Contribution by Rodrigo Rimon Ghattas Pérez
The title is borrowed from an article and an excerpt from the book The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (2022)
Degrowth is about demolishing the imperial arrangement.
Who’s driving the ecological crisis? It is overwhelmingly the rich countries of the Global North, they have colonized the atmospheric commons for their own enrichment. Nearly half of all resources consumed in the Global North every year are net appropriated from the South. Now, I wonder if this also translates to the resources used in the knowledge and material production of art objects and practices in the Global North?
In the case of Norway, most of us are in one way or another state-supported, or what is the same fossil-fuel-supported artists, meaning our artistic practices are partly subsidized using public funds and resources directly or indirectly linked to extractivist activity. What are then the considerations and political dimensions of this particular way of sustaining artists and their practices that we need to be aware of? Should we develop a type of urgency and awareness around our own ethical responsibilities to productively scrutinize our own working methods, ways of operating, and our matter consumption? All this is in relation to the impact that our art affects at the different levels of society and our ecosystems both at a local and global level.
Now, social movements in the South recognize that growth in the North is colonizing their ecosystems and appropriating their resources, driving catastrophe on a global scale. Degrowth is a call to liberate the South from imperial appropriation and decolonize the atmosphere, this includes the Western hotspots still existing inside and within the social and political fabric in many of the Global South countries since colonial times. This also works at the level of the ethics and infrastructures of the arts, as a call to include some questions and self-reflection on the increasingly neoliberal becoming of the art field in order to reconsider the way we practice as artists and whether or not we still want to hold membership in some of the global extractivist clubs.
In contrast to most Green New Deals, degrowth formulates active policies to achieve a selective downscaling and de-accumulation of those economic activities that cannot be made sustainable, contribute little use values, or are superfluous and superficial consumption – and these include things like advertising, planned obsolescence, ‘bullshit jobs’, private planes, or fossil fuel and defense industries. Degrowth claims that there is a need to reduce energy and material throughput to avoid ecological overshoot without having to live in economic scarcity, but in global economic justice hopefully delivered by means of a just ecological transition. Opening up new possibilities to reassess our priorities both individually and collectively through a shift of consciousness that makes us ask questions about our current value system and help us push forward our realist utopias on well-being and living in plenitude in a time of many and accelerating crises.
Include “interactive” elements, for download or hyperlink
The Degrowth Toolbox for Artistic Practices
The Future is Degrowth (explained)
The Future Is Degrowth
A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism
Exploring Degrowth
An ecology of mind, Gregory Bateson
Blue Print for Europe’s Just Transition
Degrowth is about global justice
an eco-social economy
[enter an uncertainty…]
ecological homelesness
boring and stagnant institutional conservatism
being and meaning outside of a Western ontological framework
scaling down forms of economic activity
do not reproduce Western paternalist and justice provider logics
a growing economy is not always a sign of progress
the individual artistic advancement has to be challenged
growth-based economies debunked
recognizing patterns of activity and behavior
look into the political dimension of aesthetics
divorce success from Capitalism
[other futures are available]
sci-fi economics labs
public value
ethics of resource transferring
tactical positioning
propositional knowledge
artistic and collective intelligence
direct democracy a commons-based peer production economy
crossover, cooperation, solidarity economy generative outcomes
building a knowledge-community
modeling the future,
economics is about collective behavior in and around value
cooperation over competition
[narrative breakdown]
we want a world where there are other worlds
El Buen Vivir, living in plenitude
What production and research logics artists follow?
state-run supported artistic practices as of public domain
plugged to sources of political power and social change
pragmatic imagination
anticipatory governance
social plurality
we are forced to predict
an ecology of mind
Cosmic Diplomacy, moving between worlds
building anew sensitivities
shift in consciousness…
an animist view