Open Call for Artists
based
in Austria and/or with easy access to Klosterneuburg, NÖ
The
challenging and disruptive times in 2020 made questions on how to bounce forward into novel, sustainable and interconnected
futures more than urgent. Owning our mess, instead of being owned by our mess, asks how to ignite individual awareness, empowerment,
and creative action in navigating the real-life environmental and societal challenges of our contemporary world. Wicked problems
are immersed in complex networks of tensions and contradictions such as local and global interconnectedness and dependencies,
which make decision-making processes challenging. Multi-dimensional approaches are needed for the evolution of our societies.
Art-science collaborations are increasingly tapped as tools for mediating conflicts as they animate the articulation of environmental,
social and cultural values, create visions and imaginative future scenarios and draw on embodied experiences as a generator
for change.
The Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Klosterneuburg
and the think tank artEC/Oindustry are thus embarking in an interdisciplinary collaboration that mobilizes the arts and the
sciences to contribute to regenerative and transformative approaches to the evolution of life on earth. The ClimArtLab, funded
by StartClim2020, sets the stage for a highly experimental space, where we broaden art-science approaches and ask:
How
can we as individuals and society step away from fear, be conscious and responsible of our ‘mess’ and find pro-environmental
and -societal agency?
In other words, how can art-science interventions generate intrinsic motivation and
creative self-action for change?
In a 2-phases workshop we will bring together perspectives
from evolutionary and sustainability sciences and from the arts. First, we will engage with differences and similarities of
their approaches to sustainability challenges as messes and wicked problems and to ideas of change, evolution, and transformation.
Learning from each other, we will explore tangible and intangible, locutionary and illocutionary, constative and performative
aspects of art-science relationships. This will imply knowledge production, terminologies, tensions within complexity discourses
and differences in approaches to solution-oriented action. Following a nexus thinking approach, we will discuss interdisciplinary
challenges along the so-called Water-Energy-Food Nexus (WEF) with a focus on plastics and its alternatives. We will engage
with questions of plastics’ lifecycle across multiple scales, from global scenarios to the local setting of Klosterneuburg.
Our explorations will serve as the basis for the second phase of the workshop: the co-design of the general structure for experimental
art-science interventions with society. The latter will be co-created by artists and scientists in the following months. We
will consciously integrate the responsible material use, consumption and waste management in our art-science practices. Our
experiments will be exhibited and tested with societal participation in June 2021.