Host Intro: Solar Punk & Warm Narratives (Eugenio Battaglia)

Placemaking the Solar Punk

Solar Punk is an aesthetic and cultural movement that has a hopeful approach to a post-collapse future where technology, the human and the non-human have found ways to coexist in symbiotic regenerative relationships. Solar Punk is an imaginary that is characterized by rugged, patchy, and good-to-work solutions that are locally sourced and diy.

Solar punk is the yearning that only a fertile compost can be derived when our institutions collapse. Solar punk imaginations happily feast upon this societal compost.

So we’re here, 2077, and it seems that the whole regeneration solar punk is finally getting boga and nova! However we believe we can get more real, more embodied, bridging our theory with our ways of living.

In other words we can be more in place…

What is placemaking?

We cannot introduce better what placemaking is by using the words of Bayo Akomolafe:

*“Place is a relationship between bodies that constitutes those bodies, not a static container that merely holds presence. To be in a place is to keep making maps to locate oneself there again and again, and being at home is always an exercise in cartography.

So how do we find ourselves in modernity? We keep lists, we name things, we lose them, we filter out information, we adopt positions, we promise, we renege, we try out things. These exercises make ‘place’ an ongoing socio-material dynamic. This suggests that to be displaced is [...] to be interrupted by the imposition of a finished product, a complete map. This is the stuff of the colonial: the denial of place and the insertion of the frozen. The toxic gift of arrival.

Knowing is placemaking. When knowing is enacted as a form of cognitive extractivism, you get the Anthropocene. When knowing is a struggle-with, a wrestling-with, a listening-with that does not privilege the one (the human) as a fixed subject and the other (the more-than-human) as a fixed object of the human gaze, other lifedeath worlds become possible.”*