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The Climate Reader: Propositions, Poetics, Operations is a new digital and print-on-demand publication by L’Internationale Online (LIO). The reader assembles contributions published by LIO in the context of the Climate Forum (I–IV), a series of seminars (2023–25) hosted by HDK-Valand as part of the four-year project “Museum of the Commons” Bringing together over twenty artists, curators, academics and activists, the series and resulting publication were conceived as an iterative space of dialogue and exchange across discursive, artistic, political and operational registers in response to climate breakdown and ecological degradation.
Building on and extending the work in Climate: Our Right to Breathe (L’Internationale and K. Verlag, 2022), The Climate Reader extends one of that book’s central propositions: that “climate” is to be understood as an ecosocial condition that intersects the ecological, the social, the political and the cultural. The reader approaches the ecosocial condition of climate not as a 'theme' to be described, explicated or represented, but rather a reality that forms and is attended to by the constellation of artists and thinkers taking part.
Climate discourse has been shaped largely by perspectives rooted in the Global North, resulting in partial narratives that have overlooked the uneven distribution of environmental harm, responsibility and knowledge. The Climate Forum series and resulting reader foreground geographically situated knowledge, particularly of communities directly affected by ecological degradation, in an attempt to defragment debates and make underlying power relations visible. In this way, they operate as a network of mediating platforms that bridge otherwise disconnected geographies of climate knowledge.
The structure of the reader follows the sequencing of Climate Forum sessions with a returning address to questions of land, colonial toxicity, institutional agency, death and indigineity. Each section opens with readings selected by the forum convenors, followed by essays, edited transcripts of conversations, and commissioned works. The Climate Reader has a consistent focus on practice, or what we name as the interrelation between “propositions, poetics and operations”.
Contributors: Nick Aikens, Sandra Ara Benites, Merve Bedir, Abril Cisneros Ramírez, Jakub Depczyński, Rodrigo Duarte, G, Institute of Radical Imagination, Kasangati Godelive Kabena, Zayaan Khan, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Samia Henni, Keywa Henri, Cathryn Klasto, Pablo Lafuente, Otobong Nkanga, Nkule Mabaso, Olivier Marboeuf, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Anaïs Roesch, Åsa Sonjasdotter, Maya Tounta, Robel Temesgen, Kulagu Tu Buvongan, Mililani Ganivet and Marie-Hélène Villierme.
Editors: Nick Aikens and Nkule Mabaso / Co-editor of Climate Forum IV contributions: Merve Bedir / Copy Editor: Rebecca Bligh / Designer: Anja Groten.
The Climate Reader: Propositions, Poetics, Operations is available for download from L’Internationale Online where you can also order your print-on-demand copy.
The publication will be launched at the HDK-Valand annual research days on January 23. The editors will also be presenting the publication online during Soil Assembly #3, part of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, on January 22. Sign up to the L’Internationale Online newsletter.
