Pluriversal futures in India: What kinds of futures do we want to see, know, and live in?
Did you know that Delhi faces some of the highest risks from extreme heat, with rising temperatures, an increase in deadly heatwaves, and acute urban heat island effects impacting local productivity, putting vulnerable populations at risk, and contributing to rapidly rising energy demand (and associated emissions)? The Taj Mahal, located a few hours’ drive from Delhi, is also vulnerable to acid rain and air pollution, polluted river water and floods, causing irreparable damage to this icon of love – at a time when the world seems to be in much need of love.
SARAH AND KATE (SWISP LAB) AT THE TAJ MAHAL, OCTOBER 2024
To respond to the material and moral complexities of living and loving in climate crisis, SWISP Lab and friends — Science Gallery Bengaluru, Socratus, and the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) — invited young professionals, university students, and educators to come together at the University of Melbourne Global Centre in New Delhi for a Pluriversal Climate Futures Summit in October, 2024 to spark dialogue and actions aimed at creating a more just, sustainable, and pluralistic future.
These four days brought together visionary thinkers, artists, and scientists to collectively imagine new, reparative futures by hacking the Anthropocene through:
Quote from Smriti Tiwari, Socratus Program Associate
“The journey we were able to take the participants over three days truly felt engaging and transformative. The biggest validation came from many attendees returning on consecutive days and bringing along colleagues/friends with them. I deeply appreciated that we were able to create diverse avenues for the felts around climate change, be it via poetry, art, story or exhibitions. This is because the facts can often demotivate us but the felts help us to keep going despite the despair. We need such spaces to come together to think and work towards alternate and better futures.”
At the heart of this gathering was the idea of pluriversal politics, as championed by renowned anthropologist Arturo Escobar. Escobar emphasizes that building a myriad of world-making stories is crucial to imagining and realizing different possible futures— ones that foster profound social transformations in the face of planetary crises.
LEARNING WITH THE LAND, ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, KRITI AGGARWAL, OCTOBER 2024
Through collaborative art and speculative inquiry, participants tapped into the collective power of creative synergy, exploring visions of sustainable, equitable futures.
Day 1
SWISP lab, CEEW, and Science Gallery Bengaluru hosted this first full day of climate-focused events at the UoM Global Centre for young people aged 14-28.
The morning session began with a CEEW-led session using its What on Earth!® cartoons in sustainability and climate action to trigger conversations followed by the “Deal for Climate” card deck to explore challenges and solutions offered by different actors in society if we were to be in their shoes, for example governments, enterprises, and civil society.
L-R: LEARNING WITH THE LAND, ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, KRITI AGGARWAL; PLAYING CEEW’S “A DEAL FOR CLIMATE” CARDS; VISUALISING SYSTEMS CHANGE THROUGH THE EYES OF GOVERNMENT, ENTERPRISE AND CITIZENS; OCTOBER 2024.
In the afternoon, Kate and Sarah with Jagath from Science Gallery Bengaluru played Hacking the Anthropocene, in relation to the morning CEEW deal for climate workshop where participants explored climate stories through art and science.
L-R: HACKING THE ANTHROPO-SCENE KIT (HAK.IO); COLLAGING ANTHROPO-ZINES; “THE JOKE IS ON YOU” ANTHROPO-ZINE, OCTOBER 2024.
Day 2
SWISP lab, CEEW, Science Gallery Bengaluru and Socratus hosted this climate event as a collaborative that began with the screening of performance poetry crafted by young influencer artists of India from the platform, UnErase, who with CEEW as a knowledge partner developed a storytelling project called “Love in the Times of Climate Change”. After discussing a few of the poems as a group, the participants came together to write their own poems that touched on solastalgia, personification of nature and more.
L-R: A TEAM READS THEIR ‘LOVE IN THE TIMES OF CLIMATE CHANGE’ POETRY; SOME OF THE ‘LOVE IN THE TIMES OF CLIMATE CHANGE’ POETS AT THE SESSION; OCTOBER, 2024
In the afternoon, the event continued with Socratus leading us into Climate Recipes.
CEEW’S ALINA SEN HANGING HER CLIMATE RECIPE IN THE RECIPE ARCHIVE, OCTOBER 2024
Socratus Climate Recipes both archives and relays lived and tested knowledge as recipes that shift our existing perceptions of adaptability to climate change. Encompassing the wisdom of Indigenous ancestors, environmentalists, activists, foragers, chefs, architects, and artists, it presents practices and cultures that teach us to live with the changing biodiversity.
After taking the participants through the idea and curation of this project, Srinivas Mangipudi, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi and Diya Shah, helped the group to work on their own climate recipes to build a better world.
Day 3
SWISP lab, Science Gallery Bengaluru and Socratus presented this full day of events that began with “Hacking the Anthropocene through a Waste Museum,” featuring an in-situ participatory waste exhibition. This exhibition explored climate stories through art and science, inviting creative engagement through philosophy, theory, curatorial practices and emotion.
SRINIVAS MANGIPUDI LEADS THE WASTE MUSEUM DISCUSSION, OCTOBER 2024
In the afternoon, participants wrote and shared ‘Waste Recipes’ along the lines of the climate recipes project of the previous day. This workshop was designed to co-create innovative waste management solutions. We explored the questions: How can exhibitions be used as a site for thinking and deliberative decision-making? Can the concept of museums be extended to be used as spaces for collective immersion?
WASTE MUSEUM PARTICIPANTS SHARE THEIR CLIMATE WASTE RECIPES, OCTOBER 2024
Quote from Srinivas Mangipudi, Director, Socratus:
“Waste Museum as a part of ‘Hacking the Anthropocene’ brought together various participants to build a museum together made out of waste materials everyone brought with them.
We collectively learnt about the material and moral complexity of the objects and the complex intertwined nature of the objects and ways to grapple with them using ‘Climate Recipes’ as a methodology, which were then taken to discuss in depth using the Citizen’s Jury format.
It truly was a stitching together of various tools we have to think through some of the most critical and challenging times we are in”.
THE SOCRATUS ‘MUSEUM-IN-A-BOX’ METHODOLOGY FACILITATED THIS AS AN EXHIBITION MAKING TOOL, OCTOBER 2024
In the evening, Smriti Tiwari and Srinidhi Gurunath from Socratus took the participants through the idea behind a Citizen Jury. It enabled further contemplation, reflection and discourse around waste. In this participatory workshop, we became a jury comprised of ‘regular people’ sitting in judgement of policies made for us based on what we found in the waste museum. All of this, while keeping in mind those people who weren’t in the room using persona cards of a government school teacher trying to improve waste management in her school or a vegetable vendor whose business is suffering due to improper waste collection among others.
Dr. Barsha Poricha from Centre for Urban Regional Excellence (CURE), India was invited as an expert witness to share her points of view and learnings from over two decades of work in urban environments which gave the participants a much-needed perspective on the socio-economic-political challenges around waste management in India.
Day 4
YOUNG PEOPLE ASSOCIATED WITH GLOBAL REACH RAJASTHAN AND THE EXECUTIVE TEAM OF THE GREEN BRIGADE, OCTOBER 2024
This final day was facilitated by Science Gallery Bengaluru and SWISP Lab. It was spent with young people from a secondary school in Jaipur who travelled to New Delhi sponsored by Global Reach Rajasthan. Alongside the Executive team of The Green Brigade from The Environment Society of the College of Vocational Studies, University of Delhi we hacked the Anthropocene.
The synergies of this group of young people at the intersection of creative and scientific inquiry was incredible. We started the session with Jagath V presenting selected works from Science Gallery Bengaluru’s Sci560 Exhibition, that were curated to tell a watery story of lakes, birds, urbanisation, citizen science and environmental change – anchoring our personal climate stories in the context of human settlements, especially cities. After sharing climate stories of hope and despair, we began the hack to find innovative ways to approach and understand climate change as a collective.
Quote from Jagath V, Program Associate, Science Gallery Bengaluru
“I had a great time engaging with people from different walks of life, especially other people working in the climate space. I felt it engaged me in new ways of thinking around the climate crisis and waste in particular. Seeing and working with people who share the same goal of mitigating the climate crisis helped me reduce some climate hopelessness and anxiety. It also reinforced in me the power that art can have in the climate conversation.”
KATE, SARAH AND SHELWYN AT SCIENCE GALLERY BENGALURU, OCTOBER 2024
Following the week in New Delhi, SWISP was invited by Shelwyn James to return to Science Gallery Bengaluru to facilitate Mediator workshops as part of the ‘hacking the Anthropocene’ project in partnership with the Science Gallery Network. In Science Gallery Bengaluru, the new Sci560 exhibition season explores the city of Bengaluru as an industry, military and academic complex. The Sci560 Mediators are an integral part of the exhibition-season and provide each visitor the unique opportunity to deeply engage with the exhibits, events, and programmes.
IMAGE CAPTION: SGB MEDIATORS IN SWISP LAB RESIDENCE, OCTOBER 2024
SWISP Lab first worked with the CARBON Mediators in 2023 to begin work on the Hacking the Anthropocene (HAK.io) kits that have been played at Science Gallery Altanta and Science Gallery Melbourne. Together we facilitated public hacks at Infosys in Bengaluru. HAK.io was initially created alongside the CARBON Mediators to consider how we mediate people, place, site, materiality, thingliness, land, creativities, complexity, liminality, digitality and art science collisions in Anthropogenic times. Running the mediator co-created hack with a new group of mediators facilitated unique knowledge transfer and perspective sharing on mediation, complexity, and space.
MEDIATORS IN THE SWISP LAB RESEARCH EXHIBITION, OCTOBER 2024
Over 2 days we hacked the Anthropocene using the co-designed HAK.io. The two days with the mediators demonstrated how important it is to come together to create, question, story, query and sense make what it means to mediate the spaces between art and science in Anthropogenic times.
SWISP Lab was thrilled to be joined by an extraordinary alliance of partners for this event, including:
Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a leading policy research institute in India
Socratus Collective Wisdom Corporation, dedicated to fostering collective wisdom for tackling complex societal issues
Science Gallery Bengaluru, an innovative space where science meets art and design
Hacking the Anthropocene (HAK.io) kits, hackathons and exhibitions in Narrm/Melbourne, Bengaluru, Atlanta and at COP28 Dubai, UAE and COP29 Baku, Azerbaijan are made possible by the support of a 2022-2025 SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, ‘Learning with the Land’; Global Student Diversification – India 2023 Faculty of Education, and University of Melbourne co-investment program grant, ‘Digital Dispositions for Hacking the Anthropocene’; and the generosity of the Science Gallery International Network partnership.