There are few childhood memories that I cherish more than the family summer holidays we spent in Aldeburgh, a small, picturesque coastal town in the Southeast of England. Aside from the pebble beaches and the pastel-coloured houses, what I remember most clearly is the patch of wall in my great aunt’s house that measured our cousins’ heights by age, which, each summer, my brother and I would add our own shaky pencil lines to before standing back to marvel at how much we’d grown.

As children, our developing bodies offer the tantalising prospect of independence, of becoming the “big boys and girls,” we so desperately wish to be. When we reach adulthood, we continue to quantify our lives through this prism, but instead of focusing on our own biology, we project outwards, measuring success through the growth of our families, our bank accounts, our businesses, and our homes. On a global scale, the prosperity of whole countries is measured by the increase of their GDP. But as the world’s economies grow, so does the gap between rich and poor. In the first three-and-a-half months of 2020, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos earned more than the GDP of Honduras,² making his net worth more than GDP of Iceland, Afghanistan and Costa Rica combined.³

It’s clear by now that this “fetishization and externalisation of growth,”⁴ to quote the author Valerie Olson, has also had a catastrophic effect on our environment. It’s equally clear that a massive paradigm shift will is going to be needed to combat the deep-seated belief—which has been entrenched by decades of post-World War II economic policies—that growth is “the equivalence of life,” and “not to grow is equivalence of death.”⁵ This is where artists of all varieties—filmmakers, sculptors, writers, photographers, chefs—can help. Facts have limited sway; it’s only through “telling stories in new ways,” according to academic Geoffrey Bowker, that we can “induce people to see the world differently.”⁶

The Limits to Growth is a 1972 report on exponential economic and population growth in a finite world. Commissioned by international think tank the Club of Rome, a team of MIT researchers led by Donella and Dennis Meadows built a computer model called World3 to simulate the interactions between resource consumption, industrial output, population size, food production, and Earth’s ecosystems. After modelling data from 1900-70, the team developed a range of possible scenarios through 2100. On a “business as usual” trajectory (World Model Standard Run), the model predicted “overshoot and collapse”—in the economy, environment, and population—before 2070. Often criticized as doomsday fantasy, a 2014 University of Melbourne research paper found that the report’s forecasts are accurate, 40 years on.

Q: Can you give an example?

A: One example is a series of ‘energy slave’ tokens that are included in the show. The work is based on the concept of the energy slave, which was proposed by the American futurist Buckminster Fuller in the 1940s as a notion used to express the energy required to power a modern lifestyle. The concept refers to the technological or mechanical energy equivalent to the physical working capacity of a human adult. In 2020 we have an average of 400-500 energy slaves per living European, which means the lifestyle that we have is the result of about 400-500 times the energy that a single human body can produce. To grasp those orders of magnitude, we started to build bitumen bricks or units of measure that are basically embodying the energy equivalent in fossil fuel of various durations of human labour. We thought that this direction of work was quite eloquent as fossil fuel is the core driver of the global techno-infrastructure. Nowadays citizens are not transforming the world around them through the use of their own bodies. The primary way we transform the environment and the world around us in the twenty-first century is through prostheses, machines, automation, and computers. We recognized that in order to better understand our condition, and what a desirable outcome could look like, it was essential to understand this very material-informed model of how we interact with the world today.

In 1940, R. Buckminster Fuller introduced the term “energy slave” to describe the energy required to power the modern lifestyle.⁶ The concept refers to the technological or mechanical energy equivalent to the physical working capacity of a human adult. The energy requirements for any lifestyle can be calculated as a number of energy slaves equivalent to the number of human labourers which otherwise would be needed to produce the same amount of energy. In 2013, it was estimated that the average European employs the equivalent of 400-500 energy slaves 24 hours a day.⁷

The Energy Slave Token consists of a series of weights made of bitumen, which are the energy equivalents to specific quantities of physical human labour time (ie. 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, 1 life). This series of weights is designed to present the orders of magnitude that separate the labour-power generated by our human bodies from the energy exploited mostly from fossil fuels which power the technosphere. These open source tokens are designed to be easily replicated, used and distributed without restriction.

Average Human Labour and Fossil Fuel Power Productivity:

1 hour of average human physical labour: 75Wh
1 L of fossil fuel (potential power): 10,000Wh
1 L of fossil fuel (transformed by a motor): 4,000Wh

Fossil Fuel Equivalent of Human Labour Power:

1 hour: 75Wh / 4k Wh/L = 18.75 cm3
1 day: 75Wh * 8h / 4k Wh/L = 150 cm3
1 week: 75Wh * 8h * 5d / 4k Wh/L = 750 cm3
1 month: 75Wh * 8h * 5d * 4 w / 4k Wh/L = 3,000 cm3
1 year: 75Wh * 1590h (avg y) / 4k Wh/L = 29,775 cm3
1 life: 75Wh * 1590h (avg y) * 45y / 4k Wh/L = 1,399,875 cm3

(1) Composition: bitumen (petroleum)
(2) Average working time (1 life)
(3) Volume: 1,387,935 cm3

Energy Slave Token (Human Labor To Fossil Fuel Conversion Units), 2020, DISNOVATION.ORG & Baruch Gottlieb, installation, series of 5 standard weights, poster, 3D video

Images and text courtesy of DISNOVATION.ORG and iMAL

Valerie Olson researches contemporary sociocultural processes that remake what counts as environments. Her current projects focus on how social groups use the system concept to perceive, organize, and control spatial relations, particularly on large scales. This focus allows her to follow the ways people relate to sites, things, and processes they do not experience directly and which are categorized as outlying or beyond human. She serves on UCI interdisciplinary research teams and campus initiatives such as Water UCI, the Salton Sea Initiative, the UCI OCEANS Initiative, and the UCI Community Resilience program.

A transcript of the video can be found here. For more “Post Growth” interview segments with Valerie Olson visit postgrowth.art.

A few weeks into the first Europe-wide lockdown, I started seeing an unfamiliar meme spread across my social media channels. “We are the virus,” it read. “Coronavirus is the cure.” It wasn’t until months later during a boredom-induced re-watch of The Matrix that I realized I’d heard this sentiment before. “Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet,” says Agent Smith to Morpheus, his voice dripping with disdain. “You’re a plague and we are the cure.”

What a difference 20 years and a global pandemic makes. Where once only dictators and movie villains celebrated genocide, now gap year hippies and grumpy uncles are also getting in on the act. Of course, misanthropy is nothing new but as the news on the environment has become ever bleaker, this particular brand of cynicism has taken root in a way that feels fresh and scary. Speaking about the “we are the virus” trend recently, author Naomi Klein warned that it revealed authoritarian tendencies. “This is a time to be really vigilant about any idea that this pandemic is weeding out people who needed to be weeded out,” she told Teen Vogue. “These are fascist logistics.”⁸

But you don’t have to believe that COVID-19 is some kind of “divine purging” to show signs of ecofascism, especially when, as Klein points out, even seemingly reasonable discussions about overpopulation unfairly target developing nations. “If you look at where there continues to be the highest levels of population growth, it’s the poorest parts of the world with the lowest carbon footprints,” says Klein. “But when [that conversation] immediately moves the discussion to overpopulation, we’re changing the subject from unsustainable overconsumption by the rich to the procreation habits of the poor, and that’s a very political decision.”⁹

Using data by Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), this visualisation created by Worldmapper’s Benjamin Henning redraws the world according to proportion of total Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) emissions in 2015. The warped geography is telling: whereas main polluters like the U.S., home to then 320.7 million people, emitted 5,172,338 kton/Gg CO₂, the entire continent of Africa released one-fifth of that (1,236,083 kton/Gg CO₂) while harbouring three times as many people (995.46 million). As journalist Liza Featherstone argues in her 2019 article “Don’t Blame the Babies,” it is capitalism, not population growth, that is having the most damaging impact on our environment (see dossier entry 008).

High on fossil fuels, modernity managed to normalize the ideology according to which humankind could detach itself from the constraints and material limitations of planetary life. These constraints become harder to ignore, as the planet’s holding capacity begins to falter, and its resources run dry. How are we to reconnect with the physical, material and living reality of the world on which we depend entirely? Even today, the prevailing economic models still seem to ignore the extent to which necessary circulation of matter and energy depends on crucial physical processes for the regeneration of the biosphere or for human societies.
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The artistic research project Solar Share envisions the radical consequences of an economic model reconnected to the elementary sources of energy coming from the Sun, the Earth and the cosmos. It aims to revise the prevailing narratives with an acknowledgement of the material conditions required for the persistence of our form of life in the biosphere. It proposes futuristic visions of new relationalities between humans, life and the Earth system. The computational and diagrammatic models that have emerged from this artistic research aim to engage a broad public with vital information from science. By externalizing, in artistic and aesthetic forms, the energy systems that govern the planet’s metabolism, these models are intended to supplement critical discussion of our prospects on this planet, both in specialized spheres and in the general public, with an emphasis on the unquantifiable and missing data which lurks behind and threatens to undermine scientific, political and economic confidence.

Images and text courtesy of DISNOVATION.ORG and iMAL

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor at the School of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine, where he directs a laboratory for Values in the Design of Information Systems and Technology. Bowker’s books include Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999, authored together with Susan Leigh Star) and Memory Practices in the Sciences (2005), both published by the MIT Press.

A transcript of the video can be found here. For more “Post Growth” interview segments with Geoffrey C. Bowker visit postgrowth.art.

With the exception of climate change deniers, it’s clear to everyone by now that our reliance on fossil fuels is destroying the earth and threatening our continued existence. What’s talked about much less, however, is that replacing oil, gas, and coal with alternative energy sources is not, on its own, enough to avert climate disaster. As the author and climate activist Ted Trainer puts it: “It would be difficult to find a more taken for granted, unquestioned assumption than that it will be possible to substitute renewable energy sources for fossil fuels, while consumer-capitalist society continues on its merry pursuit of limitless affluence and growth.”¹¹

Trainer isn’t the only academic who sees growth and energy as inextricably entwined. Recently, DISNOVATION collaborator Baruch Gottlieb sent me a presentation by Jean-Marc Jancovici, in which the climate expert links post World War II GDP growth directly to the amount of energy we release into the earth, pointing out in no uncertain terms that the kind of continuous growth promised by politicians is incompatible with reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. “There’s absolutely no way we can address climate change with the correct order of magnitude, which is [reducing] the world’s emissions by three in thirty years, without triggering a world recession,” he says to an uncomfortable audience of economists. “Today saying that we are serious about climate change and that we will [still] have growth (…) is a big fat lie.”¹²

What can we do about this contradiction? Trainer’s solution is what he calls the “simple way,” or, in less euphemistic terms, drastically reducing consumption levels to 10% of their current levels. While this might be more of a provocation than a serious proposal, Trainer’s own dedication to this way of life—he doesn’t fly and grows his own food—supports, at least anecdotally, political scientist Cara New Daggett’s assertion that, rather than sitting back and waiting for renewable energies and new technology to save the day, we need “new ways of thinking about, valuing, and inhabiting energy systems.”¹³

In an article first published in the French journal Le Débat in September 2012, energy and climate expert Jean-Marc Jancovici underscores the correlation between GDP growth, energy, and oil consumption. “Energy is the blood of industrial societies,” he writes. “What counts is not its price, but availability: energy is now what drives our economic activity far more than work or capital.” In a series of charts, which DISNOVATION adapted for “Post Growth”, Janvocici demonstrates how that dependency has only increased in recent decades. In 1998 and 2005, for example, the slowdown of oil production preceded the fall of GDP and the subsequent economic crashes—“it is not because of the crisis that we use less oil, but because oil availability has decreased that we have a crisis.”

“Vertical farms in cities can produce—profitably—hydroponically grown leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and herbs, all with far less water than conventional agriculture requires. But the produce contains merely a trace of carbohydrates and hardly any protein or fat. So they cannot feed cities, especially not megacities of more than 10 million people. For that, we need vast areas of cropland planted with grains, legumes, and root, sugar, and oil crops, the produce of which is to be eaten directly or fed to animals that produce meat, milk, and eggs. The world now plants such crops in 16 million square kilometres—nearly the size of South America—and more than half of the human population now lives in cities. […] Vertical farms can’t substitute for much farmland, and the claims made for them have been exaggerated.” —Vaclav Smil (June 2018), IEEE Spectrum

Solar Share – The Farm seeks to demonstrate a fundamental and paradoxical challenge to the proposal from agro-industries (and preppers alike) to provide for the nutritional needs of large urban populations in times of climate uncertainties, through grow houses and other artificially controlled environments. This 1 square-meter experiment makes manifest the vast technical infrastructure and energy required to grow such staple as wheat in an artificial environment. In today’s economy, it is profitable to artificially produce agricultural products with high water content such as leafy greens and tomatoes.

However, from a systemic understanding, this apparent profitability depends on the availability of cheap fossil energy, unaccounted for resource extraction and pollution all over the globe, incurred in subordinate processes from mining and electronics manufacture to international freight. The present experiment seeks to reveal the numerous layers of invisible interdependencies and to provide a speculative reference reckoning of the incalculable ecosystem services at play in conventional agriculture.

Solar Share – The Farm (2020), DISNOVATION.ORG & Baruch Gottlieb, installation, 1m² of automated cultivation, LED grow lights, camera, video streaming

Valerie Olson researches contemporary sociocultural processes that remake what counts as environments. Her current projects focus on how social groups use the system concept to perceive, organize, and control spatial relations, particularly on large scales. This focus allows her to follow the ways people relate to sites, things, and processes they do not experience directly and which are categorized as outlying or beyond human. She serves on UCI interdisciplinary research teams and campus initiatives such as Water UCI, the Salton Sea Initiative, the UCI OCEANS Initiative, and the UCI Community Resilience program.

A transcript of the video can be found here. For more “Post Growth” interview segments with Valerie Olson visit postgrowth.art.

If conventional wisdom and media narratives are to be believed, then it’s only a matter of time until we transition to sustainable energy: as older, dirtier energy sources are phased out, they’ll be replaced by newer, cleaner ones. Data shows, however, that changes in energy consumption have seen the use of all sources (clean or otherwise) increase, instead of transitioning towards sustainability. “Although the percentage shares of biomass, coal and oil in our energy supply have fallen with the rise of alternatives, their total use continues to grow,” researchers Richard Newell and Daniel Raimi told Axios in 2018. “The world has never experienced an energy transition, but the challenge of climate change means that, for the first time, one will need to begin.” One of several diagrams produced for the “Post Growth” exhibition, this chart debunks the transition myth. “The rhetoric needs complete reframing,” the artists state. “The challenges the energy transition represents need to be rethought beyond science and engineering but as part of a broader reconsideration of our modes of living, values, infrastructures, and social situations.”

A few years ago, the writer and alt-right hero Jordan Peterson took some time out from ‘owning the libs’ to tweet his thoughts on a new study on ant behaviour. “30% of the ants do 70% of the work,” he wrote. “Not a consequence of the West, or capitalism, in case it needs to be said :)” It wasn’t the first time that Peterson has looked to the animal kingdom as an apologia for capitalism. The Canadian pundit is also fond of using lobsters to argue that hierarchies are ‘natural’ rather than the result of social constructs that give some groups power over others.

As anyone who spends time in the ‘manosphere’—a group of blogs and message boards populated by Incels, men’s rights groups, and pick-up artists—will know, the behaviour of wild animals is often used within these spaces to explain away the worst impulses of our species. Wolf pack behaviour, for instance, is frequently extrapolated onto humans, with the most obvious example being the popularity of the term ‘alpha’ to positively describe a male who is dominant in social or professional scenarios.¹⁶ But as many have pointed out, much of this thinking is based on a Darwinist theory of evolution, one which pits all living creatures against each other for limited natural resources while ignoring the many examples of non-human behaviour that “verges,” as a recent New York Times article put it, “on socialism.”¹⁷

Titled “The Social Life of Forests,” the article in question is based on the work of Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard whose research on subterranean networks between fungi and trees “upended” the idea of trees as “solitary individuals [that] competed for space and resources.”¹⁸ Instead, she found that “while there is indeed conflict in a forest, there is also negotiation, reciprocity, and even selflessness.” In the mid-90s, Simard’s research was seen, in the male-dominated field of forestry, as “girly.” The fact that over 15 years later it’s still controversial—some researchers see “reciprocal exploitation” in place of Simard’s “big cooperative collective”—shows how invested many people still are in a dog-eat-dog view of the world.

Part of the speculative Solar Share project that is at the heart of “Post Growth,” the Solar Share: Energy Flow Diagram attempts a ‘deep sustainability analysis’ that encompasses all human and non-human contributions. At the top are epochal sources related to the big bang, solar radiation, reserved deep heat, and chemical properties in the materiality of the Earth. Extending from these rich sources that provide all the energy for the nutritive and technical needs of human beings today, are long-term cyclical processes which eventually furnish everything we consume. Framing the central diagram are representations of waste and entropic dissolution—both black boxes unto themselves, whose complexity extends beyond the scope of this schematic.

Howard T. Odum’s (controversial) concept of ‘emergy’ attempts a comprehensive accounting of the energy consumed in direct and indirect contributions to make a product or service. Emergy allows for extremely slow and vast processes to be acknowledged as vital contributions to life, which we can no longer take for granted in an age of accelerating technological advances. Solar energy emerges as central in energy modelling, responsible for most of the sources of energy we rely upon today, including wind, tides, and, fossil fuels.

Some areas of the world get more sunlight than others, some ‘use’ more sunlight than others. In Europe, we are able to use considerably more energy than we receive naturally from the sun through imports in various concentrated forms, principally petroleum, coal and natural gas. According to The World Bank Group’s Global Solar Atlas, Brussels is one of the least sunny cities in Europe, receiving only 3 kWh/m2 on an average day, and only 1000 kWh/m2 a year. Yet Brussels’ energy consumption is comparable to that of most European cities.

Solar Share coins are made of PET plastic, a petroleum bi-product that constitutes ancient sunlight concentrated in organic material over millions of years. A few grams of PET have the same embodied energy as a square metre of yearly solar irradiation in Brussels.

How might our understanding of economics change if the instruments we used for money had an equivalent value to the solar energy required to materially produce them? As a speculative response, each Solar Share coin embodies the average solar irradiation received at a specific urban location.

Solar Share – The Coins, (2020), DISNOVATION.ORG & Baruch Gottlieb, installation, plexiglass frames, coins made of plastic waste (Precious Plastic, PET)

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor at the School of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine, where he directs a laboratory for Values in the Design of Information Systems and Technology. Bowker’s books include Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999, authored together with Susan Leigh Star) and Memory Practices in the Sciences (2005), both published by the MIT Press.

A transcript of the video can be found here. For more “Post Growth” interview segments with Geoffrey C. Bowker visit postgrowth.art.

“There is a discrepancy between the approach of economists to environmental protection and the approach of nearly everybody else,” wrote the Nobel Prize-winning American economist Thomas C. Schelling in his 1983 book Incentives for Environmental Protection. It lays out how pricing incentives such as charges on emissions; in contrast to regulatory standards, can be shaped into a practical policy that is technically effective, politically enactable, administratively enforceable, and equitable. To this day, the environmental impacts of industrial activity remain unaccounted for as what economists call externalities. The inputs provided by the planet’s ecosystems are similarly ignored. American ecologist Howard T. Odum’s Emergy accounting method provides a radical alternative. Developed in the 1990s, and informed by his work on general systems theory, Emergy describes an eco-economical model based on Embodied energy, wherein the totality of the energy required to produce goods and services—the sunlight that makes plants grow, the cosmic forces that forged Earth’s precious metals—is considered. It posits that natural systems and anything in them retain “energy memory” that, technically, goes all the way back to the Big Bang. “Emergy is a measure of energy used in the past and thus is different from a measure of energy now,” Hodum writes. “The unit of emergy (past available energy use) is the emjoule, as distinguished from joules used for available energy remaining now.”

Determined to not let lockdown blues get the better of me, I started 2021 by buying myself a gratitude journal. Turquoise and hardbound with gold lettering on the cover, this rather beautiful object has quickly become part of my morning routine, and while I wouldn’t say it’s changed my life, I have noticed that taking a few minutes each day to write down what I’m grateful for has produced a subtle shift in how I think. In the past, I’ve been guilty of treating success as a constantly moving goalpost, but regular journaling has encouraged me to celebrate even the smallest of wins, which, during lockdown, might be as simple as preparing myself a healthy lunch or checking in on a friend.

It might sound a little sentimental, but what my new routine has taught me is to value internal as well as external growth. It’s a realization that I’m sure anthropologist Valerie Olson, who I quoted in the introduction to this dossier, would be happy to hear. Speaking with DISNOVATION for the project’s interview series, Olson argued that western society has a “prejudice or a bias toward thinking about growth externally,” which blocks us from “using other knowledges than western knowledges to think about internal growth, or internal transformation as being another valuable focus for energy.”

Watching this interview again, I couldn’t help but think of the UN’s World Happiness Report, which measures countries on factors such as social help and freedom to make life choices rather than solely on their GDP. Unsurprisingly, it’s poor countries in long protracted conflicts, such as Yemen and Afghanistan, which fair the worst, but the fact that it’s Finland that has won the top spot for the last three years suggests that the size or power of a country has a limited effect on the happiness of its citizens. Take the U.S. as an example. It has the biggest GDP in the world, closely followed by China, but it ranks only 18th on the happiness scale—a pie in the face for economists or politicians who insist that GDP is the best way to measure progress.

What if, instead of focusing on production capacity and economic growth, we started to take attempts to measure internal transformation more seriously? What would change if the American media reflected on these reports rather than mock or underplay them, such as one article in which the author called a Pew Research Center survey “complete crap” because Nicaragua was above “wealthy Japan”?²⁰ One result might be that more countries adopt universal healthcare, free education, and a higher minimum wage, all of which are common in the countries that repeatedly top these lists. It might seem like a pipe dream right now, but it’s something that we should strive for, nonetheless. To quote a motivational phrase from my gratitude journal: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.”²¹

In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of ‘doughnut economics.’ Introduced by University of Oxford economist Kate Raworth in a 2012 paper and popularized in her 2017 book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, the economic model is a visual framework for sustainable development. Shaped like a doughnut—or lifebelt—it harmonizes planetary boundaries with human needs. The doughnut’s inner boundary represents the “social foundation,” where everyone’s necessities like food, healthcare, and education are being met. The outer circle describes “environmental ceilings”—air pollution, ocean acidification, climate change—that must not be overshot. The “sweet spot” in the middle is what Raworth defines as a safe and just space where humanity can thrive.

Apolitical and growth-agnostic, Raworth’s framework doesn’t lay out specific policies or goals. Instead, it relies on stakeholders—countries, cities, communities—to decide on doughnut benchmarks and ways of meeting them. Amsterdam, for example, committed to a five-year circular economy strategy that includes measures such as building supportive infrastructure with sharing platforms, thrift shops, online marketplaces, and repair services. The goal is to halve the use of new raw materials by 2030 and to achieve a fully circular economy by 2050. “In a doughnut world, the economy would sometimes be growing and sometimes shrinking,” Raworth explains in a TIME article, as GDP is put in service of reaching social goals within ecological limits, and not viewed as an indicator of success in itself. “When we think in terms of health, and we think of something that tries to grow endlessly within our bodies, we recognize that immediately: that would be cancer.”

In February, DISNOVATION’s simultaneous solo exhibitions at iMAL, Brussels and 3 bis f, Aix-en-Provence, closed to the public. Both named “Post Growth,” these dual shows explored the interdisciplinary group’s research into alternatives to infinite economic growth, which, as highlighted by the videos, printed matter, installations, and sculptures that were on display, is an attitude that has a direct correlation with climate change. In turn, Life… After the Crash, part of HOLO’s new online series of dossiers, dove into some of the topics raised at these venues in a series of Q&As, short essays, soundbites, readings, and videos.

Based in Berlin, travel restrictions meant that I never actually got to see either version in person, but after a brief period of disappointment, I realized that there was something oddly poetic about an exhibition on the dangers of growth being shut down by a global crisis that can, at least partly, be traced back to the farming industry and human encroachment on animal habitat. (For a great breakdown of the latter problem, I can highly recommend a recent episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on the “next pandemic.”) I was also cheered by the fact that, unlike most exhibitions, “Post Growth” was never intended as a one- or two-time event but was always thought of by the artists as a long-term project—one that could never be contained in a single location or time period.

So, the good news is that even if you didn’t make it to Brussels or Aix-en-Provence you haven’t missed your opportunity to contribute. Further physical editions of “Post Growth” are planned later this year at STRP, Eindhoven and IMPAKT, Utrecht, and the group will also “challenge and develop” their models within the framework of a one-year residence at Louvain-La-Neuve University, Belgium. Beyond this, you can follow their activities online through their dedicated “Post Growth” website, which features videos from their multipart series Post Growth Toolkits, as well as download the elements of The Game, a tactical card game that invites its players to “reprogram [themselves] out of economic growth orthodoxy.” Additionally, it’s also possible to play a more active role in the conversation through the DISNOVATION’s community Discord channel.