Carbon At Play: Homo Carbonicus
2026
Collaborative Improv Workshop
HART HAUS, Hong Kong
Co-designed and facilitated by Jen Yoohyun Lee, Markus Wernli, and Susan Evans, Carbon At Play brought together improvisational theatre, embodied inquiry, and environmental storytelling to explore humanity’s relationship with carbon.
The workshop’s central motif was carbon as a travelling character: an element connecting ancient forests, human bodies, the atmosphere, and industrial materials across deep time. By inviting participants to step beyond human perspectives, it aimed to make abstract carbon cycles and everyday footprints tangible, opening space to reconsider ecological relationships and imagine regenerative futures.
The workshop’s central motif was carbon as a travelling character: an element connecting ancient forests, human bodies, the atmosphere, and industrial materials across deep time. By inviting participants to step beyond human perspectives, it aimed to make abstract carbon cycles and everyday footprints tangible, opening space to reconsider ecological relationships and imagine regenerative futures.
Participants embodied carbon atoms in a collective journey spanning more than 300 million years of Earth’s history and extending into speculative futures. Movement, spatial relationships, and collaborative storytelling became ways to explore carbon’s changing forms and the tensions between living ecosystems and human activity.
Drawing on Bertolt Brecht’s Inductive Rehearsal and Augusto Boal’s Forum Theater, the workshop’s methodology translates carbon data and chemical scenarios into improvised “carbon constellations.” Posture, proximity, and movement give physical form to carbon processes, while retelling scenes from an atom’s perspective encourages participants to question familiar narratives. Reflection connects these embodied encounters back to data and the wider carbon cycle. Through this approach, data physicalization becomes a shared process of performing, interpreting, and rehearsing possible relationships with the world.
