On the second day of “Planet Writes Back!” Bertolt Brecht's poem “To the Born Later” was mentioned, published in 1939, in which he attaches the enormity of his presence to the fact that it feels wrong to talk about trees.

Too easy, too careless as a subject in a time of crime.

The three-day symposium in the Red Salon of the Berliner Volksbühne was based on the opposite premise: Now it's trees, now it's nature that needs to be talked about: the withering forest, the melting ice, the catastrophe in which the Mankind just maneuvered.

To explore how the climate crisis is echoed in art was the aim of “Planet writes back!”.

Petra Ahne

Editor in the features section.

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The title echoes “The empire writes back”, the collection of essays that gathered postcolonial positions for the first time in 1989, and the festival organizers from the Climate Cultures network berlin can claim for themselves similar pioneering work. This requires seismographic attention, sensing the response to global warming and its consequences. The conceptual foundation of the symposium came from scientists who themselves cross and expand boundaries in their disciplines. The sociologist Harald Welzer, for example, who set up a focus on climate culture with Claus Leggewie at the Essen Institute for Cultural Studies in 2008, is convinced that the social dimension of climate change receives too little attention. Or Mike Hulme, Professor of Human Geography at Cambridge University,who found the scientific view of global warming increasingly inadequate and published a six-volume work on how climate shapes cultures. Both belonged to the partly present, partly switched on guests in the Red Salon, which for three days became - as far as the hygiene rules permitted - a dimly intimate laboratory of climate change as a cultural change.

How do we get out of there and what comes after?

The thematic division of the symposium did not seem very conclusive because literature, for example, was assigned a day, but was consistently present as a genre that has its own genre label in the cultural climate discourse with “Climate Fiction”.

One day was dedicated to the arctic regions and one of the "oil moderns".

It was revealing which red threads were hidden under the disparate surface when, at the end, tired but stimulated, the panel discussions were reviewed.

What is happening to the planet and to us right now evidently spawns three narratives: that of loss, that of a visualization of what is happening, and that of a possible future - an answer to the question: How do we get out of there and what comes afterwards? The latter story doesn't really exist yet, as has been stated several times how urgently it is needed.

The loss that goes hand in hand with global warming was impressively themed in the work of Minik Rosing and Ólafur Elíasson, reported by Rosing, geologist from Greenland. For the “Ice Watch” campaign, they brought blocks of ice from the Arctic to London and Paris and melted them there. The collective “Beauty of Oil”, consisting of Alexander Klose and Benjamin Steininger, presented the visualization of human activity with relish in a lecture show, which, transformed into an exhibition, can also be seen at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

The bold mix of science, economic history and pop culture showed what Lukas Bärfuss - author of the play "Oil" - later escaped almost desperately: "Everything that I am is inconceivable without oil." post-fossil age?

“Get away from the moral nonsense”, demanded Harald Welzer and considered a “climate comedy”.

Canadian author Catherine Bush, in whose books nature has a sensual presence, believes we need to relearn awe.

In Kim Stanley Robinson's novel “A Ministry for the Future”, the world is ultimately climate neutral and fairer, but only after attacks by climate activists.

Robinson would like this part of the plot to be understood more as a warning.

It must work without violence, he said: "Otherwise we face chaos."