Some days I think that if we lose the climate battle, it’ll be due in no small part to this defeatism among the comfortable in the global north, while people in frontline communities continue to fight like hell for survival. Which is why fighting defeatism is also climate work.
[Which is why]
Am I one of those comfortable people in the global north struggling with defeatism?
[am I a… defeatist? ]
Yes. I am. I produce this weekly podcast in safe, luxurious conditions while the majority world fights like hell for survival. While the majority world suffers like hell the consequences of my generation’s excess.
[the majority world fights like hell …]
I’m a hypocrite. I’m complicit. My work is pretentious and …
[I’m a defeatist]
So, what does defeatism sound like anyway?
Well, it probably sounds like this. A privileged male voice talking about his feelings about defeatism.
Some people believe that it is already too late to prevent societal collapse. They speak about the “earth as hospice,” and suggest we use what time we have left to summon the courage to face the music, as the ship we’re all on sinks.’ …
[facing the music, as the ship we’re all on…]
In my August conscient blog I wrote that :
I see no point shuffling the deck chairs. We have already hit the metaphoric iceberg and the good ship modernity is sinking.
So, where do we go from here?
How does one defeat defeatism?
[where do we go from here? ]
In the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Moving with Storms report I was reminded of the seven steps forward and-or aside, in particular this teaching about honesty and courage to see what you don’t want to see:
Commit to expanding your capacity to sit with what is real, difficult, and painful, within and around you. In what ways are your projections, idealizations, expectations, hopes, fears, and fragilities preventing you from approaching aspects of the Climate and Nature Emergency that are unpleasant for you and/or that challenge your sense of reality and/or self-image? What are you not willing or ready to see and how does this unwillingness impair your ability to respond to the Climate and Nature Emergency ?
[ What are you not ready to see? ]
*
CREDITS
Warm thanks to Kelly Langgard for lending me her voice to read the Rebecca Solnit and Britt Wray quotes (Kelly’s voice is also featured in e142 consent). Thanks to Rebecca and Britt for use of their words and to the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective for use of an excerpt from the Moving with Storms report.
This episode was created while I was in residence during the summer of 2023 at the Centre de production DAÏMÔN in Gatineau Québec as part of the fourth edition of Radio-Hull.
I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).
The post e143 defeatism – what are not ready to see? appeared first on conscient. conscient is a bilingual blog and podcast (French or English) by audio artist Claude Schryer that explores how arts and culture contribute to environmental awareness and action.
The conscient podcast / balado conscient is a series of conversations about art, conscience and the ecological crisis. This podcast is bilingual (in either English or French). The language of the guest determines the language of the podcast. Episode notes are translated but not individual interviews.
I started the conscient project in 2020 as a personal learning journey and knowledge sharing exercise. It has been rewarding, and sometimes surprising.
The term “conscient” is defined as “being aware of one’s surroundings, thoughts and motivations”. My touchstone for the podcast is episode 1, e01 terrified, based on an essay I wrote in May 2019, where I share my anxiety about the climate crisis and my belief that arts and culture can play a critical role in raising public awareness about environmental issues. The conscient podcast / balado conscient follows up on my http://simplesoundscapes.ca (2016-2019) project: 175, 3-minute audio and video field recordings that explore mindful listening.
season 1 (may – october 2020) : environmental awareness and action Season 1 (May to October 2020) explored how the arts contribute to environmental awareness and action. I produced 3 episodes in French and 15 in English. The episodes cover a wide range of content, including activism, impact measurement, gaming, arts funding, cross-sectoral collaborations, social justice, artistic practices, etc. Episodes 8 to 17 were recorded while I was at the Creative Climate Leadership USA course in Arizona in March 2020 (led by Julie”s Bicycle). Episode 18 is a compilation of highlights from these conversations.
season 2 (march – august 2021 ) : reality and ecological grief Season 2 (March 2021 ) explores the concept of reality and is about accepting reality, working through ecological grief and charting a path forward. The first episode of season 2 (e19 reality) mixes quotations from 28 authors with field recordings from simplesoundscapes and from my 1998 soundscape composition, Au dernier vivant les biens. One of my findings from this episode is that “I now see, and more importantly, I now feel in my bones, “the state of things as they actually exist”, without social filters or unsustainable stories blocking the way”. e19 reality touches upon 7 topics: our perception of reality, the possibility of human extinction, ecological anxiety and ecological grief, hope, arts, storytelling and the wisdom of indigenous cultures. The rest of season 2 features interviews with thought leaders about their responses and reactions to e19 reality.
season 3 (october 2021 – february 2022 ) : radical listening Season 3 was about radical listening : listening deeply without passing judgment, knowing the truth and filtering out the noise and opening attention to reality and responding to what needs to be done. The format is similar the first podcast format I did in 2016 with the simplesoundscapes project, which was to ‘speak my mind’ and ‘think out loud’. I start this season with a ‘soundscape composition’, e63 a case study (part 1) and e64 a case study (part 2), a bilingual speculative fiction radio play, set in an undergraduate university history seminar course called ‘History of 2021 in Canada’. It concluded with a soundscape composition ‘Winter Diary Revisited’.
season 4 (1 january – 31 december 2023) : sounding modernity
About
I’ve been retired from the Canada Council for the Arts since September 15, 2020 where I served as a senior strategic advisor in arts granting (2016-2020) and manager of the Inter-Arts Office (1999-2015). My focus in (quasi) retirement is environmental issues within my area of expertise in arts and culture, in particular in acoustic ecology. I”m open to become involved in projects that align with my values and that move forward environmental concerns. Feel free to email me for a conversation : claude@conscient.ca
acknowledgement of eco-responsibility
I acknowledge that the production of the conscient podcast / balado conscient produces carbon. I try to minimize this carbon footprint by being as efficient as possible, including using GreenGeeks as my web server and acquiring carbon offsets for my equipment and travel activities from BullFrog Power and Less.
a word about privilege and bias.
While recording episode 19 “reality”, I heard elements of “privilege” in my voice that I had not noticed before. It sounded a bit like “ecological mansplaining”. I realize that, in spite of good intentions, I need to work my way through issues of privilege (of all kinds) and unconscious bias the way I did through ecological anxiety and grief during the fall of 2020. My re-education is ongoing.
As a theatre scholar and practitioner attending the COP28climate summit, I was invited to experience a performance of the play Bright Light Burning. Playwright Steven Gaultneyauthored this play, and it was produced by the Cairo-based, internationally recognized The Theatre of Others. Adam Marple, co-artistic director of this theatre, invited me to the performance.
The performance Bright Light Burning, in dialogue with my own research and theatre practice, led me to reflect on the role of art in climate change issues.
Signs saying ‘polluters’ and ‘climate finance – direct funds to Indigenous People’ seen at the COP28 UN Climate Summit, Dec. 10, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
The project takes its name from a Maya Angelou poem. The poetry anthology was a collaboration between scientists, health experts, educators, translators, artists and youth leaders in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. The project aims “to unite us to forge a greener healthier, and fairer world.”
Bright Light Burning, inspired by this larger poetry endeavour, is a theatrical journey that merges artistry, storytelling and environmental activism. The play presents choices made by individuals in responses to climate change — from denial to activism.
It addresses policymakers on the importance of storytelling in forging new directions. The ensemble comprises actors from different parts of the world — from Singapore to Australia, Egypt to the United States, United Arab Emirates to the United Kingdom.
‘Bright Light Burning’ Dec. 7 performance at COP28.
As different stakeholders continue to enact signed deals, pledges and commitments after COP28, and as communities grapple with the need for political will to implement needed change, who is present or absent at the table is important to achieving an equitable future.
Here are four ideas that could guide interactions, negotiations, thinking and actions around climate justice.
1. Think globally, act locally and personally
Central to the perspectives offered in these performances is the need to decentre a universalist approach to resolving climate issues. We Are The Possible reminds us to start where we are — not out of fear, but hope that humans have the capacity to bring about change. We have to believe in that.
We need to re-engage place-based and localized solutions, because what works in Latin America may not work in North America.
In my own context in Saskatchewan, theatre artists in have relied on “strategic foresight” to imagine how the theatre we want in the Prairies could help people navigate climate instability while transforming racial injustice. Through such approaches, the capacity of different regions can be built.
2. Embrace alternative ways of knowing
The performances I have seen at COP28 and other theatre projects such as climate change theatre action remind us of the need to return to a relational approach with nature in our existence, and advocate for green theatre.
When we develop habits of seeing ourselves as future ancestors, this means we have to save for the future generation and this means consuming less. This way of seeing and knowing ourselves in relationship to our world in turn affects how we use resources. The performances of Bright Light Burning were designed with a minimalist approach — no prop, set, light or make-up etc. This approach to “greening theatre” has been reiterated by arts practitioners.
Retooling Green Tools for Theatre in Africa: People Planet and Performance roundtable discussion from July 2023.
Socially engaged theatre is about holding urgent social questions at the centre of our theatre practice. In so doing, as we engage with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, questions emerge: What alternative knowledge systems critical to ecological and cultural processes are yet to be known? How can alternative knowledge that has been pushed to the periphery help us think and walk through the polycrisis? In what ways can knowledge from the global majority be amplified?
For instance, prioritizing the perspectives of Indigenous Peoples will require genuine inclusion since it is believed that Indigenous Peoples are stewards of 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity. Their intergenerational leadership, practices and knowledge in sustainable climate justice need to be recognized for biodiversity to be recovered.
Activists participate in a demonstration for climate solutions at the COP28 UN Climate Summit, Dec. 8, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
3. Embrace the need for a holistic system approach while fostering equal partnerships that seek to account for inequities, such as class-based and racialized inequities. Holistic system approaches mean that participation in climate change mitigation, anticipatory adaptation and climate justice initiatives should involve equal and genuine partnership and collaboration across geographies. Having a “co-design” mindset is essential to building sustainable systems and solutions.
4. Finally, artists and creative initiatives continue to challenge us to champion climate action.Creatives are invited to think about the impact of their production on health, recovery, peace finance, just transition, gender equality and Indigenous Peoples globally.
All hands must be on deck to walk the talk emerging from COP28, if these conversations are to yield the desired results.
(Top image: Islene Facanha, of Portugal, participates in a demonstration dressed with images of wildfires at the COP28 UN Climate Summit, Dec. 8, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. [AP Photo/Peter Dejong])
The untune residency is a non-discipline specific programme for (inter)national artists and creative practitioners to experiment, observe, learn, exchange ideas, and collaborate. We encourage the exploration and research of site-specific histories and ecologies, as well as the socio-cultural transfiguration of collective spaces in Los Angeles and California’s central coast. Selected creatives are offered guidance, space, and time to work on their own projects, collaborate with the surrounding bodies (wildlife, community, and land) and engage in daily regenerative activities (untune’s guiding principles) to learn new skills and strengthen our cohabitation instincts. These activities aim to collectively slow down the energy flow with the intention to inspire a zero-waste practice, food sustainability and accessibility, community growth, and mind/heart nourishment
Residency Details
This will be the first year untune invites creatives to apply for 3 week (two locations) or 1 week (one location) residencies:
Option one (3 weeks): two weeks at canvas 5025 (located in North East Los Angeles) and one week at Rancho Arroyo Grande (RAG, located in California’s central coast). We will be driving together from one location to the other and stopping at sites of interest along the route. The distance between the locations is approximately 300 km. This program is organized in a way to allow for non-local artists to engage with local artists.
Option two (1 week): One week at Rancho Arroyo Grande (located in California’s central coast) near the Los Padres National Forest. We will be accepting more applicants for this one week residency because the site can accommodate a greater number of people. The options are to either meet us in Los Angeles to travel together/caravan to the site OR you’re welcome to meet us at the location if you happen to be in San Luis Obispo county or traveling through the central coast.
Dates: Winter Season – APPLICATION DEADLINE: DECEMBER 22, 2023
Cohort 1: Monday Feb 5 – Monday Feb 26, 2024 (3 weeks, both sites) Monday Feb 12 – Sunday Feb 18, 2024 (1 week, only RAG)
* Spring, Summer, and Fall cohorts will be announced in January 2024.
Please visit our website and FAQ sheet for more details about the artist residency and the two sites (RAG and CANVAS 5025).
7 October 2023: At our first Green Tease exploring architecture and retrofit, we spent the afternoon discussing just transition and the role of art in future possibilities for housing.
This Green Tease was made possible by collaborating with Scott McAulay, who is a Glaswegian climate and spatial justice activist, Part 2 architectural assistant and sustainability specialist, whose work with the Anthropocene Architecture School creates spaces for people to learn about climate solutions and opportunities for a just transition in our built environments.
The team at Civic House in Glasgow provided their spacious venue for us to hold workshops and discussions, exhibitions and a film screening for Reimagining Retrofit.
The afternoon began with culture/SHIFT officer, Maja Rimer, introducing Creative Carbon Scotland’s work and highlighting that the climate crisis is a cultural issue. Andrew Williams, Project Manager at the sustainability charity Sniffer, spoke about Creative Climate Futures, a project building climate resilience in Glasgow communities. Scott McAulay then introduced the work of the Anthropocene Architecture School, covering the importance and urgency of buildings in the climate crisis. Emphasising that the tools to build sustainable homes and to retrofit existing ones to standards fit for a climate emergency already exist, and such buildings becoming the norm would change and save lives. Scott ended his talk with a radical imagination exercise, asking everyone to close their eyes and imagine what future housing might look like if it allowed humans and non-humans to thrive.
Our aim for this event was to invite attendees to begin imagining retrofit as an action beyond the scale of the individual home, to create space to have thought-provoking discussions and to generate ideas of future possibilities amongst themselves. Scott led a workshop designed to explore retrofitting at different scales – the home, the street andthe neighbourhood, encouraging attendees to sit with people they might not know to foster new connections. Facilitators from environmental, sustainability and architecture backgrounds – ACAN Scotland, the Architecture Fringe and Imagine If CIC – supported the flow of discussions.
Some of the themes that emerged from the day’s discussions were:
community
scale
long-term security
job creation
governance
ownership
shared responsibility
collaboration
the role of culture
the power of imagination
‘The scale of just transition opportunities that could be unlocked by resourcing communities to co-design and govern the retrofit of their homes, streets, and neighbourhoods is dreamlike. Barriers standing between where we are today, and a Scotland where such programmes are underway – changing and saving lives, are not technical ones: they are cultural and political and must be collectively, and imaginatively, tackled as such.’ Scott McAulay, Anthropocene Architecture School
The Wyndford Exhibition group introduced ‘Rethinking the architect: The fight to save the Wyndford’ co-created with local residents. They spoke about the frustrations of the wasteful construction industry and that demolition is never the solution. Imagine If CIC introduced their exhibit and game, designed to revolutionise the housing design process. Their aim is to challenge the decision-making process in residential design projects to allow individuals to have a say in how housing is created.
Attendees had the opportunity to explore the housing exhibitions and to watch Dampbusters by Winnie Herbstein, a documentary that explores the past, present and future of community organising in Glasgow. The film centres around the work of Cathy McCormack, a housing and anti-poverty activist from Easthall in Easterhouse.
Artist Martha Orbach led a creative re-visioning workshop on the role of culture and creativity in imagining a radically different housing future. Through experimental making with willow, drawing and diagrams the attendees explored how art can provide a space to rethink how we make a home amidst the climate crisis. There was great enthusiasm for using willow as a material, and an atmosphere of creativity filled the room. People shared their creations and commented on the meditative process that sparked their imagination.
We ended the day with Scott facilitating a second radical imagination exercise and giving out Reimagining Economic Possibilities postcards from Civic Square so that everyone had something inspiring to take away.
‘Through discussions, exhibitions and crafts we discovered how culture and art can help us imagine how our homes and neighbourhoods could be transformed. Through the event, we created a space and a time to reflect, which can be hard in a society that urges us to keep going. It also allowed participants to meet people who think differently across the arts, climate and architecture sectors, which is so important if we wish to rethink how we build today.’ Maja Rimer, Creative Carbon Scotland culture/SHIFT officer
If you were not able to attend the event, we encourage you to think about the following questions:
Physical changes retrofitting entails and relationships to the home. What has your experience of housing been over the last few years? How would your home being retrofitted to meet your needs change your life?
Cultural and social changes unlocked by retrofitting streets. What if the climate transition and retrofit of streets was designed, owned and governed by the people who live there? What more becomes possible when retrofitting as a street of neighbours?
Physical, cultural and social change necessary to retrofit neighbourhoods. What possibilities can be unlocked by retrofitting entire neighbourhoods? What kind of infrastructure is required to make this a reality? What might the role of arts and culture be in communicating the scale of what is possible?
This event took place as part of the Green Tease events series and network, a project organised by Creative Carbon Scotland, bringing together people from arts and environmental backgrounds to discuss, share expertise, and collaborate. Green Tease forms part of our culture/SHIFT programme.
(Top image ID: People sitting and standing in a room in Civic House, having conversations. The tables have paper and willow structures on them. Behind them is an exhibition ‘The fight to save the Wyndford’.)
This content is also available in / Ce contenu est également disponible sur: Français
i asked a forest for permission to record it and got a response from a tree
TRANSCRIPTION OF EPISODE
(bell and breath)
(Wind in forest soundscape)
Today’s episode is a fictional conversation between a tree and myself. It came to me while I was doing a consent and reciprocity exercise in a forest… like this one.
(Recited slowly and thoughtfully)
Me (M): Forest, are you ok if I record you today for my podcast?
Female voice (F): It’s nice of you to ask.
(silence)
F: What’s a podcast?
M: Ah, well, they’re stories told through recorded sound that humans listen to.
F Hum. We communicate through our mycorrhizal networks and symbiotic relationships with other living beings. For example, we regularly exchange nutrients through fungal mycelium. What kind of story do you want to tell your community?
M: I’m preparing an episode about listening to life in a forest – in this forest – and I wanted to ask for your consent before recording these sounds and sharing them.
F: ok. Everyone is welcome to visit our home, as long as they are respectful and do no harm.
M: Thank you. I would also like to make a gesture of reciprocity to the forest, like an offering of food or maybe a song.
(Silence)
F: or maybe leaving us alone? But good food and song are always welcome.
f: Where did you learn about consent and reciprocity?
M I learned it from a course I took at UBC called facing human wrongs. One of the exercises during this course was to make contact with the land before entering and asking for safe passage…
F: What do you mean by safe passage? Safe passage for whom?
M: Right. Let me explain. We learned that there are some human communities who still understand that there is no dualistic distinction between objects and subjects, or humans and nature.
The rivers, the mountains, the trees, the other animals and, you know, the forests themselves are experienced as conscious entities who were much older relatives and who, like human beings, required engagements based on trust, respect, consent, reciprocity and accountability.
F: I can relate to that: trust, respect, consent, reciprocity and accountability. These are part of some of our system of values of forests but there is so many humans don’t know about trees and forests, our culture and our relations.
M: We also learned that asking permission and making an offering of reciprocity was a way of entering into a relational experience between living beings, as opposed to, say, consuming an object, owning a property or enjoying a benefit.
F: and… how can I say this… how do you think that you can enter into a relational experience with a forest simply by asking permission?
(silence)
M: Well, to be honest, I don’t know.
F I agree, human, that you don’t know, at least, you don’t know yet, but maybe you will one day?
F: Do keep listening and thanks for the visit.
*
CREDITS
This is my second attempt at a two person play (the other is e111 traps). With thanks to Kelly Langgard for playing the role of tree and helping me give it shape. Thanks also for editing advice from Sabrina Mathews, Azul Carolina Duque and Flora Aldridge.
This episode was created while I was in residence during the summer of 2023 at the Centre de production DAÏMÔN in Gatineau Québec as part of the fourth edition of Radio-Hull 28 days of programming from September 7 to October 4 2023 showcasing local artistic practices.
I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).
The post e142 consent – do keep listening appeared first on conscient. conscient is a bilingual blog and podcast (French or English) by audio artist Claude Schryer that explores how arts and culture contribute to environmental awareness and action.
The conscient podcast / balado conscient is a series of conversations about art, conscience and the ecological crisis. This podcast is bilingual (in either English or French). The language of the guest determines the language of the podcast. Episode notes are translated but not individual interviews.
I started the conscient project in 2020 as a personal learning journey and knowledge sharing exercise. It has been rewarding, and sometimes surprising.
The term “conscient” is defined as “being aware of one’s surroundings, thoughts and motivations”. My touchstone for the podcast is episode 1, e01 terrified, based on an essay I wrote in May 2019, where I share my anxiety about the climate crisis and my belief that arts and culture can play a critical role in raising public awareness about environmental issues. The conscient podcast / balado conscient follows up on my http://simplesoundscapes.ca (2016-2019) project: 175, 3-minute audio and video field recordings that explore mindful listening.
season 1 (may – october 2020) : environmental awareness and action Season 1 (May to October 2020) explored how the arts contribute to environmental awareness and action. I produced 3 episodes in French and 15 in English. The episodes cover a wide range of content, including activism, impact measurement, gaming, arts funding, cross-sectoral collaborations, social justice, artistic practices, etc. Episodes 8 to 17 were recorded while I was at the Creative Climate Leadership USA course in Arizona in March 2020 (led by Julie”s Bicycle). Episode 18 is a compilation of highlights from these conversations.
season 2 (march – august 2021 ) : reality and ecological grief Season 2 (March 2021 ) explores the concept of reality and is about accepting reality, working through ecological grief and charting a path forward. The first episode of season 2 (e19 reality) mixes quotations from 28 authors with field recordings from simplesoundscapes and from my 1998 soundscape composition, Au dernier vivant les biens. One of my findings from this episode is that “I now see, and more importantly, I now feel in my bones, “the state of things as they actually exist”, without social filters or unsustainable stories blocking the way”. e19 reality touches upon 7 topics: our perception of reality, the possibility of human extinction, ecological anxiety and ecological grief, hope, arts, storytelling and the wisdom of indigenous cultures. The rest of season 2 features interviews with thought leaders about their responses and reactions to e19 reality.
season 3 (october 2021 – february 2022 ) : radical listening Season 3 was about radical listening : listening deeply without passing judgment, knowing the truth and filtering out the noise and opening attention to reality and responding to what needs to be done. The format is similar the first podcast format I did in 2016 with the simplesoundscapes project, which was to ‘speak my mind’ and ‘think out loud’. I start this season with a ‘soundscape composition’, e63 a case study (part 1) and e64 a case study (part 2), a bilingual speculative fiction radio play, set in an undergraduate university history seminar course called ‘History of 2021 in Canada’. It concluded with a soundscape composition ‘Winter Diary Revisited’.
season 4 (1 january – 31 december 2023) : sounding modernity
About
I’ve been retired from the Canada Council for the Arts since September 15, 2020 where I served as a senior strategic advisor in arts granting (2016-2020) and manager of the Inter-Arts Office (1999-2015). My focus in (quasi) retirement is environmental issues within my area of expertise in arts and culture, in particular in acoustic ecology. I”m open to become involved in projects that align with my values and that move forward environmental concerns. Feel free to email me for a conversation : claude@conscient.ca
acknowledgement of eco-responsibility
I acknowledge that the production of the conscient podcast / balado conscient produces carbon. I try to minimize this carbon footprint by being as efficient as possible, including using GreenGeeks as my web server and acquiring carbon offsets for my equipment and travel activities from BullFrog Power and Less.
a word about privilege and bias.
While recording episode 19 “reality”, I heard elements of “privilege” in my voice that I had not noticed before. It sounded a bit like “ecological mansplaining”. I realize that, in spite of good intentions, I need to work my way through issues of privilege (of all kinds) and unconscious bias the way I did through ecological anxiety and grief during the fall of 2020. My re-education is ongoing.
“I firmly believe that we will discover ancient wisdom, how to build growth and thrive in harmony with nature. This wisdom will come from every corner of the earth. We have so much to learn from one another and from our ancestors. This challenge is as much about artificial intelligence as it is about ancestral intelligence.”
On Saturday, 9 December at 4:45pm GST, cultural voices pick up this conversation at an official UN COP28 side event “Ancestral Wisdom Driving Low Carbon, Climate Resilient Futures: Asia-Pacific and Global Lessons.” The event will be livestreamed.
In the Global Stocktake framework, this session highlights how greater focus on ancestral wisdom & traditional practices including heritage vernacular architecture that pre-date (or work independently of) the fossil fuel era can accelerate progress towards climate resilient, low-carbon living today.
Starting in January, Creative Carbon Scotland are developing a series of opportunities around adaptation for cultural organisations in Scotland.
The impacts of climate change are already being felt across the world, including in Scotland, but what does this mean for Scottish cultural organisations? As climate change brings more disruption, we need to be prepared as organisations to manage the risks and become more resilient to a changing climate. Creative Carbon Scotland will be delivering a series of opportunities exploring adaptation and culture, starting in January.
Online Training
The training will align with multi-year funding applications, and help organisations understand adaptation so they can build climate resilience into their workplans and long-term vision.
18 January 2pm-3pm– An introduction to climate adaptation with Sniffer.
The first session in our training series will be delivered by Sniffer. They will give an overview of climate adaptation, build an understanding of climate risk and the actions that can be taken to build resilience.
25 January 2pm-3pm – What does climate adaptation mean for culture?
Following the introduction session, the second session will focus on culture, and ask what adaptation means for cultural organisations in Scotland. We will explore the risks and what organisations need to consider when developing an adaptation plan, show examples and case studies from creative adaptation projects such as Clyde Rebuilt and share resources that can help organisations answer questions around adaptation on funding applications.
In February we will be launching a learning set focused on adaptation and culture.
What is a learning set?
A learning set is a group of people who meet regularly to support each other’s learning around a given topic. It aims to be collaborative, with members learning from each other and sharing approaches and ideas.
What are we proposing?
Following the training, we are developing a learning set that will take this work further, and work together to consider how we weave adaptation plans into organisational planning. Organisations will review our Cultural Adaptations toolkit by introducing it within their own organisations, and collaborate to identify how it could be improved, and how it works within their own organisation. Organisations will have a reviewed adaptation plan by the end of the learning set.
It is expected that organisations who join the learning set will firstly join the training in January. After that the first learning set session will take place on Thursday 29 February 1pm-2pm. During this first session we will lay out expectations and define the key challenges and opportunities for the learning set and adaptation and culture. We will also lay out the key outcomes around resource development, improving our cultural adaptation toolkit and exploring how organisations can develop an adaptation plan.
Outside of the session and before the next session, organisations will be asked to read through our existing resources and the cultural adaptation toolkit, note down their impressions and plan how they would deliver it within their organisation.
We will then have a session in March (planned for the week beginning 18 March), where we will collectively go through the toolkit in more detail, and establish how you would deliver it in your own organisations.
Participants will then have two months to apply the learning within their own organisations and test the toolkit themselves.
We will then meet up again in May and June to discuss our findings, experiences and learnings from the process.
Creative Carbon Scotland will publish the updated toolkit and case studies of the process on our website for all organisations to use.
This process is voluntary and free. However, joining this learning set will require you to commit to the following:
Attending the first meeting on 29 February.
Attending a further three meetings, with the exact dates to be decided by the group.
Trial the Cultural Adaptations toolkit in your organisation and develop an adaptation plan.
Due to the commitment involved in this learning set, and to encourage communication and participation from all those involved, we are aiming for this group to be made up of 5-10 participants/organisations. However, the outcomes will be shared with everyone. If it is oversubscribed we will have a selection process, to ensure a range of organisations is involved.
Photographer and writer Joan Sullivan shares her realisation that, no longer content to simply document climate change, a more fluid, non-linear visual language can evoke the nonhuman voice and reflect our own impermanence in a rapidly warming world.
2,300 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes
A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera. — Dorothea Lange
Earlier this year, I had the great pleasure to collaborate with a sound artist, Robin Servant, to create an interactive climate change art installation in Quebec, Canada. The result of our collaboration was ‘La voix des glaces’ (in English: ‘Ice Voices’), a multi-sensory installation that gives voice to the nonhuman: the disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence River.
This was the first time that I exhibited my photographs as tactile sculptures. I grouped 24 of my abstract photographs of the rapidly disappearing river ice into eight triangular triptychs suspended from the ceiling in the center of the gallery. Swaying in the natural air currents of the gallery, these ‘ice sculptures’ resembled floating blocks of ice in the Saint Lawrence River.
Each photograph was embossed with braille text from recent IPCC reports. Visitors – both sighted and visually-impaired – were invited to touch the braille relief in a gesture symbolic of our collective blindness to climate change.
By touching my photographs, visitors triggered underwater audio recordings of the ice blocks as they shift and crack from friction, waves and tidal movements. Every time someone touched an image, the gallery filled with haunting, otherworldly ice voices. They destabilize us, pulling us into their evocative vortex, coaxing us to listen more intently. We find ourselves imagining what the ice is trying to tell us.
Giving voice to the nonhuman has, since 2019, transformed my photographic practice from documentary to abstraction. This shift was triggered by two events. The first (which will likely repeat itself in 2023) was Australia’s 2019-2020 Black Summer – the catastrophic, uncontrollable wildfires that killed an estimated three billion nonhuman beings. I was traumatized by the images of blood-red skies, charred kangaroos clinging to fences, and birds falling out of the sky. I suddenly realized that I could no longer participate in documenting climate change. I felt an overpowering sense of urgency to find a more fluid, non-linear, non-narrative language with which to express my ecoanxiety.
The second event that made me question the role of photography in the Anthropocene was a 2019 interview with the author Amitav Ghosh. Responding to a question from Amy Brady, Ghosh explains:
“I think, in literary terms, the most difficult challenge a writer has in an age of climate change is determining how to give a voice to the non-human(emphasis added). And not just in terms of natural disaster – in general. It’s such a challenge. One writer who has done this very well is Richard Powers. I thought his book, The Overstory, was a huge event because it expanded the boundaries of what writers can do. Now I am asking similar questions: How do we restore nonhuman voices? How do we trace the influence of the human among the nonhuman?”
I had previously read Ghosh’s 2016 non-fiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. But it was his 2019 quote above that inspired me — no, pushed me! — to completely change the way I used a camera. Instead of creating images from my perspective (while hiding behind a camera), I wanted to know how the nonhuman beings in front of my camera perceived climate change, from their perspective. What do they see when they look back at us? What do they feel about our destructive behavior and disregard for nonhuman life? What advice would they offer if given the chance? I was desperate to give voice to these nonhuman beings threatened in the age of man.
This shift in perspective, from the human to the nonhuman, has profoundly changed my art. Since 2020, I have been working on two series of abstract photos: ‘Je suis fleuve’ (in English: ‘Becoming River’) and ‘If I were a tree’. For both series, I have adopted a phenomenological approach in order to embody the nonhuman beings in front of my camera. It’s their story, not mine. If we humans are to survive the coming upheavals, we have no choice but to learn from our nonhuman relatives who were here millions of years before Homo sapiens sapiens first walked the earth. And many of them will likely still be here long after we have disappeared. So it would behove our self-described ‘wise’ species to absorb some of the wisdom from these ancient beings while there’s still time. But in order to do so, we must first slow down. We must learn to listen. We must learn to ‘see’ viscerally with our whole bodies, not just visually. This is embodiment.
A beauty filled with dread
Since Australia’s Black Summer, I have become obsessed with finding non-visual ways to enhance the photographic experience, both for myself (during the creative process) and for viewers (in the gallery setting). Instead of ‘photographing the river or the trees’, I ‘become the river or the trees’ through sustained contemplation and mimicry – moving my body in sync with the flowing water or the wind blowing through the branches. I do this using the technique ICM (Intentional Camera Movement). All of my ICM images are created in-camera; nothing is Photoshopped in post. To date, all my ICM images are single exposures, usually 1-2 seconds long. Through this experimental process, I have learned to embrace chance and mistakes. Most importantly, I have learned to stop trying to control every aspect (sharpness, composition, depth of field, etc.) as I did for 25+ years as a documentary photographer.
I describe my new abstract photos as fluid and fleeting. My hope is that these ephemeral images provoke reflection on our own impermanence in a rapidly warming world. An article in a French-language art magazine here in Quebec described my new abstract photos as “d’une beauté pleine d’effroi” (in English: “of a beauty filled with dread”). To me, that’s as close to a perfect description as possible, not just of my photos but also of my state of mind.
Yes, I am filled with dread. Things do not seem to be heading in the right direction; there’s no sense of urgency. But I also refuse to do nothing while we collectively watch the world burn on our cellphones. I counter this dread with a more powerful burning passion: to dedicate every second of my remaining years (15? max 20?) to helping shatter the absurd illusion that Homo sapiens sapiens is somehow separate from and superior to the one trillion other species with whom we share this planet and upon whom we depend for our own survival.
This is what prompted me, in part, to question the environmental impact of my own photographic practice. I started to think about all the toxic chemicals in the inks and photo papers that are used to create the photographic prints for my exhibits. Even for those photos that were never printed, a huge amount of electricity is required 24/7 to store them on my computer, in multiple external backup drives, and on my website. Social media, email, charging camera batteries, and driving to locations also require electricity and energy. Then there’s the undeniable problem of how to dispose of photographic prints (they are not recyclable), not to mention the layers of plastic and stryrofoam that protect them during shipping. I could go on and on…
But it wasn’t until November 2021, during a duo exhibit with the video artist Anna Woch, that I became aware of an even more existential dilemma for a photographer. As I looked at my photos on the wall, a wave of queasiness came over me: I felt strangely uninspired by my own work. Or, I should say, uninspired by the way they were presented: as static, two-dimensional objects hanging against a flat wall, protected behind glass to ensure that no one would damage them. After standing alone in the gallery trying to understand why I felt this way, it finally dawned on me: how absurd it was that these abstract images of the rapidly disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence River were considered untouchable, yet we humans are constantly meddling with and disturbing nature. Photographs are ephemeral, just like the disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence. Why was it so sacrosanct to protect ‘art’ for decades if the world around us was burning down? What’s the effing point? On the day that I took those photos down, I mentioned to the director of the artist-run center, Philippe Dumaine, that this would be the last time that I exhibited my photographs in the traditional manner, two-dimensionally. I had no idea what my next exhibit would look like, but I sensed that I was standing on the threshold of a new direction in my artistic practice.
A month later, I was sitting at the kitchen table of the sound artist Robin Servant, whom I had heard through the grapevine was collecting underwater recordings of the river ice with his hydrophones. In our early discussions, I had not yet developed a vision for the tactile three-dimensional photo sculptures; that would come much later thanks to the input of several artist friends. But when I first proposed this project to Robin, I already knew that I wanted to incorporate braille text into my photos in response to the rhetorical question “Are we not collectively blind to the impact of climate change?” After many iterations over the next 14 months and in collaboration with the local chapter of People Living with Visual Handicaps, we presented ‘La voix des glaces’ in February-March 2023 at the Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer in eastern Quebec. Funding for ‘La voix des glaces’ was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts.
The response to this multisensory interactive installation, in which visitors were able to experience embodiment of the disappearing river ice by using three of their five senses — sight, touch and hearing — was phenomenal. According to the Centre’s director, attendance at our installation broke all recent records. Especially among the youth. The secondary school students in particular were most captivated by ‘La voix des glaces’. One of their art teachers showed me some of the artwork that her students created after visiting our installation — such incredible abstract paintings, full of energy, movement, and emotion. And yes, rage. It gave me goosebumps knowing that some part of my work resonated with and was internalized by these young people. This gives me hope. We can live with beauty and sadness at the same time.
A publicity poster for the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES at the Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec.
I’m currently working on the conception for a new exhibit in 2024 or 2025 — my most audacious to date — that incorporates elements of ‘La voix des glaces’ but goes one step further. I’ll write about this in a future post.
Hope you enjoyed reading.
P.S. If anyone out there knows Amitav Ghosh, please thank him for inspiring me to experiment using my camera in new ways that give voice to the nonhuman.
Find out more
‘La voix des glaces’ — created by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant — was exhibited at Vaste et Vague artists’ centre in Carleton-sur-Mer (Quebec) from 24th February to 31st March 2023. It was supported by The Canada Council for the Arts.
Les artistes remercient le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien financier, et tous ses partneraires pour l’appui précieux : Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague, Centre VU, Engramme et La Chambre Blanche. / The artists thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial support, and all its partners for their valuable support: Center d’artistes Vaste et Vague, Center VU, Engramme and La Chambre Blanche.
A photographer, writer and farmer who focuses on climate change and whose abstract, phenomenological approach to photography expresses her ecoanxiety and gives voice to the nonhuman.
This is the sixth in our ‘Thinking about environmental sustainability’ blog series and focuses on collaboration and place-based working.
Although there is no specific question about collaboration and place-based working in Creative Scotland’s Multi-Year Funding or other funding programme application processes, these ways of working are essential to strong action on climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions are the product of complex systems and ways of being that individuals and single organisations cannot fully change on their own – collaborative work is required.
Strong communities are a central plank of climate change adaptation policies around the world, including those of the Scottish Government, and cultural and creative organisations and practitioners can help build and maintain these strong communities through place-based working. This blog will provide some examples of existing work and routes to new areas of work for cultural organisations and practitioners.
Creative Scotland’s Climate Emergency & Sustainability Plan recognises the importance of collaborative working. As well as internally focused actions for Creative Scotland itself, the sub-action 16.3 on page 19 reads as follows:
‘16.3 Build a roster of culture and creative organisations working on climate change, EDI or other potentially relevant topics with whom partnership working might be appropriate or beneficial.’
And the broader description of the plan focuses (page 12) on the contribution that culture and creative organisations and practitioners can make:
‘Collaboration is a core skill in many cultural fields. Artists can facilitate difficult conversations and can elicit emotions, which are often squeezed out of more technical debates. Cultural organisations reach enormous and diverse audiences and can provide buildings and spaces for events, conversation and communal, collective thinking and learning. The declaration from the 2021 meeting of Culture Ministers from the G20¹ recognised the importance of culture in addressing climate change, whilst the UN’s Race to Resilience project includes culture as one of its official elements, demonstrating interest from the climate change side.
‘Climate impacts are felt differently across Scotland and strong communities are proven to be more resilient to the challenges that climate change is bringing. This aligns with our own collaborative and partnership work on Place and the community-building effect that strong cultural organisations have in villages, towns, regions and cities.
‘We will strengthen the role of culture and creativity and their role in addressing the climate emergency by actively seeking and supporting partnerships with people and organisations in other sectors who are working on climate change.’
Place-based working
Place-based working is nothing new to many of Scotland’s cultural organisations. Creative Carbon Scotland produced a report describing the thread from David Harding’s work as Town Artist for Glenrothes New Town in the 1970s through to organisations such as The Stove, North Edinburgh Arts, the Beacon in Greenock and others today. Culture Collective provides a raft of examples of community-focused and -led arts work during the pandemic.
Creative Scotland’s Climate Emergency and Sustainability Plan highlights the need for transformational change throughout society in order to meet the net-zero target and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Within the cultural sector, consideration of what place-based working might mean for an organisation may provide a route to successful transformational thinking about not only how it does what it currently does more efficiently, but what it does to achieve its artistic, environmental, financial and social aims. This will clearly mean different things to different organisations: an urban concert hall or large gallery in the central belt will have a different concept of place and relationships with a wider set of communities than a community-focused arts centre in rural Scotland.
There is also an intersection with EDI: Which are the marginalised communities in your area, and how will they be affected by climate change impacts and mitigation efforts – for good or ill? Is there an opportunity to extend your organisation’s relationships with communities that you don’t currently work with, building audiences and your usefulness to your local authority, with the support that goes along with that?
Local assemblies and 20-minute neighbourhoods
Creative Carbon Scotland’s Climate Beacons project and SPRINGBOARD local assemblies for creative climate action are ways in which we facilitate collaboration at a local level, bringing cultural, climate change, community and public organisations together to ensure that culture is included in the local climate discussion. If you want to join an existing group or host an assembly, get in touch.
We believe that culture has a valuable contribution to make to the development of 20-minute neighbourhoods. The Place Standard tool now has a climate lens and may be a useful resource for your organisation to use when collaborating with your community. The Place Standard says: ‘Good place-making is essential for designing a robust local response to the climate emergency, such as taking local action to cut emissions and to increase resilience to local climate change impacts. The climate lens can help you to consider how the impacts and influence of climate change will play out in a local area.’
Collaboration
Collaboration at a different level is at the heart of Creative Carbon Scotland’s culture/SHIFT work. We have worked with agencies and public bodies from the resilience charity Sniffer to NatureScot and Climate Ready Clyde – a consortium of eight local authorities, two universities and others. We embed artists in these climate change projects, usually employing freelancers but sometimes acting ourselves as the embedded artist as well as bringing arts organisations and practitioners into the project. The artists here are not employed to make art – this is not a residency, which organisations other than Creative Carbon Scotland are much better equipped to facilitate – but to bring their skills, knowledge, ways of working, contacts and creativity to the table alongside the engineers, economists, project managers and others who are typically here.
Our organisational plan includes an aim to make this sort of working normal, not just something that we do ourselves – building awareness within the climate change world of culture’s potential contribution, and at the same time building capacity and capabilities within the cultural sector to fulfil a growing demand. No-one really knows how to reach net zero or how to adapt to the impacts of climate change and these projects need culture’s help.
For more examples of this work, see our current projects Transforming Audience Travel Through Art and Creative Climate Futures. Note that this sort of project is nearly always funded not from limited culture funds but from the larger budgets of public bodies and climate change generally. Creative Ireland’s €3m Creative Climate Action fund was joint funded by the Irish government’s climate change and cultural departments (not the Irish Arts Council) and was extended to €5m owing to the success of a first round and the ambition and imagination of the climate/cultural partnerships that applied. Let’s make the case for an equivalent programme in Scotland!
(Top image ID: Wavy lines in varying shades of green with the text ‘BLOG SERIES: Thinking about environmental sustainability #6’.)
This content is also available in / Ce contenu est également disponible sur: Français
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE (this episode is a mix of English and French, below is the complete English version)
(bell and breath)
Claude (C ): Steven Morin, I invite you to take a sound walk with me.
Steve (S): Excellent. Shall we?
C: So you’re a local councillor here?
S: Yes. From Hull-Wright.
C: Me, I’m an artist in residence here at DAIMON then I create works for the radio-hull 2023. Then I decided to take a walk with a friend, you, in French and English. The idea of a sound walk is to pay attention to all the details. For example, our feet are making a rather soft sound at the moment. It just rained here in Gatineau. You can feel all the details of life through sound.
Claude: And it’s going to be a bilingual conversation because Gatineau is multilingual and I’m bilingual. In fact, my family, my grandfather lived in Hull at the time. So there are lots of stories that we can tell.
C: I’d start with what you’re hearing right now, Steven.
S: I can hear the leaves in the poplar over there. You hear construction because you always hear construction in the city center. I hear birds. I think it was a chickadee. I hear the wind. I hear the wind by itself, I think. I hear the wind in the leaves. I hear the highway and then Montcalm. Someone with a chainsaw, it sounds like.
C: So that’s the idea. But what’s interesting about the sound walk is that you can also interact with the soundscape. So you listen to it, you perceive it, you’re sensitive to… for example, the car that’s just gone by. You can perceive all sorts of things with sound. For example, there are bustards ahead. We’ll see if they make a sound. We’re so used to seeing that our sense of hearing is sometimes a little less developed, so a sound walk is a way of sharpening our…
S: With geese, you can hear them in the sky, but you don’t think about them as much when they’re on the ground.
C: For example, the building here is interesting. The spinning mill was an old factory, the Hanson I forget the name of.
S: Hanson Mills. Socks, among other things? Yes, among other things.
C: Then it was converted into an artist center in the ’80s and now it’s AxeNéo7 and Daimon. I find it interesting that there’s a cultural center in a former industrial site, that it’s a way of giving new life to the building and the neighborhood.
(soundscape of children playing)
S: Ruisseau de la Brasserie was really the center of a whole industrial environment. It was the beating heart of Gatineau industry. The axes were made right there. The distillery was right there and a lot of things happened on the creek. So, when we think of industry and culture, when we talk about places, obviously it’s often post-industrial spaces that aren’t necessarily suitable for housing, so we use them to make cultural spaces. The spinning mill was a perfect example.
(urban soundscape)
S: But it’s clear that in this place, if there was an era. I try to imagine it, and then I hear it in my head: the hammers, the big machines, the saws, and so on. That’s not the case anymore. I mean, there’s no heavy industry of that kind here. The sounds would be completely different. It’s fascinating to imagine what it would have been like back then. Also, you have to remember, just before World War II, there was a big homelessness crisis of what we called the homeless at the time, who were here, who were centered on the West Side. So there would even have been camps. Are those industrial sounds? But it would have been families left in poverty, in this industrial system that left them behind. It would also have been a family place. But not in the same way as now.
(soundscape of children playing)
C: When I came here earlier, there were a lot of children playing with their bikes. I did some sound recording, and for me it’s also a discovery, because I don’t know Gatineau very well. I’m an artist from Ottawa who comes here to listen… and to take part in Radio-Hull. And I find it really interesting to get caught up in Gatineau’s atmosphere, culture and spaces.
(sound of foot on the road)
C: But speaking of sound, that’s a nice one. Yeah. Tell me what just happened here.
S: Cars going through puddles, everybody knows that sound. So typical of after the rain. Yeah. Yeah. But also, I mean, it’s asphalt. It wouldn’t be the same if this were, you know, mud. It wouldn’t be the same if this were grass. A car going through puddles definitely has to do with asphalt. And we forget to think… I always think it’s interesting to keep in mind what was here before we built cities and what were the sounds that were possible then it’s I mean, I don’t think about just sounds, I think about all the spaces, the trees. Of course the sounds come with that. How would this place have been different? It would’ve been totally forested. So you would’ve had a different perspective on everything. It would’ve sounded very different. The sounds of a forest, you know, it would’ve almost certainly been a maple forest. So what were the sounds of that, right?
C: Well, right now we’re above what kind of tree this is, but it’s not the poplars from earlier. It’s a more gentle leaf.
S: This is a Manitoba maple. A really big one, surprisingly.
C: Now on my way here this morning, I was playing with this sound.
(sound of gate)
S: Another sound everybody knows.
C: But this, this is so rich. And it’s a gate. And we’re gonna go through this gate and back to la filature…
S: This makes me think it’s school: The sound of school. Absolutely. I mean, ’cause I never worked in a factory, but I think people worked in factories, that’s the sound of the factory closing all those probably more of a sound of beep as you slide it rather than closing like that. But that for me is the sound of school. Every school has a fence like this. Right. The click click and the,
C: Is it cool in a good way or a bad way or just whatever, right?
S: I love school, I’m a parent, but I love school. When as a kid maybe I would’ve had a different idea of it.
C: You see as an artist, to me, this is a very interesting sound that I would play with, right? I would say, okay, this is a barrier. So what is the notion of what is, who’s being left out? What, what, what’s being protected? The sort of conceptual side, but then just the sound itself and it’s, it’s the richness of, of the shaking and, uh, sort of, it’s really interesting artistic material.
S: And funny, this is obviously metal, but I don’t think you can hear the metal. Yeah, you can hear the metal in the after shake, but during the, this sound isn’t necessarily clearly metallic.
C: Alright, Steven, let’s continue. What I’m going to do with this sound walk, this is a special way of doing the sound walk, is I’m going to insert sounds and do a little bit of composition with it so that your, interventions will bewith closeups of the sounds, which is a, a fun way to play with the notion of a space because that’s what artists do is, is interpret and be playful with aesthetic experiences so that audiences can have different sensations and different ways of, in this case, listening to…
(sound of a cart passing by)
C: What do you hear?
S: I hear a plane
C: So it’s going to pass over us. stereophony to pick it up.
S: It’s obviously something specific. In this part of Hall, there’s a certain height that planes are at because they’re landing or departing from the Ottawa airport. That’s one thing we hear. The other thing we hear is ‘biplanes’, often small fun planes, coming out of the Gatineau airport. They’re lower, but a different sound comes with them. But it’s still a very specific pitch.
C: Interesting. You’re good. You pay attention to the details, because it makes a difference to know where a sound comes from, at what height is it clearer if there are clouds or not? It’s all really important and interesting details, I think. So I promised at the start of our walk that I’d tell you a little story. My father, Maurice, who has sadly passed away… His father’s name was Maurice and I remember we used to come here to Hull on Roy Avenue, which isn’t far from here. I have a childhood memory of a fire, a wood-burning stove, because in those days, most people heated their homes by wood-burning stoves. Good morning, sir.
S: Can I hear the fridge? Very typical of a convenience store.
C: Is it? How’s that?
S: Listen? Do you know that sound? Are you in a convenience store, sir?
C: Can we come in? Okay, this fridge here. Wow. Hi, I’m just taking a sound clip for a sound walk.
S: He’s just taking a sound clip. OK?
C: Want to record the fridge.
Convenience store owner: Go ahead.
C: Cheers. Tell me more Steven.
S: You hear the fan that is very typical of the fridge. Low ceilings. The small areas, it’s very typical. I love depanneur. It’s something that we take for granted.
Owner: For Youtube?
C: It’s for a radio station.
Owner: Ah, radio station 106.5 ok cool. Thank you.
C: You’re welcome…
S: I think we need to think about the role of the convenience store as a community center. Convenience stores are an endangered species. I used to live in Montreal, but that’s the case in Hull too. Convenience stores have played and will continue to play a central role. It’s what they call the third place, where people gather because there’s something to do, they talk to each other, they recognize each other, they see each other. These are becoming very important community places, especially with the shrinking of public space and state-owned spaces. These third-place spaces are super important. I think we need to think hard about the role of convenience stores.
C: And the sound of convenience stores.
S: That’s part of it. You know, the smell you get in there. The vision, it’s an addiction. It’s a convenience store. Everybody knows it. When you walk in, but a very typical sound. You know, the ‘sloche’ machine has its noise. It’s a refrigerator, it makes a noise. There’s always the crooked lights that make noise. All the cash coming through the counter, it makes a noise. A sound.
C: Steven, it’s fascinating. I’m so glad we were able to discover this. There’s another sound phenomenon that happens here, and that’s dogs.
S: Hello, hello. Hello.
C: The little dogs make a particularly high-pitched sound and when there are three of them like that together. I call it an interesting sonic presence.
S: I’d say so. You can also hear the noise of the machines, the buildings around. I don’t know if I can hear them, I don’t think it’s air conditioners or heating, but you can hear this background noise that’s really ‘white noise’. I think we still need to think about sound and noise pollution, because we’re in a poor neighborhood next door. The sounds would be very different. In my opinion, there’s always something to be said for that. When you think about the city, you always have to think about that.
(cricket sound)
C: Well, we’ll be back. We’ve done a bit of a tour of the building. The spinning mill, which is spinning, I think it has to do with thread and mending and all that. We’re going to go into the building for a moment, and then we’ll finish with a sound sculpture that’s on site, here in front of the Daimon Artist Center.
C: Hello Philippe, you know, part of the Radio Hall team, so I’ve been very well received here… so inside, here, it’s just to feel the difference between the outside and inside space. So, what do you hear here inside?
S: It’s silent. It’s more than silence. It’s what we call it. We stop the noise. Everything is organized to stop the noise. Very typical inside buildings. We’re going to lower the noise, so the walls, it’s as if they’re eating the noise. You hear people talking, playing with wires, someone like that, pieces of metal, which is still someone talking. A telephone, I think. There’s a noise. It’s the sound of light.
C: Then there’s a fan over there that makes a little sound here. Yeah, that’s it. S: That’s what I was hearing. You can hear people.
C:. the contrast between an indoor and an outdoor space, something that’s really interesting, something that happens to us every day and that we don’t pay much attention to. But it’s a really nice experience to just stay inside. Outside.
(silence)
C: There’s a sculpture in front of the building here by a Montreal artist. I’ll find out his name.
S: There isn’t. There isn’t a little sign.
C: It’s Adam Basanta. It’s called Triad. Then I’m going to put my mic on like this. I invite you to listen.
S: Super interesting experiment. And if you do two different ends.
C: I can tell you about it.
S: Sounds like different frequencies. But tell me about this one.
S: You want me to tell you about here? That’s interesting. Yes. Wow!
C: Let’s sit here and try it out. I’ll go to the other end. Go ahead.
S: Hi Yes, you can hear me. It’s a fascinating noise in here, but there’s actually something in this pipe here. I imagine it changes the sound slightly. It’s fascinating the interplay of frequency and length. There’s a mathematical game going on here, which we ignore or listen to, because it’s so natural. But length changes frequency.
C: Well, we’ll stop here, since there’s a work of art that has helped us listen more closely to the space here. Thank you for the sound walk. It’s going to play, obviously. a Radio-hull 2023, but also on my conscious podcast because it’s part of the series I’m exploring, on the sounds of modernity. So we talked about all that this morning. Thank you very much Steven Moran.
S: It’s always a pleasure to talk about Hull, and then it’s fun to see too.
C: See you soon. Thank you, Steven.
*
Recorded at La Filature, Gatineau, August 30, 2023. Warm thanks to Steven Moran for his collaboration.
This episode was created while I was in residence during the summer of 2023 at the Centre de production DAÏMÔN in Gatineau Québec as part of the fourth edition of Radio-Hull 28 days of programming from September 7 to October 4 2023 showcasing local artistic practices.
I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).
My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is to the Canadian Red Cross.
The post e141 filature – what does gatineau sound like? appeared first on conscient. conscient is a bilingual blog and podcast (French or English) by audio artist Claude Schryer that explores how arts and culture contribute to environmental awareness and action.
The conscient podcast / balado conscient is a series of conversations about art, conscience and the ecological crisis. This podcast is bilingual (in either English or French). The language of the guest determines the language of the podcast. Episode notes are translated but not individual interviews.
I started the conscient project in 2020 as a personal learning journey and knowledge sharing exercise. It has been rewarding, and sometimes surprising.
The term “conscient” is defined as “being aware of one’s surroundings, thoughts and motivations”. My touchstone for the podcast is episode 1, e01 terrified, based on an essay I wrote in May 2019, where I share my anxiety about the climate crisis and my belief that arts and culture can play a critical role in raising public awareness about environmental issues. The conscient podcast / balado conscient follows up on my http://simplesoundscapes.ca (2016-2019) project: 175, 3-minute audio and video field recordings that explore mindful listening.
season 1 (may – october 2020) : environmental awareness and action Season 1 (May to October 2020) explored how the arts contribute to environmental awareness and action. I produced 3 episodes in French and 15 in English. The episodes cover a wide range of content, including activism, impact measurement, gaming, arts funding, cross-sectoral collaborations, social justice, artistic practices, etc. Episodes 8 to 17 were recorded while I was at the Creative Climate Leadership USA course in Arizona in March 2020 (led by Julie”s Bicycle). Episode 18 is a compilation of highlights from these conversations.
season 2 (march – august 2021 ) : reality and ecological grief Season 2 (March 2021 ) explores the concept of reality and is about accepting reality, working through ecological grief and charting a path forward. The first episode of season 2 (e19 reality) mixes quotations from 28 authors with field recordings from simplesoundscapes and from my 1998 soundscape composition, Au dernier vivant les biens. One of my findings from this episode is that “I now see, and more importantly, I now feel in my bones, “the state of things as they actually exist”, without social filters or unsustainable stories blocking the way”. e19 reality touches upon 7 topics: our perception of reality, the possibility of human extinction, ecological anxiety and ecological grief, hope, arts, storytelling and the wisdom of indigenous cultures. The rest of season 2 features interviews with thought leaders about their responses and reactions to e19 reality.
season 3 (october 2021 – february 2022 ) : radical listening Season 3 was about radical listening : listening deeply without passing judgment, knowing the truth and filtering out the noise and opening attention to reality and responding to what needs to be done. The format is similar the first podcast format I did in 2016 with the simplesoundscapes project, which was to ‘speak my mind’ and ‘think out loud’. I start this season with a ‘soundscape composition’, e63 a case study (part 1) and e64 a case study (part 2), a bilingual speculative fiction radio play, set in an undergraduate university history seminar course called ‘History of 2021 in Canada’. It concluded with a soundscape composition ‘Winter Diary Revisited’.
season 4 (1 january – 31 december 2023) : sounding modernity
About
I’ve been retired from the Canada Council for the Arts since September 15, 2020 where I served as a senior strategic advisor in arts granting (2016-2020) and manager of the Inter-Arts Office (1999-2015). My focus in (quasi) retirement is environmental issues within my area of expertise in arts and culture, in particular in acoustic ecology. I”m open to become involved in projects that align with my values and that move forward environmental concerns. Feel free to email me for a conversation : claude@conscient.ca
acknowledgement of eco-responsibility
I acknowledge that the production of the conscient podcast / balado conscient produces carbon. I try to minimize this carbon footprint by being as efficient as possible, including using GreenGeeks as my web server and acquiring carbon offsets for my equipment and travel activities from BullFrog Power and Less.
a word about privilege and bias.
While recording episode 19 “reality”, I heard elements of “privilege” in my voice that I had not noticed before. It sounded a bit like “ecological mansplaining”. I realize that, in spite of good intentions, I need to work my way through issues of privilege (of all kinds) and unconscious bias the way I did through ecological anxiety and grief during the fall of 2020. My re-education is ongoing.
