Above me, the clouds are moving. They have no fixed shape. They gather, dissolve, become something else. Perhaps this is what clouds do. I watch them changing while birds continue their conversations and insects move between flowers. A breeze passes over the grass and across my body. I think about Anna Tsing and her writing about life in the ruins of capitalism. What stays with me is her attention to unexpected collaborations—to the ways life persists, adapts and creates relationships in damaged landscapes. We often imagine ecological crisis as the end of something. But perhaps crisis is also a condition in which new forms of relation become visible. The garden is not outside the crisis. The traffic is here. Pollution is here. Climate instability is here. The histories of extraction that have shaped our present are here.

And yet life continues. A flower opens. An insect arrives.

Gather in the garden of the Athens Concert Hall for the concert of nature, meet and exchange with the artist Jenny Marketou around the installation Folly for Songs for FUNK Kinships: A Pollinator for Other Futures. 

By Julia Lazarus.

A journey to the forest north of Istanbul. The formerly remote rural areas along the Black Sea are being transformed by gigantic infrastructure projects for the growing megalopolis. The local population is being presented with a fait accompli. Their villages are transformed into suburbs and within just 5 years all agricultural activity becomes illegal. The film follows the Istanbul-based activists of Kuzey Ormanlari Savunmasi in their small victories and many setbacks as they organize civil resistance to the destruction of the livelihoods shared by urban and rural residents. The desperation and frustration of the residents discharges itself in grass-roots style assemblies held to establish common goals for the struggle against the superior powers.