Markus Reymann is the co-director of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and the related art-and-oceanic-research enterprise TBA21–Academy. In his role, he actively engages the need for action and change. Below, Reymann discusses his related interests.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Spiegel & Grau Greta Thunberg called for a stop to industry, and people said it was impossible; yet, when we came into the pandemic, suddenly everything around us stopped and it became possible. This idea of imagining through a variety of scenarios is taken up in Imaginable [2022] by Jane McGonigal. The author has a background in simulation practice as a futurist and game designer. Here, she proposes a timeline with precise thinking to work through various scenarios over time. This kind of thinking can help us detach from an egocentric perspective. With the many converging crises that we are living through, we need this radical shift in thinking about how we want to act and how we exist in the world to make meaningful changes.
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Image Credit: ©For The Wild™ For the Wild is a podcast series that looks at the Anthropocene and the effects on it from many different perspectives. It offers a prismatic view by examining the roles of degrowth, social and racial justice, regenerative farming practices, and more.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection The television series The Bear [2022] follows a fine dining chef who inherits a sandwich shop from his late brother, chronicling the daily struggles of running a small restaurant with family. He encounters resistance to change, as he deals with personal loss and manages expectations after leaving a high-profile job. It’s highly entertaining and very well acted. It also reminded me of the days when I used to own a restaurant in Berlin. An effort to rethink German cuisine became logistical mayhem, but we were lucky that it took off, and it gave me the opportunity to work in a transformative business.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Triarchy Press Ltd. Designing Regenerative Cultures [2016] by Daniel Christian Wahl elaborates on regenerative philosophy, which foregrounds actions that are conducive to life rather than extractive. Wahl exercises this through the big questions of agriculture, financial systems, government, and so on. Wahl considers cocreation with nature and environment, as well as humans and other species, on everything from development to supply chain to production. One of few books on the topic, it offers examples of what that philosophy might look like in practice.
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Image Credit: Courtesy HarperCollins Publishers The main thing that struck me in bell hooks’s book All About Love [1999] is the idea of love as an active choice. Love is an emotion that can overcome us, but we can also choose to bring love into the world. In our society, love has become a very nondescript emotion proliferated in songs and romantic comedies. Yet, there are fewer and fewer spaces to learn what love is and how to love. She also draws this connection between love and social justice: without justice, there cannot be love, and vice versa. The entanglement between these concepts, and the radicality of that thought and what it demands from us, have become increasingly important. Ultimately, hooks takes this emotion that is so intimate, and rigorously thinks it through, demanding deep engagement from the reader.