The Language of Climate Care I

Ania Molenda and Dayna Casey

Care Ecologies

Event

“...to find new names for what we are experiencing [and] acknowledge the transformation as it occurs, and to acknowledge the various versions of life on Earth that have existed for decades, centuries, and millenia.”

Lessing/Wilk

Academie van Bouwkunst Amsterdam | May 8th, 2023.

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In The Language of Climate Care, architecture researcher Ania Molenda led a discussion on the caring practices in architecture, arts, and design that respond to the climate emergency and language that emerges from them. Care Ecologies invited practitioners from different backgrounds to propose examples of vocabularies emerging from their fields.

In the session participants reflected on how these vocabularies (that can be other than textual: e.g. material, visual,...) pro/evoke new ways of relating to the environment and represent them as a web of relationships within the emerging map of care.

If we refuse languages, and in consequence tools, that fail to support us in practising care necessary to respond to the climate crisis, what would we replace them with? What possibilities can open when we remove terms from our vocabularies? What languages can emerge from such refusal and what new practices can they lead to? Where is room for shifts in meaning that introduce a caring dimension into the current language?

This is the first additional image. The workshop participants gather around a table with a green tablecloth, holding the archive of the event.

This is the second additional image. A pile of paper strips with various quotes and texts are assembled on the table.

This is the fourth additional image. Participants stand around a table with a green tablecloth, listening to Ania Molenda speak.