This statement is the core idea of manifesto 034. As a response to current events, it reflects on the elusive feeling of being confronted with different crises interfering with each other. Furthermore, it questions our disconnection from our collective consciousness. Especially crisis requires changes.  We can only overwhelm and process these changes collectively. In his lecture on the collective consciousness, psychologist Colton Jones talks about “The illusion of separation” as the biggest of our time. He explains it as  “The idea that we are separate from each other and the things around us including mother nature”. The manifesto takes this thesis as an impulse and comes to the observation that we live in times of broken dialogues. 

The first broken dialogue is directed to ourselves as humans and thus our collective dialogue. The second broken dialogue addresses the non-verbal with nature and thus the disconnection to our environment. “The Great Silence” by Allora & Calzadilla is used as inspiration to point out our non-verbal broken dialogue with nature. The science fiction author Ted Chiang tells the story of a parrot that expresses its lack of understanding about our treatment of nature. He ends his observations with the message “You be good, I love you.”Excerpts from this touching story were taken as quotations and complementary thoughts were placed in a broken dialogue. It is characterized by the feeling of talking past each other and is one of the key moments of the collection. As another example of our non-verbally broken dialogue with our surroundings, the collection takes up artificial intelligence-generated landscapes. They are generated from a digital compilation of real places that are fused into each other and form a non-existent place. Titled as “places that do not exist” they represent metaphorically our broken dialogue with places we treat as if we don´t really care.

As an example of our broken collective dialogue, moments of the pandemic are taken up visually.  As a drastic crisis, the pandemic has divided parts of our society and clearly demonstrated that our dialogue with each other is broken.

In summary, the collection questions our approach to global crises and thus our collective consciousness. It is about the potential of storytelling as an act of reflection and recontextualization by actively engaging in dialogue and listening to the perspective of others. It is about the verbal and non-verbal “broken dialogues” within the human community and to our environment