The GEN(S) Lexicon

ECO-ANXIETY is a feeling of worry, agitation, nervousness and unease caused by concerns related to a changing and uncertain natural environment.

NATURECULTURE(S) is a concept defining nature and culture as inextricable. It is a mental model where you don’t separate human culture from the natural world as if they were two different entities. We are nature, therefore our cultures are naturecultures.

A NARRATIVE is a story, meaning an account of connected events and a specific way of explaining and understanding these events.

GENERATION SYMBIOCENE (coined by Glenn Albrecht) emerges from the ranks of all generations, such as Gen Z (those born around 2000) and Gen Y (those born in the 80s and 90s).

This is the generation that has been striking for climate every Friday, rebelling for life and changing their everyday habits as much as they can to reduce their carbon footprint. They are also the generation most familiar with feelings of eco-anxiety, worrying about the ecological crisis and the future of life on Earth.

OTHER-THAN-HUMAN encompasses all dimensions of life outside the anthropos, such as plants, animals, microorganisms and fungi.

SUMBIOART is about stimulating evolving processes of reconnections between individuals, their communities and their place of living, as well as between the human and the other-than-human. Unlike the BioArt of the Anthropocene, SumbioArt doesn’t use living organisms or processes to make art. There is no personal gain in SumbioArt, no domination over living forms by humans. It is an inherently social and ecological practice, nurturing life bonds in a naturalcultural framework.

SUMBIOGRAPHY is a term coined by Glenn Albrecht to explain the cumulative influences on one’s life that have shaped one’s eventual views of the relationship between humans, other forms of life and nature.

SYMBIOCENE is a term coined by australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht :

— συμβίωσις (sumbíōsis) literally means a ‘living together’ or ‘companionship’.

— καινός (kainos) means ‘new’. Commonly transcripted as -cene, it is a suffix used to identify geological epochs of the Earth. Thus, the Symbiocene is the era of companionship, of the ‘living together’, when life on Earth isn’t destroyed, but instead nurtured, by humans.

SYMBIOSIS comes from the Ancient Greek συμβίωσις (sumbíōsis) – from συν (sun): ‘together’ and βίωσης (bíôsis): ‘life, way of life’. These two roots combine to form the verb συμβιόω (sumbióô) meaning ‘living together’. Thus, symbiosis is the ‘living together’, ‘the life in common’. In science, it has been used since the 19th century to define the living – especially mutualistic – relationship between two or more beings. When coining various SumbioArt practices, we chose to follow Glenn Albrecht and to translate the greek υ with the latin u instead of y, in order to shift the scientifically derived term ‘symbiosis’ into a contemporary social and cultural context and to keep closer to the root meanings of sumbíōsis and súmbios.