inhabiting sufficiency to sustain life

catalogue for the sustainability of artistic ecosystems

a project by blanca callén moreu

In order to inhabit the sufficiency today, what habits and forms of daily life that existed before we can learn from?

What practices of sufficiency can people who lived pre-capitalist experiences (in rural, post-war or escarcity contexts) teach us?

Which other ways of relating to the land (or animals, plants, minerals) can we learn from those whose worldview is not Western or anthropocentric?

What tactics or technologies for sustainability could we learn from those who migrated from extreme climatic regions?

If the climate crisis we are experiencing is the result of a fiction, already distant, in which nature is reduced to an unlimited "resource" for the exclusive well-being of humanity, and the idea of "progress" is erroneously associated with the accelerated production and consumption of products, we pose a challenge: how to (re)learn to live from sufficiency, to decrease and reduce or avoid further eco-social damage?

To answer this question, the project proposes to trace knowledge and practices from two particular points of view: on the one hand, pre-capitalist and post-consumption life experiences, like those experienced by people born during post-war periods, migrated from rural contexts or currently living in scarcity situations; and on the other, the cultural practices and non-westernised cosmovisions of those who live more ecocentric and sustainable relationships with the earth and its elements.

The starting hypothesis is that the partial reparation of the eco-social damage generated by anthropocentric and translimited living habits could come, precisely, from other pre-capitalist, eco-centric and post-consumption cosmovisions and everyday cultures that have been forgotten and made invisible and that are based on sufficiency, eco-dependence with other beings and respect for the earth's finitude and limits.

This artistic and community action-research around La Escocesa and the Poblenou neighbourhood will result in a public catalogue of cultural practices and socio-technical tactics that will help us to live from the sufficiency in order to, perhaps, sustain life in a better way.

bio

Blanca Callén Moreu is a teacher and researcher. She situates her work at the crossroads between the social studies of technoscience, the design and the culture of materials and the collective political action. In recent years she has been researching the production of material waste and cultures of repair in a context of climate crisis. She works with participatory methodologies from feminist epistemological perspectives. She is co-founder and active member of the collective Restarters BCN.

This project is supported by ICUB (Institute of Culture of Barcelona).