Brief: A Narrative of Earthly Survival
The optional brief for the Narrative Studio Course is to create a narrative work around the theme of Earthly Survival, in which the genre, storyline and media format are considered critically and self-reflectively.
You could explore what kind of visual genres, modes of storytelling, narrative structures and media formats might be appropriate to communicate the present moment of climate crisis, biodiversity loss and changing relationships to the environment.
Themes could include, for example, the disappearance of species and landscapes, the invisible processes of physics and the environment, nature that has been altered by human activity, imagined futures, utopias, anti-utopias, as well as microscopic and planetary scales as catalysts for your narrative work.
You could also consider how can a story be told when there is no clear protagonist with agency, the protagonist is non-human, or when things happen simultaneously and causalities are messy and blurry.
Relevant questions:
- Who is the narrator? From whose perspective is the story told?
- How does the story create a sense of time and place?
- How is the general atmosphere created?
- How are the characters’ experiences conveyed?
- What kind of values does the story promote?
- Who is the assumed audience?
Suggested reading:
- Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016
- Ian Cheng, Emissary's Guide to Worlding, Link to introduction, 2018,
- Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2016
- Wallpaper magazine: Artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen on how VR can bring us closer to nature, 2021
Suggested watching:
- Fabrizio Terranova, Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, 2016
- Lois Schwartzberg, Fantastic Fungi, 2019
- Marion Neumann, Mushroom speaks, 2021
Suggested listening: