Reflect Debate is a part of the project RETHINK — Contemporary Art & Climate Change which looks at climate change through the prism of artistic interpretation and organises an exhibition of 26 works created by trendsetting Nordic and international contemporary artists working in the intersection between art, culture and climate change. The organisers created Reflect Debate as an online forum where they encourage readers to get involved by commenting upon and discussing interdisciplinary themes connected to climate change.

You can browse through the collection of articles exploring and debating climate change, art and culture from a variety of perspectives. You can also share and discuss your questions and opinions with both the authors themselves and other readers. 

Because climate change is a fundamentally interdisciplinary phenomenon, Reflect Debate presents a broad cultural discourse on the consequences of climate change, transcending conventional borders and interfacing with many domains, including politics, art, technology, nature, sociology, and philosophy, among others. The discussion participants explore how climate change leads to new understandings and definitions of some of these established domains, and how they interfere with one and another. The writers are artists, philosophers, scientists, politicians, and business people, all bringing different bodies of knowledge and viewpoints about how climate change is affecting the way we live in and view the world.

The debates are structured around six themes: RETHINK Borders, RETHINK Art, RETHINK Politics, RETHINK Technology, RETHINK Nature and RETHINK Social Life. Each theme has dedicated to it both a collection of articles and a blog, where you can comment on and discuss the pertinent articles, the individual themes, and across any and all of the six themes and their representative articles.

In the debate forum RETHINK Art Lea Shick, the editor, and readers discuss various questions such as: Can art really tell us something about complex matters as climate change? Where are the borders between art, design/technology and science, and do we need to maintain these borders to protect science as well as art? What do artists do different from scientists or engineers? Can art help us change the way we live, the way we consume and the way we understand the ecological system we live in? Does the artist have a special position in the discussion about climate change, or is it just a lucrative area for the artist to get involved in? How can artworks, as those presented at RETHINK, influence public awareness and opinion and the political negotiations at COP15? 

In the RETHINK Art you can also find the articles: RETHINK: A New Improbable Form of Life written by Emma Ridgway; Imaginary Interfaces in the Blue Sky written by Søren Pold; Rethinking Art as Intimate Science: Climate Art as a Hard Humanity written by Roger Malina; and The Position of Art in the Survival Society written by Taina Kinnunen and Ilmari Leppihalme. These articles published in the RETHINK exhibition catalogue which can be purchased at one of the four museums or at the Alexandra Institute. For mail order, you can contact Lene Mortensen (lene.h.mortensen@alexandra.dk).

Be free to participate in the debate and discuss which role art as or will get in the increasing attention emerging around climate change.