Book Presentation: 'Without Growth' / Hotel Charleroi/ Filka Sekulova
For each of his future exhibitions Stijn Van Dorpe creates a booklet titled: 'Without Growth'. Therefore he invites writers, activists or researchers to reflect, in a critical and adventurous way, on the idea of a society based on a non-growing economy. Bringing these texts about an alternative economic space into the art-space, he aims both to investigate the esthetics of the economic space today and to challenge the esthetics of the art space. The work explores the tension between esthetic values in the field of arts and the esthetics of our economical space with its primary focus on growth. It evokes a space between art as a possibility for 'thinking a real new future and art as 'a utopia'. For Hotel Charleroi he made the first booklet with a text by Filka Sekulova (France-english). For this occasion Florence Scialom who will write the text for the next edition will give a short lecture.
Read the booklet
Lecture by Florence Scialom
Economic growth has monopolised perceptions of how societal progress can be measured for decades, and economic change is often seen as being controlled by policy-makers and big business only. Yet this approach overlooks many factors important to successful economies, including community connections and long-term sustainability issues. The increased financial and environmental instability facing many peoples across the world currently encourages a questioning of economic ‘business as usual’. Some scholars and activists now reject economic growth as a suitable indicator of success and instead advocate for de-growth, accompanied by a transition to economic localisation; smaller, more local economies, requiring less environmentally damaging production and consumption. Florence will discuss her own research on these themes, which is based on fieldwork conducted in the town of Totnes in the United Kingdom. Totnes is the original home to the Transition Towns movement, which seeks to support community focused solutions to climate change. Increasingly the Transition Towns movement is re-articulating its core messages in economic terms: rejecting economic growth and promoting a move towards more localised economics. Florence’s research focused on the attitudes and behaviours which resulted from this alternative economic perspective.
