Über Leben im Anthropozän // // A conversation about aesthetic and political enlightenment
Sat 06/08/24 | 4:00 pm
The event will take place in person. It can be followed via live stream. The link to the live stream will be published here shortly.
What is enlightenment on the threshold of the Anthropocene? What can be known by humankind in the age of big data and artificial intelligence? What can we hope for in the face of a capitalistically rationalized, secular present? What should we do in the midst of a climate crisis from which there seems to be no escape? As part of the PERFORMING DEMOCRACY festival, we want to discuss these Kant-inspired questions with regard to the possibilities of art and politics. Both are confronted with problems that challenge and overtax them. For example the author Kathrin Röggla describes this complex in an essay on her play “Das Wasser”: she describes the moment when she was approached by the marine biologist Antje Boethius and asked to work on the “world tragedy” that is emerging in the water sector as a result of the climate catastrophe for the theater. Boethius saw the need to add an artistic language to the scientific one, as the former was not sufficiently understood. Röggla reports how overwhelmed she was by this task at first. “The context seemed too abstract to me, too enormous, too big to grasp in literary terms, the subject matter unmanageable.” And yet she cannot escape this task.
In this event, people who have been working intensively for years on the connection between aesthetic and political enlightenment get into conversation. They will discuss the artistic search movements in this field with examples from their own work. The productions by Hannah Biedermann and Thomas Krupa can be visited after the event as part of the PERFORMING DEMOCRACY festival.
With
Hannah Biedermann (director Um Kopf und Kragen)
Adrienne Goehler (freelance publicist and curator, initiator of the Aesthetics and Sustainability Fund and HOPE HOME-НАДІЯ)
Thomas Krupa (director of Die Wand 360°)
Barbara Mundel (Artistic Director of Münchner Kammerspiele)
Tobias Rausch (Director, Fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability Potsdam)
The discussion will be led by
Josef Mackert (Catholic Academy Freiburg)
An event organised by the PERFORMING DEMOCRACY festival in cooperation with the Katholische Akademie Freiburg, the Günther Anders Research Centre at the University of Freiburg and the Heinrich Böll Foundation Baden-Württemberg.
The complete programme of the Kant conference is available at www.katholische-akademie-freiburg.de