The planet is burning and the global economy is failing as the ‘end of history’ actually morphs into an end of habitable climate. The complicity of capitalism with extinction and its dependence on the war machine is the gravest blindspot of our times. The relationship between military strategy, dominant culture, market-driven colonialism, extractivism, and industrial production is a ubiquitous aspect of the ongoing climate catastrophe. This is profoundly marked by the economic and political policies surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In his 2003 film, Erkennen und Verfolgen (War at a Distance) Harun Farocki proposes “There must be a connection between production and destruction” reminding us not only to inquire what connection it is, but precisely to understand the logic through which this connection is hidden. It is at this intersection that Nomadic Cosmologies and Fugitive Power seeks to open up a space for possible ways of being collectively. To enter Nomadic Cosmologies demands paying meticulous attention to the modes of navigation. It is to exercise one’s geographical sensibility which can hint at the nebulous ways of grounding with the universe. To connect positions from very precise locations and specific moments in time, without losing the sense of passing through time. It is also to transform a particular moment into a vantage point for future trajectories. In other words, to move transversally through past, present and future. Fugitive Power operates outside the normativity inscribed within capitalist regimes as it escapes commodifying logics. It is a power that gains momentum through energetic, clandestine and joyful maneuvers of collective organization, a spectre to be activated when least expected and most potent.
In a series of sonic and experiential conversations weaving climate struggles with environmental justice and transformative futures, eight transmissions warn that the coming storm is a total war against life and offer a call for nourishing pluralistic ways of being in and with the world. Red Forest Radiograms are an invitation to engage with the socioecological dimension of energy and people’s resistance against epistemic injustice: the reduction of all forms of life to simple parts of a complex whole, rather than many forms of life that need space to flourish on their own terms.
These experiential conversations will be transmitted over the duration of the Triennale, on site with the Milan based Radio Raheem, in Germany on the award winning artists’ radio, reboot.fm 88.4 Mhz Berlin and 90.7 Mhz Potsdam and online via Goethe-Institut. The Red Forest proposal is conceived as a response to the urgency of imagining a different world, and the need of amplifying people’s organization growing from below and against the clock. Nomadic Cosmologies and Fugitive Power builds on Germany’s commitment to critical approaches in art, discourse, science and the environment, both at home and abroad, in the hopes of activating a more equitable and sustainable future for us all.
Red Forest is an organic assemblage based on affinities and overlapping practices that grounds together research, art, political imagination, and social actions striving for transformative justice and ecological reparations. Red Forest assembles and organizes their work with infrastructures of collective reciprocity and interdependency as actual potentiality. This program draws on their research on Extractivism, Datafication, and Transformative Justice that was supported by the Kone Foundation in Finland. Red Forest is mobilized by David Muñoz-Alcántara, Diana McCarty, Mijke van der Drift and Oleksiy Radynski.
The German Pavilion at the 23rd Triennale Milano International Exhibition is convened by Red Forest on a commission from the Goethe-Institut Mailand and supported by the German Federal Foreign Office. Media Partner Radio Raheem Milan and reboot.fm Berlin. Pavilion Design David Muñoz-Alcántara, Production Andrea Angeli Architetto. Grafic Design UAU Studio.