The unfolding ecological catastrophe is one of the most pressing challenges of our times. The devastating consequences of economies based on extraction and exhaustion can be found in dilapidated lands, rivers, seas and oceans, forests, animals, plants and peoples. Some of the violence of the ecological crisis occurs slowly and out of direct sight, gradually altering our environment, climate and bodies. Most of the violence, however, has been playing out for centuries already, on a local scale, directly affecting millions of people and their livelihoods.

How do we arrive at a critical and imaginative position with regard to this crisis and its long history that casts dark shadows far beyond the present? Which artistic strategies can be employed by cultural practitioners to engage and intervene? How to connect to the struggles and the movements of people who have been enduring and resisting these neo-colonial forces on a daily basis? How to learn from and with, and embrace alternative visions for this planet, beyond relations of property and extermination?

Through the temporary masters programme Planetary Poetics, hosted in collaboration with Framer Framed and organised in collaboration with Futuros Indígenas (Mexico) and Atelier Picha (DRC), we want to connect different social ecologies across the globe and experiment with new possibilities of collective imagination, creation and intervention.