Abstract
We live in a world in which economic and personal growth is a prerequisite to being human. The alternative lies in what has yet to be explored. Confined by what we are told and know as the “good life”, we must make a choice; will we degrow on our own initiative or will we continue until the biosphere forces us to stop? This paper is written in support of the performance documentary, TERRA INCOGNITA and the formation/creative process of the Terra Incognita Collective (TIC). It will explore the environmental, social and psychological impacts of a growth-oriented culture through a degrowth lens. Furthermore, this paper will explore art as an access point to high consumption cultures and artists as important social actors within environmental and social justice movements. Terra Incognita, its audiences and artists, explore growth histories through embodiment and collective authorship.
Highlights
With a growing sense of urgency, the environmental and resource distributive implications associated with modern (Western) society—including aspects of production, consumption and ways of life—pose significant challenges and paradoxes to political visions of a societal development that contributes to social equity within planetary boundaries
It is understood that those living with a surplus of goods and finances, typically those within Western society, need to degrow in order to “liberate conceptual space for countries to find their own trajectories to what they define as the good life.”1 The focus of this project will be on “high-metabolics”: those within communities whose social practises are of high consumption and waste, who must degrow to discover “the good life.”
Degrowth “a so-called missile concept - was put forward to challenge this depoliticization of environmentalism.”3 As a result, the degrowth movement is battling political and economic power structures but social perceptions and habits enforced by years of growth and techno-centred sustainable development ideologies
Summary
With a growing sense of urgency, the environmental and resource distributive implications associated with modern (Western) society—including aspects of production, consumption and ways of life—pose significant challenges and paradoxes to political visions of a societal development that contributes to social equity within planetary boundaries. Terra Incognita aims to create authorship within an user’s experience, encouraging higher levels of political and social participation through various forms of “social acupuncture: innovative artistic interventions as a way to trigger generosity and equity” within local communities, and the collaborative creation process within the collective itself. These collaborations complement degrowth’s various strategies such as a caring economy, conviviality, commonality, self-organization, localisation and dépense, the wasteful expenditure of a community’s surplus. This paper will explain the need for alternative movements such as degrowth, how it’s dimensions relate to principles found within the collective theatre experience and how I have used the theatre mask to extend the act of creation to my users and engage them in the construction of a new cultural imaginary
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