Ebook
At the Roots
Visions for a more just future for people and planet. After all, all crisis are connected at their roots.
Real utopias from art, science and civil society. From Ecuador, Germany, Palestine and more
Texts about the power of imagination in law, art and in our heads
72 pages full of words, pictures and drawings for 8,50 Euros
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One of the most powerful real utopias that we can offer is the idea of the Rights of Nature. Because it is about to the roots of everything, and therefore could change everything. Our relationship with nature and our relationship with each other. Privately and politically. It is about treating nature as a subject with its own rights instead of treating it as an object that humans can exploit and own. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would also mean humans could no longer be exploited or even exterminated.
It is a legal idea that aims to change not just a few paragraphs, but our entire understanding of the world. At least the western one. Many indigenous peoples have been living according to this basic principle for centuries and millennia. They don't even need special laws for this.
But the West, the industrialized nations, we capitalist people obviously do, and we also need art. Because the ecological crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. We can't even imagine how things could be different, how a life with respect for nature and respect for all people could look.
SNEAKPEAK
In 2024 Radio Utopistan organised together with Gängeviertel and other organisations an exhibition on nature and justice in Hamburg and Quito. In Ecuador we could reach some 40.000 people with it as it was exhibited in the Centro Cultural Metropolitano next to the presidential palace at the main square. In both location it was for free and everybode.
We had invited artists from different cultural contexts to contribute their works on the topic. Ecuador is the country where the idea of Rights of Nature is the most advanced. We also had a supporting program with talks, workshops and special guided tours. The Ebook is the quintessence of this. Our collection of the most important and impressive insights, reflections and artistic visions that we gathered during more than a year of work on the two exhibitions in different countries and contexts.
We wanted to make tangible the idea of seeing and treating nature as a living being, which is actually super logical and unsurprising - but nevertheless completely ignored and torpedoed in our world systems.
A selection of the participating artists and speakers who have their say in the ebook: Sam Durant, Khaled Hourani, Misha Valejo Prut, Maria Sturm, Georges Senga, Sofia Acosta, Kübra Gümüsay, Alena Jabarine, Andreas Gutmann, Agustín Grijalva, Pingo, Paula Erstmann, Verena Issel, Made by us, Julia Nordholz, Felix Jung and Margaux Weiss, Sam Gora, Elisabeth Weydt
The funding and cooperation institutions of the exhibitions: Westwerk, MOM art space, Galerie Ladöns, Gängeviertel e.V., Greenpeace Umweltstiftung, Engagement Global, Hamburger Kulturbehörde, Winterstiftung, Norddeutsche Stiftung für Umwelt und Entwicklung, Alianza Francesa Quito, Casa Humboldt Quito, Centro Cultural Metropolitano Curated and organized by Sam Gora and Elisabeth Weydt. The ebook here is edited and published by the two of them and includes their own texts. It was sponsored by the Winterstiftung.
All prices in EUR
