The present environmental crisis has put the public war between current right-wing authoritarian governs and whoever in the world is concerned about the environment in the international spotlight....Show moreThe present environmental crisis has put the public war between current right-wing authoritarian governs and whoever in the world is concerned about the environment in the international spotlight. Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, on June 1, 2017 and the recent refusal of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to stop the exploitation of Amazon illustrate the emergence of a situation in which the notions of territory and nation-state no longer sustain the reality of our shared planet. The more climate change, global warming and the environmental degradation haunt the Earth’s inhabitants, the more it seems that we break apart the world as if boundaries of exclusion could prevent what is inside from perishing. In this thesis, I argue that, in the core of this issue, dwell precisely our ‘notions’ and ‘concepts’—enclosed in the huge monolith of Western modern thinking. To confront the planetary crisis, one needs a new strategy to access these problems—that would not consist in simply applying a dialectical method of discussion, but instead deploying a multidimensional approach, capable of penetrating that Western bloc from all sides. By taking on the notion of networks—whether informatic, political and biological—I critically analyse this concept and introduce the framework of the ‘swarm’ that I used in my own artistic practice as a way to allow a multiplicity of viewpoints. The art project Game of Swarms, which explores mainly the fact that the individuals of swarms work together without a locus of control, provokes the audience to rethink our current political structures and use the narrative of the game to imagine new forms of making politics and a new way to think our relation to the world. The biological self-organised model of swarms comes as a tool to create new narratives to face today’s planetary crisis and foster a more sustainable way of thinking.Show less
