Event: Symposium on alternative narratives of the climate crisis from an artistic perspective
With the symposium “Climate Literacies and Forms of Repair”, the HGK Basel invites participants on 11 November 2026 to discuss new artistic narratives of the climate crisis together with researchers from the fields of geography, anthropology, and climate science.
With the public symposium panel “Climate Literacies and Forms of Repair” on Wednesday, 11 November 2026, from 2 to 3:30 pm at the HGK Basel Studio Cinema, the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at HGK Basel invites to discuss new artistic narratives of the climate crisis together with researchers from the fields of geography, anthropology, and climate science.
The climate crisis is profoundly translocal, shaped by unequal histories of responsibility and experiences across interconnected human and more-than-human worlds. Public discourse often oscillates between technological solutionism and apocalyptic despair.
The SNSF research project Translocal Climate Narratives: Aesthetic Strategies Beyond Solution and Despair moves from questions that interrogate how climate literacies can tend to the complexity and unevenness of the crisis while including forms of repair, resilience, and action beyond this binary.
The project proposes art as a space for cultivating alternative narratives for living with the ecological crisis that are grounded in interdependence, care, and ongoing forms of repair rather than in definitive solutions.
The first symposium panel, Climate Literacies and Forms of Repair, on 11 November 2026, includes contributions by Prof. Dr. Julie Jebeile, Dr. Colin Courtney-Mustaphi, and Prof. Dr. Alice Hertzog. These three transdisciplinary scholars from the fields of geography, anthropology, and climate science, will share their research strategies and methodologies to weave the complexity of the crisis and possible forms of repair.
Translocal Climate Narratives is an SNSF artistic research project by Uriel Orlow, Denise Bertschi, Francesca Brusa, Maëlle Cornut, and Laurence Favre, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF, and hosted by the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.
The symposium panel on 11 November 2026 takes place as part of the information event for prospective students about studying at HGK Basel.
Biographies of participants:
Prof. Dr. Alice Hertzog is a social anthropologist, urban researcher, and museum director. She completed her PhD at the Chair of Sociology, Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich, in 2020. As a social anthropologist, her research has two main preoccupations. The first, in the field of urban anthropology, questions the social transformations occurring with post-migrant cityscapes. The second focus of her research, situated in museum anthropology, investigates the circulation of contested cultural heritage held in ethnographic museums. As a post-doctoral researcher, she worked for the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, where she undertook research for the Swiss Benin Initiative, investigating the collections of eight Swiss museums. In 2023 she then joined the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich as provenance researcher. Both aspects of her research are influenced by postcolonial perspectives, examining the ways in which flows of people and material culture negotiate colonial legacies and impact social change. In 2025 she was nominated assistant professor with tenure track for social and cultural anthropology and director of the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich.
Dr. Colin Courtney-Mustaphi is an environmental scientist who has worked for 20 years across three continents to research human impacts on the environment by developing time series, spatial, and qualitative data sets. Topics include examining patterns of wildfires, land uses, erosion, and pollution by studying how human modifications to the environment have long term legacy effects on aquatic ecosystems and the surrounding landscapes. His main study sites are in Africa, Europe, and arctic and western North America. He uses a multidisciplinary approach by combining paleoenvironmental, archaeological, anthropological, historical, and remote sensing data to examine anthropogenic influences on ecosystems and landscapes; through fieldwork, laboratory analyses, data analysis, and training young researchers. His interests extend to how scientific and other knowledge sources interact with societal values and rules toward ecosystem and public land management decisions and policy formulation.
Prof. Dr. Julie Jebeile is a philosopher with an initial background in physics and engineering. She is SNSF professor at the Institute of Philosophy of Universität Bern and leads the SNF PRIMA Grant project Climate Change Adaptation through the Feminist Kaleidoscope — Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Climate Science. Her research stands in philosophy of science, feminist philosophy and social epistemology. She specialised in the epistemological questions relative to scientific representations, including mathematical models, computer simulations, and visual representations. Her research was dedicated for several years to climate science and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In particular, her interest lie in the treatment and communication of climate uncertainties, the influence of socioeconomic values in knowledge production, and the production of usable expertise for policy-making.
Details
Organized by
Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN), Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel FHNW
Freilager-Platz 1, 4142 Münchenstein, Switzerland
- 11.11.2026, 14:00–15:30, HGK Basel, Studiokino (D 0.01)
See also
Courtney Mustaphi C. 11.11.2026. Measuring (wild?)Fire. Translocal Climate Narratives Symposium: Climate Literacies and Forms of Repair SNSF Project. FHNW Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel CH.
Basel Academy of Art and Design, FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland.