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The search for an ethical response to the uncertain times we are living through — marked by the rise of new authoritarianisms, geoeconomic shifts, and the looming threat of environmental catastrophes — projects the Amazon to the “center of the world.” Not only because it is a strategic biome in regulating the planet’s climate, but also because it gathers a vast constellation of memories, experiences, ways of life, cosmologies, and knowledge systems that point toward alternative possibilities of coexistence and balance.
In this sense, the Amazon stands as a radical counterpoint to the fatalism that permeates contemporary culture, often marked by exhaustion and a diminished capacity to imagine alternative futures. In the face of crisis-induced paralysis, the forest emerges not as an inevitable ruin, but as a living force of imagination and reinvention — a living laboratory that calls us to create new images, new symbols, and new imaginaries of the world we wish to inhabit, within a framework that also considers the reinvention of the Capitalocene.
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HOW CAN CULTURE, IN ITS PLURALITY OF TECHNIQUES, LANGUAGES, AND DISCOURSES, ACT AS AN AGENT OF REGENERATION AND CARE FOR LIFE? ⬎
The International Program Speculative Ecologies is dedicated to fostering the creation of a new sensory regime, promoting narratives that activate and reconfigure nature/culture agencies. Lived experience, interaction, and energetic exchange with the multiplicity of human and more-than-human life within Amazonian ecosystems will serve as a catalyst for artistic creation in dialogue with both local and global socio-environmental challenges.
WE RECOGNIZE THE FOREST AS A POWERFUL TERRITORY FOR THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE, CRITICAL REFLECTION, AND ARTISTIC PRACTICE. FROM THIS UNDERSTANDING, WE PROMOTE FORMAL AND EXPERIMENTAL GATHERINGS FOR COLLECTIVE LEARNING IN ENVIRONMENTAL RESERVES AND INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES.
FROM A WAY OF SEEING TO A WAY OF LIVING AND COEXISTING IN THE LAND
Throughout LABVERDE’s trajectory in climate culture, profound shifts have reshaped how we understand and narrate our relationship with the planet. While in 2010 nature was still largely portrayed as passive object, the 2015 debates around the Anthropocene marked a decisive turn toward recognizing human action as a transformative force within the Earth system and acknowledging multiple human and non-human agencies. By 2020, this evolved into a global cultural movement committed not only to documenting extinction and climate impacts, but also to confronting environmental injustices and advancing critical, decolonial socio-environmental approaches.
Although these movements occur simultaneously across different contexts and geographies, by the middle of this decade a new inflection becomes perceptible: a more applied and propositional approach to how culture engages with nature. It is no longer only about diagnosing the crisis, but about imagining solutions, developing technologies, and outlining pathways of repair in response to the accumulated damages of Neoliberalism. This perspective expands the field of action by recognizing the power of ancestral knowledge and organic technologies, articulating scientific research and traditional practices, and moving fluidly across times, territories, and distinct cosmologies.
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The program will be held in August 2023, curated by Lilian Fraiji with the participation of the philosopher Emanuele Coccia and mediation by experts from the Amazon Region (activists, indigenous expert, anthropologists, biologists and natural history researchers). It is supported by the National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA), Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMbio), University of the Arts London and the French Embassy in Brazil.
In its 14th edition, the International Program Speculative Ecologies is dedicated to the theme of “Resilience,” understood, according to the United Nations, as the capacity of a system, community, or society to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt, transform, and recover from the effects of threats and crises in a timely and efficient manner. It is not only about surviving impact, but about preserving, restoring, and even reinventing essential structures and functions through conscious risk management strategies. By bringing this notion into the field of speculative ecologies, the program proposes to expand the concept of resilience beyond its technical dimension, incorporating cultural, social, and imaginative forces as fundamental drivers of regeneration.
With the participation of professionals from diverse fields of knowledge, Speculative Ecologies: Resilience will take place in October/November, in the vicinity of the city of Manaus, in direct immersion within the Amazonian territory. The residency program is curated by Lilian Fraiji and environmentalist Flavia Santana, and will include international guests as well as mediation by specialists from the Amazon region — including activists, Indigenous leaders, anthropologists, ecologists, and natural history researchers — fostering a transdisciplinary environment of exchange that is situated and deeply connected to the socio-environmental realities of the forest.
This open call is intended for international artists. The participation fee contributes to strengthening the economic ecosystem and to the sustainability of the initiative, which is non-profit, while also enabling our inclusion policy through the Labverde Grant, aimed at democratizing access to the program. Only artists from the Global South who are active in their respective territories are eligible to apply.
