Rjukan Solarpunk initiative

Sun, Jun 2, 2024, 11:51 AM · 27:37

Spreading organically through social media around the world, the term ‘solarpunk’ is a modality of dreaming real-life constructive change. Googling ‘solarpunk’ yields a complex interdisciplinary heritage that meshes literature, art and ecocritical traditions with contemporary technological innovation in the energy sector and urban planning fields. Not yet institutionalized and somewhat anarchist, Solarpunk sensibilities, knowledge, and attitudes can serve as the lodestar for art and culture built around the realities of climate emergency. Solarpunk can be imagined as a sustainable network structure of ideas, sensibilities and values, fully utilizing the potential of the internet to create new modes of human contact and communication. Working with Solarpunk since 2019, we have however experienced a problem with the term. Due to the contemporary dominance of marketing logic within global aesthetics and visual culture, the style of Solarpunk have in many ways been dominated by what we know as greenwashing. We do however believe that the world really need a critical, authentic and vital Solarpunk - counterculture, and will therefore, in our interpretation of - and sharing through - the Solarpunk term use the IPCC SSP1-5 scenarios as the fundamental points of departure and essential core of interdisciplinary exchange of perspectives. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways As more and more of institutional structures are turning ``green`` there is a need to clarify nuance within various green approaches. Obviously- the topic we are focusing on here is a rapidly moving target,living an active life in public discourse, and we can imagine ideas which today is considered utopian -like new economic narratives challenging the status qou, to be part of normalized discourse around the next corner. By maintaining a focus on the IPCC SSP scenarios, we can through the arts contribute to the ``backcasting from SSP 1 (the scenario called ``Sustainability``) and the artists involved with RSA will be able to contribute to public discourse with pragmatically useful perspectives, for which visual arts is actually perhaps the best suited discipline to enter into such a challenging territory as imagined futures in uncertain times.