Text by CLOT Magazine
How long can we continue pursuing economic growth? What ideological, social and biophysical factors precipitate the current environmental crises? What agency is available for transformative practices and imaginaries to redefine how we satisfy our energy and material requirements and avert large-scale ecosystemic breakdown?
To answer these and many other questions the DISNOVATION.ORG collective presents the exhibition Post-Growth (Na De Groei), an invitation to a collective and practical examination of our shared future, examining the notion of growth in its many facets and implications, testing the limits of technology, of politics and of our imaginations.
DISNOVATION.ORG, short for ‘disobedient innovation’, is a research collective founded in Paris in 2012. The core members include Maria Roszkowska, Nicolas Maigret and Baruch Gottlieb.
They work at the interface of art, research and hacking. More specifically, their recent artistic provocations seek to empower Post Growth imaginaries and practices by challenging the widespread faith that ‘economic growth’ and ‘technological fixes’ will solve the ecosystemic disruptions they produced in the first place.
In their exhibition statement, their share: Post Growth invites us to challenge the dominant narratives about growth and progress and explore the radical implications of various artistic prototypes, like an economic model based on the energy emitted by the Sun. This speculative research provides perspectives for a shift away from the overexploitation of fossil fuels on which the reproduction of our societies mainly depends today.
Post Growth re-envisions social metabolism through an understanding of the energy it requires, it aims to reconsider the critical dimension of living and material activities of the biosphere, drawing on ecofeminism, indigenous knowledge, environmental accounting and historical materialism.
Post-Growth (Na De Groei) runs from 4 March to 22 May 2022 at IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] in Utrecht, Netherlands.
