with Ola Korbańska and Franek Korbański, student of Human Ecology, Lund University (Sweden)
Ola came to Topolò last year for an art residency, spending the whole month learning to do nothing from the stones. This year, as a part of Academy of Margins, we come here as siblings: together with Fuanek, a great addition for the village of slavic matriarchy, a student of Human Ecology and passionate climber. We see a beautiful potential in this siblings-collab which will combine the academic knowledge of Fuanek with an artistic approach of Ola.
We think it is extremely timely to talk about carbon dioxide removals—the various technologies designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a bid to stop global warming. Currently, hundreds of ideas are being tested, funded and implemented around the world. Importantly, apart from the strictly technological and logistical considerations, CDRs bring about an entire array of underlying political, social and justice issues. Such themes, ‘the political unconscious’ of carbon removals, the unspoken assumptions as well as the unarticulated consequences of introducing large scale techno-fixes to climate issues require attention and discussion—which is why we want to discuss them in Topolò.
We are also interested in what this current race to develop CDR techno fixes can tell us about our ability to imagine alternative futures. We want to ask what the imaginaries of the future tell us about our present predicament, ourselves and the world we inhabit—what are our ‘horizons of the thinkable?’ In doing so we draw our inspiration from the work of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher and his notions of capitalist realism and hauntology.
We would like to invite the community and the guests of Topolò to join us in taking carbon dioxide removals as a starting point of an investigation into the imaginations of a decarbonised future. We want to come together and ask the question—‘what’s in the air?’ In the one that we are breathing in right now as well as in the one that we will be breathing in a decade, two, in a century? We are very excited to seek the answers together in Topolò.