For all those of you who have followed my work since Fluxland 2016 and the series of talks we curated on board the boat, it gives me great pleasure to introduce my new venture, The Independent Republic of Conscience. Accompanying my upcoming performance installation, The Lovers of Pompeii, this new republic is inspired by Seamus Heaney’s poem and has been designed to foster collective participation in the world’s positive evolution.

We formally acknowledge the terrifying state of destruction facing our planet, the impact of all our human activity, and the extreme acceleration of these processes. By creating our newly independent state and by becoming Ambassadors, we hope to fight and positively impact the future of this rapid evolution in a respectful and conscientious manner.

The anthropocene utopia will be more destructive that any of the previous political utopias of the twentieth century. The trauma will be borne by all of us, it will move with respect to borders, to race, to species. There will be more natural disasters, more forced migration and more conflicts due to the impending shortages of natural, necessary primary goods.

Humans are but a part of the natural environment. We simply cannot continue presuming that we alone are allowed to modify nature and its ecosystems for our immediate benefits. We cannot continue to impose an ecological debt on future generations.

No political discussion can be had that continues to ignore the most obvious contemporary risk faced by mankind. We need to begin a transgenerational / trans- geographical conversation. History shows that we are not allowed to be blind. We have the responsibility and the duty to be actors in service of a better world.

THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIENCE is a state of mind, a place to gather people, to share and acknowledge action, and to remind politics what it is forgetting. We have the luxury, the duty, and the technology to invent a new conception of progress and to find a human way to celebrate and nurture our future generations.