From Rites to Rights — imagining ecologies of tomorrow

In collaboration with Framer Framed, we presented "From Rites to Rights: Imagining Ecologies of Tomorrow", a public event featuring the cohort of Cycle 3 of the Fellows Award: Cultural & Artistic Responses to the Environmental Crisis (CAREC) that invited us to envision alternative models of climate justice.

Cover: Sofía Acosta-Varea in collaboration with Llego Films and Archivo Visual Amazónico.
Image based on a still from the video art piece 'El Oriente es un Mito' (2022).

Our understandings of the non-human are strongly influenced and changed by life experience, geography, and culture. These personal and fragmented perspectives play a crucial role in how we coexist with the world around us – creating relations with a more-than-human world which is inherently ‘natural’ to our planet and at the same time inextricably shaped by human interventions and perspectives.

"From Rites to Rights: Imagining Ecologies of Tomorrow" brought together the Cycle 3 cohort of CAREC to reflect on cultural constructs of the non-human and how these are changing in the age of climate catastrophe. The cohort’s 12 artists and 5 mentors hail from across the world, and each practitioner’s work engages with human–non-human relationships in distinct ways. 

For some, this process involves nurturing a sense of spirituality or ancestral practice closely tied to the well-being of the Earth. For others, the focus falls on future technologies. Within the group, these varying processes of engaging with ecosystems converge, and perspectives and experiences from the past intersect with future possibilities. The encounter of various practices and sources of knowledge guides us in our collective imagining of the more-than-human worlds of tomorrow and fostering more sustainable and ecological futures.

Full programme