What follows after growth? The idea of relentless growth and progress is nowadays the only economic force that matters. It means increased living standards. But at the same time, it would be irresponsible to continue ignoring the human and environmental costs, the lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes that economic growth and all its promises causes.
The DISNOVATION.ORG collective, which was founded in 2012 by Nicolas Maigret & Maria Roszkowska, is an art collective and an international workgroup engaged in the crossovers between contemporary arts, research and hacking. Over the past ten years, they have been dissecting the dominant discourses on growth, innovation and technological solutionism – for example, with the “Museum of Failures” or the “Non-conformist Futures” exhibition at the Jeu de Paume. Together with Baruch Gottlieb, Clémence Seurat, Julien Maudet and Pauline Briand, they invited the visitors of their exhibition «Post Growth» (.2020— in Brussel to question what ideological, social and biophysical factors have precipitated the current environmental crises. The exhibition looks at perspectives for a shift away from the overexploitation of fossil fuels, ancient sunlight, the force on which the reproduction of our societies depends today.
As an extension of the exhibition, they developed a set of tools to facilitate orientation in the context of current environmental crises. The website postgrowth.art presents an online collection of interviews with thinkers whose research explores the forms that a post-fossil society could take and the challenges that must be addressed along the way. They highlight the connections between growth mechanisms and ecosystem crises, while gathering and developing the arguments.
In 2021 together with the anthropologist Nicolas Nova, the DISNOVATION.ORG collective published A Bestiary of the Anthropocene, an atlas of anthropic hybrid creatures and phenomena between “nature” and “culture” that mixes biological, mineral, technological, petrochemical. Designed as a field handbook, it aims at helping to observe, navigate, and orientate into the increasingly artificial fabric of the world.
Interview with Disnovation.org:
www.makery.info/en/2021/03/01/post-growth-imagine-la-boite-a-outils-de-lapres-croissance-1-2/