ÜberLeben: Fragen an die Zukunft

About

The exhibition „SurVival: Questions about the Future“ is conceptually based on the film „Soylent Green“ (1973), which takes place in the year 2022 and almost fifty years ago created a gloomy vision of the future, that of extreme overpopulation and the ecological problems it caused. 1 Global warming due to the use of fossil fuels is also discussed long before there was a consensus in science.2 Since the oceans have been fished dry and there is no longer enough agricultural land, people in 2022 will be fed on artificially produced food, which the ethically corrupted upper class has secretly produced from corpses by the Soylent company.3 The uninhibited exploitation of natural resources, so the message of the film, leads to a social system that is as it were self-devouring and based on violence.

The film is considered to be the first ecodystopia to have a mass impact and was produced a year after the release of “The Limits to Growth: Report of the Club of Rome on the State of Humanity”. The German version of the film was released in 1974 with the staccato like subtitle „… year 2022 … who want to survive“ and was first broadcasted on September 5, 1981 in the evening program of ARD.

Against the background of this almost 50-year-old look into a future that has now become the present, the exhibition opens up a polyphonic space for reflection with twelve artistic positions, from which, supported by a rich supporting program, we can look into our own near and distant future target. The themes dealt with in the film are addressed in the same way as the history of the specific film genre and the possible perspectives of our own survival.