Not Frequently Enough Asked Questions
What life does it still make sense to desire? The Not Frequently Enough asked Questions were imagined as a tool that could help in developing responses to the breakdown of our planet’s ecosystems. There are many questions that require answers. But answering questions means first identifying them. Choosing which questions to ask and how to formulate them already shapes our possible responses. Our ecological predicament is the subject of dominant narratives that cultivate dangerous collective imaginaries. With ‘The Great Reset’, the ‘world leaders’ of the World Economic Forum are responding to the multiple crises with what is less a reset than a radical acceleration of an already ongoing process: the establishment of total control over human and non-human life through the hyper-management of resources and technological innovation. In the face of this headlong rush, before taking action, it might be wise to develop other means of orientation so as not to feed this machine. For example, by drawing up a list of the questions that we don’t ask ourselves enough, the ‘Not Frequently Enough Asked Questions’. What if we tried to address these questions from the experience and wisdom that already exists among us at the very moment, instead of systematically referring to expert knowledge? There’s of course the risk of facing incapacity to answer, but that incapacity could also well be a way off the motorway of the dominant worldviews.
The project was originally developed under the name The Good Life as a month-long event in Luzern, Switzerland, which was ultimately cancelled because of COVID restrictions. The event was to happen at the same time as a World Economic Forum’s special meeting taking place a few kilometers away, atop a mountainpeak, just on the other side of the lake. Articulated around the “Not Frequently Enough Asked Questions” the programm was to include any contribution by local collectives, organisations or individuals whose work, activity or practice tackled in a way or another one or several of the hundred questions on the list. Together, all contributions and exchanges were to weave a bottom-up narrative made of social, political, economic and collective practices, aesthetic, poetic and sensual work, scientific research and personal experiences, as a situated alternative to the alienated worldview of the global rich.
Subsequently developed as a workshop, The Not Frequently Enough Asked Questions attempt at creating space for a collaborative telling of the overwhelming complexity of the world we live in.
conception: Christophe Meierhans, 2020
with the collaboration of: Jens Burde, Daniela Weinmann, Vera Brunschwiler
production: Luzerner Theater, La Bellonne
thanks to: Sandra Küpper, Irina Müller
occurences:
31 August 2021 — 10Days4ideas, La Bellonne | Bruxelles