Introduction
With Bernd Scherer, Nick Houde and Representatives of the Curatorial Committee of The Current
Impulses and Conversation
With Jeremias Herberg and John Kim
Moderated by Adania Shibli

The transformations of the Anthropocene can only really be understood topologically, not topographically. For this reason, the most challenging aspects of doing Anthropocene research require engaging with local situations and communities; learning from on-site realities and how they might inform broader global issues rather than flattening out place, position, or power from what is being studied.

Exploring this relational asymmetry, the first conversation of The Shape of a Practice took place between two very different regions that are experiencing transformations in social and political life, prompted by the multiple disasters that are the Anthropocene. These include changing landscapes, a reckoning with the legacies of colonialism and racial inequality, the effects of deindustrialization, and the asymmetries of risk and equity they produce. These thoughts bring the conversation to two very different places where the effects of each of these transformations on the global stage produce poly-crisis which play out in radically different ways, first in the Lausitz region of Germany and second in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota in the US.

In this archived stream, artist and researcher John Kim opens a portal on site in the city of Minneapolis, US, with a discussion about From Emergency to Emergence, a series of workshops and conversations in the aftermath of the recent uprisings and protests that concern the poly-crisis of racial inequality, a global pandemic, and ecological destruction, which have laid bare the failures of US governance to provide for the basic human need to ensure life. Focused on activist practices of solidarity and mutual aid, the series seeks to reveal how such activities offer new models and modes of self-governance and political autonomy. Back in Berlin, sociologist Jeremias Herberg discusses the coal region of Lausitz in Germany, which has a long history of post-socialist change, coal extraction and populist mobilization. In light of the governments’ plan to phase out coal by 2038, his team at IASS Potsdam has engaged in a critical, facilitative and catalytic role to discuss and collectively transform those legacies in close collaboration with local partners.