If something was to wake up a species from a downward evolutionary spiral, you wouldn’t want it to be climate change. Because that is a very firm planetary reset button. And by the time climate equilibrium has been tipped, it is too late to avoid losing and never getting back ecosystems, weather, landscapes, creatures and plants this species takes for granted.
But here we are.
Facing the risk of survival on an increasingly uninhabitable Earth.
Climate change is more than a series of cascading problems to be solved. It represents an existential opening towards real chaos, renewal and recovery. Living with climate awareness is a hack into an initiatory experience, not a fixed trajectory for success or failure.
Mark Suciu formulates a query in the introduction to the Life Before book: “how can we explore the idea of a life before a weaponized climate starts to change our relationship to the world?” This question is examined by a group of fourteen artists and writers - friends of the publisher Paradigm - in the book Life Before.
Paradigm has been making artist lead publications and apparel since 2014. The initiative works through a slowly expanding community of people from very different walks of life and with equally diverse forms of aesthetic expressions. From photography, painting, essays, interviews, fashion, and poetry, the aspiration of Paradigm has been to hold open space for popular culture to encounter radical ideas. There are thirty-five of such projects and this is one of the last.
Adidas have partnered up with Paradigm to create a publication for artists and writers to express themselves freely on matters of ecological unravelling. What formed is an assembly of citizens’ expressions. An incomplete guide that might direct towards hidden paths beneath the dominant battlegrounds.
Contributors include: Anthony Jamari Thomas, Zohra Opoku, Reginald Sylvester II, Kim Giannone, Marie Tomanova, Maxwell Deter, KC Ortiz, Radamiz, Sam Lindenfeld, Onyx Collective, Mark Suciu, Aslak Aamot Helm, Elvia Wilk, James Bridle and Nick Hakim.
