"Enabling rituals for the social production of feelings in times of ecological demise" @ ESRI 2025: "Down to Earth: Exploring Meaningful Ways of Living, Together”

I feel very honored to have been invited to the ESRI 2025 of the Mind&Life Europe Network as a speaker and faculty member. It's buddhist and contemplative nature is new to me and I am very excited - the very thoughtful programming looks extremely promising and this will surely not be just another conference with smoking heads and aching bodies - but a full spiritual, body&mind experience. I am very happy and privileged to take part in it and contribute with some socio-political contributions from my work both as an artist as well as theorist. Find my abstract below and the full program here

Enabling rituals for the social production of feelings in times of ecological demise

Input for ESRI 2025 “Down to Earth: Exploring Meaningful Ways of Being Together” by Kilian Jörg

The ecological crisis has made it into the popular conscience of mainstream discourses over that last decade, but it is today mostly associated with negative feelings such as despair, panic, grief or anxiety. In this input, I want to argue (with Shotwell 2026) that these feelings are not the “natural” result of living in times of planetary catastrophe, but are a cultural product of our hegemonial societal order.

Whereas other catastrophic events, such as natural disasters, black-outs or terrorist attacks often elicit feelings of strengthened solidarity and purpose (compare for example Solnit 2004), it is interesting to investigate why the planetary catastrophe has so far mostly individuated feelings that are of a despairing and atomizing nature: people who suffer from climate-anxiety mostly retreat into depressive inaction and the affective climate of panic leads to activist burn-out that is a real issue in movements.

Discussing examples of my own artistic practice of creating ritualistic spaces, I want to argue for the necessity of creating social and cultural institutions that promote the mutual production of enabling feelings. Ecology is not just a problem of the “natural” world, but equally one of our cultural values and infrastructures that need to be radically revised. The capitalist order based on private property, atomistic individuality, neo-colonial extractivism and heteronormative family constructions has to be de-naturalized in order to reveal it as the main reason for the production of negative feelings in the catastrophe that we need to overcome in order to become able to act. Examples from radical land reclamations and autonomous zones have in most recent times been the most fertile sites for this civilizatory task (compare Jordan & Fremeaux 2024, Gelderloos 2022).

I will talk through my experiences of the speculative-religion-turned-artistic-project Toxic Temple I have invented with Anna Lerchbaumer and will narrate about my most recent artistic project: the creation of the first national holiday devoted to an ecological topic. The Zwentendorf-Holiday will introduce you to a local specificity of Austrian ecological struggles and how they can be institutionalized to create new identities of being part of a community that refrains from the most ecocidal modern infrastructures as a virtue needed to survive and thrive on this planet.