The climate crisis and the numerous disruptions that can be directly or indirectly attributed to it already have and will further generate unforeseen consequences affecting people’s everyday lives beyond any conceivable imagination.
In times of crisis, art and culture hold the potential to act as connecting forces, creating the spaces and opportunities for people to meet and exchange while bringing together those who would otherwise not encounter one another. They serve as conduits, bridging gaps within and across diasporic, hybrid, and translocal communities. Although this may not be their primary objective, they provide shared languages through which individuals can express collective experiences, promote a sense of belonging and practice solidarity.
Whether through visual or performing arts, written or applied arts, cultural expressions create spaces for affect and emotional connections, dialogue and creative resilience enabling people to navigate the complexities of crisis and its multiple effects with an emerging or renewed sense of confidence and coherence.
Nevertheless, such creative resilience entails anticipating communities after multiple system collapses or gloom and doom scenarios. Instead of envisioning alternative futures in an imaginary world, the grammar of creative resilience operates in a distinct form of future: It anticipates times when novel forms of life and creativity will have been emerging and foresees spaces where novel organisational and social structures will have been coming into being beyond the constraints of pre-apocalyptic norms.
Specific challenges for PACESETTERS main target groups:
- For artists and creatives: Instead of attempting to further disrupt disorder, consider creating continuities that enhance collective resilience and the capacity to adapt to change.
- For research: Further exploring the multiple forms of value that stem from the interplay between the ability to create affect and the power to be affected
- For policymakers: Promoting creative confidence across diverse communities in precarious situations while acknowledging multifaceted impacts
- For finance and investment: Leveraging the desire for affective forms of knowledge production in the contexts of the climate transition.