Book Launch - "Climatic Subjects"

The occasion is the publication of the new anthology "Climatic Subjects," a cross-genre work published in collaboration with the University of Vechta and the Free University of Berlin, within the broader context of the Climate Culture Network e.V.

The Lettrétage team is delighted to introduce you to some of its fascinating contributors from a wide spectrum of climate-cultural thought, writing, photography, dance, and film.

Climatic Subjects: Who are they? Where are they? What do they do? How can literature, together with science, art, and media, contribute to a new and productive perspective on what they call climate culture by connecting direct action with aesthetics?

This evening, they will be joining forces with: performer Vera Shchelkina, climate journalist Angelina Davydova, poet and writer Zara Zerbe, writers and sound poets Michaela Vieser & Isaac Yuen, film scholar Matthias Grotkopp, cultural geographer Mike Hulme, journalist and media scholar Lebogang Neidhardt-Mokoena, and some "best of" artists from the Climate Cultures Festivals they've hosted in Berlin.

It's true: there are good solutions, broader horizons, and exciting, creative, and powerful climate issues working toward a better world. But it's also true that powerful anticlimate forces exist in this world, turning back the clock toward a catastrophic fossil fuel catastrophe. In this sense, this evening could become a rallying cry: Climate Subjects of the World, Unite!


Angelina Davydova is an environmental and climate journalist and essayist living in Berlin. She is a Fellow at the Institute for Global Reconstitution, an expert on climate projects at Dialogue for Understanding e. V., and co-host of the podcast "The Eurasian Climate Brief." She has been an observer at the UN Climate Change Conferences (UNFCCC) since 2008 and is a member of the World Future Council.


Mike Hulme is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Cambridge. His work examines the diverse ways in which climate change is addressed in public, political, religious, and scientific discourse. He is the author of twelve books on climate change, including most recently "Climate Change Isn't Everything" (Polity, 2023). He is also the author of the widely acclaimed "Why We Disagree About Climate Change" (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research from 2000 to 2007.


Mike Hulme is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Cambridge. His work explores the diverse ways in which climate change is addressed in public, political, religious, and scientific discourse. Matthias Grotkopp is an Assistant Professor of Digital Film Studies at the Department of Film Studies at the Free University of Berlin. He is the author of *Cinematic Poetics of Guilt: Audiovisual Accusation as a Mode of Commonality* (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2021). His research interests include the audiovisual representation of the climate crisis and ecological disasters, genre theory and the relationship between politics and poetics, the films of the so-called Berlin School, and digital methods of film analysis.


Lebogang Neidhardt-Mokoena is an emerging researcher in media and journalism studies with an interest in visual environmental communication. Lebogang is a trained journalist. Her contribution to this book was developed as part of a project she undertook as part of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Emerging Leaders (2022–2023). Lebogang holds a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.


Alexander Nikolsky is an artist and assistant professor at the Institute of Fine Arts of the Kemerovo State Institute of Culture and at the Institute of Film and Television of the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts. He is a participant in and curator of several exhibition projects addressing the ecological crisis and the interaction between humans and space. His artistic interests include the study of interaction between humans and non-human actors, extractivism, the planet's systemic feedback loops, and the representation of the climate crisis in art and science.


Simon Probst is a postdoctoral researcher in the DFG-funded project “Natural Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene: Archives, Media, and Literatures of Earth's History” (2024–2026), which examines the cultural dimensions of planetary crises such as climate change and the sixth mass extinction from the perspective of interdisciplinary memory studies. At the intersection of literature and science, his work combines cultural and literary theory with various fields of scientific knowledge such as climatology, earth system science, or ecosemiotics, and develops planetary and ecological perspectives on German literature from the 1st century AD.