Landscapes of Exhaustion and Hope

From climate collapse to endless wars, life under capitalism devastates the planet. “Landscapes of Exhaustion and Hope,” a public lecture and panel discussion with Amel Bešlagić, Mitesh Dixit, Nina Krajnik, Hannah Proctor, Philipp Sattler, and Rojda Tuğrul, invited the participants to use the notion of exhaustion to discuss this current state of affairs. By engaging landscapes, bodies, and people as sites of struggle for new languages and narratives—historical, potential, and actual—the aim was to consider how to go beyond apocalyptic defeatism. Discussing tools and practices from which we might begin to build anew and continue to live within the ruins of trauma and loss, we asked: Is there hope? Each speaker addressed these questions with their current research in architecture, history, and psychoanalysis. The event was organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art and took place in the context of the exhibition “Sediment” at <rotor> Centre for Contemporary Art.

Philipp Sattler