The panel brought Agosto resident Chris Hill together with Stephan Martin and Jiří Zemánek, who discussed the pressing need for a new form of informed storytelling for our contemporary era marked by ecological destruction, but also by a newfound understanding of humanity’s place in the wider cosmos. How do the observations of modern science recontextualize old narratives of human origin and identity, and what is the so-called New Story which humanity is currently in the process of writing?

The interview was organized in cooperation with the Pilgrim Society.

Moderator: Vít Bohal

Planetary Storytelling and the New Cosmology from Agosto Foundation on Vimeo.

Chris Hill (see her bio here)

Stephan Martin is an American astronomer, lecturer, writer, teacher and psychotherapist. He studied physics and astronomy and in his astronomical research he focuses on dark matter research, spiral galaxies and solar corona. He has worked for the Space Telescope Science Institute, and has also been supervisor of the Williams College observatory. Two of his books have been published in the Czech Republic: Cosmic Conversation (Kosmické rozhovory, 2016, Malvern) and Living a Cosmic Life (Žít kosmický život, Pilgrim 2019).

Jiří Zemánek is an art historian, ethnographer, curator, translator and journalist. His interests include the overlaps between artistic creation, ecology and spirituality, paradigm shifts and the emergence of a new integral culture. He is translator and editor in the fields of deep ecology, geomancy, integral culture and neo-cosmology. He is an associate of the Prostor arts review and initiator of The Pilgrim Association.