Vienna Biennale for Change

Planet Love.

This is the motto of the Vienna Biennale for Change 2021, which will be the first event of its kind to combine art, design, and architecture, with the aim of generating creative ideas and artistic projects to help improve the world. Its category-spanning, interdisciplinary approach and combination of artistic ambition and the creative economy open up new perspectives on central topics of our time and thus promote positive change in our society. The Vienna Biennale was established with the understanding that we are living in a new modernity in which the digital revolution penetrates all areas of our life and is thus fundamentally changing our civilization. Today’s Digital Modernity offers considerable potentials for lasting improvements in quality of life as well as innovative living concepts and business models in every sector.

The Vienna Biennale will start with the MAK exhibition “Climate CareCLIMATE CARE. Reimagining Shared Planetary Futures” – a comprehensive, interdisciplinary contribution based on the idea that Planet Love is not an one-way street, but that the Earth is capable of loving us back in many different ways, the exhibition explores a range of encouraging approaches for achieving radical civilizational change: a Great Transformation of society, economy, and politics, inspired by multifaceted contributions from design, arts, architecture, urbanism, technology, as well as social and cultural initiatives.

Climate Care cannot be reduced to efforts to decarbonize and achieve climate neutrality. Instead, it needs a holistic vision that places ecology at the center and emphatically incorporates social aspects – a transformative vision that is intergenerational and committed to climate justice. On this basis, the interdisciplinary exhibition reflects on the potential of climate mitigation, adaptation, geoengineering, regeneration, and circular thinking in different contexts and paints a positive picture of cross-species cooperation for Planet Earth’s “more-than-human” future.

The design of our environment and climate, with a special focus on areas of life and spheres of action, such as dwelling, nurturing, movement, co-operating, generating, health, and culture, is an essential contribution to a new “climate society.” To help achieve it, the potentials of design strategies, the arts, urbanism, and new technologies can provide critical ideas and impulses for individual and collective agency.

New approaches conceived from a global perspective are also reflecting Vienna: The exhibition will critically examine Vienna – year after year named one of the most livable cities in the world – for untapped potential. In this respect, the exhibition undertakes to question and rethink the city as a representation of our world, uncover its processes, and develop model paths for a climate-caring community.

In the face of the risks posed by the overall ecological crisis, the exhibition suggests a radical change of direction. It is engaging in a variety of “micro-revolutions” that condense into one grand visionary narrative: the narrative of a global community of all species of the Earth, natural or artificially generated, creating the conditions for hopeful paths to common sustain-able futures.

https://www.viennabiennale.org

CLIMATE CARE
 Reimagining Shared Planetary Futures
Date
: 28.05. – 03.10.
Location
: MAK, Vienna