A Trembling Utopia: Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Nikolaj Schultz

Part of an emerging movement in France — a new existentialism that turns its gaze on all of existence rather than on the human perspective — Schultz was a close collaborator of the late French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour, who championed this ‘nonhuman’ idea. Their co-authored work, On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo (Polity Books, 2023), translated into 12 languages, provides a blueprint for constructing a political subject poised to advocate for the planet’s habitability. Praised by scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty, Clive Hamilton, and Slavoj Zizek, Nikolaj’s recent book Land Sickness is a hybrid text that revisits the human figure and engages with the sociological and existential questions that the Anthropocene forces us to pose.

Newspapers have crowned him “the coming star of sociology,” and similar to Latour, his influence extends beyond academia, permeating the art world and inspiring artists and curators such as Fontaines D.C, George Rouy and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Before his passing, Latour introduced Nikolaj to Hans, but it was last summer, prompted by Corinne Flick, that Hans delved deeper into his work, picking up Land Sickness as his summer read.

Hans has played a unifying role in the art world, cultivating spaces where people, perspectives, and ideas intertwine. As the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, he has curated numerous exhibitions and projects that engage with environmental issues and sustainability. Additionally, he has promoted eco-conscious practices within the art world itself, leaving a lasting impact on the way contemporary art addresses ecological challenges. In October, he invited Schultz to give a talk at Serpentine’s prelude to this year’s Infinite Ecologies Marathon, which explores this new perspective on our relationship with nature, redirecting our attention to the world as it is rather than the human-centric one we’ve constructed.

A few weeks after our initial meeting, I managed to arrange a call with Ulrich Obrist and Schultz — a feat in itself — to discuss Land Sickness, the Anthropocene, and this new Earth “shaking beneath our feet.” Nikolaj's hand-written quotes shared throughout this article are inspired by Ulrich Obrist's Remember to Dream! 100 Artists, 100 Notes, a collection of "thoughts for the day, dreams, drawings, musings, jokes, quotations, questions, answers, poems and puns" handwritten on Post-it notes (and other scraps).

HANS ULRICH OBRIST — In this age where information is abundant but memory often falls short, I think it’s important to acknowledge the artists who have contributed to the discourse on the climate emergency since the start of the movement. In my field, Gustav Metzger springs to mind, who has been at the forefront of this struggle since the 60s/70s really. Then there’s Agnes Denes, whose seminal 1969 manifesto resonates powerfully today. And the Harrisons who contributed a manifesto that criminalized plastic for our ongoing Back to Earth program at Serpentine. There are all these artists in my field, so I’m curious, Nikolaj — who do you see as the pioneers in your field?

NIKOLAJ SCHULTZ — As you know very well Hans, the discourse on our ecological problem stretches back to mid-century movements, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the ‘Limits to Growth’ report in 1972. Yet, my field of social theory was relatively late in developing a conceptual language for discussing these changes — even if you can, of course, find ecological “undertones” in modern social theory. For example, in the work of one of my heroes Karl Polanyi who perceptively intertwined social relations with environmental conditions in his analysis of societies. There has been more progress in recent decades, thanks in part to thinkers like our common friend, Bruno Latour, whose seminal work reintegrated nonhuman actors into social theory. Also led by figures like Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, Emanuele Coccia and Anna Tsing, among others, this shift in thought has illuminated the agency of wolves, spiders, octopuses. Latour in particular helped bridge these ideas into the art world, which you’ve also been instrumental in doing.

HUO — I think that to properly tackle the significant challenges of the 21st century, we need to overcome the fear of sharing knowledge, so throughout my work I’ve aimed to do just that by bringing people together. I see curation as I do it as a form of “junction-making,” as J. G. Ballard once described it to me. I’ve created events like Serpentine’s Marathon and exhibitions like Laboratorium, Cities on the Move, and do it to serve as vectors between people and ideas.

When I first met Bruno, he felt undervalued in France at the time, particularly by its institutions, so I invited him to collaborate, together with Barbara Vanderlinden, on what we named “Laboratorium”, which looked at the workspace of artists, the studio and the laboratory as a kind of network. He was hesitant at first, but his involvement turned into enthusiasm as he organized tabletop experiments together with Peter Galison, Caroline Jones, Panamarenko, Rem Koolhaas, and Isabelle Stengers — who made the private practice of experiments a public affair. And of course, the actor-network theory was kind of crucial for that.

It all grew out of us bringing people together. You of course worked even more with him and were really the person he was most interested in as part of this younger generation of sociol - ogists, so I’m eager to hear how that came to be and about this book you co-authored before releasing your own.

NS — I first crossed paths with Bruno when he was my teacher at Sciences Po in 2015, engaging with his course on the philosophy of nature, which later influenced his seminal book Facing Gaia. For some reason he found me a good student, so slowly, in the following years, we started exchanging ideas about this new Earth that had begun shaking beneath our feet. These exchanges turned into a real collaboration around the time he was writing Down to Earth, in which he introduced the term ‘geo-social classes’ that we would collaborate on until his death.

As a sociology student who — before I encountered Bruno’s thought — had been trained in the old German tradition of critical theory, and in Marxism to a certain degree, I thought that this idea of a new concept of class for a time of global climate change was interesting. And knowing that Bruno tended to sometimes not follow through entirely on his many conceptual inventions, I pressed the case that we should take this newly minted term seriously and develop it further than he had done initially.

This we did, then we began writing our book on the topic in 2021, analyzing why ecological parties struggle to gain political support despite the overwhelming evidence of the unfolding ecological disasters. Our book, on the one hand, sought to diagnose this void in political effects, the absence of mobilization and lack of political passions for ecology — and on the other hand, it tried to indicate pathways out of this political inertia.

We argue that ecologists haven’t taken the cultural struggle for ideas seriously enough, and art plays a significant role in this struggle, capable of shaping our sensitivity for issues previously ignored and driving social change. Bruno was heavily inspired by your work in this regard, an insight that followed him for many years, all the way up to his last book, On the Emergence of an Ecological Class, the one he and I wrote together.

HUO — That’s exciting. I read the book in German. You mention movements like Fridays For Future and local organizations working locally and nationally, drawing a parallel between historical workers’ movements and the present need for an ecological class today to halt climate change. Yet, you advocate for a politics that broadly protects our Lebensgrundlage — our foundations of life. It made me think about Joseph Beuys and a lecture he gave in Rorschach, back in the ‘80s when I was still a child, about his role in co-founding the Green Party. He was an artist aiming to marshall this ecological class you refer to. From your perspective, what are the practical steps we can take to move beyond the book and into societal action?

Nikolaj Schultz by Jesper D. Lund

NS — We were really bemused by the dispersed nature of the climate movements, with little action despite looming disasters, which we see unfolding in front of our eyes. Why are “We” not acting? Well, our argument is that nobody really knows who this “We” consists of.

The past half-century, the ecology movement has squandered precious time, sustained by the belief that as ecological disasters loomed closer, people would naturally rally under the banner of Mother Nature — that a common recognition of our shared planet would unite us in action, all together. Instead, these questions of nature, soil, land, territory are not topics that unite us. We all see that now, in every country, all over the continents. Ecology is not a peace treaty; it is rather to be understood as a battle cry.

However, these conflicts are not the Achilles heel of ecology and political mobilization for the climate question, they are actually its unrealized potential. We are witnessing a strange historical reversal, where it is exactly the process of production that has turned into a system of destruction that threatens ecological sustainability. The issue now is connecting these conflicts into a unified narrative, which could help to create a “We” relative to the nature of today’s conflicts. As social history has shown, embracing conflict can be beneficial in galvanizing political movements. While it’s not fully formed yet, we see examples of this emerging ecological class fighting for the planet’s habitable condition worldwide — for instance, indigenous people in America fighting for their territory, others fighting against the construction of polluting coal-mines in Germany or against mega-bassins in France. We are also seeing inklings towards making it a consistent political narrative. The big problem is of course that historically — as you know — the evolution of a class consciousness typically unfolds over a century, a timescale we simply don’t have. If we’re to stand a chance, paradoxically, it is essential to embrace a slower pace of trying to construct such a thing, and art plays a vital role in this process.

And for good reasons, because imagine what Frida Kahlo did for communism, what Goddard did for socialism, or what a writer like Jack Kerouac did for liberalism. The arts intrinsically demand time, and it is because we are in a hurry that we must take ours, as Bruno used to say.

HUO — That’s really interesting. In your talk at the Serpentine in October, “On the Many Ways of Becoming Sensible in the Anthropocene,” you discussed a new existentialism for our era, focusing on our changing relationship with non-human entities — calling for a greater sensitivity towards all life forms. You emphasized the need to not just analyze this shift but also describe how human existential conditions are changing in the Anthropocene—evolving into an entity that threatens its own species and its habitats. Can you elaborate on this idea? You hinted at it earlier, but I’m also curious about how spirituality factors in.

NS — The point I made in the Serpentine talk — and one I still hold firmly — is that perhaps while we’ve made many strides in considering non-human life that pushes back against centuries of anthropocentrism, we also need to understand how human existence is changing. For me, a new existentialism needs to include both. Today, to be a human being means understanding that you are a species that is in the very middle of destroying its own conditions that it needs to sustain its life.

Think about it this way: Over the summer, the film Oppenheimer captivated many, and for good reasons, because it marks an interesting turn not only in world history, I would argue, but also in the very existential conditions of the human being. Karl Jaspers explored this in The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man.

Back then the situation was different, because it was simply a few political or military elites who held this power of extinction. But today, we collectively hold the power to harm our species with everyday choices — taking a shower, drinking coffee, traveling by airplane. We’re all, in a sense, constantly echoing Oppenheimer’s words, “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds,” because of the destructive traces that we leave behind.

This idea of a new existentialism fit for the New Climatic Regime is what guides my investigation in Land Sickness. What interests me is the emotional-existential and psychological-moral landscape that this creates: what are the effects, the feelings, the experience of understanding that you have become a creature that contributes daily to the slow destruction of its own species’ conditions of existence? What is the confusion, the nausea or the vertigo, to speak the terminology of the old existentialist Sartre, that this creates, when you are realizing you live on a planet that is shaking because of your own actions?

HUO — This is the central question you raised at the Serpentine.

NS — Yes, exactly. I raised the question of this new human conditions’ translation into art, and the artists you highlighted at Serpentine that day have of course begun this work, largely turning their creative focus towards the non-humans that we coexist with — like your friend Tomas Saraceno. I wonder if there could be a new artistic gaze towards the new human condition in the Anthropocene. Have you noticed any signs of this in your curatorial practice or elsewhere in the art world?

HUO — I feel like there’s a strong appetite today among artists to break free from the event culture mold that most exhibitions, even long-standing ones, fall under. We see more artists who wish to question and reinvent the fundamentals of what an exhibition can be, like Tomas, who transformed a gallery with solar panels and visitor-pedaled bicycles, giving space to non-human curators like birds, spiders, and dogs. Meanwhile, artists like Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg take a different path, opting out of traditional shows to create AI-assisted gardens for pollinators — a space enjoyable for humans, but decidedly not for us.

There are also long-term projects, like a farm and artist residency in Nigeria developed by Yinka Shonibare, inspired by Roman Krznaric’s ideas on deep time from How to Be a Good Ancestor; and thinking about how art can catalyze environmental campaigns, which led us at the Serpentine to compile 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, a collection of practical instructions from artists on how to engage with ecological issues in daily life.

Returning to your book, Land Sickness, there’s something truly captivating about it. It pulls the reader in but not in the way a typical theory book might; it’s deeply biographical and experiential, naturally making it existential. Once I started reading it, I found it impossible to stop.

The way it commences — with the relentless nature of our problems. The sense that there is no escape stays with the reader. It follows you in the same way that these problems do and while it reflects your personal journey, it also resonates as a collective narrative.

It clearly aims to reach beyond an academic audience, reminiscent of Bruno’s evolution, his profound leap from scholarly to mainstream thought, now being one of the most read philosophers globally. You seem to be following a similar path. How did you approach writing with a broader audience in mind?

NS — When I was writing Land Sickness, Bruno was penning After Lockdown [called “Where am I?” in French]. We were both starting our drafts during that same awfully hot summer, sharing them back and forward. Bruno was asking “Where am I?” But I suggested asking instead “What am I?” — exactly because this “what” today is intrinsically linked to the question of “where”.

And now, my attraction to this question — and especially because I was interested in the affects of this transformation — led me to write in a different style, one that bridges the academic and the affectual. I did not know that I would write a full book in this tone before I saw the impact it had. Land Sickness actually started as a short essay that I published in a few different languages. I was surprised to see how it garnered attention from people both within and outside academia, so I expanded it into a book — one that falls more into the category of “literary sociology” or “literary existentialism” than “existential literature”.

With certain existential questions, and with the experience of a self or a subject changing shape, it can be useful to start with our own experiences, hence the awfully outdated “I”-narrator. Classic existentialists did this too. And I think, if the reader approaches the book as a hybrid essay as I describe, then it might perhaps resonate. I hope that it does, because related to our discussion above, the Anthropocene and our New Climatic Regime demands new ways of narrating theory, because as Ursula Le Guin once suggested, we need both the curiosity of science and the risk of aesthetics. And this is the path I tried to aim for in Land Sickness, by finding a genre in between.

HUO — When I first met Umberto Eco in Milan, we had a conversation and then after, he showed me his incredible collection of old books. In his apartment, he had a locked room full of medieval manuscripts that only he could enter, like something out of his novel The Name of the Rose. As I was leaving he asked me, “Do you people still hand write?” He then said that handwriting is disappearing and that he is too old to do anything about it. That is the task he gave me, to help save handwriting from extinction.

At that moment, I wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t just start a calligraphy school, I’m not competent for that. However, a few weeks earlier, the artist Ryan Trecartin had just introduced me to Instagram. And one rainy day soon after, I was sitting in a cafe with Etel [Adnan] chatting.

As everyone looked at their phones, she wrote a poem in her notebook, which is when it clicked. I meet artists and poets all the time. So, I started to ask them to jot down sentences whenever I met them, which led to Remember Nature, and then what’s become somewhat of a movement on Instagram, protesting the death of handwriting.

One of those sentences was yours, beautifully put: “We are all suffering from land sickness. The earth is trembling and the human is trembling with it,” which reminded me straight away of Édouard Glissant, who was like a mentor to me. He always talked about a ‘trembling’ world, a utopia in constant motion. I’m curious how this idea has influenced you and how it’s significant in your work. Can you elaborate on what a “trembling utopia” means to you?

NS — I will have to read Glissant now, and — this is probably the one and only time I will ever say in an interview that I am a patriot, and that’s because when I think of “fear and trembling,” I am of course drawing directly on Kierkegaard, a fellow Dane!

Yet, again, there is a difference. Kierkegaard was describing his anxieties, his anguish, but his answer was related to a deep and thorough exploration of the inward depths and freedoms of his subjectivity. But what struck me, while I wrote this note to you at the Serpentine, is that today, the trembling is different: Today, if we “fear and tremble”, it is not because of a dizziness that comes from realizing the limitless possibilities of your own subjective freedom. Instead, it is a dizziness and a trembling that comes from the ruinous traces that your freedom has left behind, which swing back at us like a boomerang, threatening the limits of the Earth System and the planet’s habitability.

HUO — This was one of the main topics of our project Back to Earth.

NS — I want to touch on the short yet fascinating book project of yours, 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, which underscores an important point about the need for closer ties between artists and political movements, particularly those focused on the environment. Bruno and I have critiqued the lack of such alliances as it’s not about artists or curators falling short but rather about political ecologists not fully embracing the potential of creative initiatives like yours. How do you see the political realm engaging with and embracing these questions and resources?

HUO — I believe we’ve reached a time when every organization, whether it’s a political party, a government, a corporation, or a brand, should include artists in their decision-making processes as artists John Latham and Barbara Steveni suggested through their artist placement group. Artists adapt quickly, which is crucial for tackling issues like climate change.

What once seemed like a utopian ideal for companies is now really a necessity. A decade ago, when I mentioned this concept to CEOs and government officials, they’d laugh it off. But now, it’s not a joke anymore; people are taking it seriously and asking how to make it a reality. However, fully integrating artists into these sectors is still a work in progress. The idea of bringing artists in all these sectors is still largely an unrealized project. Another is to start a modern version of Black Mountain College — an educational model bringing different disciplines into dialogue.

That leads me to my final question, the one I ask in every interview. We often hear about architects’ unrealized projects — they publish theirs. But what about philosophers, sociologists, scientists, visual artists, poets, and designers? Outside of architecture, we seldom hear about their shelved ideas. And the scope of the unrealized is vast. So, as we wrap up this conversation, I’d love to hear about one or two of your favorite unrealized projects.

NS — That is a very personal and existential question in itself. Do you mean something truly unrealizable, or just unachieved yet?

HUO — That’s exactly it, which is why I’m curious about your take. It’s inherently existential.

NS — It’s an interesting question. And while not exactly what you’re asking, it does remind me of a reflection I recently had, about what it is that connects all my work, both the more sociological work that I have done on the topic of geo-social classes — partly with Bruno — and the more existential investigation I spoke about above. In the time of the Anthropocene, I believe we are divided, collectively and individually, sociologically and existentially, and it is these divisions that I am interested in investigating and describing. So, I would say, my yet “unrealized project” — one that will probably take a lifetime, or at least a career — would be to exactly map, comprehend, and develop a language for better understanding these fractures in the geo-social class landscape, and in our psycho-emotional or existential landscape. And why do I find that important? Well, because as every good tailor knows, if you want to fix or mend back together a piece of fabric, then it’s a good idea to first find out how it has splintered — and I believe the same counts for our social and our existential fabric, our collective and individual life-terrains.

Apart from that, I am currently writing a book about tech elites and their bizarre dreams of taking off to and inhabiting planet Mars, in which I try to describe why we shouldn’t pay so much attention to their silly plans, but instead just let them leave and say ciao, see you around, enjoy the ride…

HUO — Thanks for that. Just one more thought. In a world which is more fragmented, I feel like the idea of the “universal” becomes key. Not the old Eurocentric imperial perspective at all. Instead I’m drawn to my conversations with Souleymane Bachir Diagne who suggests universalism in the 21st century should be about celebrating the irreplicable plurality of culture and languages.

It’s not about replacing one perspective with another but blending them together, perhaps leading us to what Walter Mignolo calls the “pluriverse,” the many and the one mixing — to recognize all the different ways people see the world and having those perspectives speak to each other. I’m curious to hear your take on this decolonized notion of “universal”.

NS — I will have to think more about the question, but I think you are right in asking it. And what you say about a new sort of universality that starts from diverse modes of being, resonates with what Bruno called the “composition of a common world”. Another angle to consider is how climate change has become a universal concern in the Anthropocene. Regardless of geographical location or societal status, we are all in a situation where we must fight to safeguard the planet’s conditions of habitability.

And as I argue in Land Sickness, then this requires that we give up on the idea of “progressing straight forward” with absolute certainty, and that we instead go towards the future in a continuously reflexive and humble manner, mixing situated knowledges with curiosities, care, precaution and imagination — a sort of horizon, where we must remain open to the necessity of reinventing and renewing our ways of life, strategies and techniques, as we come to learn more about the Earth System and its workings. And of course, as you indicate, then this indeed also requires the pluralism and the plurality of perspectives that you mention.

As for unrealized projects, I will have to think more about it, especially since we’ll be discussing the topic in Venice in June. Ultimately, I think it’s about mapping out the pieces and fragments of this strange new universal situation and figuring out how to mend them. That’s also why I very much like your notion of piecing things together — it’s what we need to do.