Giulia Lepori and Michał Krawczyk. Regenerative Dwelling in the Age of Collapse: A Story
Channel: Giulia Lepori
Date: 2020-07-12

Video-paper for ASLE Symposium ‘Humanities on the Brink: Energy, Environment, Emergency’ 2020 _ Thanks for watching! We'd love your feedback!

Abstract:
We are living an epoch of collapse. We are living through the collapses that derive from the Anthropocene.
To live through (Ingold 2011) means that we are not occupants of a collapsing world, but we are inhabitants in the world’s collective collapsing performance. Being aware of the Earth’s state of degradation is a way to be mentally prepared for the challenges that we will be presented. This, in our opinion, shall be the underlying statement behind the current humanities. Nevertheless, our doctoral researches in the environmental humanities propose neither the doom and gloom nor the apocalyptic storytelling. They propose to allow places for difference. We feel the responsibility to offer media that show how the world can be different from the ways it is. In the context of positive solutions, this exposition is a joint multimodal storytelling of two ethnographic fieldworks in the permacultural site of Centre for Development of Consciousness – Thar dö Ling, in Sicily, Italy. For six months we lived with a family of permaculture designers, to experience and document a manner of dwelling that creates human habitats in sustainable relations with the more-than-human biotic and elemental communities. In the two researches, moving images and writings are both methodological tools and artifacts that narrate while affecting. In this collaboration, we argue that multimodal storytelling is a practice of enhanced mediation that can affect the audience at intellectual and sensorial levels, promoting the imagining of regeneration. Thus, we exhibit four short films accompanied by four readings, which tell stories of/for a culture of ecological consciousness. Far from suggesting the one-for-all solutions for a universal culture of ecology, this presentation is an ethnographic fragment to witness that in our age of collapse, regenerative imagination is still enacted.