Another World is Possible: Towards Futures-Transforming Approaches for Societal Renewal

The research explores the role of reflexive and aesthetic practices in a time of interlocking crises increasingly described as a "metacrisis" – or as logics that have cultivated a relationship with the world grounded in the separation of self, others, and the world around us: a separation that constrains our capacity to relate and respond adequately to phenomena such as climate change. The question is pursued empirically through participation in a transdisciplinary, arts-based research project on artistically conveying climate change in the Swiss Alps. It is grounded in a relational ontology of being-in-relation with the uncertainty of futures, which must be understood as open categories for inviting transformation in the present to unfold anew and otherwise – hence the plural "futures". It inquires into these practices and processes at the intersection of environmental communication and telematic technologies, and how they enable a new relationship with the changing Alpine landscapes – spaces in which climate change unsettles conventional categories of nature, culture, and future rapidly.