In September 2019, I began working at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, as Online Editor of the Anthropocene Curriculum website: anthropocene-curriculum.org. As part of this role, in November 2019, I travelled to New Orleans for the Anthropocene River Campus, the culmination of the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project that began in the summer of that year.
The Anthropocene Curriculum is a long-term initiative that explores frameworks for critical knowledge and education in our contemporary epoch—the Anthropocene. The project draws together heterogeneous practices of knowledge production and dissemination, inviting academics, artists, and activists from around the world to co-develop a new culture of capacity and awareness that responds to an unfolding global crisis. It does this by producing experimental co-learning situations and examples for transdisciplinary collaboration that are capable of explicitly tackling the social and geo-political dimensions of knowledge that are contested in this epoch.
In 2013, the Anthropocene Project was the prelude to HKW’s examination of the new geological age. The two-year research project probed the cultural, socio-economic and political implications of the Anthropocene with exhibitions, performances and workshops. Since then, the Anthropocene Curriculum has been testing pathways for a transdisciplinary culture of knowledge and education and new methods of mediation that meet the challenges of the Anthropocene. The website www.anthropocene-curriculum.org reflects the current state of research and makes the results of the process available to the public.
Fiona Shipwright 