This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Last year, I traveled to the Galápagos Islands. I felt I had stepped back to a place I recognized from my past but had only experienced in my imagination. As a child, when the world seemed so big and boundless, I explored landscapes like this, untouched by humans. But as I stood upon the volcanic rock of this dynamic ecosystem filled with life, I felt the fleetingness of its being in every step I took. Both beautiful and foreboding, I wanted to somehow envelop it, to enclose this place in a cavity of myself where I could keep it, protect it, defend it, and sustain it.

But, who am I? I’m not a scientist who can uncover data-based solutions. I am not a politician who can develop a multi-national logistical plan for action. I am an artist, and artists possess a unique and crucial skill – the ability to communicate. Scientists and politicians have their own particular vernacular, but artists have the ability to access that part of human interconnectivity that cannot be communicated through language. My artistic practice is a social practice – my task is to create methods and approaches that destabilize linear ways of knowing and understanding the world.

In December 2015, I created A Poem for Lonesome George dedicated to the last Pinta Island tortoise who passed away in 2012, 40-years the sole survivor of his species. The work was designed for the Boston Convention Center’s marquee – an 80ft x 24ft seven-screen outdoor video display. Inspired by the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko, I used the architectural structure of the building to create a memorial for George – its physical size a testament to the significance of George’s existence and his passing. I created the piece not only for George, but for us as well, because in 2012 on that research station in the Galápagos, a part of us died too. A part of our planet, a part of our humanity, and a part of our existence was gone. The work had its intended effect: people wanted to know more about George, and they expressed cross-species empathy for a dead reptile. That is the power and the possibility of art.

My recent project, Wish You Were Here: Greetings from the Galápagos, is a three-channel experiential video installation. As an interdisciplinary artist, I utilized an assortment of mediums and strategies: digital animation, photography, collage, traditional drawing, and live action video. The viewer stands in the center of the piece, with imagery in front of them and on either side. The left and right screens represent the change of the seasons and atmospheric phenomena – the original habitat of now extinct species. Extinct animals begin to emerge on these screens; they appear chronologically as they disappeared from earth. The middle screen is filled with still present animals, a composite of travel photographs I took in Galápagos. Slowly, they transition into extinct species by changing from color imagery to pencil sketches, then disappearing from the middle screen and appearing on the left or right. A human figure (me) moves within the landscape as both a guardian of collective memory and as an embodiment of present-day eco-consumerism.

The installation navigates the unsteady terrain between environmental advocacy and tourism, conservation and consumption, sustainability and exploitation. There is a tension between the exploitation of the natural world, and the desire to preserve and sustain it. I appear as the artist, studying and sketching these extinct animals – acting as an archivist or a dreamcatcher – attempting to write them into our collective memory. I also participate in conventional tourist-based activities: taking and posing for photos, relaxing, reading, doing bad yoga. I appreciate the animals, but am completely oblivious to their transformation and eventual relocation to the realm of mythology. Through all my actions, I invite the viewer to recognize themselves.

In my work, I often create fantastical landscapes that are intended to provide a physical representation of a mental space. This surrealist approach to communication exposes the limitations of language, and opens up a space for the viewer to explore alternate ways of accessing and connecting to the emotional realities of others. In this piece, I make reference to the earth as a conscious being that experiences climate change as trauma – impact in one sphere creates profound effect in another. I utilize abstracted brain scan imagery, animated synaptic flashes, and the interactive compartmentalization occurring on all three screens to convey the interconnectivity of human action/impact, as well as how our existence is directly linked to the existence of other species. I’m also interested in the tension between our ability to employ medical devices to “read” physical changes in the brain based on trauma response, and the blatant inadequacy of language to convey the actual experience of trauma. The piece concludes when an ominous sun – visually akin to popular atomic bomb footage – devours the entire landscape and the viewer is left alone in a pure white light. The explosion of the visuals is in stark contrast to the sound of absolute silence; there is no life remaining to hear the destruction of our world.

Ultimately, it is the interconnectivity of our existences that will save or destroy us. Wish You Were Here: Greetings from the Galápagos is intended to construct a quiet space for reflection on oneself and on one’s manner of engagement with the world. The meditative quality of the piece will kindle action by allowing time for reflection on our intimate kinship with other species. In today’s world, the space for this sort of contemplation is not readily available or even encouraged, but it is necessary if people are to make significant changes in their lives. My work creates an alternative space, a unique experience, in order to initiate a new dialogue about environmentalism. By providing the opportunity for a private moment, Wish You Were Here encourages radical thinking about the impact of our daily practices and the urgency of the challenges facing our planet.

(Top image: Wish You Were Here: Greetings from the Galápagos (detail image) by Allison Maria Rodriguez, 3-Channel Video Installation, 2017.)

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Allison Maria Rodriguez is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist working predominately in new media, film/video and installation. With themes ranging from human migration to data visualization, her work converges on a desire to understand the space within which language fails and lived experience remains unarticulated. Rodriguez’s work has been exhibited internationally in both traditional and non-traditional art spaces. Her most recent projects include several large-scale public art video installations commissioned by Boston Cyberarts and the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. She received her MFA from Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

About Artists and Climate Change:

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

Visual artists are often solitary creatures, drawing their creative inspiration from the world around them – music, nature, relationships, politics –working sequestered in their individual studios. This typical artist way of working has been thrown overboard by us – myself, a silk painter and environmental planner based in Boston’s North Shore, and Leslie Bartlett, a photographer and Cape Ann, Massachusetts local historian. For the past three years, we have been working together as an artist collaborative – SQ and LB Artist Collaboration. I work from a silk painting teaching studio/cooperative named Ten Pound Studio in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Ten Pound Studio. I bring my work to Les’ studio in Manchester, Massachusetts where we collaborate on our exhibits using Les’ computer and printers.

Our goal is to present – through silk paintings, photography, and montages of the two media – an emotional fusion of the art and science of climate change as it impacts Boston and the North Shore’s coastal landscapes. We draw deeply from our individual passion for pristine landscapes. Our past experiences of landscapes, however, are from two different countries, and two very different perspectives. I was born in Shropshire in the UK, a county of extraordinary beauty: green rolling hills, open fields still in agricultural use, the meandering River Severn, old castles, and Tudor and Stuart architecture. Leslie is from Epsom, New Hampshire and lived there before it was developed into many subdivisions. He knows the place as a rural town of remote houses tucked into deep woods of oak, ash, poplar and maple, where there were few open vistas but many opportunities to live quietly and deeply with nature. We both became artists in mid-life. I turned to silk painting after a career in urban and environmental planning; Les became a renowned photographer of the quarries and nature of Cape Ann following a sojourn as a juggler at Le Grand David Magic Company. Our collaboration is grounded in our desire to help natural landscapes survive intact and unsullied by human thoughtlessness, as well as in our commitment to high aesthetic standards in painting, photography and printing.

Skyscape silk painting, Shrewsbury, UK (left). Photograph of Magic Illusion, Le Grand David Magic Company (right).

We started off with an examination of the effects of sea level rise and storm surges on the North Shore coastal landscape. We worked closely with the environmental education department of Mass Audubon Society to understand the science of climate change and sea level rise in Essex County. Montages of silk paintings and photos of drowning iconic images followed in a series of exhibits on Climate Change and the Great Marsh; Storm Surge and Drowning Arthur Fiedler.

Exhibit of Climate Change and the Great Marsh, Ipswich, MA.

In 2016, we turned to looking at what makes a landscape resilient to climate change, drawing inspiration from scientific research on climate change resiliency by Dr. Mark Anderson of The Nature Conservancy. While walking through the quarries of Rockport, it occurred to me that the varied landforms – rocky coastlands, water-covered quarries surrounded by lichen-covered granite boulders left over from the quarry industry which deserted this area in 1930, forested wetlands of sumac and swamp white oaks – create a diversity of micro-climates. In turn, these micro-climates buffer the wildlife from the effects of climate change. The undeveloped lands serve as a stronghold for the natural habitats in the quarry landscape. Nature has a chance to survive. As an artist collaborative, Les and I decided to create an exhibit to illustrate The Resilient Quarry Landscape of Cape Ann. With the assistance of a local non-profit organization, we secured grants from Applied Materials, Essex County Ecology Center, and Essex County Greenbelt Association to create an outdoor exhibit of silk paintings and photography. The silk prints hung from 10-feet high copper stands, and two boards displayed graphics of the science of climate change resilience. The exhibit was in conjunction with a series of dazzling quarry dance performances by Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre over a three-day weekend at a quarry in Lanesville, Gloucester.

Quarry Dance 5 silk painting and photography exhibit, Lanesville, MA.

We collaborated closely with Windhover Center for Performing Arts, as well as Essex County Greenbelt Association, who ​owns the quarries in this locale, and who organized talks and tours of the area. The spectacular blend of nature, music, art and science is still remembered by people who came to this free event.

Today ‘resilience’ is a pressing topic for our Artist Collaboration, as shown on our website. Drawing on our Cape Ann work, we were invited to create a dual exhibit on The Resilient Landscape of Marblehead and Cape Ann: Viewed Through the Prism of Ecology and Stories for the Marblehead Arts Association, (MAA,) May 5 – June 18, 2017. We looked at both climate change resilience and the quarries of Cape Ann, and at community resilience, expressed through the preservation of nature sanctuaries within the town of Marblehead. To do this work, we spent the winter walking through many woods, ocean side preserves, and an Audubon Sanctuary, in Marblehead. We collaborated with a local storyteller, Judith Black, who introduced us to local historians and recently presented a program of storytelling with us at the MAA. Les found an extraordinary rock in the woods of Steer Swamp, with unique granite markings. The rock became an iconic image of the exhibit – in both photography and silk paintings. This August the exhibit moves to the Lanesville Community Center in Gloucester, MA; next year to Cornell University.

As an Artist Collaboration, we have the luxury of exploring concepts, themes, and artistic media in a collaborative fashion. For me, this makes the ‘work’ in artwork more exciting, and it pulls me into new directions. For Les, his love of rock and rural landscape gains a new focus when interpreted through my silk paintings – especially in the light of climate change.

(Top image: Collaborative collage of silk painting and photography, Marblehead Arts Association exhibit, 2017.)

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Susan Quateman is an environmental planner, who formerly directed the Mass Dept. of Transportation’s Open Space Program. After many years of working as an urban and environmental planner and landscape designer, she became a silk painter. Four years ago, Susan decided to combine silk painting with her environmental background, and focused on issues of climate change in the North Shore’s coastal landscapes. She has since exhibited her silk paintings solo and with Les Bartlett’s photography, in many Boston and North Shore locales. She has published articles in Silkworm, the Gloucester Daily Times and Marblehead Reporter, as well as Cornell University’s College of Art, Architecture and Planning Newsletter.

Leslie Bartlett is a Cape Ann Historian and landscape photographer who loves climbing down into abandoned granite quarries to photograph mineralized rock walls in their luminescent colors. His scramble and free rock climbing is enabled by his some 30 years of juggling with a Stage Magic Company in Beverly, MA. During his stint with the Le Grand David Magic Company he learned to wait as long as 25 years for the right image to appear before the camera lens. He has exhibited at the Cape Ann Museum and Rockport Art Association on Cape Ann, SOHO Photo in NY, twice at the Vermont State Capital, and at the Michigan State University Law School.

About Artists and Climate Change:

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

When my friend emailed me a link to that New York Times piece about a growing crack in an Antarctic ice shelf in February, I saved one of the images from the article to my computer. In it, the crack is a long, gray line on the white ice, like mechanical pencil drawn with an unsteady hand. An impossibly thin line, a few miles wide in real life, splitting the ice in two. The crack has grown in the months since I downloaded that photo, and soon it will break off entirely. The shelf will crash into the sea. The very old glacier behind it will begin to melt.

I open the file and look at it so often it feels like the crack is in my mind: widening, terrifyingly persistent, snaking deeper and deeper into the ice.
Six months ago, I began organizing an anthology of comics by some of my favorite experimental cartoonists to describe something that I’ve felt in myself and watched my friends experience, but haven’t always seen reflected in art: climate change grief. That hairline crack in consciousness, knowing that the earth is changing and dying. The emotion of the rift in the ice.
I’m a cartoonist. I make poetry comics—comics that use the motion of the panel and sequential image to make poetry. They’re not always narrative, often not linear. I’m interested in pushing comics forward into stranger, deeper waters, to see how the form can express human experience more precisely.
Warmer, open to a piece by Alyssa Berg.

The nuances of poetry comics are well-suited to take on climate grief. It’s a strange kind of grief, so big it’s almost impossibly abstract. Miles and miles of ocean, rising! Massive icebergs, melting, cracking, crashing into the sea! Entire species, crashing into extinction! Entire ecosystems, thrown off balance! A grief as big as the planet.
But it’s also small—a hairline crack so far away it’s nearly imaginary; small enough that I can sometimes go a whole day forgetting that anything has gone wrong. I go to work and come home again, forgetting for eight or twelve hours that anything is out of the ordinary.

Then I remember. In March, when the flower beds of Boston’s South End bloomed a little too early, only to be bitten back by frost. In February, when the weather was unseasonably warm, like a premature spring, and the sun was hot on my neck.

What are we supposed to do with this existential heartbreak, knowing that our world is dying?

What are we supposed to do with this unshakable feeling that our world is Good, and it is Good for people to live here; it is Good for ecosystems to continue on as they have; it is Good for families of humans and families of all sorts of animals to live, as they have done, since the beginning of creation? What are we supposed to do with all of this enormous, inexpressible beauty, and the enormous, crushing reality of the ways we are destroying it?

A great deal of art and design produced around climate change is created with the unconvinced or uninformed in mind. And while I am deeply grateful for the hard work of those who educate, and plan, and organize—and I do a little of that myself—I think that there is a deep grief, profoundly physical and spiritual, that comes with knowing what is happening to the world; a grief that needs to be addressed.

Out of all of this—the grief and confusion and half-willful forgetfulness—I decided to make an anthology called Warmer: A collection of comics about climate change for the fearful & hopeful.

Because here is the truth: I am confused, and I am scared. Most days I am tentatively hopeful, and most days I would prefer to forget all of this and never think about it again. I am angry at those in power, and I am angry at myself. I am grieving, abstractly, for people in nations I will never visit, full of families whose homes will be underwater soon. I am grieving for my hypothetical children, and their hypothetical children, and their hypothetical children. I am grieving for myself.

For the last six months, I’ve worked with my friend and co-editor, cartoonist Andrew White, to curate a collection of comics that engage with what we’ve felt ourselves as we’ve tried to come to terms with climate change. We gathered nineteen writers and cartoonists from around the world (and contributed work ourselves) to make a book of comics full of pain, and fear, and hope, and grief. Some are funny, some are mournful, all are strange and honest.

I decided to make an anthology because climate grief is difficult to face by yourself. It is a communal grief, a communal fear, a communal guilt. I brought eighteen other artists around me because it is easier to walk into a dark place when you’re with other people, even when you’re not sure what lies in wait for you.

One unexpected delight of making an anthology—bringing together a group of people from all different continents, with different lives and thoughts and ways of drawing—has been the diversity of expression.

Denmark-based cartoonist Tor Brandt and Minnesota-based cartoonist Caitlin Skaalrud both made apocalyptic comics that imagine a strange, difficult future. Others, like Virginia-based Andrew White (also my co-editor), and Washington-based Jonathan Bell Wolfe, crafted dreamy, meditative pieces that overwhelm with their quietude. And a few approached the enormity of the impending tragedy by looking very closely at a specific species—humpback whales and bees in particular (pieces drawn by New York-based Alyssa Berg and Minnesota-based Maggie Umber).

To be clear: I don’t have any answers. And answers are certainly what we need now, badly—answers about what should be done, how we ought to live, how we ought to deconstruct and rebuild our societies and governments and industries, to save our world.

What I do have—and part of what I need—is a book of gorgeous, scary, sad, strange, hopeful comics that remind me of my place in the world, and make me feel a little less alone.

We’re publishing the book with the help of Kickstarter. You can pre-order a copy, and help us make sure it gets to print, HERE.

(Top image: Cover art by Madeleine Witt.)

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Madeleine Witt is a designer, illustrator, and cartoonist. She is one of the co-editors of Warmer: A collection of comics about climate change for the fearful & hopeful. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. You can read her comics in Guernica Magazine, or on her website.

About Artists and Climate Change:

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

In Finale, by Kendra Fanconi, a single actor on stage addresses an audience member. “Friend,” the actor says, and asks that person if they can hold hands:

Okay, it’s a little freaky maybe and I have sweaty palms. But we are friends and we have opposable thumbs so I just thought. I mean, we are not the only one in the world with opposable thumbs. You should see the raccoons get into my compost. But you and I have this thing we can do with our hands that no other mammals can—that is the way our hands fold and our fingers do this. (Touches fingers to bottom of palm.) It means we can hold things tightly. It’s a defining characteristic of our species. It’s this powerful thing we can do. Can I take your hand? Will you hold mine?

They do, of course, and they even wind up slow dancing together, sharing a physical and social closeness that communicates itself powerfully to the onlookers.

It’s no surprise that reaching across the fourth wall is one of the ways contemporary theatre is engaging with the ecological crisis. After all, forging intimate bonds between actors and spectators has been a powerful part of political theatre for the past half century, formalized in genres like the happening, environmental theatre, and—more recently—immersive performance like the wildly successful Sleep No More. As such, it has a lot to offer to theatre engaged in the project of ecological consciousness-raising. Fanconi’s actor ends the play by stating, in the simplest possible terms, a new destiny for the theatre of co-presence in the age of climate change:

…fellow-human-who-can-hold-things-tightly […] don’t say a word. Just know that I am here, okay? When it feels very large and very daunting remember that. This is something we are doing together. Spinning around the sun. Very slowly. On the one planet we have. That the ones like us, who can hold things tightly, must save.

Actress Allegra Cox and director Brooklyn Robinson during the shooting of the film adaptation of Darrah Cloud’s TESS Talk at the Pomona College School of Theatre in California.

Many of the plays that emerged in response to the 2015 Climate Change Theatre Action project used forms of direct address to capture the range of feelings this subject arouses: urgency, fear, despair, rueful resignation, even savage mockery. Thus Darrah Cloud’s TESS Talk parodied the smug talk of the expert lecture circuit by giving its audience step-by-step instructions on “How to Deny Climate Change”:

Step 2: Join PEHA, People for the Ethical Hating of Animals. Let’s face it, guys. Animals are stupid. They can’t talk, they don’t wear clothes, they certainly don’t contribute to the economy by buying anything. They’re all victims of the developing world and we hate victims. Victims ask for it. They like being victims. They’re weak and ignorant and can’t even hire a good lawyer. And they smell. If your grandkids complain, take away their teddy bears and replace them with real taxidermy so they know what it is they’re whining about. That’ll stop ‘em! Hah!

These are just two of the many instances in which theatre addressing climate change is making powerful use of the representational strategies and modes of address developed over the past half century. But it’s doing something else as well: inventing new strategies that will align the theatrical apparatus—its conventions, protocols, and possibilities—with the altered conceptual frameworks offered—or necessitated—by climate change. My shorthand term for this new set of inventions is “Fifth Wall Dramaturgy.” Explaining it involves sketching in certain theoretical considerations, in particular about what else changes as the climate does.

Climate change, we’re realizing, goes way beyond climate. The changes coming—or already happening—affect every level of human activity and experience, including fundamental things like where we (can or cannot) live, what’s left for us to eat safely, and how we’ll think and what we’ll say about our species in light of our unplanned world-changing effects on this planet. Recognizing for the first time that we humans are a geophysical force—that our activities shape and hence are part of geophysical and ecological systems—forces us to expand the frames of our self-understanding. The fact that our current and recent lifeways have inadvertently affected such massive entities as the ocean (acidification, rising sea levels, etc.) and the polar ice caps (glaciers melting, ice sheets breaking up) tells us that our usual frames of self-analysis—mainly, the psychological, sociological, and political—are no longer adequate. We need to redraw the boundaries and expand the frame within which human meaning is created. We need to understand the human in its complex relation to the nonhuman, a relation that is both determining and determined, partly under our control, mostly outside it.

One of the first boundaries that climate change disrupts is also one of the most ideologically powerful conceptual structures of modernity: the boundary that defines a nation. As the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change signals in its very name, climate change doesn’t respect national borders. The nation—the master-fiction of the world politics of the past several centuries—is under attack from both economic and ecological directions. Economically, it is utterly undermined by globalization; ecologically, by climate change. The waves of refugees currently crashing on the shores of Europe are figures of both forces, and the incoherent political and moral response to their plight is evidence of how increasingly entangled the skeins of politics, economics, and ecology now are. When this entanglement suddenly produces an image that rivets the attention of the world—for example, the image of little Aylan Kurdi, the three-year old Syrian boy lying dead on a beach in Turkey—we are challenged to align these complex realities with our deepest emotional responses, challenged to balance our sorrow for Aylan with our feeling of helplessness before the forces that brought him to that beach: the devastating droughts that have displaced countless populations, in Syria, Africa, and elsewhere, leading to conflicts which become politicized (and which the media insists on representing as solely political or sectarian, ignoring their ecological dimensions and origins).

The image of Aylan that caught the world’s attention, and the many artworks that image has inspired, open a space for reflection about the new intersection of politics and ecology that climate change is ushering in at great speed. As climate change, sectarian conflict, and globalization increasingly make nonsense of the political power of nations, it is forcing us to reckon with that border that all countries share and that all have always ignored: their border with the atmosphere. Other than occasions when a country’s “air space” is “violated,” or when enemy bombs rain down on us, we rarely think of the sky as a political space. Climate change is challenging that assumption, forcing us to recognize that the ways we’re affecting or interfering with each other’s national spaces is not restricted to modes like trade, diplomacy, and warfare: rather, the carbon emissions of one nation can play an inordinately large role in damaging the ecology of distant places, with the atmosphere, our common border, serving as the major conduit—a “free” space: totally unregulated by the laws of nations, utterly uncontrollable by human beings, completely impervious to our species’ wall-building prowess. To begin to take this space seriously will require us to develop an “atmospheric” consciousness.

Looking up at the sky has been, traditionally and archetypally, a figure for aspiration. On occasion, as when we are exhorted to contemplate the vastness of the universe, it has been a figure for humility, a call to acknowledge the puniness of our humanity. Both moves are sentimental and inflated, whether in self-aggrandizement or self-effacement. The same two kinds of inflation are currently tempting the discourse around climate change. There are those who see in the looming crisis a chance for our species to make paradigm-shifting leaps in technological innovation and scientific mastery. There are others who see it as the twilight of human civilization, a time for mourning and letting go.

Fifth Wall Dramaturgy (and the “atmospheric imagination” it reflects) is an alternative way of “looking up.” It’s an activation of the “diegetic” mode of literary communication—the “telling,” as opposed to the “showing,” or “mimetic” mode—that ecologically-prescient modernists had begun to use decades ago to point to the natural world that always silently surrounds the clamorous social interactions on stage. To be sure, in the past that “view beyond the social world” had been fleeting, and decidedly dismal, as in the following moment in Pinter’s The Caretaker:

DAVIES: What’s that? A pond?

ASTON: Yes.

DAVIES: What you got, fish?

ASTON: No. There isn’t anything in there.

Pause

This is a “world” view only a shade less despairing than Beckett’s notorious one, voiced by Clov, in Endgame, as he looks out of the window: “Nothing.”

While twentieth-century playwrights registered only the alienating gap between the social and natural worlds, the views of the “outside” world registered by recent climate change plays see a great deal more. Looking up and beyond the social world, they see forces as powerful and as fearful as the supernatural forces that had reigned over the dramas of antiquity. Instead of wrathful gods and goddesses, the drama of climate change invokes, for example, pitiless physical realities. So in Run from the Sun by Daniel Gallant, we meet a man who’s been locked up, judged a “danger to myself” for being outdoors during the day without sunblock. “The sun,” he declares, “is my enemy. My antagonist and oppressor. I cringe when it rises.” But then, with a sudden surge of the self-delusion that has brought him and his species to this dangerous pass, he consoles himself: “But still, the sun doesn’t rule my life. I can walk outside anytime I want, between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m., covered head to toe.”

Besides expanding the dramatic frame beyond the social world, Fifth Wall dramaturgy also expands it temporally, pushing past cultural history to locate the human story in the deep time of the earth. In Original Fire, Kevin Loring offers a flash history of human civilization as a brief and deadly obsession with fire, a history of burning whose concluding conflagration could inaugurate a more elementally balanced history:

Maybe… we need to look away from the fire.

Maybe we need to look deeper into the water—

Maybe we need to look into the wind and the subtleties of the Earth.

Maybe we need to harness the other elements we take for granted.

In Jeremy Picard’s Martha, the expanded temporal frame includes past, present, and future, linking the habits and assumptions of an ecologically unconscious society to the far-reaching destruction they produce. Inhabiting the continuum, as the play invites us to do, realigns the human with the geological time scales that matter now:

When I turn my head to the left, you disappear. When I turn my head to the right, you are still here, even seven hundred years in the future.

You can see that far?

My neck is extremely flexible.

But if I’m still here in seven hundred years, what does that mean?

It means you also wish to invest in time.

Mother by Chantal Bilodeau, performed by Esther Sophia Artner at The Box Collective in Brooklyn, NY. Photo by Julia Deffet.

The view of the world that climate change calls for is a wide view and a long one. It is a view we must learn to borrow from the earth itself, from whose perspective the human is a complicated, fascinating, and—above all—evolving phenomenon. As the ageless voice of the earth says in Chantal Bilodeau’s Mother,

I should have seen it coming of course

I should have realized when you crawled out of the ocean

that something was happening

that something had been set in motion

But the truth is

it was all random

A little mutation here

a little mutation there

and boom

there you were

with your big head and your big brain

so proud of yourself for standing on your own two feet

The evolving human is the protagonist of Fifth Wall dramaturgy, trying out forms of ecological consciousness that are more attuned to the scale and complexity of climate change. To make that consciousness something more than an abstraction or a new kind of inflated self-importance, to make it a compelling theatrical experience, will require that intimacy not be sacrificed to achieve scale. And this is where the theatre’s unparalleled articulation of the literal and the metaphoric, the embodied human and his or her frames of meaning, can accomplish something that other art forms can’t as easily: expand the frame while preserving the voice, body, and emotion with which new ecological consciousness will be made. That is the voice, body, and emotion whose task it is to reach across inherited social and national boundaries, to break the fifth wall of anthropocentrism. “Look at me,” the earth’s voice instructs, “If I see myself in your eyes, I’ll know that everything will be okay.”

(Top image: Colin Waitt and audience member in Kendra Fanconi’s Finale as part of Where Have All The Glaciers Gone, conceived and directed by Erin B. Mee in New York City. Photo by June Xie.)

Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor and Professor of English and Drama. She is the author of No Man’s Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet’s Plays, and Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, as well as numerous articles on drama theory and theatre history in such journals as Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, and Theatre. Recent publications include Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, co-edited with Holly Hughes, and Ecocide: Research Theatre and Climate Change, co-authored with Shonni Enelow. With director Fritz Ertl, she has developed a number of theatre pieces using a process they call “Research Theatre,” and she has worked collaboratively with the artist Marina Zurkow, most recently in a multi-platform project entitled “Dear Climate.”

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Climate change does not feature prominently in the landscape that comprises literary fiction. When the subject does appear, it is far more likely to be in nonfiction work. Sadly, the writers who write science fiction, the genre to which climate change has been relegated, are not taken seriously by the literary world. They will for instance rarely be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Global literature has shown that mainstream writers regularly respond to war and national emergencies of all kinds, but somehow climate change has so far proved resistant to their interest.

In the modern novel, it seems that subjects like climate change move to the background, while as what we experience in our everyday lives and relationships moves to the foreground. As Amitav Ghosh explains in his book The Great Derangement, the techniques that are identified with the contemporary novel exclude climate change, because its science and effects are difficult to grasp, and not something which we deal with regularly.

Even if we look at the array of science fiction films and television series being produced today, we find they are weighted towards vampires, witches, extra-terrestrials, and secondary fantasy worlds. Very few of them address the subject of climate change directly. It’s an odd thing that just when we are destroying our biosphere, films and television shows remain focused on the human experience or on extra-terrestrial life.

Three years ago, I read the nonfiction climate change book This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. While Klein’s book was masterful, I suspected there would be many people who wouldn’t read it because of its dense content. To offer an alternative, I decided to write a fictional book on the subject. Thus began my adventures as a science fiction writer.

I had written three novels but never one in the science fiction genre. As I searched around for examples I might follow, I deliberately didn’t choose novelist Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy wrote the brilliant post-apocalyptic tale The Road, which follows the journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of civilization and almost all life on earth. Instead, like Andy Weir, author of The Martian, I focused on the science of climate change, and the practicalities of what it will take for human beings to survive it.

My book The Burning Years is a research-based, futuristic depiction of the struggle to survive on an earth that has been devastated by climate change. Alternative living environments are being created to sustain life until such time as the surface of the earth can heal itself and again become habitable.

This is the setting in which the story unfolds with its conflicts, challenges, and cast of characters exhibiting the best and worst of human nature. Beyond the story itself is a cautionary tale that urges us to take the stewardship of our earth more seriously.

If I had written a literary novel like McCarthy’s, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, I would have, like him, described the disaster not in scientific terms but through the thoughts and feelings of one or two characters. I would have shown these characters through the lens of the Anthropocene, and would have followed their interior dialogue and unfolding relationships as they experienced prolonged exposure to solar UV radiation. I would have described their pain as cancer rapidly spread to their lymph nodes and formed golf ball sized lumps throughout their bodies. I would also have described, either in the first or second person, their sight loss and slurred speech caused by lesions in their brains. I would have analyzed their humanness as they began to slowly and painfully waste way, losing everything and everyone they loved.

While this might have resembled the truth of what I imagine will happen, I couldn’t bring myself to write this story. Instead I chose to take a broader scientific and political perspective.  As part of this perspective, I focus on the neoliberals who are now in charge of our government. I analyze their motives as they heedlessly and cynically promote a high-consumption, carbon-intensive system, treating our atmosphere like a waste dump.

I wrote The Burning Years to inspire my readers to become involved in individual and collective actions that might increase the odds of our planet’s survival. As the great statesman and abolitionist Horace Mann once said: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

I hope my audience will come to realize at the end of the book that we are a society in love with the hyper-carbonized pursuit of short-term comfort, in the grips of worldwide political corruption, and plagued with wealth inequality and hoarding. I hope they will be moved to find practical ways to cut back on their own use of fossil fuels, and encourage their towns, cities, and state governments to do the same.

As I was writing The Burning Years, I knew in my heart that it would be well-nigh impossible for a society such as ours to change its economic system fast enough to prevent climate change. In the end, I had to acknowledge to myself that the book I have written is perhaps a prophetic warning of a mass extinction event, the proportions of which are beyond our capacity to grasp.

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Felicity Harley is a polished public speaker, published journalist, and writer. Her work has recently been published in an anthology called Gathered Light – On the Poetry of Joni Mitchell, alongside writers such as Wally Lamb, Kim Addonizio, Fred Wah, and others. In celebration of the 65^th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and on behalf of Poets for Human Rights, Felicity was the winner of the Anita McAndrews Award. In 2015 Felicity’s book of short stories Portraits and Landscapes, was published. The Burning Years, published in February 2017, is the first of a quartet called “Until This Last.”

About Artists and Climate Change:

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 makes people chase that utopian destination and what happens when they get there?

Since 2013 I have been interested in how humans interact with the natural world, and have found myself investigating islands – isolated islands, World Heritage islands.

The first island I visited was Lord Howe Island, 600 nautical miles off the east coast of Australia. I have been visiting this island since 2001. The large main island and several small outer islands form a National Park and World Heritage Site. In 1987, the local governing body decided to limit the number of tourist beds on the island to 400. Thankfully today, they have only 398 beds so aside from walking trails, the place remains relative untouched. It’s wonderful, except for the ocean pollution; a continuous stream of flotsam and jetsam washes up on the shores. In 2014, as part of an onsite residency, I collected the debris to see what was there. I was methodical; I selected three beaches, and went on three walks, picking up everything I saw. This resulted in my artwork Corpses of the Everyday (shown above), a continuous stream of text just like the continuous stream of debris that washes up on these beaches.

In 2014, I had the opportunity to travel to the Galapagos Islands, 600 nautical miles off the coast of Ecuador. Like Lord Howe Island, the Galapagos are designated as a World Heritage Site, but unlike Lord Howe, they appear to have no “real” restriction on the number of tourists who visit it. In my research, I was shocked to find out that in 1990, 40,000 people visited. Ten years later in 2000, 60,000 tourists stepped upon its shores. When I visited in 2014, a staggering 215,691 tourists from 159 countries clambered to see this “utopian” ideal of evolution. My two-week journey traveling on the Cachalote, which carried 14 tourists, was pretty standard. However, there are larger vessels that carry up to 100 tourists at a time. On any given day, 95 ships are circling the archipelago. This is not a small problem. Each ship has a water desalination plant on board so travelers like me can have fresh water, creating (in my analysis) a problem with the brine discharge. These ships are required to anchor in the same place at each island so the cumulative effect could be catastrophic to this fragile environment. It was possible to see the beginning of these effects already.

I was left feeling that I needed to bring light to this issue. The tourists are, with the government’s help, slowly destroying that which they covet. So, I created Towards Dystopia. This work is not just about the Galapagos but also about Lord Howe, about islands connected by water currents across the globe.  It takes the problem of desalination and uses a process of water purification as part of its core.

A petri dish sits on the floor. In it, a coral ceramic form resembles favia speciosa, unique to Lord Howe Island. The dish is filled with highly saline water and its content is pumped into an adjacent fish tank. Filled with the debris collected from Lord Howe, this tank works like a window to the unseen world.  Water flows to a tea urn, a metaphor for contemporary society in all its banality and inertia. The tank heats the water which then flows back to the dish, a closed water circuit flowing in the same way the South Pacific currents flow from the Galapagos to Lord Howe Island.  A projection of an air bubble floating to the surface from a reef travels across the screen, reinforcing the utopian holiday.

My discussion here is not just about the plastic that can be seen in the tank or its ominous shadow on the wall, but also about hidden elements. Each ceramic has the text from Corpses of the Everyday written on its surface. It is small, yet its presence is a reminder of the plastic we don’t see, the small pieces that remain hidden, the micro-plastics.

In January 2017, I decided to explore just how far our influence had gone and went with the not-for-profit group Ninth Wave to Antarctica. It was not an ordinary 19-day trip as we were beset by storms. However, we did manage to spend 2.5 days on Deception Island.

My reason for traveling there was the need to bring our everyday world and contemporary lives to this place of isolation, and confront our impact. The video/sound installation Deception uses videos I collected from street corners of various cities around the globe. Projected onto a melting glacier/ice floe, these images of our contemporary worlds – street scenes showing the everyday movement of our lives – open up a dialogue around the role of contemporary society in global warming, and how remote places are being affected.


These works with their interdisciplinary, eco-critical vision, transcend the traditional boundaries between sciences and the humanities.

Deception is about deception. It is not just the name of the place where the work was recorded, but it is the way we, as a society, deceive ourselves so as to not see what we know to be true. The deception of our governments is in not taking strong and immediate action. The deception of the oil industry is in working to hide the impact of its practices.

Given Australia’s history and ongoing presence in Antarctica, Deception is just one part of a greater dialogue intended to increase awareness of our actions, which have a ‘butterfly effect’ on such a remote, utopian destination – a place one would expect to be unaffected by our society. This work and the resulting exhibition show how we are effecting and affecting Deception Island. Because of its isolation and surrounding waters, it and its wildlife, remain virtually invisible to our world.

(Top image: Corpses of the Everyday, 2015. Catalogue of collected debris from Lord Howe Island, hand-stenciled on clear builder’s plastic 3600 x 5000 mm.)

Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger, MA, MFA, (Sydney College of the Arts) is an artist exploring the connections between science and art. Lea’s art works were recently shown at the Jane Goodall Foundation Symposium Brussels, Stunning Edge Exhibition Taiwan, the New York Hall of Science, Harbour Sculpture (Sydney), Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize and in her recent Solo Exhibition Deception at Accelerator Gallery Ultimo. Since 2014 Lea has been delivering papers that relate to her research and resulting artworks, at conferences including Affective Habitat ANU in Canberra; 2015; AESS at UCSD San Diego CA; ISEAHK2016, Hong Kong; Arts in Society at UCLA Los Angeles CA and lectured at Spektrum (in association with Art Laboratory) Berlin.

About Artists and Climate Change:

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

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What could I do with my rage, despair, and disbelief after the calamitous US election? My mind raced as I realized the new president’s intention to turn back Obama’s climate change protections and give free reign to climate change-denying, coal-burning, and oil-drilling billionaires. What would happen to our Mother Earth, our life-giving oceans, and our future generations?

On the eve of the inauguration, the only thing I could do was to make a political statement with my art, particularly on the topic of climate change and the oceans. Recently my digital collages have explored the beauty and serenity of sea shells and seashores with photography and scanned acrylic painting. Because of this work, it was an easy transition for me to make this statement using similar digital techniques, and visual elements of sea creatures and bodies of water. In this new series, the colors and shapes are more dramatic than the previous gentle images of shells and shores. The semi-abstract images could be harder to interpret, even with the titles and written descriptions that inform the viewer of various environmental issues. Some of my followers have found the new series austere, and some have seen the beauty in it, but all have been supportive of the new work.

Perhaps the most alarming of the collages is Coral Grief (pictured above). Ocean coral gets its purple, pink, and other colors from the algae living within it. Existing in a symbiotic relationship, the coral provides a dwelling for the algae, while the algae provide the coral with food. Coral reefs thrive within a narrow temperature range. Their fate is being challenged as the oceans absorb much of the heat created by global warming. When coral is stressed, it discharges its algae and becomes white or bleached, and vulnerable to death. A major bleaching event is considered one of the most visual indicators of climate change.

This image was produced by layering ocean and coral photography. With photo-manipulation, I was able to portray the coral as bleached. As I searched for an appropriate title, the term coral reef yielded to the reality of ‘coral grief.’

Temperature Rising, Betty Butler, Digital collage, 2017.

Temperature Rising is a visual commentary on global warming. Carbon generated over the ages is stored in Arctic frozen soils called permafrost. As global temperatures rise, melting permafrost releases this stored carbon in the form of C02 and methane gas. With this release, both of these powerful greenhouse gases are expected to exacerbate climate change.

For me, Temperature Rising became an amalgamation of earth and sun, with the sun clearly encroaching on the available space. I started with a photograph of waves in the cobalt-blue Gulf of Mexico. With a photo-manipulation program, I inverted the ocean, and it stunningly became a bright yellow-gold. Inversion is the equivalent to reversing a color photograph to that of a negative. I found it interesting that the yellow-orange area bears some resemblance to sun spots and the bright areas (faculae) that surround them.

As an artist, I am fascinated with the patterns repeated in nature, from the spots on sea shells, to similar spots on leopards. The photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of newly forming stars in the ‘Pillars of Creation’ could be mistaken for exaggerated cumulonimbus clouds that accompany earthly thunderstorms. If these visual patterns are connected, aren’t all creatures and systems similarly bonded and worthy of concern?

Coastal Question asks questions related to our coasts. For example, how will sea level rise affect our cities? Sea levels in South Florida could rise up to two feet over the next four decades. That puts Miami Beach – an island three miles off the Florida coast – at risk… The city is already experiencing sunny day flooding – days when there’s no rain, but high tides push water up through storm drains and flood city streets.

The execution of this image began with a scan of an acrylic painting overlaid with coastal photographs. Shapes were subtracted digitally from the watery scene in order to allow the painted color to reveal itself. A similar technique was used in Sea Change.

In Sea Change, variations in color symbolically embody the non-static nature of our oceans. Ocean waters are becoming warmer and more acidic, broadly affecting ocean circulation, chemistry, ecosystems and marine life.

From the very start, the big concern about global warming has been the possibility of a ‘runaway’ global warming and climate change. ‘Runaway’ (self-accelerating) global heating and climate change is the planetary tipping point of many tipping points combined. We must work diligently to prevent this worst-case scenario from occurring.

Working on this series about climate change and the oceans has felt satisfying and productive. Connecting with organizations such as Artists and Climate Change has felt empowering. Even as scientists and climate-activists are marching and organizing, I hope that artists lending their voice to this urgent issue will provide an emotional component that inspires positive action. In spite of climate-denier propaganda, many U.S. citizens are aware of the climate-crisis; it just isn’t on the top of their list of concerns. It is not as personal to them as the need to pay the rent, and feed and educate their children. I hope that the beautiful, inspirational and gut-grabbing aspect of art will bring the nation toward realizing that their children’s and grandchildren’s very future is at stake, as drought and coastal city flooding induce food shortages, mass migration, conflict and war.

(Top image: Coral Grief, Betty Butler, Digital collage, 2017.)

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Betty Butler is a nationally exhibiting artist, specializing in digital collages of her own painting and photography. She has recently participated in one-woman shows at the Frame Warehouse and Creative Coworking galleries, both based in Evanston IL. The artist has exhibited at Flow Art Space, St. Paul, MN and took part in a public art campaign in Niles, IL. Butler has won six awards, 2012-2017, in the new media category, from www.ArtSlant.com , an international contemporary art network. A native Chicagoan, she earned her B.A. in Design from the University of Illinois Chicago after studying fine arts in NYC.

 

About Artists and Climate Change:

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

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How to visualize social sciences research and theoretical thinking

In my doctoral research, I study how Arctic communities use and co-produce knowledge on the future impacts of climate change to their living environment, livelihoods, and lifestyles, as a part of proactive, planned adaptation to climate change. While my main professional role is one of a multidisciplinary Arctic social scientist, my goals as an artist lie within science communications and public engagement.

When doing my PhD research on climate change adaptation-related planning, I have noticed how difficult it is to predict the future impacts of climate change. There are knowledge gaps and uncertainties concerning the functioning of the global climate system and its feedback mechanisms, and especially concerning the societal impacts of the changing natural conditions for Arctic communities and regions. The unpredictability of human behavior in terms of politics, technological development, and consumption trends, for example, make it difficult to know what’s going to happen with greenhouse gas emissions in the long run and globally. The uncertainties multiply the further the time span stretches. To bridge this gap, in addition to sophisticated scientific, futurological, and planning-related methods, a lot of imagination is needed. Art and speculative visualization can help envision what the Arctic would look like after many of the projected changes have come to pass.

There is increasing awareness among researchers of climate change-related topics of the importance of communicating science through creative and interactive means, including interactive websites, games, and art exhibitions.

Still, when I started my climate change adaptation doctoral research in Sociology at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Finland, I wouldn’t have believed that some years later I would have my own photography exhibition around this topic. While research ethics would restrict or make it impossible to illustrate the actual data collection process through photographs of interviewees or planning meetings, and social sciences research largely takes place in unsexy surroundings – in front of a computer or at a desk crowded with books – other more creative and artistic ways to visualize abstract issues can be found.

The symbolic animal brings a message on Arctic climate change

My solution to the problem of making the visualization of social sciences research both ethical and interesting was to photograph a plastic polar bear figurine in natural environments in different parts of the world. Since the polar bear figurine has followed me everywhere, tucked in my pocket, over the last five years (2011-2016), the photo exhibition also tells the story of my journey towards obtaining a PhD.

A PhD Summer School in Design Research in 2011 inspired me to start working with artistic methods for conceptual work and science communications. I had the idea to start taking photos of the plastic polar bear figurine I had bought in Tromsø, in the Norwegian Arctic, earlier that year. The project became serious when I was awarded a science popularization grant in 2015.

Nanoq – Imag(in)ing Climate Change is my first solo exhibition. From its first showing at Arktikum Science Centre in Rovaniemi, Lapland, Finland, the exhibition was well received. My polar bear photos have traveled to three different venues in Finland and the US, including the Embassy of Finland in Washington D.C. in March-April 2017 where they were displayed as part of the 100^th Anniversary of the Independence of Finland. Several more showings are planned for 2017 at science fiction, science, and art-related events.

Through art, play, and imagination, the exhibition offers a way to visualize the possible worlds opening up because of climate change. It is both science communication and science fantasy. The hybrid photos, taken from 2011 to 2016 in different parts of the Arctic including Greenland, Iceland, North Norway, and Finnish Lapland, and also in India, create an artificial and imagined timeline of the impacts of climate change from icy to hot climatic conditions.

Polar bears live at the edge of the Arctic sea ice and are considered marine mammals. They are one of the world’s largest predators and their diet consists ideally of fatty seals and other marine mammals. As the Arctic sea ice melts, they lose their preferred habitats and must seek new homes in order to survive.

Because of the expected 30% or more decline in the global polar bear population over the next 35 to 40 years, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has declared the polar bear a vulnerable species. This charismatic animal is actually not relevant to my doctoral research, which focuses empirically on Arctic regions outside of its range, but as a symbol of Arctic climate change, it conveys the complexity of the problem with powerful conviction.

Polar bears are sometimes seen at some of the sites I visited in West Greenland and Northernmost Iceland. Indeed, “nanoq” is the Greenlandic word for “polar bear.” Most of the photos, however, were taken in regions where polar bears do not live, such as Finnish Lapland, the Arctic sea coast of Northern Norway, and Southern India. This is how I was able to simulate a change in the polar bears’ living environment from icy to ice-free conditions.

To create the illusion of a life-size polar bear in (most of) the photos, I worked with perspective and paid attention to elements of composition such as viewpoint and depth. In the photos, the polar bear figurine is seen mostly alone, but sometimes it is accompanied by other plastic animals or even living things. By placing a small-scale polar bear in the same frame as a large-scale one, even a short distance in depth (15-20 cm) between them helps to create the illusion of life-size polar bears standing far apart, and at a distance from the photographer. In some cases, it looks as if the photos have been taken from a helicopter. Moreover, I used natural elements that exhibit self-similarity, which can cause a confusion of scale and hence help create the illusion. It is quite astonishing, for example, how a pebble can look like a boulder when a tiny plastic animal figurine is placed next to it, or how snow-covered rocks on a fell top can look like a mountain range. Snow and ice too can take self-similar forms.

The plastic polar bear figurine has physically traveled to all of the places seen in the photos – it was not added afterwards through image editing software. As such, my artistic work method could also also described as, or has elements of, photoplay.

The main question I have been working with when making the Nanoq exhibition is how to visualize climate change in order to make it knowable and understandable. Through my artistic work, I hope to communicate science and encourage audiences to imagine and discuss possible worlds of the future, and specifically with the Nanoq exhibition, to envision what climate change may mean in practice in the long run. My aim is to encourage people to ask “what if?” In addition to bringing Nanoq – Imag(in)ing Climate Change to new audiences, I hope to make the exhibition more interactive in the future by organizing public engagement events to study the use and co-production of knowledge on climate change.

(Top image: The opening of the exhibition at the Arktikum Science Centre. Photo: Johanna Westerlund, Arctic Centre.)

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Ilona Mettiäinen is a researcher at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. In the winter of 2017, Mettiäinen was a Visiting Arctic Fellow at the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire in the US. Mettiäinen is currently finishing an Interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Lapland on the use and co-production of knowledge for planned adaptation to climate change on a regional level. She also lectures on Arctic Human Geography, Sustainable Arctic Tourism, and Collaborative Planning Methods. In December 2015, she represented the Arctic Centre at the Arctic side event of the UNFCCC Paris Climate Conference.

Filed under: Ilona Mettiäinen Tagged: Europe, Photography

About Artists and Climate Change:

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

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We really didn’t know what to expect. The last time I was in Washington, DC was for the Women’s March, and that exceeded any and all expectations. My grandparents, who live outside of DC, were not optimistic; no one was talking about record-breaking crowds for The People’s Climate March. A handful of my friends planned to march in New York City, and I knew of some others who had ventured down to DC for the day, but it was impossible to know how many people would emerge. One thing was for sure: it was going to be hot.

On the Metro into The District on April 29, we commented on those amongst us who were also heading in for the March. One element from the Women’s March we missed was the unifying pink hats. But we were welcomed by a woman from Seattle passing out homemade stickers touting phrases like “Science Matters” and “Demand Better Government.” When we got downtown, it was clear who was there for the March: just about everyone! Due to construction (intentionally planned for the day of this major march?), we rode a bus towards the National Mall. One of the first groups we crossed on our way to the March lineup was a group of young children and their parents, all dressed as little bees, and escorted by a Queen Bee. It was heart-melting (and while the little “bees” were already melting from the heat, the gesture was not lost). In the shade, we found the lineup, amongst the Defenders of Truth constituents, including scientists and educators. The signs were various, colorful, and witty. The March organizers focused on Climate, Jobs, and Justice, and it was clear from the start that this March was about those things, and everything in between. We set off through the streets of the U.S. capitol, in solidarity with the scientists around us, and the thousands of other concerned people of all backgrounds that poured into the streets with us.

En route to the White House, we crossed Trump International Hotel. Marchers erupted in sets of “Boo” and “Shame,” but also in celebratory music. I can’t capture this energy in writing (you can listen to this moment from the March , via Google Drive), but the big-band musicians elevated our marching, supporting our walk through the heat and accompanying our political action with some groovy tunes. At once, a march about climate justice buoyed other justice issues, like political justice. As our country’s power dynamics impact everyone who lives here (and around the globe), so do the decisions of those with that power.

In addition to the giant puppets, beautiful signs, and joyous music, there was organized creative action for individuals to participate in at the culmination of the March. Unlike at the Women’s March, people were invited to leave their signs on the lawn at the base of the Washington Monument, to be organized in a huge pattern, spelling out “Climate, Jobs, and Justice.” It was a simple yet impactful way to showcase the signs, in all their variety. We also participated in The Climate Ribbon project, an initiative of the arts-activism organization Beautiful Trouble. Starting with the question “What do you love and hope to never lose to climate chaos?,” participants engage in a personal ritual, tying their answer via ribbon onto the “tree” and claiming another’s ribbon to take with them. The installation itself is striking – from afar, we were trying to gauge what kind of “wall” it was – and the element of personal participation was fun and thoughtful. It was a reflective way to take something tangible from the day.

It’s about the Planet, the economy, our humanity, politics – power. Who has the power to make decisions that affect billions of individuals (humans and non-humans included). The mix of political, cultural, and environmental issues encapsulated by the crowds spoke to the multipronged-ness of climate justice. It’s about a safe, healthy environment for all, yes, but it’s also about economics and race and gender and more – because all categories cross-cut the lived experience of occupying Planet Earth: our shared climatic system. How fitting that the 2017 People’s Climate March was on a day of record-breaking heat. How fitting that this Climate March was geared toward jobs and justice. How fitting that this March was intentionally politically-charged. In this way, this Climate March continued a culture of resistance, offering modes of practicing disruption of the oppressive powers-that-be. We all have the power to incorporate resistance into our daily lives. So, let’s keep it up!

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About Artists and Climate Change:

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