On Thursday, March 26th, vCIES 2020 Artist-in-Residence Xavier Cortada delivered a keynote plenary speech to conference attendees via this online platform. Originally, when the conference was to be hosted in Miami, Cortada anticipated giving a speech with a focus on sea-level rise and climate change. With the coronavirus pandemic upon us, Cortada also discussed the interconnectedness of the issues at hand.
Keynote Plenary: The Future is Here, Now
When addressing climate change and its impacts, or any type of environmental awareness, there is always the problem of words falling on deaf ears. Many people remain in denial about its existence and the impacts climate change presents. In this keynote plenary, artist Xavier Cortada presents a solution to this issue; instead of speaking to a present in denial, he asks us to speak to the future, as an acknowledgment of their existence and our own current environmental reality. Cortada, who serves as Artist-in-Residence for the CIES 2020 Conference, invites participants to write and upload open letters to the future addressing the current effects of climate change.
Through the act of writing letters that display environmental concern for the future, the audience acknowledges the connection that the present has with the future, in hopes of prompting awareness and solutions to environmental issues that affect us now. This produces intergenerational cooperation in tackling these issues, instead of simply leaving them for future generations to deal with on their own. As the Coronavirus Pandemic grips our world, problems that we once deemed too distant now abruptly transform our present reality. Our failure to lengthen our care horizon across space, across time and across species continue to makes us more and more vulnerable in an interconnected world.