In Search of the Pluriverse

Lately, as makers and as human beings, we have been feeling deep discomfort with the way we – as Western capitalist society – live with each other and with other-than-humans on this planet. Patriarchal thinking and doing, greed, waste, inequality. To secure a future for all living entities on this planet, we feel that a radical shift is needed. But how?

We chose a book as our guide: Designs for the Pluriverse by Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar. His writing brings together many different ways of knowing. We set to work with some notions from the book: the realisation that we are all interdependent, the idea that autonomy and communality can go hand in hand and – if we want to “make a world in which many worlds can thrive” – the need for radical imaginations.

We decided to search at the fringes of Europe for manifestations of this more pluriversal way of looking at life and this planet. Why edges, why fringes? Because where one thing ends and another begins, change has room to grow. With makers and thinkers based in the Netherlands, we are connecting with local makers and thinkers in five locations: İstanbul, the Scottish Isle of Mull, Berlin, Casablanca and the Spanish region Asturias. At these locations we capture the encounters in radio talks that we publish as podcasts. We are still in the middle of this process of travelling, looking, listening and editing.