Imagining the Post-Anthropocene in the BioFutures Living Lab: Responding to Power Outage from a Multispecies Perspective

Power outages have become a reality for many people living in natural disaster sensitive areas and politically disruptive climates. When our power-driven infrastructures collapses, and darkness descends upon the Earth, we need to be creative in finding new ways to illuminate the planet. Bio art can become a way of attuning to new, nature-based realities. Bio artists observe natural phenomena and explore what we can learn from nature to re-think our material environment, which is mainly build for a power generated and technology-driven world. In this project we investigate how the illuminative power of nature can be used to provide light, warmth and beauty in times of darkness. Drawing on post-human theory and its critique on the current mis-/ab-/use of nature, we will engage young generations of citizens from different parts in the world in experiential futuring and co-creative living labs to investigate how bio art can direct to symbiotic futures in which the human and other-than-human join forces and establish an affirmative relationship to respond to major societal challenges. We hope to emphasize how bio artistic approaches and tactics can guide us during times of crisis, whilst at the same time critically rethinking the often disruptive forms of relationships between humans and other-than-humans. Our ambition is no less than envisioning and imagining progressive futures in which multispecies relationality will become the new normal.