The series Creators facing Climate Emergency provides a platform for conversations between artists, thinkers and scientists to create new narratives, raise awareness and incite action in the face of climate change, using artists as mediators. These conversations also propose new ways of producing and disseminating art in the face of our fragile environment and accelerating technological change.
Can art change our environmental behaviour? How is the environmental crisis impacting artistic and writing practices? Carrying reflections about the role of the artists, the Fondation Thalie invites Daniel Wetzel from the theatre label Rimini Protokoll to dialogue with Dr. Albert Moukheiber, a neuroscience researcher and clinical psychologist, and author of “Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions”.
Guests: Daniel Wetzel, co-founder member of the theater label Rimini Protokoll, and Albert Moukheiber, neuroscience researcher and clinical psychologist.
Moderated by Stefano Vendramin, curator in art related to ecology.
Daniel Wetzel is a theatre maker. He co-founded the theatre label Rimini Protokoll together with Helgard Haug and Stefan Kaegi. The book Rimini Protokoll (Walther Koenig, 2021, English) sums up more than 300 different works within 20 years of their activities on stages, streets and various kinds of urban sites. Their World Climate Change Conference (Hamburg 2015) divided an audience of 800 into 195 delegations representing the nations negotiating at every annual conference hosted by the UN, practising the dynamics of running from meeting to meeting until the final declaration in the general assembly. Their installation Win >< Win (Barcelona 2017) is shown internationally in museums – presenting a swarm of jellyfish and staging us as a bunch of humans on both sides of the basin that at times converts into a mirror, us who would disappear again, and those who would survive mankind and enjoy the rise of temperatures. The Conference of the Absent (Dresden, co-produced and presented last December by the Kaaitheater, Brussels) turns sustainability into a game of absence – it offers a format in which the lecturers of the conference would not travel but their speeches and dialogues would be held and performed by spontaneous volunteers out of the audience.
Albert Moukheiber is a neuroscience researcher and clinical psychologist. He worked for 10 years at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital focusing on anxiety disorders and resilience and is currently teaching clinical psychology and psychopathology at the University of Paris 8. He has co-founded Chiasma, a structure that focuses on critical reasoning and mental flexibility; especially on how we form our opinions and how this impacts our decision-making. Albert is also a speaker and intervenes in companies to share the latest scientific knowledge about our cognition and behaviours and how they impact us in our daily lives. Albert is the author of “Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You: How the Brain Shapes Opinions and Perceptions” (Allary Editions).