“let’s talk about the weather”

The Anthropocene Commons is an international network of researchers, artists and ecological activists with a strong presence in Chicago and along the Mississippi River. We formed in the wake of the decade-long Anthropocene Curriculum project sponspored by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPI). Today we are anchored by the MPI-Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, and, more locally, by the Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange in Minneapolis and along the river. On a deeper level, however, this project is mobile, adrift – continually changing like the weather itself. Activities include online forums, gatherings across the earth (including Chicago), art events, publications, university-based talks and classes, and now, a bi-weekly discussion and reading group in Chicago.

The formula is simple: We meet every other week at Watershed Art & Ecology for a one-hour, in-person session including activity updates and presentations of personal or small-group projects, leading into an hour-long hybrid discussion with participants at the table and on screen, focused on a theme and a reading (or a video, a zine, etc). We encourage you to come together in the flesh, but Chicago is big, and the wide world is even bigger, so we also encourage you to participate in the hybrid session. Discussion topics will be publicized by email, instagram and on this website. This formula is mutable and open to change, because we make it – just as a larger, more complex and more radically unequal “we” makes the weather of the Anthropocene.

This discussion and reading group is affiliated with the UIC Anthropocene Lab.