Flatland Journal VIII

“We don’t seem to live on the same planet”

Cocktails for a Happy New Year to everyone! It’s a cocktail full of life; with clear water from one of the private wells of the gods; it is an anti poison to methane, sulfur hexafluoride et cetera; it is rich with phytoplankton and needs sun to transform; it is a miniature aquatic ecosystem that exists beyond our ontological senses. It is your imaginary cocktail and it will love you forever.

To download the journal, click here: Flatland Journal 8th edition 2020

The creator of your and our cocktail is Greek artist Stelios Karamanolis (1977, Athens) who loves to unfold in his raw canvases a world different than the reality we seem to belong to. And we need another world…we need to be creative.

In our last journal during the ‘first lockdown’ in May/June 2020 we focused on “building – back – better” (a plan that was invented in 2015 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and which became recently the centre of Joe Biden’s speeches on his economic recovery plan. J)

Building-back-better is about choosing policies and actions that protect nature – so that nature can help to protect us. Still, we feel perhaps disoriented. Since the question of how to build a habitable planet is impossible to tackle, we might need to turn to fiction to come up with a possible way out.

This edition of the Flatland Journal touches a possible way out. A way to make sense of the fundamental dilemmas derived from climate change: nature is no longer an inert background from which resources are extracted for human activities. On the contrary. It has reclaimed its role as an active agent in the fate of the planet.

FLATLAND loves the idea (by Bruno Latour) that we as humans do not comprise the ‘centre’ of nature anymore; rather, we are in constant interaction with other beings. Thus freedom as we know it, is not reserved for human life forms only. There are so many other life forms, each having its own laws. It means that each human activity has to be considered along with the impact it will have on the planet.

We hope you agree and wish you Happy Holidays.

Fiona van Schendel (Director FLATLAND) and Josephine van Schendel