The Anthropocene as a provocation

The core premise of the Anthropocene hypothesis denotes that the cumulative activities of industrialized humanity are pushing the entirety of the Earth into a new geological epoch, an epoch for which there is no analog in Earth history. Taking its cue from Earth system science on the one hand and geology on the other, it adds the crucial dimension of human culpability by signaling how the (unintended) consequences of human interventions are rapidly and irrevocably altering the overall metabolism of the Earth, threatening to destabilize biophysical systems and biogeochemical cycles in their current perimeters. Geoscientists and humanists alike agree that such a transition has already begun and that its outcome is as yet uncertain.

Through the realization and denomination of human impacts on planetary scale the term problematizes the commonly held idea that “natural” systems of the planet were somehow separated from the processes of human culture and thereby cuts across cultural and epistemic genera. An “age of anthropos’ making” has obvious consequences in how it compels humanity and its variety of cultural baselines to reflect on their combined agency. Human beings are no longer just cultural actors in front of nature’s static scenery but have instead entered into a multifaceted dynamic of entanglement, happening on highly unstable ground, as an industrialized humanity elicits the sensitivity of the planet to react to internal disturbance. And if we, as humans, are the most agential force of this age then a whole slew of ethical and epistemic questions must be asked as to our role. The predominant and most urgent one of which is: How can our societies and cultures, our politics and economic structures, or even our forms of life, adequately address and curtail these shifts across species patterns, across biophysical systems, and across geohistorical time?

Origin of the project

Engaging with some of these problematics, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) realized The Anthropocene Project, a series of public events, exhibitions, workshops, and publications in 2013/14 addressing the Anthropocene as a novel category of thinking and practice. The project produced artistic situations for public engagement and supported new forms of research and discourse helping to recover, question, detail, and test the concept of the Anthropocene from a generally cultural perspective. Some highlights of the project consisted in the exhibition The Whole Earth, the film project Anthropocene Observatory, the event A Matter Theater, and the essential four-volume publication Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain, Vapor, Ray, while the international Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) held its first meeting.

In the course of preparing this two-year project, two workshops co-organized with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), invited young researchers to present their work, ideas, and methods on Anthropocene-related themes. During the opening of the Anthropocene Project in January 2013, this thread went public with the convening of a larger research forum consisting of five different research initiatives from across Europe while a roundtable session gathered twenty research directors from renowned institutions to discuss and compile a “wish-list” for future approaches to Anthropocene-related research.

What became clear through these exchanges was the central need for one particular goal: reforming the way knowledge is produced and disseminated. As traditional European nature–culture dichotomies, and the hegemonic conceptions of how humans relate to Earth and its other species of life have become increasingly inadequate for making sense of this epoch or this world, many of the underlying knowledge practices and assumptions of universities, academies, research platforms, and cultural institutions will need to be challenged because their structures and systems of knowledge have become a liability in the pursuit of a broader and richer understanding of what might be termed an “earthbound knowledge.”

Developing models of Anthropocene thinking and practice

HKW and MPIWG constituted an unusual alliance. On the one side is HKW, a cultural laboratory that has the freedom to work beyond the bounds of more academic settings but, at the same time, is limited by the confines of arts institutions. On the other side is MPIWG, an institute conducting basic research into the historical formation of knowledge in a largely independent manner. The collaboration of these two highly different but committed partners opened up a novel space free of many institutional constraints allowing them to develop and test new ways of research curation. Ingesting the results of the explorative workshops and the opening event, HKW and MPIWG together set out to combine both their skills and privilege to provide an experimental platform for novel forms of cross-disciplinary thinking and mutual learning. The aim was to foster the collective development of new modes of research, education, and civic commitment to match the new basecamp conditions of the trans-scalar agency within a nature–cultural Earth. The objective: to create a model Anthropocene Curriculum.

The Anthropocene Curriculum initiative rests fundamentally on the idea that the cascading challenge, if not catastrophic outlook, of the Anthropocene creates a necessity to make previously uncharted, transdisciplinary connections apparent and to develop new forms of navigating the spectra of issues defining the new epoch. The project seeks to approach knowledge and its production in a novel way that embodies and traverses planetary complexities and helps to create the social-epistemic formations carefully acting on it. Conceptually, this tenders a remarkable context shift in how we understand human beings and their relation to the Earth system. Practically, this has important implications not only for the (Earth) sciences but also for the humanities, design, and the arts. New approaches for modeling problems are integral to any reexamination of our role within this age. After all, how could the highly segregated and subdivided forms of modern and Westernized knowledge grapple with the concatenation between politics and planetary systems, theology and an emerging “technosphere,” human-induced violence and viral evolution, contrasting vectors of knowledge that so many of today’s problematics envelope? How, too, without delving into these new, intransitive forms, could we ever transition into a future-oriented and integrative model of knowledge that allows us to do more than simply react to these often jarring dynamics? The problems are simply too rich, nested within various contexts of interaction, and embroiled in vast cascades not easily mapped by singular knowledge sets or uniform-scale granularities. If we are to engage with this epoch, we must pursue these questions anew or, better yet, learn how to reframe the questions we are asking entirely.

The general aim of the Anthropocene Curriculum has thus been to transform interdisciplinary exchange into an operative tool and catalyze active collaboration between research and education. Beyond the obvious benefits of sharing and collaborating, the mandate of the curriculum has been to create new forms of education that involve various social, scientific, epistemic, and political reconfigurations. The approach suggests that these are vital for knowledge production in the face of catastrophic changes that affect the Earth—its systems and inhabitants—asymmetrically yet ubiquitously, across species, substance, and determination. This search for novel forms of problem-driven research and education is linked to current debates around the shifting roles, means, and institutions of higher education (such as curriculum reform, higher education infrastructures beyond universities, etc.) in particular, although its aims are more widespread. While the project framework encourages the integration of cross-disciplinary thinking, civic commitment in the curricula of universities and research institutions, it also envisions an entirely new epistemological horizon. The Anthropocene Curriculum approach thus addresses a qualitative shift in conceptualizing and framing knowledge—its devices, methods, and institutions—by productively imbricating the plurality of knowledge within an experimental educational setup: a plurality that explicitly bridges different models of knowledge (institutional or otherwise, spatially distributed, and situated) into novel milieus of collaboration rather than into a mere relativism of perspective. More practically speaking, it seeks to incubate, test, and foster cross-disciplinary engagement by composing experimental spaces and a self-reflective framework for co-learning and co-producing.

The Anthropocene Campus

The first test for this constructive framework took place in November 2014 during the first Anthropocene Campus: An intensive, nine-day, HKW event featuring seminars, discussions, and public forums involving 140 young researchers, educators, artists, and activists from more than thirty countries. From the “geo-political” interdependencies between desertification and armed conflict, across the mediatization of the Anthropocene, to urban metabolisms or socioeconomic modeling studies—the campus consisted of concrete case studies and cross-disciplinary research endeavors. Accompanying the campus was a public program and a larger public forum where the specific role of education in the collaborative development of urgent concerns for future engagement were discussed extensively. This negotiation presented a rare opportunity to work out a pedagogically feasible design for knowledge building and knowledge transfer outside of a traditional academic setting, and this set the stage for the future development of the project along such lines.

Due to the success of the first Anthropocene Campus another such experiment was conducted in March 2016 at HKW, this time with central focus on the concept of the technosphere: the hypothetical Earth-scale sphere of technological systems that is comparable to, and intermingles with, the other geospheres such as the biosphere or hydrosphere. The Anthropocene Campus: The Technosphere Issue reflected developments in the debate during the 2014 Campus and thus became a focus of the follow-up project to HKW’s The Anthropocene Project, titled simply Technosphere. After all, if human activity has come to be such a prominent biophysical force, altering geochemical cycles and the fate of evolution, then it would be through the agency of technology—ranging from the level of molecular interventions to the vastness of planetary scale systems—that such an impact would occur. For this reason, it seemed essential to draw in discourses and practices related to technological agency within the Anthropocene Curriculum to broaden and enrich how this epoch is understood.

A global network

In the process of coordinating and hosting the first two Campus events in Berlin, a global network of smaller initiatives, and bigger projects did emerge around the project. To strengthen this momentum and to support the idea for a globally differentiated understanding of the Anthropocene, the project has then gradually shifted its focus to partner projects outside Germany around the year 2017. Whereas Berlin continued to provide an important hub for the project, the aim was now to unfold the potential of its relevance in other contexts. The result became an ongoing series of globally dispersed initiatives at varying scales—campuses, co-learning hubs, field trips, and workshops—all dealing with locally focused concerns. Taken together, these partner projects today essentially create a heterogeneous network of situated-knowledge topographies each of which relate to and engage differently with the Anthropocene concept. Working independently according to their own approach and capacity these satellite initiatives now all find a common space under the umbrella framework of the Anthropocene Curriculum.

Reflecting this new focus on diverse Anthropocene topographies, the project also re-oriented itself towards a more situated and field-based inquiry. An initial, large-scale attempt to spell out such an in-situ approach was the investigation of the Mississippi River Basin as an exemplary space of ongoing Anthropocene transformations in 2018-19. Titled Mississippi. An Anthropocene River this 18-month project brought together hundreds of local and international scholars, artists, and activists along the watershed jointly studying and framing the varied ongoing historical, social, and technological causes and effects that have—and still are—radically altering a transcontinental riverine landscape. The project comprised five interdisciplinary Anthropocene Field Stations along the river, a three-month long Anthropocene River Journey, an Anthropocene River School program, both online and on-site, and culminated in a weeklong Anthropocene River Campus event in New Orleans in November 2019.

To facilitate communication, leverage a common understanding, and bind local topographies into a global topology of “earthbound knowledge,” a digital platform is essential. Replacing the previous website that worked as a growing, open repository documenting and presenting the resources, outcomes, and experiences of the overall Anthropocene Curriculum project, the platform seeks to include the digital space itself as an in situ experiment. The current version of the site launched in 2019 represented an attempt at bringing together the strength of the original website and its activities alongside introducing research tools and publication formats—such as the case studies or Courses—which could enable new horizons of sharing and co-learning for contributors far and wide and support the globally distributed forms of democratic knowledge production that is tinkered with in times of global transitions.

In October 2020, an event was held that reflected on the tools, infrastructures, and practices of the AC project itself. Titled The Shape of a Practice: Negotiating Context in the Anthropocene and taking place during a period of pandemic restrictions, this weeklong event took a hybrid form, hosting local Berlin initiatives at HKW while also bringing together many international partner projects in a specially designed online environment. The event focussed particularly on negotiating how practices and concerns can be understood across the myriad social, ecological, and political topographies of the Anthropocene.

In 2022 a series of events and accompanying research combined the Anthropocene Curriculum experiment with the notion of evidence. Using the intermediate results of the Anthropocene Working Group’s search for the onset of the Anthropocene as a point of focus, the Evidence & Experiment program explored how knowledge practices confer on truth in times of conflicting political concerns and fragmented social values. In May 2022, Unearthing the Present took place, inviting scientists, researchers, artists and activists to decipher stratigraphic samples collected from sites around the globe and reflect upon what they reveal about the social, political and technological transformations over the last century. In addition, the AWG and its associated research groups invited the public to attend as observers the AWG’s internal meeting and to witness a milestone in the process of defining the geological Anthropocene.

In October 2022, Where is the Planetary?, produced in collaboration with the artist Koki Tanaka, explored shared planetary-scale practices for an equitable cohabitation on Earth. Over the course of three days, HKW’s auditorium became an intermediary space in which discourse and gesture combined in order to collectively seek out the responsibilities and possibilities of a planetary praxis.

Beyond HKW: The Anthropocene Commons

October 2022 also saw the members of the global AC network meet at HKW to reflect upon 10 years of collaboration and exchange, while also establishing an operational framework for a distributed future outside the stewardship of an institution. Following a series of online plenaries in the preceding months, the two-day meeting at HKW considered questions of governance and pedagogy, of scale and resources, drawing upon a decade’s worth of knowledge gleaned from re-imagining the work of educational, research and cultural institutions to better respond to the crises of our times. A new umbrella for the community’s activities emerged from these lively discussions: the Anthropocene Commons. Commoning here not only means creating shared spaces, but also turning institutions inside-out to make research available to frontline communities as well as collaboratively creating pedagogies with and for diverse perspectives. To provide a foundation for its future activities, the community collectively authored an emergent statement of its vision and mission, identifying the core values and aims of the Anthropocene Commons approach moving forward: Shared Spaces, Pedagogies of Action, and Research.

Between 2013–22, the Anthropocene Curriculum constituted a unique curatorial project, undertaken during a period marked by a powerful and global shift in public discourse, political decision-making, and ecologic thinking. From 2023, carrying on the experimental nature and transdisciplinary approach that has characterized the project over the last decade, the Anthropocene Commons continues this urgent work as an open community of researchers, educators, activists, scientists, artists, and other actors who create shared spaces to explore experimental pedagogies and research practices to engage the Anthropocene’s human and more-than-human challenges and futures.