Parallax Lisboa is an initiative that experiments with novel ways of knowing and teaching in the Anthropocene. Spanning across a broad range of disciplines, the initiative seeks to make the interdependence of anthropocenic processes sense-able.
Parallax Lisboa is a group of researchers and artists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds working on subjects related to the Anthropocene and its many debates. Most of the members are based at the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia—CIUHCT (Lisbon, Portugal), which offers institutional support, and started working collectively on the Anthropocene debates through CIUHCT’s research project Anthropolands.
According to its dictionary definition, parallax is “the effect by which the position of an object seems to change when it is looked at from different positions.” The challenges of the Anthropocene demand research actions that cut across disciplinary barriers to create new modes of making and sharing knowledge. But while a transdisciplinary approach is necessary, we should also restrain from aiming at an integrated framework. On the contrary, new actionable insights may spark only from an open, non-hierarchical and even conflictual exchange, in which multiple, and not necessarily compatible, perspectives on reality are at stake. The Anthropocene Campus: Parallax, which took place in Lisbon in January 2020, used the concept of parallax to engage with issues of environmental and social transformation and collapse highlighted by the term Anthropocene.
To that end, Parallax proposed to organize a discussion around two intertwined and complementary frameworks, which are often divorced from each other in disciplinary discourses: on the one hand, systems of social and technological organization, which structure our actions and, therefore, considerably define what actions are possible within a given historical context; and on the other, perception and narrative, which determine our limits for understanding the present and imagining the future. Power and discourse are negotiated, challenged and perpetuated through both means, defining the conditions in which we live. Taking the parallax effect seriously means not to dismiss it as an error or as an “apparent” movement. The movement is there, and we must ourselves move in order to follow it.