How could collaboration maintain a habitable planet?
Where is the Planetary? is a collective search for models of living together on Earth. Following five central questions, the artist Koki Tanaka has designed five experimental settings in which researchers, artists, and activists collaborate to develop perspectives and practices that consider and bring together not only the systemic processes of planet Earth, but also the worldviews of its inhabitants: What are the conditions for habitability? How can habitability be measured? What planetary damage can be repaired? Who gets to decide what actions are taken? How do we tell planetary stories?
 
Over the course of three days, the HKW will turn into a rehearsal room for planetary praxis. In his experimental setups Koki Tanaka removes essentially everyday activities and work sequences from their ordinary context, thus revealing their hidden potential for exchange and transformation. An integral part of his settings is the presence of film cameras, which are operated by the artist in collaboration with the film collective TINT. The filming and being filmed continuously disrupts the supposed self-evident nature of routines and directs attention toward the particular gestures of togetherness. Through conversations and practices the participants seek ways to transform the multitude of perspectives and cosmologies into a common agency. This does not imply striving for a new universalism, but rather calls for the courage to imagine a composite of different, even divergent, ways of world-making. Where is the Planetary? asks anew the old question of “How do we live together?” and opposes reductive anthropological models with a decentered and plural approach of “being human as praxis” (Sylvia Wynter).
 
More information: hkw.de/en/planetary
Curatorial Statement