Cultures of Climate: Climate Ecologies: Responses to the Panicocene

Climate Ecologies: Responses to the Panicocene brings together staff from the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Huddersfield, who respond creatively to Elena Giacomelli’s concept of the Panicocene through the lenses of their disciplinary specialisms, including photography, architecture, videography, music, installation, and sculpture. It presents a constellation of visual works that interrogate the entangled crises of climate change and human mobility through the lenses of place, belonging, material culture, and activism. It responds to the critical questions raised by the concept of the Panicocene as an era where climate change and migration are framed in narratives of anxiety and emergency. In the Western dominant discourse, a politicized narrative of migration is often mixed with climate change and, as such, portrayed as a threat itself. In other words, when climate migration gains traction in media coverage, it is usually linked with security and risk issues rather than with efforts that reduce vulnerability to climate change effects. Mobilities under climate change may take many forms, which are contextually dependent and are shaped, at least in part, by existing relations of power and inequality. In dialogue with the conference’s critical interrogation of visual aesthetics and narrative, the exhibition explores how we can re-frame narratives of climate-mobilities through grounded, place-based stories, foregrounding the textures of lived experience, rather than the dominant tropes of threat and emergency.