This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

A quick Internet search for the world’s windiest cities suggests that Wellington, New Zealand, is the most tempestuous:  its average annual wind speed is 26.7 km/h (16.6 mph). Close runners-up include the cities of:

• Rio Gallegos (Argentina) – 25.7 km/h (16 mph)
• Saint Johns, Newfoundland (Canada) – 24.3 km/h (15.1 mph)
• Punta Arenas (Chile) – 23.3 km/h (14.5 mph)

But despite their blustery reputations, none of these famously windy cities has honored the wind gods with a museum dedicated to the wind. For that, you have to travel to the magical city of Trieste, the architecturally stunning seaport in northeast Italy at the head of the Adriatic, tucked inside the Slovenian border. The city James Joyce called home for 11 years.

Not only have Triestinos embraced the cold north winds that define their city, they discovered, way back in 1999, how to capture the wind: Bora in scatola. Once captured, the wind began to work its magic, and soon afterwards, Rino Lombardi’s dream of creating the world’s first wind museum – Museo della Bora – was born. A humble home for the most mischievous, volatile and invisible of elements, in which we spend our entire lives.

Rino Lombardi, founder and director of the Museo della Bora, carefully releasing the bora from a can of “bora in scatola” (wind in a box).

A professional copywriter with a dry sense of humor, Mr. Lombardi opened, in 2004, a temporary home – magazzino dei venti – for the restless and impetuous bora. “She is free and easy; she is not willing to remain trapped,” he explains. “She wants to steal hats, snap umbrellas, overturn trash bins and cars, sink boats, and roar at the trees. The only way to calm her is to give her a stage all her own.” And so, the search for a larger and permanent home for the Museo della Bora continues.

Nota bene: bora (μπόρα) derives from Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, whose windswept hair and beard were tinged with ice and snow. Meteorologically, the bora describes the cold east-northeasterly (ENE) katabatic winds that sweep down from the foreboding limestone Karst plateau, and descend rapidly – sometimes violently – towards the Adriatic coastline. Trieste is right in its path.

Currently located on Via Belpoggio, the Museo della Bora’s magazzino is literally bursting at the seams with sculptures, kites, weather vanes, anemometers, miniature windmills, wind socks, crampons, pinwheels, whirligigs, flags, hats, maps, poems, postcards, posters, paintings, photographs, cartoons, newspaper clippings, books, documentary films, audio and video recordings. Collectively, these found / donated / purchased objects illustrate the infinite ways our lives are touched and shaped by the wind: mythical, historical, cultural, political, architectural, meteorological, literary, journalistic, artistic, technological or just plain whimsical.

“Like any self-respecting museum,” said Mr. Lombardi, tongue in cheek, “the Museo della Bora has several collections.” He walked me through each collection, crowded impossibly into a 60 square-metre space that is at once fantastical and fascinating. At times, I felt like a child again, filled with awe at the craziness of it all. Crazy and alive like the wind.

The most popular collection seems to be the ever-expanding wind archive: bookshelves and display cases overflowing with jars, bottles, pots and cans; each one contains a unique sample of wind collected by wind lovers from the four cardinal directions. The majority of these bottles arrive by the post, with hand-written notes attached documenting the date and place of collection: Halifax, Oslo, Mount Fuji, Chicago, Padua, Rio. My bottle of Québec’s westerly winds – carefully sealed inside a Christmas tree-shaped bottle no less! – has just been mailed. When it arrives in Trieste, I will join the prestigious ranks of other “wind ambassadors” whose bottled donations make up the Museo della Bora’s eclectic wind archive.

For history buffs, the archive of Silvio Polli, considered one of the world’s leading experts on the bora, is a treasure trove of old black and white photographs, newspaper articles, scientific publications and meteorologic instruments. This archive was donated by the Polli family to the Museo della Bora.

One of the many antique anemometers in the Museo della Bora’s collection.

I particularly love the museum’s collection of Roberto Pastrovicchio‘s black-and-white photographs of broken umbrellas abandoned in the streets of Trieste, umbrellas that obviously had displeased Boreas for one reason or another. With his project Analisi Catabatica (Katabatic Analysis), Pastrovicchio attempts to create an “aesthetic catalogue” of the bora through its impact on everyday objects.

Roberto Pastrovicchio. Analisi Catabatica #03 / data 20.11.2011 / ora/hour 15.30 / velocità raffica / guts speed 91,08 Km/h. Reprinted with permission.

But I am saving the best for last. The Museo della Bora’s most impressive collection, in my humble opinion, is the library that Mr. Lombardi has lovingly curated over the past 20 years. So many books about my muse in one place! Art, architecture, history, fiction, poetry, mythology, meteorology, renewable energy… Don Quixote tilting at windmills; the poems of Umberto Saba; architectural techniques to funnel wind into buildings in order to provide natural air conditioning; the history of French weather vanes; several university theses.

This library would be an invaluable resource for artists in residence, especially those researching the question: how have artists represented the invisible through the ages? As one example, see Zephyr and Aura gently blowing Boticelli’s Venus to shore on the cover of Il Libro del Vento, an incredibly beautiful book by Italian art historian Alessandro Nova. This is but one of the more than 400 titles in the Museo della Bora’s documentation center.

The cover of Alessandro Nova’s Il Libro del Vento, one of the more than 400 titles in the Museo della Bora’s collection.

In addition to founding and directing the Museo della Bora, Mr. Lombardi is the regional coordinator of the National Association of Small Museums (Associazione Nazionale dei Piccoli Musei), for Italy’s Friuli Venezia Giulia region. Over a glass of hugo, the popular Triestien cocktail of elderflower, prosecco, mint, and lime, he shared his vision for this small museum:  to encourage the free circulation and exchange of scientific, artistic, cultural and social ideas. In this way, Mr. Lombardi hopes that the bora can be used as a metaphor for opening borders.

Given the European Union’s current refugee crisis, this is an extremely pertinent point. And it will no doubt become even more salient as climate migrants begin to abandon their homelands due to crop failure, sea level rise or extreme weather.

Museo della Bora is still a work-in-progress. But don’t let that stop you from visiting. Schedule your visit in early June, to participate in the annual Boramata, Trieste’s city-wide celebration of its most famous citizen. Or, schedule your visit between November and February in order to experience the bora, like James Joyce, in all its fury. “For my part I love the bora,” wrote Joyce. “It acts on me as a spirit of health that brings air from the sky.”

Visits to the Museo della Bora’s magazzino are by appointment only. Be prepared to be carried away by Mr. Lombardi’s enthusiasm, by the bora, by the magic of it all. The Museo della Bora is a rare gem.

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Joan Sullivan is a renewable energy photographer based in Québec, Canada. Since 2009, Joan has focused her cameras (and more recently her drones) exclusively on the energy transition. Her goal is to create positive images and stories that help us embrace the tantalizing concept that the Holy Grail is finally within reach: a 100% post-carbon economy within our lifetimes. Joan collaborates frequently with filmmakers on documentary films that explore the human side of the energy transition. She is currently working on a photo book about the energy transition. Her renewable energy photos have been exhibited in group shows in Canada, Italy and the UK. You can find Joan on Twitter and Instagram. 

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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Though metropolitan Bangkok is rapidly pumping out new malls and hotels across its territory, nature conservation organizations and artists have a history of standing together in safeguarding green spaces. They also play a pivotal role in putting other urgent environmental issues on the agenda such as the rising levels of air pollution and animal poaching. Recently, when a black panther was killed in a wildlife sanctuary by one of Thailand’s richest men, artists and activists across the country rose to paint murals, perform music, and demonstrate to make sure this injustice wouldn’t go unnoticed.

Organizations such as the Green World Foundation, the Bird Conservation Society of Thailand, Friends of the River, Society for the Conservation of National Treasures and Environment (SCONTE), and Greenpeace Thailand have been very active and, interestingly enough, have figured out that engaging artists in their work can be extremely effective. In 2017, Greenpeace Thailand organized the exhibition “Heart for the Ocean: Break Free from Plastic” at the Bangkok Art Cultural Center (BACC), which included the installation Blue Ocean, A Message From The Sea by Prasopsuk Lerdviriyapiti, also known as Ajarn Pom. The installation was 3.5 x 5 meters and consisted of seaborne rubbish from several local beaches on the island of Phuket, which Pom picked up along with a crew of seventy volunteers. Phuket, Thailand’s largest island in the South, is known for its beautiful beaches, though in recent years it has been severely impacted by a huge influx of tourists – and their trash.

“Blue Ocean, A Message From The Sea” by Prasopsuk Lerdviriyapiti.

Earlier this year (Jan-Feb 2018), Greenpeace Thailand put on another exhibition at BACC, showcasing the work of Thai artist Ruangsak Anuwatwimon. The exhibition featured a series of sculptures covered in dust that the artist collected from various polluted areas in and around Bangkok, raising awareness about the drastically increased levels of air-pollution in the city. For his project The Ash Heart Project, Anuwatwimon created artworks from the ashes of 270 different species. He collected specimens in his environment that had  died due to human involvement, then got the remains ritually cremated and moulded into the shape of the human heart. Cremated species included the Cavendish banana, European olive, fly agaric, a Belgian horse, carp fish, and a house mouse. With this work, Anuwatwimon wants to bring attention to the way humans influence the natural environment, and vice versa. He wants to raise questions about the complex relationship between people, their beliefs, death, and the nature surrounding us.

“The Ash Heart Project” by Ruangsak Anuwatwimon.

In the spirit of compiling my top 10 favorite art/sustainability initiatives in various cities and countries, I attempted to make a selection of 10 art initiatives in Thailand that are doing pioneering work engaging with our natural environment. As I’m more familiar with what’s happening in Bangkok, you will find a lot of city initiatives. But this is only a starting point and I invite you to share more exciting initiatives that you know of in the comments section below!

1.  Big Trees

Big Trees is a group of professionals comprised mostly of artists, designers, architects and lawyers. On the weekend, they get together and bike through the city. They visit landmark old trees in parks, Buddhist temples, universities, and diplomatic compounds in order to investigate where development is happening and where they can contribute to preserving nature. They are an active bunch and regularly get out of the city to re-connect with nature, climb mountains and hike together, discussing strategies and campaigns to protect the land in creative ways. This network of art and nature lovers is the go-to place for Bangkokians concerned about trees being cut (which happens a lot), and those who want to get involved with the environmental aspect of art, food, education, crafts, and collaboration.

Big Trees re-connecting with nature and discussing strategies on top of Chiang Dao in the North of Thailand.

2.  Bangkok Art and Culture Center (BACC)

It’s incredible but it’s true: This large venue in the heart of Bangkok is the result of a long and persistent campaign of Thai artists advocating for an art center when there was none. Though BACC is now an established art venue, the rebellious spirit of its advocates still shines through its cutting-edge program of exhibitions and events. BACC often hosts shows in collaboration with Greenpeace and never shies away from environmental, political, and social topics.

Green Art Lab Alliance conference at BACC in collaboration with Big Trees.

3.  Scrap Lab and RISC

These initiatives by Dr. Singh Intrachooto seem to be only two of the many eco/design/sustainability projects that the well-known architect and designer is involved with. Dr. Intrachooto turned around the Faculty of Architecture at Kasetsart University in Bangkok when he founded Scrap Lab, a design and research center focusing on sustainable materials and material innovation. He uses waste from the food industry and from hospitals (amongst others) that his design students then develop into new products that have new purposes. Expanding on this concept, he also founded the Research, Innovation and Sustainability Center (RISC) earlier this year, where many of these new, sustainable materials are archived and promoted to be used in the industry. From egg-scales to seaweeds, for Dr. Intrachooto creativity is key in making sure nothing is wasted.

The brand new Research, Innovation and Sustainability Center (RISC).

4.  Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture

Based in Thailand’s scenic Ratchaburi province, artists Jiradej and Pornpilai Meemalai collaborate under the name jiandyin. They are also the founders of Baan Noorg Collaborative Art and Culture, a non-profit artist initiative housed in a beautiful old building with a massive garden. They initiate projects with the local Nongpo community and invite artists and researchers from abroad to spend time together in this idyllic place, far away from the city. They operate in a true collaborative spirit, with respect and care for nature as well as for each other.

The Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture.

5.  Rebel Art Space

Rebel Art Space was founded by artists Vasan Sitthiket, Sai Wannaphon Chimbangchong, and Jiratti Kuttunam. The two-floor gallery, tucked away behind the busy Sukhumvit Soi in Bangkok, focuses on art related to acts of rebellion, social activism, and projects that bring attention to societal issues. The topics are especially aligned with Sitthiket’s own work, where demonstration and political engagement are key. Sitthiket even ran for parliament with his Artist Party in 2005. He currently has a solo show on at BACC, another important art institution in Bangkok that he helped establish back in the days.

Vassan Sitthiket at Rebel Art Space.

6.  Fabcafe

The Fabcafe is a Makerspace in Bangkok that functions as a central hub for the city’s creative environmental movement. Fabcafe hosts farmers markets and workshops, and offers a variety of digital fabrication tools, including laser cutters and 3D printers. The founders have a background in architecture and are very “networked” with the creative crowd in Bangkok, always ensuring interesting encounters in the cool little cafe that’s part of it.

Bangkok’s Fabcafe.

7.  THAILAND CREATIVE & DESIGN CENTER (TCDC)

Now with an additional office in Chiang Mai, the Thailand Creative & Design Center encourages creativity in Thai society with an active program of exhibitions, talks, and workshops. Though it is a large, governmental institution, they have not forgotten about sustainability. Part of the services they offer is a material library for designers, including a beautiful resource library and printing and multimedia tools. They are the initiators of the annual Bangkok Design Week and Chiang Mai Design Week where, particularly in the latter, sustainable materials and crafts such as weaving, natural dying, wood carving and ceramics are well represented.

Chiang Mai Design Week 14 (CMDW14).

8.  Land Foundation

Though not recently as active as the Land Foundation, the two famous artists Rirkrit Tiranvanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert were true pioneers when they established this initiative in 1998, the result of a merging of ideas by different artists to cultivate a place of and for social engagement, located near the village of Sanpatong. Rice farmers in this district of the Chiang Mai province in the north of Thailand were having a hard time due to floods and high water levels. A group of artists suggested to buy the land and revive it in collaboration with the community, and to invite international artists to contribute. They built sustainable artists’ houses and gardens on the site, hosting projects for the local community.

Sample House/Elvis House at the Land Foundation.

9.  Creative District Bangkok

Creative District Bangkok is a self-proclaimed “diverse, inclusive, interdependent, and resilient ecosystem” of people (including a lot of artists, designers, and architects) who have as their mission to make the neighborhoods of Bangrak and Klongsan more creative and more green. From organizing river clean-ups and registering trees, to cycling tours to community projects, they are always open to collaboration and creating together. Food (sustainability as well as cuisine innovation), art, community, design, property preservation (a big topic in Bangkok!), and urban planning and environmental improvement are their main points of focus.

Community projects with Creative District Bangkok.

10.  Jim Thompson Farm Tour

Jim Thompson was an American who moved to Thailand in the 1950’s and revived the Thai silk industry using new design techniques. He mysteriously disappeared in 1967 and was never found. What remains, however, is the Jim Thompson House, a popular tourist destination in Bangkok. Thompson was a fervent collector of beautiful things, all neatly displayed in his also beautiful house. In the last few years, the Jim Thompson House has expanded its activities, allowing visitors to join on Farm Tour, a cultural “eco and agro” experience. The visit allows people to experience the unique Isan culture (from the North of Thailand) and learn about silk production processes, Thai traditions, and the significance of water. It includes hydroponic vegetable gardens, water gardens, and a huge pumpkin sculpture made of yes, pumpkins.

The Jim Thompson Farm.

With special thanks to Promadhattavedi Chatvichai, Anunta Intra-Aksorn, Singh Intrachooto and Ruangsak Anuwatwimon.

(Top image: The Last Kill painted by 10 Thai muralists, March 2018. Photo: Nontarat Phaicharoen/BenarNews.)

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Curator Yasmine Ostendorf (MA) has worked extensively on international cultural mobility programs and on the topic of art and environment for expert organizations such as Julie’s Bicycle (UK), Bamboo Curtain Studio (TW) Cape Farewell (UK) and Trans Artists (NL). She founded the Green Art Lab Alliance, a network of 35 cultural organizations in Europe and Asia that addresses our social and environmental responsibility, and is the author of the series of guides “Creative Responses to Sustainability.” She is the Head of Nature Research at the Van Eyck Academy (NL), a lab that enables artists to consider nature in relation to ecological and landscape development issues and the initiator of the Van Eyck Food Lab.

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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The ninth in a year-long series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances and publications that are popping up in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.

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Pop Art emerged as a movement in the mid-1950s in England and the United States in response to the growing consumerism, mass media and mass production that followed the austerity of World War II. Artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg appropriated everyday objects found on/in supermarket shelves, television, comic books, cartoons, magazines and advertising – such as Campbell’s soup cans, Coke bottles, Brillo soap pads and hamburgers – which had come to represent popular culture. Using the vivid primary colors and bold text found in advertising as well as a wicked sense of humor, they created paintings, prints and sculptures that mirrored the iconography and obsessions of daily life.

Karen Hackenberg, a Rhode Island School of Design-trained painter now living in Port Townsend, near Discovery Bay on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, has developed a new version of Pop Art that is a response to a cultural obsession plaguing today’s world: plastic in its myriad forms – product packaging, grocery bags, water bottles, toys, toothbrushes, straws, plates and cups, and thousands of other everyday objects. What Hackenberg sees as she walks along the Discovery Bay shoreline is the result of that obsession – an unending tide of cast-off plastic debris, which is washing onto the beach, impacting the health of the oceans and becoming what she calls “the new sand.”

In the same way that Pop artists of the 1950s and 1960s created images of cultural icons that were both visually seductive and culturally relevant, Hackenberg too beautifies and glorifies her cast-off, found objects by placing them in the forefront of her paintings as towering monuments along a pleasing, placid sea. She credits Claes Oldenburg’s oversized sculptures of iconic objects set in landscapes as her inspiration for the compositions of the “beach trash dramas” in her on-going Watershed series. The viewer’s perspective in all of these paintings is situated below the horizon as if one is lying flat on the sand looking up at the objects.

Karen Hackenberg, “Shades of Green; Amphorae, ca. 2012,” 24” x 48,” oil on canvas, 2012. Courtesy of Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA

When I asked Hackenberg which landscape artists have informed the light-filled, color saturated, seascape portions of her paintings, she acknowledged having taken inspiration from the dramatic, iconic landscapes of the Hudson River School of artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole, the New York School landscapes of Gretna Campbell and Paul Resika, the mystical seascapes of Rockwell Kent, and the ironic landscape paintings of Ed Ruscha, which combine marketing graphics with images of nature. Hackenberg’s choice to combine the Pop Art treatment of her oversized plastic objects with seascapes that are referencing traditional landscape painters results in a sense of displacement, an angst suggesting that something is quite wrong in this universe.

Rockwell Kent (1882 – 1971), “Afternoon on the Sea, Monhegan, 1907, oil on canvas, 34” x 44”, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Kent’s color-saturated seascapes inspired Hackenberg’s paintings.

Hackenberg is a constant scavenger of sea relics, a beach anthropologist and a keen observer of the “ironic absurdities in the ways we humans often regard the natural world as merely the resource for our self-gratifying consumer habits, while we ignore the destruction of life and beauty in our oblivious rush to purchase the next big thing.” A number of her paintings include images of plastic action figures, toy soldiers and dinosaurs that she found among the seaweed. Placed prominently in the foreground atop stones and other debris, they replace the starfish, crabs and sand dollars usually found on the beach and become an ominous reference to the destruction and extinction of marine life that is occurring at a rapid pace. In the painting Amphibious Landing, a lone green plastic marine patrols a seemingly peaceful shoreline. Is he guarding our way of life or entering a new battle for survival?

Karen Hackenberg, “Amphibious Landing,” Gouache on Paper, 5.5” x 7,” 2012. Courtesy of Paper Hammer, Seattle, WA

Hackenberg’s discovery of debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami, whose waves reached as far as the Pacific shores of our own country, led her to develop a series of paintings that she calls, Ukiyo-e (The Floating World). In contrast to the Watershed paintings in which her plastic objects are rooted monumentally on the beach, the Floating World landscapes depict, as she says, “shards of plastic floating in the atmosphere above the ocean, obscuring the natural beauty of the view beyond and referencing the everyday tsunami of plastic trash.”

Karen Hackenberg, “Toss Up,” Oil on Wood Panel, 45″ x 36,” 2017. Courtesy of Patricia Rovzar Gallery.

Many contemporary artists around the world have taken on the subject of the billions of pieces of plastic that are polluting our oceans, contaminating our water supplies and becoming toxic food for sea animals, but Karen Hackenberg is one of the few who has shined a light on our collective addiction to plastic for its inherent beauty, for its “Pop Art” value. She calls it, almost fondly, “our trash, our little shiny, beautiful plastic throwaways,” with an emphasis on the word “our.”

(Top image: Karen Hackenberg, “Flood Tide,” oil on canvas, 30” x 40,” 2018. Courtesy of Patricia Rovzar Gallery.)

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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist, writer, and educator whose work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Her latest bodies of work focus on the threat of rising tides caused by climate change, the trillions of pieces of plastic in our oceans and the wars that are predicted to occur in the future over access to clean water. She is also the co-creator of two interactive public art projects: The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and Home, which calls attention to homelessness and the lack of affordable housing in our cities and towns.

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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Graz is the second-largest city in Austria and is located south of the Alps, near the border to Slovenia. Besides being a major tourist destination and the epicenter of academic activity in the region, the city has been struggling with environmental problems—first and foremost air pollution. At the same time, Graz has been a hub for ecologically minded thinkers and activists outside academia, as can be seen, for instance, in the highly visible vegetarian and vegan restaurant scene. Thus, it is not surprising that the local universities have been active in climate change research.

On a gray November morning at 7:30 a.m., a dozen actors, directors, and producers of the “Pennyless Players,” a theatre group composed of students in American and British Studies at the University of Graz in Austria, gathered to set up a classroom for a performance scheduled for 8:15 a.m. The unusual hour did not in the least deter this enthusiastic group of theatre practitioners from demonstrating their dedication to theatre as a means of addressing current global concerns. When I approached them with the idea of bringing Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) to our campus, they jumped at the chance to perform a set of CCTA 2017 plays during a session of my cultural studies seminar entitled “Traditions, Theories, Trailblazers: A History of American Studies.” In this class we discuss how theoretical approaches in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies have been evolving and changing over time. As this seminar is part of our cultural studies curriculum, we explore the reciprocal intersections between cultural self-expression and public ways of thinking and feeling about, for instance, climate change.

Changes in approaches and methods since the 1990s explain why issues related to climate change have become relevant to American Studies. Into the 1960s, scholars concerned with American literature and culture tended to focus on what they considered “consensus” on shared myths and symbols which facilitated an understanding of US national culture. Not surprisingly, the upheavals of the 1960s brought the status quo about the field’s trajectories and outlook into question. Unifying conceptualizations of culture and identity that privileged Euro-American, white, and predominately male mainstream perspectives and that disregarded any sort of minority discourse were recognized and critiqued as such. For  the past three decades, an ever-growing contingent of scholars has been debating what they call “transnational American Studies.” In short, researchers have been grappling with questions and methods that do not replicate but rather identify and question myopic perspectives on the United States as an exceptional nation of white Europeans whose exceptionality ostensibly justifies all manner of collateral damage of a divinely sanctioned mission.

Parallel to the increased attention paid to boundary-crossings and global outlooks, the original interdisciplinarity of American Studies has been expanded beyond the humanities. Drawing on ecocritical work done in literary studies and collaborating with fields such as ethics, philosophy, economics, behavioral psychology, and law, American Studies scholars have become active in exploring issues such as environmental justice, artistic representations (of nature, of humans and/in nature, etc.), and climate change. As an Americanist whose scholarly work focuses on literature and culture, I welcome the move towards transnational and transoceanic topics and I am enthusiastic about interrogating climate change theatre. The transnational study of this movement opens up multi-faceted opportunities for cross- and interdisciplinary research with a global perspective in mind.

In this spirit, I decided to dedicate one session of my seminar to a performance of selected CCTA plays. After providing words of welcome and a brief introduction to the impetus and broad geographical reach of CCTA, the Pennyless Players took over the session and established a sense of sharing the performance space with the audience of about twenty students. Several acting exercises got everyone moving, tuning into their bodily awareness and into their sense perceptions, and also lightening the mood by way of a few laughs. And then the show began.

Blind date going awry in “Single Use” by Marcia Johnson. Photo by Pennyless Players.

The Pennyless Players extended Marcia Johnson’s Single Use by taking time to set up the situation of a blind date in a coffee shop. They used a third actor to represent the server’s offstage voice of Johnson’s manuscript. Furthermore, they fleshed out the differences between the characters and added moments of awkward silence and miscommunication. In this play, the female character, Val, fearlessly defends her sense of responsibility for the planet’s well-being. She explains that the latter is of higher value than her personal pleasure and convenience. The male character, Mitchell, privileges his presumed prerogative of getting a girl alongside consumer goods without considering the larger consequences. The players created a dramatic scene in which satisfying one’s perceived individual pleasure occurs before the backdrop of unchecked anthropogenic climate change. The scene showed how the incommensurate relationship between the personal and planetary dimensions triggered the failure of a potential love relationship. This dialogue-focused scene thus set a tone of urgency by acknowledging the significance of individual conduct for the planet and the potential impact of diverging opinions on personal relationships.

Sarena Parmar’s allegorical short play The Rubik’s Cube Solution jolted the audience by its harsh apocalyptic vision of a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t predicament. The complex situation of the global economy and the climate, which is encapsulated in a scene in which citizens under duress confront a seemingly unsolvable Rubik’s Cube, pits a ruthless and generically named Controller against three equally nameless Citizens. One of the Citizens encourages the Quiet Citizen and the Anxious Citizen not to accept being bullied into compliance by deliberately withheld information and official doctrine. Subsequently, the trio begins to brainstorm ideas for solutions despite the Controller’s complaints. The Controller’s intimidating manner and dejection on the citizens’ faces ultimately yield to a sense of hope through joint action. By implication, contributions to solving climate change-related issues require a bottom-up approach whenever official policy focuses on spreading fear and misinformation.

The Pennyless Players effectively embellished Amahl Khouri’s Oh How We Loved Our Tuna!—a bitingly sarcastic monologue spoken in the majestic first-person plural (“we”)—by adding sonic and visual elements. This elegy addresses tuna which “We loved…to death” because “we couldn’t get enough of you.” As the puns unmistakably convey, culinary appreciation of the bluefin has led to commercially driven overfishing and extermination. With staccato beats, swelling and diminishing volume, and intermittent silence, the drummer underscored the lyrical eulogy spoken alternately by the two actors. Also, one of the speaking actors accompanied the recitation by drawing a specimen of tuna on the board. The performers thus engaged the audience members’ senses in multiple ways. The increasingly threatening-sounding drum beats clashed with the cutesy elements of the childlike drawing. This combination of sensory appeals beautifully heightened the verbal sarcasm. As in Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, any laughter came with a bitter taste of despair, as the tense atmosphere in the classroom confirmed.

“Oh How We Loved Our Tuna!” by Amahl Khouri. Photo by Pennyless Players.

Vinicius Jatobá’s You Should Know Better is a dialogue between a wife and a husband in their 70s who have been married for ages. This short play contrasted nicely with the opening performance in the sense that it encapsulates a thwarted attempt at individual change within a habit-driven marriage. Realizing that climate change poses an immediate local threat, the husband wants to make his wife aware of impending disaster caused by human misdeeds. The wife, in (non-)response, suggests that they have popcorn. She eventually acknowledges that their habits are destructive but assumes that they cannot be changed. His mounting sense of dread and her resignation to numb disengagement both result in paralysis in the face of impending disaster.

The fabulous performance concluded with Ian Rowland’s Bottoms Up, another monologue, this time presented as a solo performance. A tipsy speaker wielding a bottle and guzzling from a glass hilariously discusses the impact of climate change on champagne production. Finishing on a note of hedonism triumphing over engaging with the realities of climate change neatly closed the circle of CCTA plays presented that morning. As the Pennyless Players distributed beverages before the monologue, audience members were also physically involved in consuming products that they should contemplate in light of climate change.

The subsequent discussion centered on how performers and audience members assessed the roles and possibilities of theatre to communicate climate change-related issues and to follow an activist agenda. The Pennyless Players shared their familiarity with the vivid theatre scene in Graz, particularly regarding performance venues and theatre groups that focus on socio-political issues. I was impressed by how both performers and seminar participants related their academic work in literary and cultural studies to their responses to the performance. We discussed the benefits of studying theatrical representations of climate change from the perspectives of transnational American Studies—particularly because this approach encourages us to study long-term processes as well as the border-crossing and potentially global impact of political, economic, and cultural forms of oppression. The Pennyless Players had chosen their favorites from a selection of eight plays I had provided. Luckily, even this small sample and their selection of works by Marcia Johnson (Canada/Jamaica), Sarena Parmar (Canada), Amahl Khouri (Germany/Jordan), Vinicius Jatobá (Brazil), and Ian Rowland (UK) partially reflects the many nations and continents represented in CCTA 2017. The theatre group has expressed their interest in working with more of the CCTA plays, and I hope that they will decide also to feature a climate change-related play for one of their evening-length projects at some point.

In 2015, the University of Graz launched a large-scale doctoral program focused on climate change that has attracted an interdisciplinary group of researchers. In conjunction with several colleagues interested in ecocritical approaches to literature, drama, and film, I am currently working towards increasing the visibility of literary and cultural studies within our larger institutional context and towards strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration in the realm of climate change studies.

One indicator of such interdisciplinary broadening is the 2nd World Symposium on Climate Change Communication, held in Graz in early February 2018. The program featured speakers from all over the world—researchers from the natural sciences, the social sciences, law, economics, and the humanities; representatives of state-run programs and agencies; and members of organizations that foster climate change awareness and networking. My talk on the CCTA plays of 2015 and 2017 was not as ‘exotic’ as I had expected. I take it as a sign of hope that a sprinkling of speakers addressed the arts’ contributions to representing and thus communicating climate change. Who knows—Graz may evolve more and more into a city of climate change communication.

(Top image: The Rubik’s Cube Solution by Sarena Parmar. Photo by Pennyless Players.)

This article was originally published on HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on March 21, 2018.

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Nassim W. Balestrini is professor of American Studies and Intermediality, and Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG), Austria. Her publications and research interests include American literature and culture (predominantly of the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries) as well as adaptation and intermedial relations (as in her monograph From Fiction to Libretto: Irving, Hawthorne, and James as Opera, 2005, and in the edited volume Adaptation and American Studies, 2011). Currently, she is working on hip-hop artists’ life writing across media, American theatre history, contemporary American drama and opera, and the poet laureate traditions in the United States and in Canada.

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
—Leonardo da Vinci

Doing research, pioneering new approaches, changing mindsets and perspectives is what I am involved with as an artist. What other possibilities do materials have?

I look for boundaries and try to cross them. I search for different ways to use materials, expanding possibilities and, in the process, creating a foundation for sustainable development in the world of color and the world of art – worlds which strive for synergy with nature and the sciences. Sustainability, climate change, our relationship to the earth we live on and the species we share it with – these are the defining issues of my generation and the generations to come. The art world should take a stand. It has an important role to play. My focus on sustainability and cradle-to-cradle processes means that my work is becoming more and more intertwined with other disciplines in the creative industry and beyond.

This is a natural evolution and one I cherish deeply because I have seen and experienced first-hand how working (and growing) together creates the perfect circumstances for innovation and change. Of course, I could have settled for creating aesthetically pleasing images but for me that is not enough… I want to move beyond the borders of aesthetics to create real impact.

The installation “Waste of Color/Color of Waste,” 2017. On the left is the full installation, on the right is a close-up of the wall of prints.

Last year I made an installation piece called Waste of Color/Color of Waste for Cultura Nova Festival in the Netherlands, that challenged artists and designers to work with recycled materials. I research natural color pigments but for this occasion, I traded my traditionally (in)organic raw materials for processed materials. I chose to work with discarded roof tiles made from natural clay. As so many other building materials during the demolition process, roof tiles are considered waste and often end up in landfills. I processed these roof tiles, transforming them into two different color pigments. The installation illustrated every step, making the process from raw materials into art part of the artwork itself.

Prints were part of the installation. They were made according to an original design using my own hands and printed on biodegradable “growing paper” made from recycled paper in which seeds have been embedded. Each print is painted and/or drawn separately, making it one of a kind. It is all part of my concept, my vision … make art, not waste! The raw material comes from the earth; if the artwork is no longer desired, it can be returned to the earth, to nature… Place it under a thin layer of soil in the spring/summer and nature will bloom again. A new cycle can start.

As a result of this exhibition, I was asked to collaborate with architect Erol Öztan, designer of the Resource House and founder of ReUse Materials. I am researching the possibility of creating pigment out of buildings’ natural waste materials. The outcome of this research will hopefully provide a range of color pigments that can be used to paint walls, floors, ceramics, or other (bio-based) materials.

The goal of the Resource House is to create a circular system/economy within the building industry. The partners involved in this venture work together to move beyond borders and create impact. Their mission statement explains it well: “We no longer settle for the throwaway culture we live in. Raw materials are becoming scarce more rapidly than we think. Yet only an average of 3% of all building materials are qualitatively reused in the building industry. Instead of further draining our resources, the Resource House strives to only use materials sourced sustainably . Currently the rate of reused materials in the Resource House is 66% and we are striving for 100%.”

Architect Erol Öztan adds: “We need to see the true value of materials that are already available but considered obsolete and therefore waste. So instead of searching for materials that will fit my designs, I design with the materials that are available in mind. The Resource House will not only show that designing and building within a circular system is possible, but that it doesn’t have to be more expensive or less beautiful.”

The Resource House by architect Erol Öztan.

Collaborating with an initiative like the Resource House is a new direction for me. Of course, there may be more practical uses for building waste materials than turning them into color pigments. But that is not the point. My role is to trigger something, to change perspectives, make people look differently at things, materials, their surroundings, nature, their behavior. I try to make room for dialogue, for asking questions and wondering. And yes, sometimes this means you have to stop playing safe, be strong and brace yourself for failure and misunderstanding. It means you have to be ready to move beyond borders, out of comfort zones, and into change together with others brave enough to do the same.

I am nature. We are nature, earth, soil. Everything is connected. Nothing in life is permanent. Be humble.

(Top image: Down to Earth, paying respect to Mother Nature. The (biodegradable) paint on my legs, arms, and hands is made of soil, earth, nature.)

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Dorieke Schreurs currently lives in Maastricht, in the very south of the Netherlands. She studied Fine Arts, Stage Design, Art Education, and specialized in old painting techniques. She combines art with research, science, and education. Optimist and realist, she focuses on sustainable, cradle-to-cradle, nature-inspired solutions and innovations in her work and her personal life.

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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“What is your presentation about?” Clara asks. Like most undergraduate science majors in this lecture hall, Clara has never seen a one-person performance art piece. Without stage lights or a sound system, I set up in the multi-purpose room. A console the size of a small car serves as lectern. Two hundred students sit in tiered seating above me. I tell myself, “It is just like an Amphitheater in Ancient Greece.”

I tell her, “Everything is Connected is a one-person play. Don’t take notes; just enjoy.” She must be thinking, “I could be doing real work right now.” A professor introduces me, “Peterson is a quirky queer Quaker, a playwright, actor, performance artist, Bible scholar, LGBTQ rights activist, and host of Citizens’ Climate Radio.” A handful of students applaud. I begin.

“What you are about to see is a performance lecture in three acts. These acts may seem unconnected. l will talk as myself and also perform in character.” I don’t tell them this type of presentation rose out of the tensions I feel being an artist, an activist, and an academic. These roles pull at each other, competing to take a prominent place. My shows attempt to give them each equal pull, like the cords that enable a tent to hold its shape.

I seek to use my skills as a playwright and actor to take on LGBTQ issues, justice, privilege, and climate change while revealing the interconnectedness of these issues. I also throw in a Bible story. Within these different frames, I repeat core concepts knowing audience members will begin to see patterns emerge. In first performing my own very personal story, then an ancient Bible story, and finally the unfolding global story of climate change, I lead them to a synthesis of abstract ideas as outlined in Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning.

Act One
The first act of Everything is Connected includes me talking about my weird coming out experience coupled with a scene from my one-person play Doin’ Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House. The play comically exposes the dangerous world of gay conversion therapy—programs promising to “cure” LGBTQ people. As someone who survived seventeen years of this before coming out as gay, I want to highlight both the foolishness and the destructiveness of these “straight camps.”

The main character, Chad, a campy gay man who cannot tamp down his fem side, addresses the audience as if they just arrived for a tour of the house. This relationship heightens the audience’s experience; Chad addresses them as if they are totally on-board with the misguided facility.

Act Two
Something similar happens in Act Two where I talk about discrimination within the LGBTQ community—racism, sexism, and transphobia. I perform a scene from Transfigurations—Transgressing Gender in the Bible about Joseph and his famous dream coat; I suggest it might actually be a princess dress. I narrate the scene as Joseph’s butch, gender-normative Uncle Esau. Scornful of Joseph, he never once makes eye contact with the audience until the final line. There is a pause and deep breath as Esau lifts his head and in a husky whisper admits, “He saved us all.”

I imagine Clara is thinking, “What on earth does any of this have to do with climate change?” I am performing stories about outsiders rejected—a white gay man who loses male privilege in an Evangelical church and brothers who assault and exile their gender non-conforming sibling. I reference the HIV/AIDS crisis, Ancient Egypt, and my own working class Italian-American family. I’m throwing out threads and asking, “Aren’t we all in the same boat together?” I’m setting Clara up for Tony Buffusio in Act Three who weaves it all together.

Act Three
Tony, a working-class, bisexual, Italian-American from New York City, pokes fun at polar bears, explaining coffee is also an endangered species. He jokes how he came out bisexual and vegan at the same time; his family struggles more with his diet than his sexual orientation.

Talking about queer responses to climate change, Tony revisits the Joseph story as a climate narrative, reveals how early responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis serve as a model for climate advocates today, and stresses climate change is about justice and human rights, “We’re all in the same boat together—just not on the same deck.”

Then in an explosion of emotion ranging from rage to frustration to fear, Tony demonstrates what many people feel today. He next admits he’s been hearing voices from people in the future. “You don’t expect they have anything nice to say to us. But I’m confused by what they’re saying. They’re telling us,” and he looks out an audience member, “Thank you!’” He looks at another, “Thank you,” and another, “Thank you for everything you did for us!” He scrunches up his face puzzled, and ends the show, “So I’m thinking, what the hell are we about to do that they’re going to thank us for it?”

In a proper theatre, there would be a black out. Exit Tony. In this multipurpose room, I slip behind the lectern and say, “We have time for questions.” Deep, thoughtful questions emerge. They are hungry for solutions, to discover their role.

For fifteen years, I have been doing theatre for clients in venues that usually never hosted a queer theatrical production. These include the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, Hartford City Social Workers, Offices of Sustainability at Penn State, University of South Carolina, and Villanova, Haverford College’s Office of Religious Life, Boston Public Schools, Britains’ National Health Service, the Church of Sweden, the Norwegian Christian Student Movement, the Lambeth Conference, Vanderbilt School of Religion, Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia Theological Seminary, and a Mennonite Church in Pittsburgh.

The solo stage work of Whoopi Goldberg, John Leguizamo, and Lily Tomlin taught me marginalized people can use comic storytelling and character acting to communicate personal and political messages. These comic actors shape-shifted and embodied multiple personalities as they developed immediate and intimate relationships with their audiences. Unlike a traditional play with multiple actors interacting while the audience observes, the one-person comedy turns the audience into a character. We speak directly to them, casting them in roles.

Since I take on hot-topic issues in front of diverse audiences, I always expect someone to leave offended in a huff or to start an argument during the Q&A. Climate Change presentations can overwhelm audiences or they can become defensive. Instead after my shows people stick around. I hear laughing and chatting. I see people connecting with each other. Some approach me just to thank me. Others want to tell me their stories. There is a lightness in the audience as they disperse.

As I pack up, Clara smiles. “I get it now, and you gave me so much to think about!”

(Top image: Courtesy Peterson Toscano.)

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Using theatre, comedy, and character-driven one-person shows, Peterson Toscano explores LGBTQ issues, privilege, religion, and climate change. Peterson’s unique personal journey led him to performance art. After spending seventeen years and over $30,000 on three continents attempting to de-gay himself through gay conversion therapy, he came out as a quirky queer Quaker concerned with human rights and comedy. In 2017 Peterson produced Transfigurations—Transgressing Gender in the Bible, a film about gender non-conforming characters. Toscano studied theatre at City College of NY and has authored eleven performance pieces. He is also the host of Citizens’ Climate Radio.

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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I’m interested in water and the different pathways it takes. Not only the recognizable flow of rivers and glaciers, or global currents of air and sea water, but the obscure shifts of water from one state to another or across cell membranes. I’ve been tracing water pathways and their stories while developing ways to create environments as art installations.

I was given the opportunity to mount my first installation, Catch of the Day, at the Contemporary Art Museum in Mazatlán, Mexico. The exhibition consists of a 45 x 7 meters suspended fishing net. Woven into the net is a school of plastic fish and plastic water bottles with notes inside of them. A series of 11 monoprints hangs on the wall and at the entrance there are 10 wooden boxes containing children’s toys accompanied by lost and missing posters. Catch of the Day opened March 15 and runs until May 11, 2018.

Catch of the day is derivative of the work I started at an artist residency in Rota, on the southern coast of Spain. My objective during this residency was to investigate how the tide could leave marks on paper. This was to be an extension of work I started in Ireland but I soon realized my plan was physically impossible. What I did instead was start a deep listening practice. For 2 months, just before sunrise, I walked the beach for several hours documenting the tideline marks and collecting plastic and other shoreline flotsam.

Photo credit: Joyce Majiski.

In effect, each tideline is a drawing, telling the story of that day’s tides through the marks on the sand and what has washed up on shore. I discovered that the variety and abundance of plastic landing on the world’s shorelines is astounding. Each day’s harvest was strangely and inexplicably unique, revealing plastic toy shovels one day, bottle caps, colorful plastic straws, and cutlery the next. For an entire week I witnessed lines of persistent oily brown foam, which was suddenly replaced by huge amounts of white Styrofoam that disintegrated and flew along the length of the beach. Some items became buried in the sand or pushed further away from the water line with successively higher tides, but most of the garbage was carried away by the wind or returned to the water, in an endless cycle. When clothing and shoes tangled in bits of fishing nets appeared I was alarmed enough to speak to the authorities about the possibility of refugees capsizing in boats offshore. But I was assured that the currents and the refugees’ countries of origin made it almost impossible for this to be the case.

Day after day I returned to the tideline while researching current marine ecology issues. This led me from plastics and global dumping of refuse to over-fishing, habitat destruction, changes in salinity, and dead zones. I discovered that despite the many innovative solutions that are being developed to mitigate our destruction, the problems we have created are massive and seem beyond our capacity to repair.

In Mexico, I began to look at the situation from another point of view. What if a collective of creatures such as whales, seahorses, and coelacanths decided they were fed up with humanity using their homes as dumping grounds or with their fellow tuna being overfished – creatures fed up with the toxic waste, the thoughtless plundering of resources, the accumulation of garbage, and total disregard for sea life on this planet of water? This Ocean Administration would be comprised of the Departments of Plastics, Human Relations, Toxic Waste, Lost Objects, General Neglect (to name a few), and would address the issues, sending messages back to us in our own discarded plastic bottles. This became the first component of the exhibition Catch of the Day and I included eight letters from various departments of Ocean Management. Each letter is signed by one of the ancient sea goddesses, stamped with the Ocean Management crest and suspended throughout the fishing net for people to discover.

Photo credit: Miguel Angel Roman.

Also interwoven in the net are schools of plastic fish that I created using a technique developed by Canadian artist Laurel Paluck, which involves ironing plastic bags together to create “ocean leather” fish, beautiful and tough.

We often overlook that plastic degrades in the ocean, becoming a particle soup almost impossible to clean up. Microscopic filaments are ingested by microscopic creatures, which are in turn eaten by larger invertebrates and so on. The chemicals (and the plastic) bio-accumulates and since we eat the largest fish in the food chain, we ingest more plastic/chemicals than we know.

I wanted to reinforce this idea so I included a tray of gelatinous fish-shaped h’or doers at the opening reception that had people wondering “What exactly did I just eat?”

Another component of the exhibition is a series of 10 “precious” boxes containing intact children’s toys that I found washed up on the beach in Spain. (See photo at the top.) Lost and missing posters that depict these toys as precious objects accompany the boxes, alluding to the fact that if we took better care of our things, perhaps we wouldn’t lose or discard them. Our thoughtlessness leads to more consumerism.

Photo credit: Miguel Angel Roman.

The final element of the show is a line of 11 monoprints mounted side by side on the wall behind the fishing net. These multi-layered pieces start in the light blues of the shoreline, and gradually get darker as we move towards the ocean depths. The last two monoprints feature images of plankton and the shadow of a coelacanth rendered with glow in the dark ink. The monoprints represent the intricacy and beauty of nature, reinforcing the interconnectedness of all life. Ironically the viewer cannot get very close to this work because the net is blocking their way.

I was heartened by the many conversations I had during the installation and exhibition opening, often referring to a collective consciousness about how we exist in this world and what we leave behind for future generations. My aim is always to walk people through an environment with the hope of raising awareness and posing questions from different perspectives. I believe that humanity has the capacity to make change as long as there is a clear direction and the public and political will to support it.

I am grateful to all of the individuals who helped me during my research and hanging of the exhibition. Special thanks to Cecilia Sánchez Duarte, Director of the Museo de Arte de Mazatlán, for her vision, and to the Canada Council for the Arts for travel support.

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Joyce Majiski’s work examines connection to place within a context of global environmental concerns. Past careers as a biologist and wilderness guide and several artistic residencies have taken her to remote wild places contributing to her artistic practice. Moving between wilderness and urban landscapes, she seeks out connections between these environments and how humans live and find connection within them. Joyce’s North of Myth exhibition travelled to Finland, Sweden, and Northern Ireland. Her current investigations about water have been exhibited in Spain and Mazatlán, Mexico. She lives in the Yukon

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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When I was small, like most kids I loved to draw and was obsessed with animals. But as I grew up, my fascination never went away. I instinctively knew that art had to be an integral part of my life. I applied to schools and was lucky enough to be accepted into a prestigious college where I spent my first year immersed in foundation studies — drawing, painting, and sculpture. At the beginning of my second year, the time came to choose a major. Without giving it too much thought, I and the majority of my class chose illustration.

And so I began my artistic education in earnest. I learned to accurately represent people, places, and things on paper. I learned to boil down the concept of a magazine article or book and draw it in one frame. I learned pen and ink, watercolors, acrylic, and oil painting. I learned how to work with clients who needed to sell a product or an idea quickly and effectively. My work was not deemed successful unless the message and intent were easily gleaned in three seconds or less. Although I am grateful for the education I received, the career path this training led me to ultimately left me deeply unfulfilled.

Not wanting to live an unsatisfying life, I tried to figure out the reason for my discontent. It seems obvious now, but it took me about eight years to find that what I was missing was the ability to be regenerative to self and society. The concept of creating easily-digested images felt like I was fueling the capitalist machine and reinforcing our ever-shortening attention span. The more I researched, the more I realized I was not alone. Even the college that I went to, Rhode Island School of Design, now offers an MA in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies. The burgeoning fields of social practice and interdisciplinary art indicate to me that there is a whole generation of dissatisfied artists looking for ways to use their skills to find solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.

I chose to radically change the course of my artistic practice when I enrolled in an Interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Hartford. I sometimes find it hard to believe that both this program and my course in illustration fall into the same category of “art.” The artists that I have been introduced to in the last year, such as Mark Dion, Hope Ginsburg, Ernesto Pujol, and Linda Weintraub, have reminded me how art can be a powerful tool for social change, not just another trade to further the destructive goals of capitalism.

Through these and other artists, I have discovered the importance of making open-ended and sometimes ambiguous art. They have demonstrated why making work that requires contemplation and interpretation is so important in today’s fast-paced world. Slowly, I am learning to let go of the control over my own work that I cultivated for years as an illustrator.

Why is it so important to release control over your message? I have asked myself this many times over the past year. As a trained illustrator, it seems so fundamental that the point of art is to communicate. I still believe this to be true, but my understanding of the word “communicate” has evolved. An illustration conveys the client or illustrator’s point of view. It supports a campaign, article, or written piece. If it is successful, an illustration evokes the same response in most, if not all, viewers. The viewer understands that this is what they are meant to think or feel, and they move on. This happens to each one of us hundreds of times a day as we are bombarded with all forms of media. I believe it creates a numbing effect that cancels out the very intention of the work. Instead of feeling a certain way about an idea, we get so overwhelmed that we feel nothing at all. Apathy becomes a coping mechanism for most people just to survive the day.

When we create work that requires interpretation, we ask the viewer to stop, think, and most importantly, engage. Although we may not reach everyone, those who accept the challenge and create their own narrative begin to feel agency over the work. It becomes a collaboration through the mere act of a viewer’s engagement and interpretation. This connection is important because those who feel agency can begin to feel empowered to engender change on their own. It opens up dialogues that would not have occurred if everyone agreed on the subject and intention of a given work of art.

With many of my most recent paintings, I begin as an illustrator would with a specific story or idea in my mind. My painting E Pluribus Unum (2017) was conceived of when I read an article about the Trump administration’s decision to reverse the ban on lead bullets for hunting on federal grounds. This decision has led to thousands of raptors, including bald eagles, to die of lead poisoning in the wild. When I show the painting, I have rich and deep discussions with viewers because they see different things depending on their own experiences. Some latch onto the imagery, some to the text, others just to the colors and textures. Through this one piece, I have been able to discuss environmentalism, public policy, Greek mythology, race relations in America, the gun debate, and so much more. Although much of what has been brought up was not my original intention, I still feel a sense of satisfaction and success that I have never felt with an illustration, precisely because of these conversations.

Art in its myriad forms has many levels of power. It is often used as a tool for propaganda, but I believe its most potent use is to connect people through dialogue. I still use the skills I learned as an illustrator to point the conversation in a particular direction, but I no longer see any value in choreographing the conclusion to that conversation as well.

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Sophy Tuttle is an artist from Boston, Massachusetts whose work reflects her interest in politics and the environment. She received her BFA in Illustration from Rhode Island School of Design and is currently working on an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Hartford Art School. Her work has been shown extensively in New England, as well as nationally and internationally. Influenced by artists such as Walton Ford, Mark Dion, Alexis Rockman, and J. J. Audubon, her work calls attention to the environmental consequences of humankind’s collective values and decision-making in the Anthropocene era. 

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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We humans have been harvesting the wind for at least 5,000 years. A clay vase dating to 3500 BCE from Egypt’s pre-dynastic Naqada II period depicts what is considered to be the world’s first clear image of a boat under sail. The square sail illustrated on this vase, presumably made of linen, was used to propel early Egyptian rudderless boats upstream on the Nile River, catching the northerly winds against the flow of the river.

Photo of the pre-dynastic Naqada II vase. Reprinted with permission from the British Museum online.

It would take another three millennia before humans transformed the wind’s kinetic energy into mechanical energy to operate machines to pump water, grind grain or mill wood. Early records suggest that by 200 B.C., simple windmills in China were pumping water. In 9th century Persia, vertical axis windmills with woven reed sails were grinding grain. In 14th century Europe, horizontal axis turbines were reclaiming land from low-lying marshland. By the 17th century, the Netherlands was home to approximately 9,000 windmills. Rembrandt’s The Mill, part of the National Gallery of Art’s Widener Collection in Washington, is widely considered to be one of his most famous paintings.

Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606 – 1669), The Mill, 1645/1648, oil on canvas, Widener Collection 1942.9.62, National Gallery of Art.

But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that sapiens finally figured out how to convert the mechanical energy generated by a windmill into electricity. In 1887, the Scottish electrical engineer James Blyth built the first battery-charging wind machine that powered his cottage for 25 years. Later that same year, the American inventor Charles Brush built what is considered to be the first automatically operated wind turbine. It took another 100 years before multi-megawatt wind farms became commercially viable, prompted in part by the oil crises of the late 20th century.

But who, you might be asking, was the first artist to incorporate wind energy into a work of art? We may never know. Perhaps it was an ancient musician, who created – accidentally or intentionally – wind chimes of shells, bone, or bamboo. Wind chimes, a type of percussion instrument, are an example of chance-based music due to the randomness of the wind, which acts simultaneously as composer and player.

Or perhaps it was an Egyptian or Persian architect. Windcatchers (malqaf in Arabic; badgir in Farsi), also known as wind towers or wind chimneys, were a traditional Persian architectural roof-top structure designed to catch the prevailing winds to provide top-down natural ventilation and passive cooling within thick-walled buildings (often constructed partially or completely underground) in desert environments. So effective were windcatchers at cooling buildings that they were routinely used as a form of refrigeration in ancient Persia. The beautiful photo below of abandoned windcatchers near Yazd in central Iran was taken by Dave Ways.

Photo by Dave Ways, reprinted with permission from The Longest Way Home.

For a stunning contemporary interpretation of windcatchers, look no further than avant-garde Paris-based Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut’s The Gate Heliopolis, currently under construction in Cairo. Callebaut’s design includes nine oval “mega-trees” which function as giant windcatchers to suck prevailing winds deep into the heart of the building as natural (and free!) air conditioning in Cairo’s hot urban environment.

Another example of a contemporary artist inspired by wind energy is the renowned American sculptor Anthony Howe. I first wrote about Mr. Howe’s hypnotic wind-powered kinetic sculpture back in 2014. Since then, whenever I needed a creative fix – to be carried away by the beauty of his hypnotic artworks – all I had to do was visit his YouTube channel and start clicking away…

A 2016 headline in the Dallas News says it all: “Anthony Howe creates art that seeks to slow your heartbeat down and make your life better.” I promise you: this is not hyperbole!

In case you missed the opening ceremony of the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics, here is a video link of Mr. Howe discussing his massive two-tonne cauldron being “lit” by the olympic flame.  In an interview with PR Newswire, Mr. Howe explained that his olympic vision was “to replicate the sun, using movement to mimic its pulsing energy and reflection of light. I hope what people take away from the cauldron, the Opening Ceremonies, and the Rio Games themselves is that there are no limits to what a human being can accomplish.”

We Canadians are the lucky recipients of one of Mr. Howe’s most recent installations, right in the middle of downtown Montréal. Last year, Concordia University’s chancellor Jonathan Wener and his wife Susan donated Di-Octo II to their alma mater in honor of the 375th anniversary of Montréal and the 150th anniversary of Canada. This eight-meter-high kinetic sculpture now graces the northeast corner of De Maisonneuve Ouest and Mackay Streets.

Photo by John Mahoney, Montreal Gazette, September 2017.

Although most of Mr. Howe’s sculptures are powered by the wind, they do not (yet!) generate electricity. Perhaps we will have to leave this challenge to the next generation of kinetic sculptors. In the meantime, the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) is leading the way: encouraging artists and architects around the world to adopt “solution-based art practice” by designing public art and sustainable infrastructure that generate renewable energy within urban environments. One of their visions: clean power stations as tourist attractions.

We’ve come a long way since 3500 BCE. In fact, we’ve come full circle, back to the future: the very first energy revolution was renewable (wood, wind, water); the second was coal; the third was oil; and the fourth – which we are currently living through – is renewable once again. But tighten your seat belts! This time around, the 21st century version of the renewable energy revolution portends virtual power plants, energy democracy and the break up of energy monopolies within our lifetimes. The Holy Grail is finally within reach: a post-carbon economy. Artists can help get us there faster by creating positive stories of clean abundance and endless possibilities.

(Top image: Wind turbines by Joan Sullivan.)

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Joan Sullivan is a renewable energy photographer based in Québec, Canada. Since 2009, Joan has focused her cameras (and more recently her drones) exclusively on the energy transition. Her goal is to create positive images and stories that help us embrace the tantalizing concept that the Holy Grail is finally within reach: a 100% post-carbon economy within our lifetimes. Joan collaborates frequently with filmmakers on documentary films that explore the human side of the energy transition. She is currently working on a photo book about the energy transition. Her renewable energy photos have been exhibited in group shows in Canada, Italy and the UK. You can find Joan on Twitter and Instagram. 

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

The eighth in a year-long series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances and publications that are popping up in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.

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Although most commonly known as the author of Silent Spring, the 1962 book that is credited with starting the environmental movement, Rachel Carson was also what historian and author Jill Lepore described as a “scientist poet of the sea.” In her recent article in the March 26, 2018 issue of The New Yorker, entitled “The Right Way to Remember Rachel Carson,” Lepore describes Carson’s enduring love of the ocean and its shorelines. Lepore notes that all of Carson’s books prior to Silent Spring, including Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951) and The Edge of the Sea (1955), focused on her decades of research on the life of the sea and her daily observations of ocean life. Carson’s lyrical and captivating writing style, which reinforces her own sense of herself as a poet of the sea is reflected in this excerpt from her first published work, “Undersea,” an essay that appeared in a 1934 issue of Atlantic Monthly.

Who knows the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere. Nor can we know the vicissitudes of life on the ocean floor, where the sunlight, filtering through a hundred feet of water, makes but a fleeting bluish twilight, in which dwell sponge and mollusk and starfish and coral, where swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks. Even less is it given to man to descend those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss, where reign utter silence and unvarying cold and eternal night.

In 1964, right before she died and after Silent Spring brought environmental issues into public consciousness, Carson had been observing another puzzling phenomenon that, unfortunately, she did not have the chance to pursue. She wrote presciently: “We live in an age of rising seas…in our own lifetime we are witnessing a startling alteration of the climate.”

Rachel Carson observing the sea.

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is an internationally acclaimed poet and spoken word artist who was born and lives on the Marshall Islands, a remote chain of coral atolls located in the Northern Pacific Ocean halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Although she is not a scientist like Rachel Carson, Jetnil-Kijiner shares Carson’s love of the sea and her use of poetic language to express her feelings and concerns about the environment, especially her acute alarm about the rising tides that Carson had observed 54 years ago.

Jetnil-Kijiner’s poetry is focused primarily on her beloved Marshall Islands, which lay only six feet above sea level, the same six feet that scientists predict the seas will rise by the end of the century, and which are already experiencing significant tidal flooding once every month. According to Marshall Island Foreign Minister Tony de Brum, the island of his childhood is “not only getting narrower – it is getting shorter…There are coffins and dead people being washed from graves – it’s that serious.”

A seaside cemetery on the Marshall Islands that has been eroded due to rising tides. Credit: New York Times.

In 2014, Jetnil-Kijiner was catapulted from her relatively obscure presence as a “YouTube poet” into a highly sought-after global poet/climate activist after she was selected to perform as the Civil Society Speaker at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York City. In the poem she recited that day, “Dear Matafele Peinam,” Jetnil-Kijiner promised her baby daughter that she and an army of others would work ceaselessly to ensure that her homeland would not be overcome by the rising tides threatening its shores and that she would not become a homeless climate refugee.

This excerpt from “Dear Matafele Peinam” is followed by a video of her 2014 UN presentation.

dear matafele peinam,

you are a seven month old sunrise of gummy smiles
you are bald as an egg and bald as the Buddha
you are thighs that are thunder and shrieks that are lightning
so excited for bananas, hugs and
our morning walks past the lagoon

dear matafele peinam,
I want to tell you about that lagoon
that lucid, sleepy lagoon lounging against the sunrise

men say that one day
that lagoon will devour you

they say it will gnaw at the shoreline
chew at the roots of your breadfruit trees
gulp down rows of your seawalls
and crunch your island’s shattered bones

they say you, your daughter
and your granddaughter too
will wander rootless
with only a passport to call home

Since her breakout 2014 performance, Jentnil-Kijiner has been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts, including CNN, Democracy Now, Mother Jones, The Huffington Post, NBC News and National Geographic. In 2017, her first collection of poetry, entitled, Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter was published by the University of Arizona press, giving her the distinction of being the first published author from the Marshall Islands. Not limiting herself to poetry as her only form of action against the dangers of climate change, though, Jetnil-Kijiner has co-founded Jo-Jikum, an organization empowering Marshallese youth to “seek solutions to climate change and other environmental impacts threatening their home island” and has spoken all over the world on climate change including at COP (Conference of the Parties) 22 in 2016 and COP 21 in 2015.

As she warns in her poem “Butterfly Thief,”:

But what if we don’t save Tuvalu
what if bees and butterflies become extinct
what if our/my islands don’t survive

just who
do you think
will be next?

I’m taking you with me

As a poet lover of the sea and environmental activist, Kathy Jentnil-Kijiner is a legitimate heiress to the spirit and work of Rachel Carson.

(Top image: The Marshall Islands during a King Tide.)

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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist, writer, and educator whose work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Her latest bodies of work focus on the threat of rising tides caused by climate change, the trillions of pieces of plastic in our oceans and the wars that are predicted to occur in the future over access to clean water. She is also the co-creator of two interactive public art projects: The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and Home, which calls attention to homelessness and the lack of affordable housing in our cities and towns.

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog