What does it mean to envision ‘sustainable futures’, specifically, via the color green?
Susanne Ferwerda is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research brings together art and literature from Europe and Oceania in order to question normative approaches to human-ocean relationships. She pays particular attention to how colonial oceanic pasts and presents inform our imagination of oceanic futures. This project looks into the centrality of green as a color to symbolize the world’s transition to more sustainable ecologies. What does it mean to envision ‘sustainable futures’ via the color green? If we look at the larger spectrum of greens what, for instance, happens when we consider green via ‘avocado green’ and its connections to both the rise of environmental consumerism in the 1970s as well as the resistance of the millennial generation to increased precarity via their supposed overconsumption of avocado-on-toast? Or ‘absinthe’ and its poisonous but countercultural connections? This project goes beyond simplistic interpretations of green transitions as homogenous, only starting from a single color. We will walk around Stavanger to engage with the varieties of greens we encounter and create a ‘new green’ for future earthly survival. What kind of stories can our future greens tell?
Susanne Ferwerda presented her project to University of Stavanger in a research talk on Wednesday 23 November 2022.
In the fall of 2022, University of Stavanger welcomed 12 guest researchers and artists from across the world to engage with each other and the UiS community in a semester-long exploration of the meanings of green transitions. Each fellow gave a talk to present their project and contributed to an international conference on green transitions.