Existential sustainability: Can cultural and creative industries make us understand societal challenges?
Which of Agenda 2030's 17 sustainability goals includes the deeply human need for art, creativity and culture? During a workshop at the Faculty of Arts, Magali Ljungar-Chapelon, an artistic researcher in digital design, would try to fit work with different art forms among the global goals, but did not find a goal that she felt was appropriate. The solution was to create our own goal, existential sustainability. The hope is that culture and creative industries can contribute to solving our major societal challenges.
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Photo Dr Magali Ljungar-Chapelon, Artistic Researcher in Digital Design, LTH's representative in Lund University Working group for Cultural Collaboration, research coordinator at LTH and a teacher at the Faculty of Arts, talks about how she discovered that existential sustainability was missing among the seventeen global goals.
“Of course we need to work on the 17 global goals, but I don't think that is enough, but we also need to work on deeper human goals. From a humanistic pedagogical perspective, art can help reveal the essence of life by creating meaning that also encompasses the opposite in the form of the absurd, contradictory, destructive as well as the sublime.
One point of weighing in on existential sustainability and working more interdisciplinary could be to provide a deeper understanding of other sectors of society.
“University teachers and researchers from every discipline provide a valuable foundation for targeted training of students' ability to develop an open mind to be able to respond to unexpected situations, address complexity and, if necessary, be able to build walls against destructive phenomena and to achieve sustainability goals in specific sectors of society. However, segmented professional knowledge is not enough to be able to practice a more comprehensive form of sustainability, an existential sustainability that bridges and includes human experience in all sectors of society and in the encounter with the world. An interdisciplinary approach, including a cultural and philosophical dimension, may be key to managing existential sustainability.
Birgitta Persson at Future by Lund refers to Karen O'Brien, professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at Oslo University. Birgitta shared Karen O'Brien's thoughts that humanity has focused on climate crisis and climate change as the problem for decades, but despite both impressive scientific and technological progress and agreement on fundamental issues, it has not been able to create actions that have yielded results. Therefore, the climate crisis should perhaps be treated as a relationship crisis instead. In this way, existential sustainability could be a useful concept when approaching the relationship/climate crisis.
“We need to find ways to build a capacity to deal with the complex challenges we face. We need to work on understanding the connections between the complex rather than finding solutions to all the small parts,” says Birgitta Persson.
