Manuscript of a lecture on 19 December 2025, as part of CLIP #7: The Garage of Prepping Otherwise, at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam.

Also published in the “The Garage of Prepping Otherwise: Collective Learning in Practice” (2026) book.

Falling Apart

“This strange and awful time was the happiest of my life.”
(Station Eleven, 2021)

Introduction to the Apocalypse

I became a climate activist in COP15 Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. Going there, I only had a vague idea of the extent of the biocrisis, the crisis of the living. But I was already an anticapitalist, so I had plenty of distrust towards the hype that Obama would be resolving hundreds of years of contradictions in a few days and save the world. I went following another hype: in an article, Naomi Klein was teasing that Copenhagen would be as significant as the Battle of Seattle a decade ago. The radical flank, gathering under the banner of Climate Justice Action, was calling for disruptive, disobedient actions. So I went there to be a party-pooper together with my comrades, but while our actions were harshly repressed, the party itself flopped big time: the neoliberal centrists couldn’t agree on anything and accidentally reminded everyone that nobody was really in charge of spaceship earth.

One booklet I picked up at the counter-summit struck a chord with me. Titled Introduction to the Apocalypse, and written by an anonymous collective, it was a critique of green capitalism, a warning on emerging eco-fascism, and a call for sabotage, insurrection and communisation. The text articulated why we should get on board the climate movement with a surprising historical parallel:

Everyone knows the task of our generation is the overthrow of the existing order, yet like the early Christians describing the end of feudalism in religious rather than political language, our generation is unable to express the obvious necessity of revolution in any more than the scientific language of catastrophic climate change. (…) The first step in overthrowing the present order is no different: to formulate a new political language of insurrection from the scientific language of catastrophic climate change.

In other words, us radicals, critical as we may be about the hegemonic techno-scientific epistemology, we must occupy that discursive space and force the Western consciousness to follow its own rationalist paradigm to its logical conclusion: that system change is not only necessary and overdue, but it is also inevitable. This was my collapse-acceptance moment: the world was going to get very messy within my lifetime, and if I wanted to survive, I would join the ranks of those struggling to derail, delay and dampen that future, by any means necessary.

I moved to Amsterdam in 2010 to play my part in building the European climate justice movement. In the decade that followed, I worked on projects that attempted to respond to various challenges of a just transition. Looking back, I am able to discern three complementary strategies that make more sense to me now than it did then: Speculation, Prefiguration and Disruption. I will briefly present them before bringing us to the present.

Just Transition strategies

I had studied design and had a weak spot for the smooth, polished, glossy forms of late capitalist modernity. But I certainly didn’t want to become an advertiser, so I needed to find another way to practice what I learned. Like many people who feel stuck at the end of their studies, I decided to go into academia. I did a PhD on postcapitalist design, researching ways of creating and producing without commodities, commerce and consumerism. While I was studying existing practices and not crystal ball readings, this kind of transition work is strongly rooted in speculation: Researching, imagining and disseminating visions, stories and ways of being of the world we want. This is not a purely utopian practice in the traditional sense, because better futures henceforth need to take into account a broken planet. In a way, this was my first attempt at collapse-bargaining: I wanted to understand what could be salvaged, repurposed or composted, not only from the heaps of junk we inherit, but also from the skills, desires and attachments that made us late capitalist subjects with an imperial mode of living.

The second, prefigurative track is all about getting our hands dirty in the imperfect present, to live “as if we are already free”, to prepare, anticipate and precipitate the ways of living we are calling for. In practice, my focus has been building and maintaining housing commons and co-living, since working full time, renting from a landlord and living by myself were neither desirable nor financially sustainable. I got involved in renovating and inhabiting an old primary school building with ten others, and operating a social centre as infrastructure for a broader community. NieuwLand became our home, where the blood, sweat and tears taught me more about commoning than my academic research. More than just a roof, it provided me with an intentional community, sharing the responsibilities of collective action and the joys of luxury communism.

What may seem like foolish youthful idealism, looking back now appears as the most pragmatic and strategic decision I ever made. It allowed me to disentangle and shelter myself from the everyday disasters of capitalist relations. I speak at past tense, but NieuwLand is still there, but I just moved out recently, after ten beautiful years. This is because for the last seven years, I was also building another housing cooperative, this time from scratch, and for fifty people. Not because I was not happy at NieuwLand, but because commoning entails reproducing the same conditions for others; I could not pay back the initiators of the project, but I could pay forward.

I’ll tell more about this project later, but let’s face it: the climate doesn’t care much about humanities research and shared homemaking. This is why my main passion and occupation for a decade has been organising disruptive action campaigns for climate justice. This movement took me to the ends of the world. It was righteous, it was truthful, and it was beautiful. We organised distributed creative actions with Climate Games, unsolicited art performances with Fossil Free Culture, and mass civil disobedience with CodeROOD. One battle after another, we strived to refine the narrative, broaden the movement, deepen the analysis, sharpen the demands, escalate the tactics and embolden the strategy.

If I can ruthlessly simplify, our theory of change was: sustained disruption of fossil capital will create a crisis of their legitimacy, and public sympathy to our cause will tip the balance of power in our favour. Perhaps it wasn’t always spoken out loud, but it implied that the liberal world order could be reasoned with, or that it would step out of our way, overwhelmed by our moral authority. For a fleeting moment, this seemed to be working. The movement become a force to be reckoned with; we were able to shut down fossil infrastructure for multiple days and mobilise protests with hundreds of thousands of people. Established organisations started adopting our narratives and even our tactics. We witnessed the emergence of a new generation of climate activists, with Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise Movement.

Increasingly, my collapse-acceptance was eclipsed by a confidence that we were on the right track, that we could turn the tide during Decade Zero, before we ran out of our carbon budget. We launched Shell Must Fall, our most ambitious campaign to date, challenging the very legality of energy corporations. We did so by announcing a year in advance our intentions to disrupt, block and cancel the shareholder meeting of Royal Dutch Shell. We worked tirelessly all year and we were expecting thousands of people to join us in The Hague. We were only two months away when the pandemic hit, and disrupted our disruption. Shell Must Fall became the greatest action that never happened.

Letting Go

“There was nothing left for us to do but to (…) meet our end in the noblest manner.”
(Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men)

The New Abnormal

The pandemic led me to my second activist burnout, loss of purpose and crisis of faith in the movement. For the second time, history was slapping me on the face and teaching me humility, when I was getting carried away with illusions of grandeur and hubris of making a dent in the world. The lockdowns gave the rare opportunity to stop and reflect deeply: for the first time in a decade, it allowed us to question our theories of change, modes of organising and fundamental assumptions about the magnitude of the crisis. It took us two years to feel ready to let go of our dormant organisation, and we ‘composted’ codeROOD with love, pride and grief in equal doses.

I reconciled with my original collapse-acceptance from ten years before, which I had neglected in favour of collapse-bargaining and struggling for a smooth and controlled pathway to a better world. It seems we were counting on the best‑case scenario as our playing field —not the erratic, unforgiving course of history. So I confess that I no longer have the heart to promise a Just Transition. I do not believe there is a win‑win scenario for a soft landing with no loss and minimal inconvenience for everyone. I fear that the decline is long, the descent rough, and the disintegration so uneven that people may keep debating for decades whether it’s really collapsing at all.

I’m compelled to provide this emotional disclosure, because I don’t believe that collapse-acceptance is a rational, logical conclusion in the first place. I am not here to convince you that we are headed to complete, inevitable, certain collapse. I am not here to argue that “I have looked into the abyss and seen the darkness, and if you do not share my view, then you must be in denial”. I really don’t want you to get the impression that I’m saying “it’s already too late”, “total collapse is inevitable” or “there’s nothing we can do”. I believe everyone experience these ebbs and flows, and every generation has the right to give it a shot, without being told it’s a lost cause. But I still want to talk about collapse, precisely because I disagree with most of these cynical narratives that surround us. Simply put, I do not mean to turn my personal disillusionment into collective despair. In fact, I want to argue that collapse might be the most hopeful framework at our disposal.

Collapsing meanings of Collapse

I want to unpack what collapse can mean if we are to politicise the term in emancipatory ways. Many people react strongly against collapse narratives, associating them with eco‑pessimism and doomerism. I’m tempted to turn this around: why should we prefix our politics with a neutral‑sounding “climate‑,” which is perceived as technical and detached from the lived experience of most people? A collapse-framing lowers the threshold of participation to existential levels, without needing academic‑level understanding of climate science, degrowth economics or decolonial politics. Instead of throwing around facts and figures about how terrible things are to mobilise people, I’d like to invite you to ask them: what is collapsing for you? Your experience of collapse can be radically different than mine. It can be the loss of livelihoods, jobs, welfare, land, belonging, meaning, community, dignity, peace, or freedom. What may look like collapse for one species might be survival for another.

So first and foremost, let’s consider collapse to be a subjective, affective category, not an objective fact. It really depends on what you consider normal, aspirational, dreadful or unimaginable. Let’s get used to thinking in terms of collapses as plural and fragmental, instead of singular and total. Indigenous peoples and enslaved people have begun experiencing collapse many centuries ago. Deindustrialising working classes in overdeveloped countries have been experiencing it for several decades. Free women in medieval Europe experienced collapse. Queers and especially gay men experienced collapse. European Jews and Palestinian Arabs experienced collapse. In “Ideas to Postpone the End of the World”, Indigenous leader and thinker Ailton Krenak asks:

Why are we so afraid of falling when fall is all we’ve ever done? We’ve fallen to different degrees and in different places across the planet. But we’re still terrified of what will happen when the next topple comes. Why do we hate the sensation of falling? It happens that’s all we’ve been doing of late. Falling, falling, falling. So why are we so upset over it now? We feel insecure, paranoid even, because all the other outcomes we can see require the implosion of the house we inherited but live in fear of losing.

This is not to relativise or normalise any horror and suffering in history. Instead, it is to find strength by honouring the memory of all the survivors before us. This way of thinking about collapse invites us to abandon collapse as something that happens in a hypothetical future, and inscribes it in history. But even when we say “as collapse unfolds” instead of “when the collapse happens”, language betrays reality and turns it into a noun: the collapse. It becomes an agent of history, a vengeful god, a thing in itself. This is a dangerous mystification that lets the culprits off the hook. But there might be more creative uses of collapse as verb or adjective: “this government implements collapse politics”, “that company is a collapse accelerator” or “austerity collapses care infrastructures”.

Finally, collapse offers an opportunity to clarify our political attachments. Which collapse are we referring to? Is it the fall of neoliberalism and the rise with end-times fascism? Is it the implosion of the American Empire into civil war? Is it the end of Western civilisation, whatever that means? Is it the extinction of our species? Is it the sixth mass extinction that wipes out most of the living world? Clearly there are some collapses that are more desirable than others. Which collapse can we wish for and conspire about? It might be hard to isolate them, but specifying our fears and desires might restore a sense of agency, that collapse is not only something that happens to us; it may as well be caused by us. If the Empire causes the collapse of living world, then the collapse of the Empire might be our only shot at protecting life that remains.

Coming Together

“Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely.”
(Mike Davis, 2022)

Starting over

Talking about these vast, scary scales gives me vertigo and hurts my head. I wish to get back to the ground where I can have more comfort and confidence in my words. I’d like to return to some practices and experiences from this year that informed these reflections. I hope they can provide a sense of clarity and courage.

The first one is the case study and collaborators of my current research project. E-WERK is a former lignite plant near Berlin that was decommissioned after the fall of the wall. In the last decade, an artist Pablo Wendel and curator Helen Turner have reactivated the power plant as a cultural venue. You might be thinking: “great, yet another industrial heritage turned into a fancy art gallery”. But it is so much more than that: alongside the artistic programme, they also produce Kunststrom (“art-current”), which is electricity they generate on site by waste wood gasification, which is then distributed through an energy cooperative. It is truly a beacon of hope in Brandenburg which is increasingly sliding into AfD control. E-WERK demonstrates that providing vital systems cannot be an afterthought but the driving force for cultural practices in collapse or in transition.

I’m mentioning this example as someone who has disrupted coal plants and wished to see them all turned into clubs, just like Berghain. And yet my own relation to energy has remained abstract. I couldn’t even tell how much our solar panels at NieuwLand produced (now I know; roughly 10 megawatt-hours per year). Pablo and Helen taught me that there are no shortcuts to a generalised energy democracy without building energy communities in the first place. What’s more, they taught me that honouring and valorising the complex legacy of such a place is a precondition for securing popular support for its just transition instead of falling into neglect, disuse and ruins. We are now collaborating on a book project, a manual for switching the power on in such places.

This year, also in Brandenburg, I attended the first Collapse Camp, 15 years after the first Climate Camp in Germany. It is a daring proposition to reinvent movement practices around mutual aid, community care and solidarity. In stark contrast to Climate Camps, there was no grand strategy and no spectacular action. Instead, the camp opened with a ritual making space for processing various emotions around collapse: Uncertainty, Fear, Anger, Shame and Grief. Workshops ranged from queer self-defence to disaster preparedness, from first aid to secure communications. There were tensions around whether this was a substitute or complementary to disruptive actions. While the participants were from a broader age range and political spectrum than previous camps, it utterly failed in bringing racial diversity, especially those who have lived experiences of disaster, conflict and survival. While it was certainly no anti-Deutsch gathering, keffiyehs remained the only explicit reference to Palestine.

For a gathering intended to encourage collectivist prepping and mutual aid as disaster response, it was strikingly anachronistic that we still clung to our late-capitalist festival habits, like sleeping in individual tents (instead of collective accommodation) and following a loose program based on personal whims. There are plans to make the future camps more serious about training participants, rehearsing collectivist practices and offering full immersion into collapse scenarios. I also have doubts on whether loose informal networks can truly provide solidarity beyond charity, and would love to see highly coordinated and disciplined forms of organisation emerge, to create redundancy for public services and vital systems that are being dismantled.

In stark contrast to Collapse Camp, only a month later I found myself preparing for COP30 climate summit in Belém. I felt extremely hypocritical, not just because I was flying across the planet, but especially because I had even less faith in UN climate summits then before. And yet somehow Belém was calling me, as if to revisit a crime scene, to confront ghosts of the past that set me on this path, perhaps to close this cycle and open a new one. It turns out climate summits make even less sense than they did 15 years ago. The procedural theatre basically amounts to a ceremonial practice, a strange ritual by white men that get together, wear suits and sign documents. Somehow the global majority still plays along, perhaps out of respect to cultural habits? That said, COP30 deserves special mention for the heat, the flooding, the food queues and finally the fire that truly created the immersive climate summit ever.

In all seriousness, the real story was once again outside the summit, at the protests and the People’s Summit. Already on day two, indigenous people mainly from Tupinamba community broke into the summit, succeeding what we had attempted and failed to achieve back in Copenhagen. They secured a dozen of demarcations for indigenous territories from the government. Another promising development for civil society was the Just Transition Mechanism being set in (slow) motion. Perhaps not all hope is lost yet? Similarly, what does it mean to genuinely feel excited about the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative and the Just Transition Away From Fossil Fuels Conference in Colombia that will take place in April? Does simultaneously advocating for collapse politics and being interested in some UN processes make me an incoherent mess? I’d like to believe these are not mutually exclusive, and since we live in monstrous times, the radical indeterminacy of the future makes us live full of contradictions.

Collectivist Prepping

My last story is about my second housing project that I initiated seven years ago. De Nieuwe Meent is a pioneering social rental housing cooperative to pilot a new generation of such projects. It is based on core values of sustainability, diversity, care and commoning. You could see those as our anti-capitalist, eco-socialist, queer-feminist, anti-racist compass.

It houses about 50 people in a 7-storey, wooden construction with independent units, living groups and lots of shared facilities like communal lobby, multipurpose space, laundry, green room, courtyard, café and office spaces. It is ‘energy neutral’, in the sense that its geothermal heating-cooling system is powered by our solar panels and highly insulated and efficient.

Our community is all low-income members, with 3/4 from migration background, significant number of queers, a 55+ group, a wheelchair user, several single-parent households, including an undocumented family. It’s never easy, but our diversity gives us great strength and rootedness in the broader society. We hope to set a good example for future housing cooperatives to push these practices further.

What started as a “postcapitalist commune” project, now feels more like a “prepper palace”. It’s the same building and same values, but I see it as an example and a testing ground for building “lifehouses” that are fit for both normalcy and emergency situations. By commoning vital systems (like space, energy, food, care and labour), we can be better prepared for shocks and crises.

Against the fantasies of individualist prepping, we offer a collectivist response, because survival is only possible through community care—prepare—repair. For lack of a better term, this is what I tentatively call collapsolidarity: a single, inseparable practice of letting go and coming together while falling apart. Solidarity is neither self-sufficiency nor charity; it is a practice of collective survival and repair, resilience and regeneration.

In a thought-provoking article called “biocommunism”, Nick Dyer-Witheford argues that “ecological crisis has entered a new phase in which the time for averting disaster has expired, and battles are now fought out on already-catastrophized ground” and that “biocommunist organization starts at the point of destruction”. So wherever there is collapse, there can be solidarity. Wherever vital systems are broken or breaking down, there is something to protect, reinforce and repair.

On a broken, volatile world, perhaps we can at best practice emergent design — things that can work whatever history throws at us, regardless if we win or lose. In these dark days, this is where I find hope, because hope means neither wishing that things will go on as they are nor that they will get any better, but that we will find ways to act with courage, dignity and compassion —no matter what happens.

I want to end with a quote from a cli-fi book called The Deluge, where the last words of one of the characters: “Love this fallen world as hard as you can”.

Love this fallen world as hard as you can.