Marvels & Catastrophes artist group

Marvels & Catastrophes is an interdisciplinary artis collective that was launched in 2018 as an act of defiance, in the hope of creating an alternative set of creative strategies capable of addressing the increasing disastrous effects of climate change. The premise was, and remains, simple: there is a body of unassailable science, concerning human agency and climate change, that clearly is not gaining the kind of broad consensus that is urgently needed to bring humanity together in common cause. Marvels and Catastrophes was established to examine not just the science, but to go further by exploring how earlier historic precedents and generational narratives worked to bind together populations and their cultures in the past. History shows that science and myth have always coexisted. Convincing the world population to work together on such a grand scale needs more than communicating the science. We also need to invent ways to fuel our imagination to act in concert. Our strategy then is to imagine, toy, and develop ideas, designs and concepts that can pull us out of this most difficult quagmire.

Unfortunately, we are now in the second year of the Covid19 global pandemic, where it would seem that the tragic evidence of what unchecked human activity can bring about on itself is undeniable. And yet conspiracy theories, false science, unregulated capital, bad politics and a shockingly weak social contract continues to undermine collective action. Marvels and Catastrophes, as a work collective, hopes to counter these widely held myths with a more critically constructive set of propositions that would work on more positive outcomes. The virus, a symbol of when the last vestiges of the wild encroached upon and overrun by human negligence, can also be a sort of diagram for resistance.

/Peter Lang, co-founder of Marvels & Catastrophes

Marvels & Catastrophes are also participants in and contributors to the Listen project, where they among other things arranged an open studio showing their work processing both environmental disasters and the corona-cricis. Through the group, Listen is integrated into the Symbios project, which creates synergies between the two processes.