A Climate Fictionalism – Curators’ Incubator Program at Museum

In Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s islandish fantasy, “Man with the Compound Eyes”, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch demolished a prehistoric culture of Woenesia Island in the eastern waters of Taiwan. In the novel, the power of climate is described as a hybrid that through nature and civilization, meanwhile, it configures a picture of contemporary globalised society, floating above the ‘technology’ and ‘crisis’ — Island as a phantom of modernity.

The curatorial concept of “A Climate Fictionalism adopts an emerging terminology in popular literature, “climate fiction (cli-fi).” It refers to a sort of fiction that presents a contemporary reality of Dystopia—the present day, creating its heroic rescue stories through the natural disasters. Compared with the sci-fi’s futurism, “cli-fi” is a hypothesis based on the substantial and physical world; it focuses more on the social reality and also re-claims humanity by means of this metaphor of dystopia. It imagines the dramatic climate changes and environmental disasters as a chaoslike power that transcends the contemporary governmentality, deconstructing and reforming the already known experiences as well as the order of power.