ETHOS Lab

To generate this year’s theme we came together and wrote down what feels important (both worrying and exciting) to each of us right now and how that connects to our mutual need for the local environment where we work together. We shared various critical reflections and idealistic aspirations, but also questions and uncertainties we have about this current moment that seems crowded with competing urgencies. As a way to make space for these uncertainties, we decided to filter out the things we know we clearly want to move away from and abandon, as well as those that we know we want to move towards, i.e. the ideals that still ring clear to us and what we readily oppose. What this left remaining was the messy-in-between: the both-ands, neither-nors, the land of double-binds and double standards, where the illogical sometimes seems to make sense. These became our Urgent Contradictions – contradictions we feel are worth following, crawling, nagging, devouring, de-bugging, or trolling in 2024 as we dream of better times ahead.