Date: Friday 4th September 2026
Time: 17:00–21:00
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)
Access: Free entrance

Beyond Carbon is an immersive screening that transports viewers to an Indigenous Dayak village in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Created in collaboration with village elders, women, and youth, Beyond Carbon merges remote sensing data with animation and live action footage into an experience that encapsulates the deep interdependence between humans and our more-than-human planetary co-dwellers.

Viewers will encounter a tropical rainforest ecosystem that is one of the planet’s richest biodiversity areas—but one increasingly under threat from mining, palm oil, and carbon offset plantations. What kinds of data are used to represent a place? What worldviews do these datafications represent? How can we confront the colonial legacy of extractivism to finally put differently situated knowledges in conversation with one another?

What emerges in the 12-minute screening through interviews, animated retellings of Indigenous myths, forest sounds, and data visualizations of forest carbon are negotiations between two value systems—one that relies on numbers to measure the rainforest’s ability to sequester carbon and another that understands the forest as an extension of community.

There will be a conversation with Prof. Diana Suhardiman, Professor of Natural Resource Governance, Climate and Equity at Leiden University after the screening.

For more details about Beyond Carbon, a transnational initiative founded to counter forest data infrastructures with community-owned knowledges of landscapes in Indonesia and beyond, explore here: https://beyondcarbon.earth

An accompanying essay for the project can be found here: https://beyondcarbon.earth/a-forest-is-never-one-thing/

This event is supported by SocTalk and Green Screen Coalition.

Soctalk is a junior staff initiative within the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The collective organizes workshops and courses both inside and outside the university. Soctalk aims to foster a culture of care that critically engages with institutional structures, while redistributing and collectivizing resources to support communities and initiatives in the city of Rotterdam.