Research Institute for Sustainability at GFZ (RIFS)
03.12.2025-05.12.2025
RIFS Conference 2025 – Tough Conversations in Tough Times
03-05 December 2025 | Leonardo Royal Berlin Hotel Otto-Braun-Straße 90, 10249 Berlin Germany
Over three days, 300+ participants across 52 sessions gathered for transdisciplinary exchange—researchers, policymakers, civil society actors, and practitioners, meeting the question that now sits at the heart of sustainability politics:
“what does it take to pursue ambitious transformation when public debate is hardening, and resistance is becoming louder?”
In this setting, the exhibition became both artwork and research output.
On the walls: photographic montages and visual experiments developed over the past years, images that feel like interrupted horizons, fragile frames, and layered textures that refuse a single “right” reading. In the conference hall: fragments of conversations collected across seven previous shows—anonymous notes, reflections, emotional keywords; small acts of courage where people dared to name what climate change actually feels like in everyday life.
At RIFS, those threads were brought into one space and asked to do something slightly unusual for a conference: not illustrate a panel, not “decorate” a hallway, but hold attention long enough for something honest to surface.
The guiding question was simple, but uneasy:
What happens when we treat art not as decoration around a conference, but as infrastructure for public conversation?
You could move through the works quickly but the invitation was to slow down. Alongside the images, prompts asked visitors to respond: to write, circle, underline, disagree, or simply pause. The goal was not persuasion. It was room-making: for climate talk that is often too emotional for policy spaces, and too technical for daily life. Here, the exhibition tried to become a bridge between knowledge and feeling, between the urgency we carry privately and the language we use publicly.
Artistic Research Session
Friday, 5 December 2025 | 10:35–12:05
As part of the official conference programme, I hosted an artistic session connected to the exhibition. We walked through selected works together, using them as starting points rather than endpoints. I shared early findings from the exhibitions so far where conversations opened, where they shut down, and what people seemed to need in order to stay with the topic without slipping into resignation.
Participants were invited into a few low-pressure participatory exercises, small, practical ways to bring emotion, memory, and imagination back into climate conversations that too often become distant, managerial, or numb. The session backed up with the data was designed for researchers, practitioners, activists, and anyone who has ever thought.
“I care, but I don’t know how to talk about this anymore.”
Early research signals
Across the exhibitions so far, the data suggests that the exhibition format can shift both perceptions and emotions in measurable ways:
Knowledge: 56% of visitors reported at least some shift in understanding (28% described this shift as moderate or high).
Fear/concern: 48% placed themselves in the moderate or high change categories.
Hope: in one sample, ~80% reported at least some shift in hope.
These are early signals not conclusions but they point to something important: when people are given a space that legitimises emotion as part of climate discourse, the conversation changes texture. It becomes less performative, less abstract, and—sometimes—more possible.
Check out for more information on the outcome from my research here: https://youtu.be/P9idoy9z5eA?si=WbqMP8G7ueV-UwEd
If you attended the conference and would like to connect, collaborate, or host a Drishya Kala Klima exhibition/dialogue in 2026, you’re very welcome to reach out.
We keep making space for the tough conversations—one image, one story, one shared moment at a time..
