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Short abstract:

The paper explores how institutionalized knowledge about public finance audit is turned into counter-knowledge in the transdisciplinary project “Pre-enacting climate change knowledge” (PECCK) in order to become a proposition for future climate governance.

Long abstract:

Scholars in the anthropology of knowledge and STS have analyzed and problematized in detail the effects of the climate budget regime on climate change knowledge and climate governance. Before that background, the transdisciplinary project “Pre-enacting climate change knowledge” (PECCK, 2022-2024) projected the demand of the Austrian Climate Referendum (2020) for a Climate Court of Audit and brought it into being as a real fiction.

https://klimarechnungshof.jetzt/

Consisting of a core group of anthropologist/sts researchers, curators, a designer and filmmaker we worked with a more or less consistent group of experts from administration, climate sciences and activism. In three workshops and five staged acts we appropriated well established institutional knowledge on auditing public finances and translated it into a real-fictional campaign for the creation of a climate court of audit. These acts were publicly filmed, edited and made public via social media and a real-fictional campaign homepage.

Besides presenting the audio-visual outcome of the project I propose to analyze the conditions for realizing an anticipatory format such as a real-fiction: 1) its potential to interact with other forms of knowledge in the “ecology of climate change knowledge” (Knox 2020). 2) the possibility to bundle interests and time 3) to experience an institution from within (in our case a museum), 4) to work with the performativity of audio-visual representation (in our case: film). And finally: 5) to appropriate existing institutional knowledge and turn it into counter- or activist knowledge.