Art for Radical Ecologies Manifesto
Art for Radical Ecologies Manifesto was initiated by Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI), current member of L’Internationale. The manifesto was developed during three public assemblies at the Venice Climate Camps (2022 and 2023) and the World Congress for Climate Justice of Milan (2023) where fellow artists, cultural workers, activists and researchers joined the Art for Radical Ecologies platform. As IRI writes in a foreword to the program, the manifesto makes the compelling case for ‘aesthetic-political concatenations that interpret creativity as a radical character of the social and not as a commodity.’ It is based on ‘the conviction that the fight for climate justice is, necessarily, a fight against and beyond extractive capitalism, even in its green version, that is actually an attempt to turn the crisis into new accumulation.’ L’Internationale Online and IRI will be publishing further texts that expand on the positions of the manifesto.
1/ Art is part of the world. Art for Radical Ecologies is part of the struggles to change it.
2/ Art is a promise of other worlds, but it is in the actual world that promises must be kept participating in the struggles for its transformation.
3/ New materialism and historical materialism together act against exploitation and domination. Speculation opens up to potential becoming counter-hegemonic social practice, otherwise it is neutralization and capture.
4/ In our current environmental breakdown, the necessary condition for autonomy of art is its autonomy from the neoliberal-extractivist apparatus. Art workers and art institutions must reflect about their positionality and act accordingly.
5/ Art for Radical Ecologies is abolitionist, against police repression, fascism, racism, colonialism and genocide. It is grounded in the voices of the oppressed and is our breath of liberation.
6/ The revolutionary subject is not only human. Transversal and interspecies alliances can powerfully act against ventriloquisms, dualisms, and othering hierarchies.
7/ Art for Radical Ecologies makes visible the human and other-than-human vulnerabilities and precariuosness and takes care of them.
8/ Dismantling the foundations of colonial privilege in this era of environmental and democratic collapse is paramount. Art for Radical Ecologies opens up space against the contention and detention of migrating humans and other-than-humans.
9/ Struggles are interconnected, because so are oppressions. Ideological and material extractivism abusing lives as resources, means or products must end now. In shared life, liberation is total.
10/ End Fossil is the priority. Any complicity with biocapitalism, extractive industry and financial greenwashing in and outside art institutions must end.
11/ Art for Radical Ecologies is either anti-capitalist or it is not. Capitalism is the driver of environmental breakdown. There is no such thing as sustainable capitalism. Techno solutionism and transition reformism are bullshit.
12/ Art for Radical Ecologies stands with technologies that free human and other-than human life and do not perpetuate the exploitation of productive and reproductive labor.
13/ Art for Radical Ecologies is generative yet anti-productivist. It embraces degrowth and multiplies questions, terminologies, connections and scenarios.
14/ Art institutions funded by toxic philanthropy must be abolished. Anti-museums and alter-institutions are the forms that we adopt for common instituent imagination.
15/ As art workers we inhabit spaces of race, class, gender privilege as well as subordination. We stand with those whose freedoms are menaced. We reclaim freedom of speech and stand against censorship.
16/ Dystopia is privilege. Enough with the apocalyptic talk, it’s not the end of the world, but of global capitalism and its toxic imaginaries. Art repairs temporalities and liberates futurity, opening horizons beyond capitalist realism and catastrophism.
First published on November 3rd, 2023, by Institute of Radical Imagination
Sign the manifesto on instituteofradicalimagination.org
The views and opinions published here mirror the principles of academic freedom and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the L'Internationale confederation and its members.
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The Climate Forum is a space of dialogue with respect to the concrete eco-political operational practices implemented within the art field.
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The series builds upon earlier research resulting in the (2022) book Climate: Our Right to Breathe and reaches toward emerging change practices. It asks: How might the speculative and critical insights framed within the registers of the discursive, the affective, and the symbolic be operationalised within everyday working? While the wider agenda of the series is to consider institutional practices, the first session maps some of the ways ecopolitics are formulated by artist and activist iniatives.
Register here.
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