Members of the Opus They team conducted interviews and focus groups over several weeks with individuals from different fields: art, history, anthropology, philosophy, art practice, architecture, design, and curation.
These meetings aimed to learn from interdisciplinary perspectives about current crises, anthropocentrism and the role of the arts in exploring innovative ways of being together in the world. Below, you can read a few extracts from these sessions.
I think it's important not to imagine these forms of radical possibility or even radical necessity in purely abstract terms, in terms of some sort of radically different Utopia to come. I think that now topias are important. I think that the spaces that people cultivate on an everyday level, and communities and different kinds of movements, spaces of different kinds and forms of collective action of different kinds…all of those spaces of possibility have a great deal to teach us in terms of how we move toward those more radical forms of possibility.
Anand Pandian, Professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University
These construction sites offer me a library of materials, because these materials all end up in skips, to be discarded and mixed with other debris. So my practice sometimes also touches these relics that are emerging. I use them in my practice, be it performance, be it sculpture or ceramics, or even an interdisciplinary collaboration with an author or a composer.
Victor Agius, Visual artist
The current crises are not disconnected. There are environmental catastrophes together with human ones caused by political situations, and they are all linked. For example, the fires in California and Canada, or the floods we had here in Austria, where people ended up homeless. There’s the genocide that is happening in Palestine, and the erosion of democracy in the US under Trump.
We can approach these challenges from the perspective of the South American political and scholarly movement called the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) project. Researchers in this project look at the colonialism of the Spanish and the Portuguese in South America. The urge for expansion was a search for riches because Europe at the time was so poor. Colonists brought ideas, people, plant materials, other riches to Europe, and the MCD scholars argue that it was this influx that enabled modernity to develop at all. But then Euro-centric histories discuss modernity as emerging only from European creativity. It’s basically an extraction of knowledge, materials, people, wealth, which enabled Europe to become as powerful and rich as it did. And so when you think about the catastrophes that we have today, most of them arise due to that same form of extractivism, where all the wealth gets sucked into Europe and North America, thereby impoverishing the other parts of the world.
Caroline Gatt, Anthropologist and Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Karl-Franzens-University of Graz
The post-Anthropocene can be facilitated. This is my hypothesis. If we feel that we are creative beings, if I feel that I can make a difference, if I feel that I can solve a problem creatively… then I will engage more to make the world a better place.
Margaret Mangion, Associate Professor, The Edward de Bono Institute for Creative Thinking and Innovation, University of Malta
So with all the crises that are happening around us, there has been a response from the side of the humanities, to come up with a critique of how the human has been understood and therefore mobilised by certain systems of power, whether they are political, economic, religious, and so on. So when we talk about the posthuman, we're not trying to exterminate the human race or say that there are not going to be any more humans now walking around. It's more about understanding how we can practise that humanity differently and engage with the world differently.
Manuela Zammit, Contemporary art historian and critic
I think of art as a form of aesthetic resistance to the conceptual paradigms and conceptual frameworks that we're caught within, and are regulated on the whole by forces that are antithetical to human existence in the sense that we would like to see it: empathic, open, and driven towards the development of human consciousness in a more beneficial sense, rather than the development or the maximisation of capital.
Gabriel Zammit, Curator
The university faculty I lecture in belongs to the humanities. And of course, there are also the sciences. Now, the sciences are expected to study what is not human as such, broadly, while the humanities, of course, are only allowed to discuss what is human. And this kind of bifurcation, this limiting of what is and what is not within the sphere of the human influences everything we do and think.
Niki Young, Philosopher
The temptation for many people is to say that we need large solutions. Having spent a few years working in the field of climate startups and climate tech, I was exposed to the idea that everything has to be at planetary scale. But increasingly, I'm starting to think that the only way to effectively deal with these kinds of things is to do things on a small scale.
Richard Muscat
People are shouting on top of each other. There's a strong sense of narcissism and individualism so we need a social platform. Now it's all about the individual. The idea of the social creates a space where people can talk. The problem with individualism is that we never tend to think of the individual as part of a network. So we're not looking at how the individual is affected by the system, and we're not looking at how that individual affects the system. Obviously human actions have effects on systems, and systems have effects on human actions. We are avoiding that complexity completely.
Francois Zammit
We have to be really careful about false binaries. From the imperialism of a certain standpoint, we might see two possibilities, an anthropocentric approach and a non-anthropocentric approach. And I think that it makes sense from the inside to say, “Oh, this is the anthropocentric and that everything else belongs in this other category called the non-anthropocentric.” And from the inside of this you could, you could put everything else in this other box and treat this as a binary. But I think the reality is there is no one non-anthropocentric approach. There's an infinite plurality of anthropocentric approaches that we can learn to understand and begin to think with and take seriously what it would mean to live with, but that takes a great deal of patience.
Anand Pandian, Professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University
It’s important to think about the concept of polyphony, where everyone has a voice, and we need to hear voices. And sadly, the thing is, since most things are so top down, decisions are made and polyphony doesn't happen.
Margaret Mangion, Associate Professor, The Edward de Bono Institute for Creative Thinking and Innovation, University of Malta
And I believe that we have become fundamentally disconnected, and we are affected by urbanisation and human acceleration to the point that we see ourselves as being disconnected from nature.
Jonathan Mizzi, architect, artist and designer, Director at Mizzi Studio
It's like a big monster that somehow looks at us from the future, but it's also not very easy to pinpoint what will change or what is about to change. I mean, even my colleagues from science departments have no clue what is actually going on when, for instance, the temperature on Earth rises by two degrees Celsius. We don't know what processes will be started up, and where that will lead. But I think this only confirms the urgency that we we need to live our lives otherwise, and we need to explore and think together how this can be done, and art plays a crucial role in that, in terms of searching for ways of intervening into the contemporary, into the way we have organized things up till today.
Rick Dolphijn, writer, educator, and curator, serving as an associate professor at Media and Culture Studies, Humanities, Utrecht University