We have arrived at a critical point, where it is becoming more and more difficult to pretend that depletion of natural resources, climate change, local and global inequalities, radicalisation of opinions and the consequences of all these processes have nothing to do with us. The question is no longer whether there has to be change and whether there will be change. The question is how it will happen. This time instead of talking about the world we currently live in we will attempt to talk about the world we want to live in the future and how we could get there.

Programme curated by transnational activist organisation Agents of Alternatives

17.00-18.00
Katharina Moebus
Talk: Agents of Alternatives – Re-designing Our Realities
Agents of Alternatives – Re-designing Our Realities’ (2015) is a collectively written book exploring the visions, actions, tools and impacts of ‘alternativ-ists’ who are applying creative practices to forge plausible, alternative ways of working and living. It presents an integrated framework for navigating a collection of essays, interviews and case studies from well-known international contributors and local activists. These originate from diverse fields, including design, the arts, architecture, education, politics, economics, urban planning and city administration, social enterprises, non-governmental organisations, and experts on the Commons. Katharina Moebus, co-editor of the book will explore the context and ideas presented in the book and open a space for a conversation and dialogue with the audience.

18.00-19.00
Alekos Pantazis
Lecture: Hacking the “Musical Chairs” game: The Commons
In order to depict Commons in a nutshell, we could use the comparison of Jose Ramos and say that a “Commons” musical chairs game would be the reverse of the classical “Capitalistic” and current musical chairs game – it adds new chairs to the game instead of removing them. When the music stops, a chair is added and another person can join the game. In the current game, each year has less environmental “chairs” and less humane “chairs”. Commoning is a vibrant activity for the deployment of a new type of game that will treat “chairs” as a common good. That is because we take pleasure from Commoning and think that humanity is tired of standing in the middle of eternity with so many unused and destroyed chairs around her. As Buckminster Fuller used to say: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” and this is what Commoning is all about.

19.00-20.00
Frauke Hehl
Lecture: How to have fun being an ‘agent of alternatives’ within the ‘wrong’ world around
Frauke Hehl will talk about projects like the workstation Ideenwerkstatt Berlin e.V. which are focused on carrying out all daily life solutions to people, to empower people in figuring out their identities and the different forms of working and living, exploring the question of what a future-compliant lifestyle, often selfmade and unconventional, could look like. She will also give more insight into how always next to the aim to challenge social, political and societal changes, there is also the aim to give people a platform to reorganise their individual and common lifestyles on a pragmatic scale to sustainable and satisfying ones.

20.00-21.50
Envisioning New Futures: World Café facilitated by Katharina Moebus & Alekos Pantazis
The World Café is a structured conversational process intended to facilitate open and intimate discussion, and link ideas within a larger group to access the collective intelligence or collective wisdom in the room. Participants move between a series of tables where they continue the discussion in response to a set of questions, which are predetermined and focused on the specific goals of each World Café, in this case exploring the question of alternative futures. The first World Café event was organised in 1995 and since then the number of people who have participated in events is estimated to be in the tens of thousands.