# Re: Climate?

The climate crisis is no longer a distant threat. It already shapes the world we live in, and yet public debate around it keeps getting pushed to the margins. Record heatwaves, droughts, floods, fires: these are becoming the new normal, and so, it seems, is a shift in the cultural climate. Public discourse hardens, political priorities move elsewhere and authoritarian and nationalist movements gain ground, often paired with agendas that downplay or flatly deny human-made climate change.In this climate, established knowledge starts to lose its grip.

Never before have we known this much about the climate, and yet that knowledge carries surprisingly little political or social weight. The climate movement’s rallying cry, “Listen to the science!”, exposes a blind spot: the assumption that scientific evidence converts directly into political action. It does not. Knowledge can inform political decisions, but it cannot stand in for the negotiations a society must undertake on its own. The climate crisis is not just a matter of energy policy or technological transformation. It is a matter of perception, of communication, of our collective imaginative capacity.

“Climate?” points directly to this duality.What connects the physical system of the planet to the mood in society? Both levels follow their own internal logic, and yet neither can be understood apart from the other. Whether scientific findings actually change anything depends, among other things, on the cultural and political climate in which they land.History offers little evidence that knowledge becomes actionable on its own. It tends to develop its force within specific cultural, political and affective conditions.

The arts have been working with this tension for some time, responding at once to ecological destruction and to their own growing marginalisation. One question runs through much of this work: how do you make perceptible something that resists immediate perception? Climate is not weather. It does not arrive as an event but as an abstract structure, built from timescales, data and gradual changes. A longue durée. How do you bring the planetary scale within reach of the imagination?

Scientific models produce knowledge but not necessarily experience. This is where art has something specific to offer: as a means not to illustrate scientific findings but to hold open other forms of attention and imagination.As a way of altering the image a society carries of itself and of what might still be possible.

That ambition is now under pressure. Ecological discourse swings between moral overload and political exhaustion, while climate issues compete for attention with wars, economic crises and identity conflicts. The question of what art and culture can actually do in this situation keeps coming back.Is raising awareness still enough? Or do artistic practices need to open up something more, new ways of perceiving, of experiencing, of acting together?

The conversation with Christoph F. E. Holzhey starts here. Drawing on his work on uncertainty, ambivalence and perception, we ask why scientific knowledge can inform political decisions but never be a substitute for them.Holzhey is sceptical of technocratic fixes and right-wing science denial alike and turns instead to the question of what room for action remains under conditions of irreversible change. At the centre of the conversation is the tension between planetary scale and individual experience, and the problem of which aesthetic forms might facilitate an experience of this distance.

Iris ter Schiphorst reads the ecological crisis as a crisis of temporal order. Algorithmic acceleration, relentless updating, the erosion of shared visions of the future: these pressures are dismantling any sense of a collective time horizon. Privileged actors withdraw into private forms of security, while the present splinters into parallel realities. It is in this context that art and aesthetic practice are acquiring new social relevance, as possible interruptions of a regime of contemporaneity that keeps dissolving historical experience into an endless loop of updates and circulation.

Petja Ivanova’s artistic works bring these questions back to the relationship between body, technology and the environment. Her piece Procession into the Eco-Liminal operates as documentary research, combining digital ecology with speculative visual spaces: landscapes speak, bodies merge with weather phenomena, ecological processes appear not as external nature but as something already inside us, shaping what we are.

The ecological crisis does not unfold somewhere outside our social and cultural lives. It alters how we perceive, how we speak, what politics prioritises, how we live together. Whether scientific findings actually matter, whether they change anything, depends in part on whether they can be felt and on whether they open up new ways of imagining how we can act together.

Translated by Peter Rigney

Manos Tsangaris
President of the Akademie der Künste

Anh-Linh Ngo
Vice President of the Akademie der Künste