Visions of a Post-Pandemic Future
Lockdown Lessons

Automated, non-hierarchical, forgery-proof: blockchain technologies have big potential for reducing power imbalances in art and society. Cultural practitioners discuss their possibilities and specific applications at the “Radical Friends Summit”.

Over the past two years, the gap between rich and poor in the USA has widened in the wake of the pandemic. What effect has that had on the nation’s conception of democracy? Leonhard Emmerling and Nikolai Blaumer look at new radical democracy movements and the restoration of a sensus communis.

What does it mean to be a citizen? How does it affect our political autonomy? Writer and podcaster Amit Varma, and Kavita Krishnan, writer and feminist activist take a ride through the city of New Delhi discussing how democracy can be renewed in post-pandemic times.

What is the economical potential of the African creative industries? Namibian filmmaker and creative entrepreneur Joel Kaudife Haikali speaks about his own experience on the Namibian market and his co-created Creative Industry Guide, which aims to bring African creatives and investors together on pan-African collaborations.

The pandemic jeopardises not only everyone’s health, but also the well-being of whole societies, testing what solidarity means today. In this module experts ask how much solidarity is needed in times of crisis to keep society from breaking up. Who gets to be represented by whom? Who is legitimised to represent them?

Creative companies in sub-Saharan Africa, each in their own way, have helped to overcome the privations of lockdown, isolation and immobility. Their products reflect the added value of creative work for wider social questions. In the module “Creative Industry” such creative entrepreneurs come together upon invitation of the Goethe-Institut Namibia and discuss ways of collectively constructing a designable future.

The coronavirus has changed the social standing of scientists and researchers in the Global North. Researchers in various disciplines are helping us to understand what positive and negative effects the pandemic had on various social groups. The Goethe-Institut Brussels and its partners will address this urgent question and take the chance to look into the future: How do we want to live from now on?

This past year has made clear that while our lives are coming to a standstill in almost every domain, the dynamic of digital transformation is accelerating. We need new approaches to break out of the cycle of centralised data storage and surveillance technologies. Blockchain technologies allow new ways of working in the cultural domain, but cultural workers must be involved in order to explore and shape the future makeup and organisation of its institutions.

In ways we never imagined a virus now compels the world to keep its distance and regulates the closeness we are allowed to have with others. What happens with us when cultural practices of proximity are so fundamentally questioned? Which forms of distancing has the pandemic required in different social systems? The Goethe-Institut aims to explore these questions in Brazil, Korea, India and Germany. The focus will be on the future: How close to others can we be, and how close do we want to be?