World-Making: Imagining a Well-Cared for Planet

Image: Design Earth, The Planet After Geoengineering

HEKLER ASSEMBLY: Infrastructures of Care 
See the full program here.


Session #3: World-Making: Imagining a Well-Cared for Planet

When: Thursday. October 14, 2021 12-3pm ET
Where: ZOOM

Hosts: Hawa Allan, Amplifier (Vince Carducci, Claude Boullevraye de Passillé, Stephen Zacks), Sonja Blum

What are the common principles, ideas, and visions that we take for granted are shared universally? What motivations other than self-interest and short-term profit can be encouraged, designed into a system, and used to produce better outcomes? In this workshop we will examine processes, principles, and visions for the planetary as an exercise of writing a constitution, in the effort to begin bringing about a legally binding global community that can preserve and protect life, not just of humanity, but of billions of other species with which we share space.

Session Material

·      Declaration of Independence (1776)

·      Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1793)

·      Ten Principles of Bandung (1955)

·      International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976)

·      International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976)

·      Declaration on the Right to Development (1986)

·      Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007)

.      Belgrade Declaration of Non-Aligned Countries (1961)

REFLECTIONS


Ideas about future planetary order

Impediments:

  • What makes a mandate different from declaration - is there an impediment related to our constructs of how law goes into effect?

  • Declaration assumes hierarchical power 

  • Difficulty of reconciling local and global concerns 

  • Is the form of declaration the right 

  • UN human rights & Indegionus Peoples rights 

  • Everyone being equipped with conscience and using logic and reason 

  • Assumption of universal morality 

  • Assumption of competence of international tribunals

Principles: 

  • We begin by imagining that it is possible to have a future, one in which the Earth will not be burned and destroyed and all biodiversity and human life destroyed. 

  • Basic rights in this future world are to be free of oppression, universal basic salary, rights of food and shelter, water, living in non-polluted surrounding 

  • Living with difference is core / and any global declaration doesn’t impose same social order to arrive at basic rights 

  • Trauma and neurological make up, material culture and enforced laws that shaped it - cooperation and compassion as a response to imperialism logic 

  • Everyone is an artist - art as a liberatory and transformative tool vs segregated class / discipline based category dependent of participation in hegemonic educational frameworks 

  • Art for everyone, art as everyone 

  • Pre-capitalist cultural production

  • Non-Western pre-modern practice

  • Ethics over morality

HOSTS

Hawa Allan writes cultural criticism, fiction and poetry. Her book INSURRECTION, a weaving of personal narrative and legal history, is forthcoming in January 2022 from W.W. Norton. 

Amplifier Inc. is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation founded in 2013. Its mission is to employ emerging ideas, media, design, and aesthetic strategies to alter the terms of political debate, influence public policy, reconceive theoretical frameworks, promote proven tools and methods to improve local and global governance, and advance systemic reform and formation of new institutions. It produces events, public forums, white papers, media, reporting, and architecture and design projects, and participates in political and community advocacy to accomplish these goals.

Sonja Blum is a neurologist and an artist. She explores a space between intuition, memory, and social politics, and contemplates how collective identity and modes of knowledge production are intertwined, and how modes of knowledge production are legitimized. The work takes form through multiple media including video, installation, writing and performance, and collective experiments stretching the imagination of knowledge production and collective study. 

Stephen Zacks is an advocacy journalist, architecture critic, urbanist, and organizer based in New York City. He serves as president of the nonprofit Amplifier Inc., which promotes new conceptual frameworks and proven strategies to influence public policy and improve local and global governance. His projects have received awards from ArtPlace, Creative Capital, Warhol Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Graham Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and the New York State Council on the Arts.