Beyond Carbon in the Netherlands

EVENT DETAILS

Beyond Carbon is organizing two immersive screenings this September in Rotterdam and Utrecht, in collaboration with Varia and EMMA Centrum. These events are supported by Erasmus University and Green Screen Coalition.

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🌿 About

Beyond Carbon is an immersive screening that transports viewers to an Indigenous Dayak village in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Created in collaboration with village elders, women, and youth, Beyond Carbon merges remote sensing data with animation, digital collage and live action footage into an experience that encapsulates the deep interdependence between humans and our more-than-human planetary co-dwellers.

🌳 A rainforest under threat

Viewers will encounter a tropical rainforest ecosystem that is one of the planet’s richest biodiversity areas—but one increasingly under threat from mining, palm oil, and carbon offset plantations.

🔍 Questions about data & knowledge

What kinds of data are used to represent a place? What worldviews do these datafications represent? How can we confront the colonial legacy of extractivism to finally put differently situated knowledges in conversation with one another?

⚖️ Two value systems

What emerges in the 15-minute screening through interviews, animated retellings of Indigenous myths, forest sounds, and data visualizations of forest carbon are negotiations between two value systems—one that relies on numbers to measure the rainforest’s ability to sequester carbon and another that understands the forest as an extension of community. 

The full curatorial essay accompanying the screenings is called A Forest Is Never One Thing.

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Prof. Diana Suhardiman (Leiden University) and Jueling Hu (University of Amsterdam) will join us as discussants in Rotterdam and Utrecht respectively.

You can find more details about the Beyond Carbon installation in this page.

_{Stills from the Beyond Carbon installation, clockwise from left: illustration of the sacred riverbank Riam Bejankar by Laura N-Tamara; a sketch of the triptych layout by Michelle Cheripka; digital collages of carbon allotropes superimposed against the local forest landscape by contributor Adrian Randall; Mekar Raya's village chief Pak Tony in an interview with the Beyond Carbon team in February 2025; Dayak children Dantan and Mare collecting food from the forest.}

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_{Main poster image designed by Laura N-Tamara and Melis Ece.}