic consequence of emphasizing “existence” over “coexistence” – a picturing of the human motivated only by securing its own existential material wants, being but one example as Sylvia Wynter has noted. Although the case for some time, at the level of lived experience the current corona crisis shows the magnitude of our entanglement, a condition of coexistence that is irreducible to exclusively interhuman relations. In her lecture, Patricia Reed examines the term “planetarity” (coming from Earth System sciences) as a demand for a perspectival shift to coexistence, in order to be able to access different scales of reality – including more-than-human interdependencies. How does “planetarity” recondition our understanding of the “local”, how do picturings of the human change when upheld relationally, and how are linkages to be built between scientific knowledge and socio-political responsibilities?