A picture = 1000 words?
Creativity fires transformative change
The image on the cover of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Degrowth – due for release 25 June 2025 – was created by Australian artist Kirsten Moegerlein. Doesn’t it show that a picture is worth a 1000 words?
Kirsten re-enchants ways of being and seeing. She curates events – such as the Degrowth Central Victoria and Friends 2024 Words in Winter event, ‘The Untamed Heart of Paradise’. This ‘journey of song, poetry and story – to compost your mind and share in the heart of community’ received an encore later in 2024 at the Castlemaine Free University.
In the first half of 2025 Kirsten created a lively reduce, reuse, recycle image for the Mount Alexander Shire Eco Art Truck project.
The tour of the Routledge Handbook on Degrowth – along with the 2025 Degrowth Journal Arts Special Issue and degrowth-aligned initiatives such as Haus Des Wandels – highlight the growing significance of creativity in degrowth transformations.
The Copenhagen event included multimedia performances and a panel of degrowth activists and academics who devote time to creative projects integrating degrowth themes. Art and Society through Feminist Degrowth was organised by the Centre for Applied Ecological Thinking and The Syndicate of Creatures (tSoC) with an immersive multimedia projection with sound followed by a panel conversation moderated by Rebecca L. Rutt (University of Copenhagen). It included short readings of creative writing on degrowth too.
The Syndicate of Creature will perform in the program the jointly presented 18th Conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) and 11th International Degrowth Conference, ‘Building socially just postgrowth futures – linking theory and action’ in Oslo 24–27 June 2025 where the handbook will have its international launch.
Meanwhile, a Routledge Handbook of Degrowth event takes place on 13 June 2025 in the Brno House of Arts, where the co-authors of the Czech chapter will speak about degrowth alongside the editor Anitra Nelson. As in their promotion:
The chapter on Accidental Degrowth in Czechia challenges prevailing conceptualisations of degrowth, which portray it mainly as a result of deliberate political strategies. It argues that this perspective often overlooks practices that align with the degrowth movement in various ways, but which are undertaken outside of it, by actors who are unaware, who lack specific degrowth goals, and often result from trajectories which are not straightforward. Degrowth theory and the degrowth movement picture societal transition as a form of utopia, a form of societal organisation that does not exist (yet). Its materialisation, however, will necessarily be different from the picture painted by theory.
Creative intellectual discussions are akin to creative processes and cultural production when thinking and talking about transformation, no?