“Like a market we have the forest where we collect fruit, hunt animals [such] as fish—freely—where we are eating and living, without dollars,” says Alicia Cahuia. Cahuia is a Woarani expert who was born and lives in the Amazonian forest, and who questions the decisions made in the city on behalf of the inhabitants of the forest. The traveling exhibition “Challenge Yasuní” uses an interactive interface to slowly introduce people to different views on the global challenges of the Anthropocene, including extractivism, energy policies, democracy, degrowth, and ownership. The name derives from the Ecuadorian Yasuní Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini (Yasuní-ITT) initiative, which called on the international community to prevent the expansion of oil fields in Yasuní National Park, but “Challenge Yasuní”is also used as an emblematic case for a broader discussion about global challenges that result from complex interactions between anthropogenic environmental changes.

The participative exhibition is a collaboration between Stella Veciana and Dan Norton. When it was first presented at the Center for Development Research in Bonn, it showed an interactive video-interface projected onto a kentia palm tree and a series of posters with quotes from interviewed experts of the so-called “global North” and “global South.” The interactive interface contains a growing archive of video interviews that connect specialist knowledge from a continuous series of transdisciplinary conferences. The key questions of the interviews address themes such as present resource policies, their impact on environmental and human rights, and possible ecologically friendly and good-governance alternatives to extractive and neo-extractive development models. Other interviews discuss topics relating to sustainability research and Buen Vivir. The interactive software allows extended video interviews to be analyzed and classified by theme and topic, and then these topics are categorized using key words in a drop-down menu, making each interview sequence directly accessible. This allows all interview comments that have been made regarding, for example, the key words Buen Vivir to be easily found, selected, and discussed on the site. Similar themes and references from specialists of the North and South can be compared, contrasted, and synthesized. Knowledge locked within long narratives can be identified, selected, and mixed. The user’s own line of inquiry directs the narrative between the key words, and allows the interviews to respond to the viewer’s own interests. Correspondingly, the viewer’s own sequence of choices determines the slowness or speed of their line of inquiry.

“Challenge Yasuní” offers the audience a way to compare interviewees’ views and bring (inevitably) defended expert opinions into play within an undefended space. The simple creative acts of selecting and mixing, when facilitated in a video interface for sharing knowledge, balance the user’s role between reader and writer; between learning new knowledge and creating their own knowledge.

The participative exhibition is a collaboration between Stella Veciana and Dan Norton. When it was first presented at the Center for Development Research in Bonn, it showed an interactive video-interface projected onto a kentia palm tree and a series of posters with quotes from interviewed experts of the so-called “global North” and “global South.” The interactive interface contains a growing archive of video interviews that connect specialist knowledge from a continuous series of transdisciplinary conferences. The key questions of the interviews address themes such as present resource policies, their impact on environmental and human rights, and possible ecologically friendly and good-governance alternatives to extractive and neo-extractive development models. Other interviews discuss topics relating to sustainability research and Buen Vivir. The interactive software allows extended video interviews to be analyzed and classified by theme and topic, and then these topics are categorized using key words in a drop-down menu, making each interview sequence directly accessible. This allows all interview comments that have been made regarding, for example, the key words Buen Vivir to be easily found, selected, and discussed on the site.

Similar themes and references from specialists of the North and South can be compared, contrasted, and synthesized. Knowledge locked within long narratives can be identified, selected, and mixed. The user’s own line of inquiry directs the narrative between the key words, and allows the interviews to respond to the viewer’s own interests. Correspondingly, the viewer’s own sequence of choices determines the slowness or speed of their line of inquiry.

“Challenge Yasuní” offers the audience a way to compare interviewees’ views and bring (inevitably) defended expert opinions into play within an undefended space. The simple creative acts of selecting and mixing, when facilitated in a video interface for sharing knowledge, balance the user’s role between reader and writer; between learning new knowledge and creating their own knowledge.