PART ONE
Good evening and a warm welcome to Klimata #5 also from my side. Thank you very much for coming, and thank you very much, Léna, Jasna and Dániel, for inviting me to this programme, and thank you very much, Zoltán and Bátor, for your work and technical support in the past days. My name is Janine Eisenächer. I am a performance and sound artist, researcher and curator, and since this year again, an activist.
WE ONLY HAVE 10 YEARS LEFT.
Today, on December 2nd 2019, the day where we gather here fo dive into diverse artistic worlds, processes of world-making and coping strategies to hopefully learn from them and get inspired by them, is the day of the beginning of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid. Originally named the Conference of Parties, in short COP.
THEY DO THE COP-STRATEGY, WE DO COPING STRATEGIES.
How to cope with climate change?
WE ONLY HAVE 10 YEARS LEFT.
How to cope with the enormous impacts it already has now and will have even more in the future? On us. On all human beings. On all non-human beings. On all things?
WE ONLY HAVE 10 YEARS LEFT, IF WE'RE LUCKY.
It's here. Climate Change is here. It's here with us. In this very space.
I can feel it in my body.
WE ONLY HAVE 10 YEARS LEFT.
I am angry. I am frustrated. I am sad and sometimes desperate.
I am full of rage. Full of hope. Full of energy. Full of love.
I am afraid but I am fearless.
WE ONLY HAVE 10 YEARS LEFT.
How to cope with the tremendous challenges that lie ahead of us, NO!, that lie right here before us?
WE ONLY HAVE 10 YEARS LEFT, IF WE'RE LUCKY.
How to cope with this high pressure and urgency to act?
Because this is what we need to do. This is what we need to do. This is what we need.
PART TWO
WE NEED (YOU) TO be strong.
WE NEED (YOU) TO be there.
WE NEED (YOU) TO resist.
WE NEED (YOU) TO take care.
WE NEED (YOU) TO be angry.
WE NEED (YOU) TO be loud.
WE NEED (YOU) TO continue.
WE NEED (YOU) TO act now.
WE NEED (YOU) TO be many.
WE NEED (YOU) TO be-with.
WE NEED (YOU) TO be patient.
WE NEED (YOU) TO breathe.
WE NEED (YOU) TO be careful.
WE NEED (YOU) TO slow down.
WE NEED (YOU) TO listen.
WE NEED (YOU) TO reach out.
WE NEED (YOU) TO be present.
WE NEED (YOU) TO connect.
WE NEED (YOU) TO regenerate.
WE NEED (YOU) TO reflect.
WE NEED YOU, TOO.
WE NEED YOU, TOO.
PART THREE
Breathe.
Arrive.
Connect.
Listen.
Assemble.
Encounter.
Find a position in this space you feel comfortable with.
From wherever you are now, let your eyes wander along the things that are present in this space. Take your time. Try to feel the situation these things create in this space. This is a landscape. This is an assemblage, as Jane Bennett would call it. This is an environment, as Timothy Morton would call it. This is a string figure, as Donna Haraway would call it. It contains and forms associations, affects, desires, relations, production processes, geographies, stories, biochemicals, memories, imaginations, emotions, fossilbased plastics, trees and acid, minerals, thousands of years of natural forces, trade unions, politics, secret deals, money, consumption cycles, sounds, smells, tastes, names, bacteria, matter. All the things in this space I have chosen to bring. Or, they made me choose to bring them. I put them in this order, considering their materiality, size, shape, colour, acoustic potential and story in relation to the situation they were creating; in relation to their contextual affordance. All these things and the process of finding the right place, one out of many possible balances to the other things in the space as well as to the architecture here, are part of my world-making. Better said, we are part of our worldmaking, part of each other. We're co-creators. We have different relationships with each other, close and distant ones. Always moving and changing, through which we form other environmental entanglements that again have an impact on how we relate to the world and what we do, to what worlds we co-create.
My coping strategy is to listen. Listening to myself and to whom or what surrounds me. Through listening we can be-with the things, we can inter-are with the world and with the Earth. Through listening we connect with the lives, the matter and stories of others, human or non-human. Through listening we can enter modes of hearing co-existence, we can have real encounters and act accordingly, which is respectful, open-minded, playfully and equally, peaceful or conflictual.