06-02, 13:00–13:25 (Europe/Prague), Root Stage
Solarpunk aesthetics/ narratives in the past, present and the future?
Spreading organically through social media around the world, the term ‘solarpunk’ is a modality of dreaming real-life constructive change. Googling ‘solarpunk’ yields a complex interdisciplinary heritage that meshes literature, art and ecocritical traditions with contemporary technological innovation in the energy sector and urban planning fields. Not yet institutionalized and somewhat anarchist, Solarpunk sensibilities, knowledge, and attitudes can serve as the lodestar for art and culture built around the realities of climate emergency. Solarpunk can be imagined as a sustainable network structure of ideas, sensibilities and values, fully utilizing the potential of the internet to create new modes of human contact and communication.
Working with Solarpunk since 2019, we have however experienced a problem with the term. Due to the contemporary dominance of marketing logic within global aesthetics and visual culture, the style of Solarpunk have in many ways been dominated by what we know as greenwashing. We do however believe that the world really need a critical, authentic and vital Solarpunk - counterculture, and will therefore, in our interpretation of - and sharing through - the Solarpunk term use the IPCC SSP1-5 scenarios as the fundamental points of departure and essential core of interdisciplinary exchange of perspectives. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways As more and more of institutional structures are turning green there is a need to clarify nuance within various green approaches. Obviously- the topic we are focusing on here is a rapidly moving target,living an active life in public discourse, and we can imagine ideas which today is considered utopian -like new economic narratives challenging the status qou, to be part of normalized discourse around the next corner.
By maintaining a focus on the IPCC SSP scenarios, we can through the arts contribute to the backcasting from SSP 1 (the scenario calledSustainability``) and the artists involved with RSA will be able to contribute to public discourse with pragmatically useful perspectives, for which visual arts is actually perhaps the best suited discipline to enter into such a challenging territory as imagined futures in uncertain times.
BIO/ARTIST STATEMENT: Margrethe Kolstad Brekke (artist/initiator of the Rjukan Solarpunk Academy)
Utopia as motif, motive, and method
As an art student in the years 2009-2014, the discussion around the Anthropocene
and general knowledge about the climate crisis had established the apocalyptic sublime as a growing rhetorical backdrop in cultural production. In this constant mindscape, I spent most of my years studying. In the textile arts BA program, you could find evidence of apocalypse and colonial-era injustice in every tool, fiber, trade route, and pattern design.
But towards the end of the MA program, I started to get the sense that I had to do
my own artwork a bit differently. That a more interesting, more responsible,- and counterintuitive artistic challenge would be to try and make art about hopes and dreams in times like this. So this is
what Ive been doing since the autumn of 2013.
1st, in Bergen, through all kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations in the years when
post-petroleum technologies still came with a sense of the unreal, and the knots- and bolts of real-life green transitions still had a sense of optimistic innocence about it.
Since 2019 my perspective has been rooted in the rural rust-belt town Rjukan, where I moved motivated by cheap housing, large abandoned industrial buildings, and
among other things the promise in the town’s motto, inspired by the recently installed sunmirrors: ``To make the impossible possible ``. in collaboration with the Sunmirror artist Martin Andersen and Siddharth Sareen (UiS), we established Rjukan Solarpunk Academy (RSA) in 2019. RSA has since then developed into a fruitful hub of science, art, and community development. Inspired by our partnership with the PHD-school ``Empowered Futures`` we piloted the festival concept ``Solarpunk Campus Rjukan`` in 2023.
Over the next years, fueled with new creative forces like the traveling writer Daniel Nyiri, and transitioning from ``indiestyle-relational-artproject to a more solid organizational structure- we will work on continued institutionalization of the RSA, and give space for a more diverse interpretation of the term Solarpunk. While RSA will take on a life of its own, I will gradually turn most of my attention back towards traditional studio work, where main topic of my own artistic practice will be the IPPC SSP1-5, so chances are that this will also influence the direction in RSA over the next couple of years.
My role model for this balance of activities has throughout the years been mainly
William Morris, a productive textile artists trying his best to respond to the burning open questions of his own era.
https://www.mkbrekke.com/
https://www.rjukansolarpunkacademy.com/
https://www.solarpunkcampus.org/