Empathy and Sustainability: The Art of Thinking like a Mountain

ended

The project adopts an innovative approach by addressing the role of empathy in advocating for the climate crisis at the speed needed through artistic co-operation and creation of novel art-projects, and suggests that exploring the empathy-sustainability relationship through the arts can bring significant advances to the promotion of sustainability actions and pro-environmental behaviours. The project aims at supporting a diverse set of cultural players to take an active role promoting empathy and sustainability in their respective local, national and transnational/European communities, advancing a better understanding of the ways in which empathy-related arts contribute to individual sustainability orientations and broader environmental sustainability. The project is expected to initiate a dialogue between artists, sustainability experts, philosophers and social scientists, in order to explore the importance of empathy as a key to aid people tackle and act upon climate change. In that scope, the proposal lies on two interconnected pillars: (i) the facilitation of artists to produce, through sustainable practices, art that fosters an empathic stance towards non-human beings and nature, and thus effectively incorporate the concept of sustainability in their artistic production; (ii) the necessity for artists and cultural workers to become themselves empathic and resilient individuals in order to deal with the post-pandemic social and economic crisis. The proposed set is designed on our belief that the concept of empathy and its conceptual derivatives can shed new light on how we understand and embody sustainability in the arts, and become the common theoretical ground of the two pillars.