What if we began to think of reason as plural — reasons or reasonings — rather than the monolithic "Reason" from on high? What would it be like to think with all five senses, going beyond our habitual ocularcentrism? What if affect were both disruptor and the source of our greatest inflexibility? What role does ritual have in metabolizing the whole spectrum of human affect, both individually and collectively? What relationship holds between beauty and ethics in times such as these? What can art, philosophy, and activism learn from one another? How can we create alliances across sociological divides that habitually keep theorists and activists separate? Finally, how can we create more plausible scenarios of hope for a greater number of people?

This conversation was possibly the most wide-ranging we’ve had so far on the podcast. As you’ll hear, Dr Kilian Jörg is a capacious and audacious thinker, and has reflected long and hard on some of modernity’s most recalcitrant (and most insidious) problems: problems ranging from the climate crisis to the loss of ritual, from polarization to ‘the hope gap.’ But they don’t just do the hard thinking; they are also engaging with these problems from the ground up, reaching across sociological divides that may seem unbridgeable to many. A kaleidoscopic thinker, Kilian is as fluent in the realm of philosophy — drawing from Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Michel Serres — as they are in the world of art and ecological justice, inspired by the likes of Timothy Morton and Elin Kelsey. All in all, this conversation was a masterclass in what it means to refuse the dualisms between thinking and acting, between theory and activism, and to invoke the possibility of pluralism in the face of pure criticality.

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Dr Kilian Jörg works both artistically and philosophically on the topic of ecological catastrophe and how its transformative forces can best be imagined and deployed. Previous publications have covered themes as wide ranging as club culture, the political backlash from an ecological perspective, cultivating distance in catastrophic times, and a speculative religion of waste. Their current research topics are the car as a metaphor for our toxic entanglements with modern lifestyles (released in book form as “Das Auto und die ökologische Katastrophe” in 2024), the socio-psychological effects of living with ecocide, and radical activist strategies of reclaiming land like the ZAD in France (published as "Durchlöchert den Status Quo!" in 2025). Kilian is working both in theory as well as artistic and activist practice on how to create rituals that enable us to cultivate more complex feelings in times of collapse. They currently teach at the School of Transformation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the program Plastic and Environment at the Art University of Linz. Furthermore, they are affiliated with various collectives, such as the Futurama.Lab, Stoffwechsel - Ecologies of Collaboration, and the CRC Affective Societies at the FU Berlin.

More about our guest: www.kilianj.org | Paper referenced: "Affect as Disruption: Affective Experimentation, Automobility, and the Ecological Crisis"

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In the highly regulated spaces of most museums today, is it possible to enact a different type of experience, one that is relational, participatory, and even aspirational? Can the public be just as important as the artist and curator in the process of making an aesthetic experience meaningful? Museum director Karen Grøn believes so. And she has made it her mission to make the Trapholt Museum of Art and Design a refreshingly novel site of co-creation, where the visitors and guards are just as instrumental as all the other moving parts. She sees art as a moving rhizome of relations and materialities — an “infrastructure of meanings” — and the museum as offering a frame which opens a piece of art to the question of why. Far from being simplistic, her process is always theoretically informed, whether by enaction itself or Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, and it coaxes the visitor into experience itself, rather than telling them about the experience they ought to have. The result is a space in which the community feels a strong personal tie to the museum, almost as a second home, in which they can “unfold their potential for participating in the world.” And that, if anything, is what Karen aspires to, and why she thinks this enterprise remains as vital and relevant as ever.

Karen Grøn is Museum director and curator of collaborative art projects at the Trapholt Museum of Modern Art, Craft and Design in Kolding, Denmark. She explores and researches how to make the arts accessible and relevant to multiple citizens through engagement and exchange. Karen has a master’s degree in Aesthetics and Culture from the University of Aarhus and a master’s in public management from the University of Southern Denmark. In 2005-2006, Karen was a guest researcher at the University College London, and then in 2018-2019, at the Tate Museum.

If you’d like to read a bit more about her unique approach, you can peruse an article she contributed to the Tate Museum website: The Art Museum and Psychological Well-being. You can also hear her speak at the 2020 EU Presidency Museum Conference, on “Museums and Social Responsibility - Values revisited”. Finally, we'd encourage you to have a look at the fourth semester of Core Enaction, in which Karen was in dialogue with enactive researcher and artist Shay Welch.

For more information about Trapholt’s current exhibition, “Feel Me,” which Karen mentions in our conversation, you can visit the Trapholt Museum Website.

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In the words of Jane Hirshfield, “science exists to try to answer the questions that can be answered. Poems exist to answer the questions that cannot be answered and yet require of us some response.” Her poems do just this, but with the dexterity and finesse of a Zen koan. Jane is an unusual voice in the landscape of contemporary poetry, in that she has spent much of her life as a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, bringing that particular ethos of attention to her inner life, but also to issues of social and environmental justice. Known the world over for her ten collections of poetry and several more collections of essays and translations, her voice can just as easily be found in The New York Times or The Guardian as on a stage before 50,000 people in the March for Science.

In this conversation, Jane generously took us on a tour of her many influences, practices, and ponderings: from her introduction to Gregory Bateson and the Lindisfarne Association, to what she sees as the role of poetry in democracy and society, to her deeply kinaesthetic process of making poetry, to the intimate crosstalk between poetry and science, and, finally, to what we both see as being the ‘ethics of poetry’. Jane has spoken of her poems as “an enactment of a struggle to say yes to that which we would prefer to say no to” — a statement which seems as poignant as ever, and indicative of how capacious her mind and practice are. We spoke about the uncanny power that poetry has to convey beauty and grief in the same breath, and how to embrace what she calls the ‘ambush of amazement’ in times that might otherwise compel us to go numb. Ultimately, the conversation was an enactment of what it means to stay awake and tender in a world of such unutterable complexity.

More about Jane Hirshfield: Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere, the values of interconnection, and the alliance of poetry and the sciences. A practitioner of Soto Zen for fifty years, she received lay-ordination in 1979 in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Hirshfield's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and Columbia University's Translation Center Award. In 2024 she received the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize, China’s premier independently-given award for a world poet. Author of the recently published The Asking: New and Selected Poems (US, Knopf, 2023; UK, Bloodaxe, 2024); nine previous poetry collections; two now-classic collections of essays on art's infrastructure and craft, Nine Gates and Ten Windows; and four books presenting world poets from the deep past, she has presented at festivals and universities worldwide and her work has been translated into eighteen languages. A 2026 Visiting Fellow and Poet in Residence at Harvard Divinity School and former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

For anyone who missed Jane’s singular Mind Matters talk in February 2025, you can view it on our YouTube channel at any time.

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