Botanica Urbana: Blooming from the Ruins

In the page's words:

Blooming from the Ruins, searches for new worlds and imaginations, combining science, art and culture. This fusion crystallizes various fragments that materialize in the form of temporary exhibitions, performative readings, video performances, workshops, dance, culinary performances and music. Through these forms of artistic exploration, we want to show how Hamburg collectives experiment with alternative ways of working and living and successfully find sustainable and beautiful ways out of capitalist and neoliberal logic. Blooming stands for the blossoming of these collectives, it is a metaphor for the plant-like, the sympoiesis that Donna Haraway describes as a common existence and becoming with human & non-human beings, it is a turning away from individualism. Blooming symbolizes the growth of the Hamburg collectives, which are rooted and interwoven in a partly invisible way. Ruins - The ruins stand for the traces of modernity as well as the gentrified and profit-oriented city. The ruins are also a metaphor for the dried-up rivers, the contaminated seas and the monocultures that are taking the place of wilderness and destroying ecosystems as they spread. Our vision "Collectives in full Bloom" is a change of perspective that shows how much hope there is in small things and gives room for positive futures. The artistic works & the design of the festival will be created in direct cooperation between different collectives. What can interdisciplinary work between science, art and culture make possible for artistic practice? With whom can we root ourselves and where can we spread our roots? How can subculture and collectives transform and reimagine the city in the Anthropocene? And what role does an artistic-scientific examination of issues of ecology, the human-nature relationship and urbanity play in this? What ways do we want to find to orient ourselves away from neoliberal and capitalist logic? These are the questions we will be addressing during the festival. We invite organizations, universities, scientists, artists, people, plants and animals to show us how they cultivate beauty and meaning in a supposedly broken world. Together we will address our city, our society, the care of ecosystems and our relationship to the world in an artistic-scientific way. With the help of decolonial and feminist perspectives, we want to find alternatives together. In its process, our urban development must not exclude the same people from the discourse who want to live in it; rather, it must be inclusive, interdisciplinary and cooperative in order to create the transition to an ecological and social city. A joint transformation process also means that we have to change our self-image and perception together.