Translocal Climate Narratives: Aesthetic Strategies Beyond Solutions and Despair, Basel Academy of Art and Design

The ecological crisis represents one of the greatest challenges of our time, encompassing climate change, biodiversity loss, and broader threats to the balance of life on Earth. The climate crisis has both global dimensions and deeply local effects. The historical and contemporary actions of high-emission countries in the Global North disproportionately impact those in the so-called Global South, who bear less responsibility for the crisis. This underscores the fundamentally translocal nature of climate change. Furthermore, the complexity of the crisis makes it extremely difficult to grasp and narrate. Mainstream media and public discourse often oscillate between solutionist frameworks rooted in technological optimism that emphasizes individual and corporate responsibility, and apocalyptic despair that paralyzes action and undermines meaningful change.

Taking Switzerland as a starting point, the SNSF research project Translocal Climate Narratives: Aesthetic Strategies Beyond Solutions and Despair by Uriel Orlow, Denise Bertschi, Francesca Brusa, Maëlle Cornut, and Laurence Favre aims to highlight geographic interconnections of the climate crisis through four artistic translocal field studies that also consider more-than-human dimensions. The research will develop artistic strategies to foster climate literacies that narrate and represent the climate crisis by focusing on ways of living with and adapting to it. The project hosted by Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW aims to create new imaginaries beyond the dualism of solution and despair. By connecting Switzerland with four different southern geographies, the research will develop situated, translocal climate narratives of resilience and repair.

The research is guided by the following questions:

1. How can we acknowledge the complexity, translocal interconnectedness, and profound sadness of the climate crisis without being paralyzed? What role can artistic practice play in this process?
2. What forms of resilience and repair do we need to cultivate—what ways of being with the crisis, attending to it without turning away, offering care and staying with the trouble rather than seeking illusory solutions or surrendering to despair? What artistic strategies are needed to narrate and represent these forms of resilience?
3. How does transdisciplinary artistic research contribute to climate literacy, making complex climate awareness more widespread across academic fields and society?

The project will address these questions through four practice-led sub-projects and a transversal art-theoretical study. The artistic sub-projects will connect Switzerland with four southern geographies—the Himalayas, Peru, Mozambique, and Southern Europe/North Africa. By focusing on human and more-than-human entanglements with minerals, plants, animals, and the atmosphere, and engaging in transdisciplinary dialogue with specialists and local communities, the artistic projects will develop aesthetic strategies to communicate situated, translocal knowledge of the climate crisis that focuses on resilience, adaptation, and care. A transversal critical art theory study will examine the research process and artistic outcomes, situating them within broader theoretical and artistic contexts from each region involved.

Translocal Climate Narratives posits that translocal artistic research can make an important contribution to climate literacy by developing visual and narrative strategies that highlight practices of resilience. In doing so, it offers an alternative to the binary of solution and despair. Working in dialogue with local communities and interdisciplinary academic fields, the research engages with the multilayered complexities of the climate crisis to inspire transformative change.

The research project Translocal Climate Narratives is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF and hosted by the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.

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