By Hanna Cormick

INTERSECTIONS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS AND DISABILITY

For some of us, the crisis isn’t coming, it’s here: air we can’t breathe, water we can’t drink, food and resource scarcity, sun that blisters our skin, pollution so thick that everything becomes a poison. I have been living inside a sealed room for five years, disabled by the environment that we have created through our actions.

I have a rare immune disease, but the systems of my body are not wildly different from a regular person, just accelerated, amplified. My cells, ravaged by the effects of humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, have mutated, and through the damage done to my body by the toxic environment we have created around us, I feel the damage we do to the planet. I may be in the vanguard for humans, but I’m alongside a host of other early climate casualties that don’t usually have a voice: animal and insect species going extinct, glaciers melting, coastlines disappearing, and bushland aflame.

I wasn’t listening to the tremors that were running through my cells
that were the same tremors running through the coral, the sea-bed, the roots
that we are not on the Earth, but of it

– The Mermaid

I’m especially susceptible to air pollution, though what classifies as a pollutant is perhaps more broad than you realize: if someone walks past me with a coffee, I’ll have a seizure because of the way the dairy particles pollute the air; I can’t open the window of the single room I live in because if a neighbor has hung their laundry out, the petrochemicals in the fragrance of their laundry powder will trigger my mutated white blood cells to mount an allergic response, causing respiratory distress. To need an EpiPen because of the fossil fuels in someone else’s perfume or the odor of their takeaway meal is an observably direct example of how our little – and what we assume to be personal – actions affect those beyond us; your lunch invades my cells, the planet is inside my veins.

My performance artwork uses my body as a metaphor for the damage we do to the Earth. But it isn’t really a metaphor. We are indivisible from the planet; the damage we do to it we are also doing to ourselves. Our environment shapes us, our function and identity, as surely as the organs inside our body and the thoughts in our head. The social model of disability interprets disability as the barriers that are created by the environmental and social structures we find ourselves within. This is in specific contrast to the outdated medical model of disability, which interprets disability as stemming from something being “wrong” with one’s body.

RADICAL VISIBILITY

The Mermaid, my first performance artwork after a three-year art-hiatus, debuted in 2018 at Art, Not Apart, a festival in Canberra, Australia, with later remounts at Ainslie + Gorman Arts Centre for I-Day 2018, and Sydney Festival 2020. This work was my “coming out” as disabled; for years, I had been hiding my illnesses from my colleagues and friends with a subterfuge of vague excuses and radio silence, but with this work I claimed my new identity in a public act. I put my body at risk to speak out and be seen – a radical action against the shame borne of internalized ableism and the cultural invisibility that facilitates us hurting each other and our planet.

The character of the mermaid is a symbol of the social model: in the water the mermaid moves freely, but on land she presents as disabled; it is the environment, not her body, that creates the barrier. The Mermaid asks us to consider what our shared resources are and how our pollution of those resources disables the people, creatures, and systems around us.

Placing my real mobility and medical aids – a wheelchair, oxygen tank, full-face respirator, saline IV drip, and body orthoses – against the image of a mermaid, I spoke of my experience of disability, illness, and climate in the same space as the public. This sharing of space, however, meant sharing the air, and it ran the risk of triggering serious allergic events, including anaphylaxis, seizures, dystonic storms, and episodes of paralysis, which could “interrupt” the work at any moment, any number of times. The audience found their places inside the ruins of the abandoned coal tunnels of the Coal Loader â€“ an old coal processing station, now turned sustainability center, on Sydney Harbour’s edge – but, if they were wearing fragrance or cosmetics, they were asked to move to an upstairs area or the rear of the space. Segregation, something routinely experienced by the disabled, affected their access and framed their experience.

This risk variable was built in to the structure of the piece with a kind of dark and irreverent humor. For example, a mast cell seizure, which left my body thrashing about on the floor in a state of complete vulnerability and lack of agency, would result in very loud surf rock music playing as assistants held up cue cards and reiterated through a megaphone that I was having an allergic reaction, what it was potentially triggered by, and the audience’s complicity in that event. These medical events happened ten times over the two years in which the work was performed; sometimes not at all, sometimes multiple times in one showing.

Why expose myself to this danger and put moments of such fragility and trauma on display?

Invisibility is the mechanism that allows us to continue to operate in a mode of “business as usual,” safe from the threat of retribution or the crush of guilt; if someone, or something, isn’t acknowledged, you don’t need to acknowledge its rights, or the suffering that your actions cause it. We also create a system that perpetuates that invisibility through the mechanism of stigma and shame. These are true for many forms of oppression and exploitation, not just victims of the climate crisis. And I knew that giving in to those internalized feelings of shame would only facilitate further oppression.

Invisibility doesn’t make the problem go away; I am at the mercy of these systems whether I am in public or not. Shining a light on my own situation is also a means of shining a light on other people, species, and ecosystems, especially those who do not have the capacity to speak out or the privilege of a platform, as I do.

SICK PLANET

On the ride back from the hospital, I saw the rocks peeking from the mountainside
and I felt like I looked at the ancient face of the country
And I said: “help me, I’m sick”
And it replied: “me too”

— The Mermaid

The Sydney Festival season of The Mermaid in 2020 coincided with the catastrophic bushfire emergency in Australia. Enormous swathes of land had been destroyed by mega blazes, fire tornados and pyrocumulonimbus storms. The air was thick with a bright orange haze and the taste of ash. Suddenly, people were wearing respirators to go outside, like me. They had to seal the cracks where the air seeped into their houses, and they could smell smoke particles from an event miles away that blew into their bedroom. They started to realize how the air could hurt them. Their experience was catching up to mine, the Earth was starting to wear her sickness visibly.

As I write this, COVID-19 is sweeping the globe, and other people’s lives are again starting to mirror my own; a hyper-awareness of the vectors of transmission between us, our safety at the mercy of how others use our shared spaces, and the loneliness of being excluded because of a hostile, contaminated environment. We are starting to understand that we are all participants in this global event, and we need to work collectively to prevent the contamination of the air in our lungs, the fluids on our skin, and the people around us.

CANARY IN THE COAL MINE

In contrast to the embodied practice of The Mermaid, my work Canary, a short-form piece commissioned by the Arctic Cycle for Climate Change Theatre Action 2019, highlights the absence of my body. I was interested in the way privilege can be leveraged in activism – particularly the sort of activism that puts one’s body on the line. I drew inspiration from the way allies encircle and protect marginalized protestors at Black Lives Matter marches so that they would be arrested instead of their peers, or the way the often-denigrated white middle-classness of Extinction Rebellion protestors (or of outspoken protestor celebrities) affords a kind of safety. Protestors with privilege can go out there and champion their message, and if they are arrested, it ends up as a slap on the wrists, whereas for other marginalized people, that same arrest for that same action could result in incarceration, unemployment, deportation, violence, or murder. It is the responsibility of those with privilege to use it to protect the planet.

As someone who is vulnerable to harm in situations that implicate my body – though predominantly through immunologic rather than carceral channels – I became intrigued by the use of a surrogate to participate in civil disobedience. Not as a replacement of one voice for another (always something to be wary of), but as a conduit for the marginalized voice to be present without risk. I wanted to see how this could be extended to my protest-art; if, as a performer, my body could be manifested through someone else.

Canary asks another body to stand in for my body, an activism by proxy in which my absence becomes the illustration, and, like The Mermaid, asks the audience to be aware of their complicity and their responsibility in making the space inaccessible for me and those like me. The text weaves my own medical story with that of a revenge-fantasy uprising of coal mine canaries. A dark humor is again present in these tiny bolshie birds who strip themselves naked and propose to revolt against a world who used their suffering as an exploitable tool to assist fossil fuel extraction. It challenges us to reflect upon all the different “canaries in the coal mine” – those we have relegated to being our early warning signal, the climate casualties who pay for our safety and convenience with their lives – and how we might instead leverage the privilege of our own bodies to protect theirs.

And they are almost forgotten
In the silence of their absence
Forgetting also
That their silence
Is the warning

— Canary

Our minds are formed and reformed through the medium of culture – that is to say story, which means text but which also means image and movement and shared experience. My performances committed the subversive act of telling the stories that society is trying to hide, of showing things we try to avoid – our own fragility, our culpability as oppressors – for us to sit in the discomfort required to instigate change.

These artworks are not just stories but actions: the act of placing one’s body in a state of precarity to illustrate a hidden reality, the act of transforming a moment of real private suffering into a public political message, the act of standing in or speaking for beings who cannot, the act of breathing air with an audience and making them aware of what is in that air, the act of creating a visible image for the invisible effects of our actions. The process of creating these artworks was also an action of revolt against the unsustainable systems that I, as an artist, was guilty of perpetuating.

THE SHOW MUST NOT GO ON

Just as healing the climate crisis requires not individual solutions but an overhaul of our current social and economic system, creating these artworks revealed to me that accessing these stories within my body would require entirely new modes of working. Becoming disabled forced me to become aware of not just how my body was a stage on which our damage to the planet played out, but how the “extractivist” mindsets of our culture underpinned my relationship with my body and my art. I used to treat my body as if it were a limitless resource for me to use to achieve my aims; I worked grueling hours and pushed myself until I collapsed, I believed I could mold my body into a machine in which any weakness was to be conquered through trying harder. While I preached the need for sustainability, social justice, and relationships between ourselves and our planet that prioritized communal and interdependent care, my most intimate of relationships, and perhaps therefore the most honest – with myself – was championing these capitalist, hyper-extractive ideals.

In the past, if a task was too large, a hurdle insurmountable, a deadline too close, I’d dig in and push through, and accomplish the “impossible.” I was willing to burn up every part of myself in the service of my art – and quite specifically in service of producing proliferate results from increasingly scarce resources: time, sleep, food, headspace, energy. But this new awareness forced me to embrace attributes I would previously have derided – slowness, incapability, surrender – and to preference a sustainable relationship with my body over productivity; to treat my body as I would want to treat the Earth, and to admit that, sometimes, the show must not go on.

Exhaustion, overwork, proliferative output, and stress are lauded in theatre; how many artists are in multiple projects at once, working multiple jobs to make ends meet, demanding impossible hours and physical/ mental/ emotional energy from their bodies without adequate physical, mental, or emotional nourishment? But when I became disabled, that “resource” of energy was suddenly precarious and finite, and I had to admit that I was not capable of doing everything alone – whether that meant getting in and out of my wheelchair, feeding myself, or making artwork. The web of connectivity that we exist within became tangible and necessary to my survival.

I dug deeper and deeper into that dwindling reservoir of energy
With no thought for how or if it could replenish
I wanted to take my health back by force

— The Mermaid

We fetishize strength and independence, and label weakness and dependency as things to be conquered – but it is precisely this conquering narrative (how industrialist, how colonialist…) that prevents us from learning how to work in cooperation. We do not need to conquer and mold nature, and we do not need to conquer or “cure” our bodies. We need to work with them.

Interdependence is our resilience. Radical connectivity is our rebellion. An inclusive sustainable design of our spaces and society needs to reject the anthropocentric attitudes of modern human culture – our societal structures should also cater for animals, plants, and complex ecosystems in recognition of how we are all connected as one planet.

And so, in this climate crisis life, my art and the way I made it have had to change. I still struggle. It will always be a struggle so long as I am within an industry that idolizes extractive behavior, in an environment that is built for a very particular type of species with a very particular type of body. But if our stories change, what we value changes – and then our practices can change too.

(Top image: Hanna Cormick in The Mermaid. Photo by Sydney Festival, Daniel Boud.)

This article was originally published on HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on April 28, 2020.

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Hanna Cormick is a performance artist with a background in physical theatre, dance, circus and interdisciplinary art. She is a graduate of École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and Charles Sturt University’s Acting degree. Cormick’s practice has spanned many genres and continents over twenty years, including as a founding member of Australian interdisciplinary art-science group Last Man To Die, one half of Parisian cirque-cabaret duo Les Douleurs Exquises, and as a mask artist in France and Indonesia. Her current practice is a reclamation of body through radical visibility.

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By June Arderne, Keni Fine, Ruby, Silvia Peláez

Reader-submitted stories of the COVID-19 pandemic, in no more than 100 words. Read past stories here. Submit your own here.

HUGS IN THE DISTANCE

Every Mother’s Day, I take my Mom to her favorite restaurant. She smiles, embraces me, and shows her happiness through the brightness in her eyes. This May, I just send her roses and lilies and we have a face-to-face call. I can see the fear and sadness she hides. 

We begin talking about the coronavirus, but as the conversation progresses, we relax, appreciate the opportunity to connect through technology. We laugh and feel close thanks to the hugs and kisses thrown at the screen. When we say goodbye, we have hopes to get together again.

— Silvia Peláez (Mexico City, Mexico)

* * *

THANK YOU, SUNRISE

Although we may be living in a sad, boring, and confusing world right now, there are still ways to stay happy. I would like to thank the youth-led Sunrise Movement for bringing me happiness and motivation during the coronavirus crisis. The climate crisis is still happening, people! Sunrise is an incredible movement and it is what keeps me going. I now feel I have the power to make change in a world where, unfortunately, most don’t feel that way. Listen to the youth. They know what’s real. Thank you Sunrise, for giving me courage during these unprecedented and scary times.

— Ruby (Ithaca, New York)

* * *

TUNING IN TO NATURE

I sweep up the leaves that have turned red and dropped, aware that the seasons are changing as I am. I focus on the garden and my daily visitors. A bird hops onto my bird bath and a praying mantis is spotted on the wall. I welcome these joyful new friends and hope they have come to stay. The vegetable patch is developing and other creatures make holes in the leaves. I am trying to accept and thrive instead of battling to survive. By tuning in to nature, I let my mind flow like water and reflect it like a mirror.

— June Arderne (Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa)

* * *

THE VIRUS OF GREED

Trumpish billionaires are especially thriving in quarantine. How?

The richest New York City billionaire landlord does it through wanton disregard. Disregards a court order to fix chronic leaks until the ceiling collapses. Catastrophic flooding destroys a sweet lady’s apartment. She loses belongings, furnishings, and her thirty-plus-year rent-stabilized home.

Sickened from mold, immune compromised, homeless for over two years, with zero compensation from the billionaires, she’s vulnerable, quarantined in yet another friend’s house.

Papers arrive! Settlement? Finally? No, billionaire landlord’s still suing for thousands of dollars in “back rent” – for when she was homeless.

The Virus of Greed persists. Superspreader President, no vaccine.

— Keni Fine (Astoria, New York)

(Top photo: Skylines: Deconstructively Evicted.)

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This series is edited by Thomas Peterson. One of the editors of Artists & Climate Change, he is also a theatre director and researcher whose work focuses on the climate crisis.

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Thomas Peterson

“Too much propaganda masquerading as art.” This was the first comment that appeared on Instagram when HowlRound Theatre Commons shared my recent essay on the necessity of creating plays that tell local climate stories. At first I was a little miffed – it’s hard not to be when someone summarily dismisses your work or accuses you of propagandizing. “Was I really promoting propaganda?” I worried, as thoughts of Goebbels, Riefenstahl, D.W. Griffith, and other horrifying propagandists swirled in my head.

The word propaganda comes from the Latin propago, both a verb signifying increase and a noun signifying a new layer or shoot produced by a plant. This latter usage of propago continues in English, meaning a layer or branch laid down to root – propaganda has always been green. 

Moreover, for all its negative connotations, propaganda is often defined as a value-neutral term, referring simply to communication that seeks primarily to influence its audience or further an agenda. The Enclopædia Britannica entry on the subject commences by defining propaganda as “dissemination of information – facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies – to influence public opinion.” While I would certainly be embarrassed to promote manipulation based on rumors and lies, I realized that deliberately influencing public opinion by disseminating facts and arguments was precisely the goal of the kind of climate storytelling I aimed to encourage. 

I had also recently seen some stunningly beautiful works of propaganda, thanks to the Criterion Channel’s streaming archive. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove seemed like all the evidence I needed that art and propaganda were not mutually exclusive categories –that great works of art could also be designed to influence public opinion. In a world badly in need of many new carbon dioxide-absorbing shoots, or propago, making climate propaganda seemed particularly apt.

Nevertheless, I thought about this Instagram comment for days. “Too much propaganda masquerading as art.” The term “masquerading” stung, as it implied a binary between art and propaganda and invoked the deceitful manipulation associated with the worst kinds of the latter, but my main gripe was with the words “too much.” We don’t have too much climate propaganda masquerading as art. In fact, we have far too little climate propaganda, whether framed as art or not.

We are in a climate crisis; fewer and fewer people dispute this consensus. This is the most consequential crisis, the most complex challenge, the highest impact threat ever faced by humans, not just directly but also because of the threat to the ecosystems that sustain us as well as countless other species. Effective responses to global crises have historically required mass mobilization, and the mobilization required to transition to a zero carbon economy will be greater than any yet achieved. Previous crises, such as the Great Depression and World War II, only instigated such mass mobilizations through the organized development and dissemination of propaganda.

In the past several years, it has become commonplace to describe the shift needed to respond to the climate crisis as akin to the American mobilization for the Second World War. Whole organizations and movements, such as The Climate Mobilization, are founded on this premise, and the idea of a World War II-scale response has been echoed by voices ranging from Bill McKibben to the Democratic Party Platform Committee. The American mobilization for World War II was supported by a massive, largely government-funded propaganda campaign, eventually coordinated by the United States Office of War Information, which used every available artistic medium – from Hollywood films to posters – to build support for war production and encourage popular animosity towards the Axis powers.

The Green New Deal and its variants – the most prominent and comprehensive plans to mitigate the climate crisis – also harken back to a mass mobilization. While the propaganda that accompanied the New Deal was not coordinated by a single office like the efforts that would later accompany the Second World War, Franklin Delano Roosevelt rallied the country through “a hodgepodge of media efforts carried out by an alphabet soup of agencies,” as Stephen Duncombe put it in a piece on â€œFDR’s Democratic Propaganda” in The Nation in 2008. Duncombe acknowledges that “many progressives today have an adverse reaction to propaganda,” but insists that this aversion is naïve: it was only through such mass persuasion that Roosevelt was able to mobilize the country for the greatest expansion of the welfare state and equalization of the economic playing field in American history.

The New Deal also provides the best historical precedent for government-supported art-making on a mass scale. Under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Writers’ Project employed over forty thousand artists in the late 1930s. While these projects did not exclusively produce propaganda, many of the more prominent works created by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) were explicitly anti-capitalist, or advocated for labor rights or racial equality. Notable examples include One-Third of a Nation, a Living Newspaper play about housing inequality; FTP director Hallie Flanagan’s communist play Can You Hear Their Voices?; and Sinclair Lewis’s theatrical adaptation of his anti-fascist novel It Can’t Happen Here. Is it too much to hope that a Green New Deal might include a New Green Federal Theatre Project?

To be sure, the climate crisis is not a war and it is not an economic depression, though it will likely precipitate both. Nevertheless, it will fundamentally alter our societies in ways that resemble changes wrought during wartime and after economic collapse.

Given the magnitude of the crisis we are facing, the necessity of a mass mobilization to mitigate its impacts, and the success of artistic propaganda campaigns in moving public opinion in the past, I argue that artists have an ethical responsibility to create propaganda for climate justice, for a Green New Deal, for an end to the burning of fossil fuels. This work will also challenge the denialist propaganda that the fossil fuel industry has funded and produced for decades.

We must, of course, be wary of the potentially alienating effects of the term, as it can imply an intent to mislead or dupe. Why use the term “propaganda” at all when it carries such alarming baggage, particularly in a twentieth century context, when the propaganda agencies of repressive regimes come immediately to mind?

I embrace the term because it helps me to throw away my learned squeamishness about art that is politically instrumental, about art that wears its politics on its sleeve. The dominant critical framework in Western art tends to condemn didacticism, favoring a politics that is couched in metaphor over a politics that is unambiguous.

Creating overtly political work on climate may in fact be preferable to the alternative: the climate crisis as metaphor. After reading Paul Elie’s recent essay in the New Yorker, â€œ(Against) Virus as Metaphor,” I returned to Susan Sontag’s â€œIllness as Metaphor” and â€œAIDS and its Metaphors.” Sontag argues, as Elie elegantly paraphrases, that illness metaphors “hinder the rational and scientific apprehension that is needed to contain disease and provide care for people. To treat illness as a metaphor is to avoid or delay or even thwart the treatment of literal illness.” Perhaps to treat climate as metaphor – to insist that to be made legible, climate change must be layered atop a plot or subject at the human scale, as metaphor for interpersonal violence or other suffering – is both to hinder the “rational and scientific apprehension” of the rapidly worsening conditions for human life on this planet, and to “delay or even thwart” our response to this almost unimaginable crisis.

The climate crisis leaves no time for subtlety, and little room for metaphor. We have firm climatological deadlines: ten years, quickly slipping towards nine, an atmospheric carbon dioxide level of 418 parts per million – for the first time in at least three million years – and climbing ever higher.

I use the term propaganda because we artists have an ethical obligation to communicate this urgency, and to say it clearly. Your climate art should be so explicit in its politics that a fossil fuel executive or a banker funding extraction projects or a reactionary politician pushing climate denial would never choose to buy it or attend your performance. And if he did (for they are mostly men) he would understand that he was being called to account.

If using the term propaganda liberates you to create work like this and frees you from the fear of scolding critics or Instagram commenters who tell you that art should not be didactic, that art should not impose its views, then I think propaganda is a useful term, and one I proudly claim. Make climate propaganda (the good kind). Lay down new roots, propago.

(Top image: Still from “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” illustrated by Molly Crabapple, directed by Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt.)

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Thomas Peterson is a theatre director and researcher whose work focuses on the climate crisis. He is an Artistic Associate with The Arctic Cycle, co-organizing Climate Change Theatre Action. He recently returned from a Harvard Williams-Lodge Scholarship in Paris, where he wrote a thesis on the aesthetic of the sublime in the theatrical representation of the Anthropocene. He created Roy Loves America, a multi-form performance piece about Roy Cohn, and is developing an original adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, set on a dying planet. His engagement in climate activism stretches back to high school, when he led a successful fossil fuel divestment campaign.

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Anna, Kaatje, Sebastien, Jaya, Paige, and Sophie, Cora Pearlstein, Jason Wallin, Judy Fox

Reader-submitted stories of the COVID-19 pandemic, in no more than 100 words. Read past stories here. Submit your own here.

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

The world turned upside down… inside out… falling apart… a worldwide pandemic. Stopped in our tracks. How do any of us respond? How quickly or slowly do we face the facts and become willing to change? This is a unique moment in our lifetime. It is devastating, and, at the same time, it opens up possibilities to be different. We are collectively and individually faced with our mortality, our vulnerability, our uncertain futures.

When things don’t seem to work anymore, what do we turn to? Yes, making art, writing, planting, creating, cooking, imagining… appreciating beauty, nature, sunlight.

— Judy Fox (Lenox, Massachusetts)

* * *

ART IN CRISIS

I was supposed to be in King Lear this spring. Instead of canceling our show, my incredible director decided to continue, via Zoom. Theatre is the one constant in my life, the art I turn to when the rest of my world is in shambles. I feel so lucky to have something that I love, even in the midst of chaos. I turn to theatre when I can’t do anything else. I get to see friends, be creative, and genuinely love something I’m creating. Now especially, art grounds me, keeps me sane, and reminds me of beauty in the world.

— Cora Pearlstein (Seattle, Washington)

* * *

CONSPIRACY OF BATS

We are told that this is the era of man, the Anthropocene. As the fog of “civilizational progress” momentarily lifts, however, a forgotten nature emerges through the veil of toxic pollution, birds sing in the absence of noise pollution, and animals territorialize spaces long thought conquered by humans. Perhaps this suggests a new epoch after the Anthropocene, when the world designed by man will be revealed to be but one world – and hardly the best of all possible worlds. Here, we encounter the horror of civilizational design and the myriad worlds it has disappeared in its march toward oblivion.

— Jason Wallin (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada)

* * *

I KNOW BUT I WONDER

I know it’s for the best but I wonder when it’ll end
I fear I like this better but I wonder: is loneliness worse in a crowd
I say I’m okay and I wonder if they’re lying too
I hear politicians but I wonder what’s true
I touch nothing; is nothing enough?
I know I care; am I a counterfeit angel?
I hear people feel alone but isn’t that what they always feel?
I see my opponent; how can I defeat them?
I touch when I’m wanted, but I wonder: can I reach out first
I love and I wonder

— Anna, Kaatje, Sebastien, Jaya, Paige, and Sophie, ages 13 to 16 
(Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

(Top photo: 100 Watt Productions: The voice of youth on the climate crisis.)

______________________________

This series is edited by Thomas Peterson. One of the editors of Artists & Climate Change, he is also a theatre director and researcher whose work focuses on the climate crisis.

 

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Aarushi Bhaskaran, Alyssa Cokinis, Barbara Curzon-Siggers, Kara Gibson

Reader-submitted stories of the COVID-19 pandemic, in no more than 100 words. Read past stories here. Submit your own here.

TIME MOCKS MY PAUSED LIFE

My room’s filled with half-unpacked boxes from a year ago and suitcases containing half my wardrobe. We moved here, I went off to college, and then I just didn’t have the time. Didn’t. Have. Time. All I’ve got now is time. Time to make this feel like home, like it’s mine. Fairy lights tucked in a corner to sometime adorn my wall, a poster in a box, my old Casio keyboard. I’ve got the time. Someday this’ll feel like home. I think back to my dorm, roommates, classes, job — the start of a life. My life. Someday.

— Aarushi Bhaskaran (San Jose, California)

(Top photo: The wall of my dorm room the week I left.)

* * *

YOGA MEANS “UNION”

“Change.” And no one moves. “Interlock your fingers and grab your right foot, three inches below your toes.” And nothing. An intake of air as I prepare to repeat the instruction, and suddenly the video jumps forward: the grid of bodies are miraculously mid-posture. I see a gallery of incongruous body parts, depending on camera angles. The individual breaths I monitor so closely are now a mystery to me. Instructing yoga virtually, I rely more now on a dimension of faith. Zoom! Their hands are in prayer and their eyes are shining as we close the practice. Namaste.

— Kara Gibson (Geneva, Switzerland)

* * *

BURIAL

Autumn leaves and unseasonably warm evening breeze – the new normal – spread across the path, soon fraying russet remainders will fall onto the turned soil. I buried my little feline, my sanctuary and comfort, dear embodiment of solace, in solitude – the new normal – all I have to give now are the shedding trees and tears. Alone, an old woman squinting in the moonlight, yearning, my soul is curled about that small frame beneath the earth. Resurrection isn’t likely.

— Barbara Curzon-Siggers (Clunes, Victoria, Australia)

* * *

LIFE’S LITTLE STRINGS

Second semester never started in Shanghai. My MA hangs on a virtual thread, my classmates and me as little strings connected to my instructor’s Zoom panopticon, or perhaps it’s not theirs to be in charge of. I wasn’t supposed to move to Salem yet, but here I am, with my loving partner, and still we long for our Iowa homes, his still there and mine long gone. Maybe I just want my mom. My belongings are separated by an ocean. There is no crossing it anymore; the US has made sure of that. Bad news, online school: the only constants.

— Alyssa Cokinis (Salem, Oregon)

______________________________

This series is edited by Thomas Peterson. One of the editors of Artists & Climate Change, he is also a theatre director and researcher whose work focuses on the climate crisis.

———-

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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By Ross Travis

“Welcome to the cosmic sideshow, where you human cockroaches are the main act.”

Thus begins the sardonic diatribe of the eternal Harpy from the land of mythology in Tempting Fate, my satirical sideshow entertainment reflecting the house of mirrors called climate change. This original one-man bouffon show, in which I play 32 characters, balks at the science, bemoans the social impacts, and screams in horror at the political divide. You find yourself laughing at the grotesque hyperbole and the fantastically fecund characters bedecked in disdain and hubris. You see Mother Earth talk trash to those who bite her tit while suckling her life-giving abundance.

Tempting Fate, which premiered at Little Boxes Theatre in San Francisco in May of 2019, is the third work produced by my company, Antic in a Drain. The company’s mission is to combine circus and bouffon to develop extreme characters and tell stories from the fringes, igniting dialogue and change within communities around ignored or taboo social issues. Over the last six years, my work has satirically skewered humankind’s exploitative relationship with nature. My primary modus operandi is a traditional, grotesque, satirical form of physical theatre called bouffon, which was codified from many traditions (including the medieval Feast of Fools celebration, the satyr plays of the ancient Greeks, and the shamans of Native American tribes) by the French theatre provocateur Jacques Lecoq in the fifties and sixties.

My calling to create work about the interactions between humans and the earth springs from a childhood growing up in the nature of rural Colorado, and from the way I’ve seen humans neglect and burden the earth and its creatures throughout my life. I have lived in San Francisco for the last ten years, and have seen first-hand how coastal communities in the San Francisco Bay Area (and around the world) are threatened by climate change. What I saw and learned while living in the Bay Area sparked the creation of another work of mine, Bucko: Whaleman!, a swashbuckling spectacle that plunges a satirical harpoon into the heart of manifest destiny and white privilege from the bow of maritime history and literature. 

We are currently feeling a surge of the effects of climate change: out-of-control wildfires, island nations displaced due to flooding and superstorms, and a global pandemic of a novel coronavirus. I am terrified and deeply sorrowful about the issue; how are there those who still do not believe in climate change? Political, corporate, and religious leaders use the word of God, misinformation campaigns, and capitalist rhetoric to indoctrinate their citizens and divert their attention. In order to understand the points of view of these influencers and their constituencies, I must empathetically dive into their perspectives and approach what I find through a humorous lens.

But I’m an equal opportunity offender. Great satire is not black and white like agitprop. Great satire leaves us dwelling on the complexities of our complicity. So I also take a plunge into my own bias and the ways in which the political left is also apathetic or hypocritical. Bouffons have no allegiances and no alliances, they are free agents, funhouse mirrors, alien inquisitors. Imagine, if you will, a group of pleasure seeking, fun loving aliens landing in the middle of a war zone in Syria. “Oh! This is how they have fun on this planet!”, they say to each other in their alien tongue. They then begin to act out the atrocities they see before them like children at the playground. The humans stop and see their own behavior being replicated before them in all its grotesque hypocrisy, they laugh at the absurd portrayal of their actions, they empathize with the plight of their foes, they weep in catharsis.

With this in mind, I do my best to adopt a neutral perspective and soak up as much as I can from all sides of an issue. During my research and development period, I take a head-first plunge, conducting interviews with experts, listening to podcasts, reading books and articles, and watching documentaries and films. I try to become as much of an expert as I can. Then I find what games I see being played and identify who all the players are, who is complicit and in what ways. I replay these games and scenarios for the audience through grotesque characters, gratuitous ritual, song, and ecstatic play. 

In Tempting Fate, the characters include a tempestuous harpy straight from the land of mythology, bringing an ominous reminder from the gods; a former oil executive, now a sustainable farmer at a Climate Changers Anonymous meeting (struggling with the difficulty of his new off-the-grid life in a yurt with a backed up compostable toilet); and a liberal cheerleader for team Human, trying to keep her squad positive as they get clobbered by team Climate Change (who are kicking international climate change through team Human’s goal posts and uprooting the lives of millions of their fans).

I question whether or not someone can be truly changed by a piece of theatre, but I dream that they might be. Bouffon is the theatre form I’ve found with the greatest potential to make people examine their most firmly held convictions and biases. It’s my belief (scientific proof pending) that the laughter elicited by the comedy in a bouffon performance opens the audience so that when the tragedy of the material is presented, they are more apt to consider new perspectives. The emotional rollercoaster of this form, the extremity and vulnerability that it requires, the fact that no one is safe and every perspective will be challenged (even the creator’s) can be very humbling and disarming. This is perhaps exactly what we need when we have all retreated to our tribes and armed our “bubbles.”

Tempting Fate will be touring nationally and internationally as soon as the quarantine restrictions are lifted and it is safe enough to do so.

(Top image: The Harpy, from Tempting Fate. Costumes by Lydia Foreman, masks and puppets by Ronlin Foreman, written, created, and performed by Ross Travis, directed by Ronlin Foreman. Photos by Eric Gillet of Shoot That Klown.)

____________________________________

Ross Travis is an award-winning actor, creator, bouffon, physical comedian, and circus performer (specializing in Chinese pole), who has studied with world-renowned master pedagogues, including Dodi DiSanto, Giovanni Fusetti, Ronlin Foreman, Stephen Buescher, Dominik Wyss, and Master Lu Yi. Ross has developed three shows: The Greatest Monkey Show On Earth, which won the Artistic Risk Award at the Vancouver Fringe Festival and received two nominations at the 2016 Theatre Bay Area Awards, winning for Outstanding Costume Design; Bucko: Whaleman!, which premiered at San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park in 2017; and Tempting Fate, which was nominated for seven 2019 Theatre Bay Area Awards, winning for Outstanding Creative Specialties for mask design.

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Eileen E. Schmitz, Finley Baker, Kathryn Coleman & Abbey MacDonald, Talisa Flores

Reader-submitted stories of the COVID-19 pandemic, in no more than 100 words. Read past stories here. Submit your own here.

THEY DON’T NEED ME I NEED THEM

I look out my back door, I gaze at the yard birds. I keep them stocked with food. They don’t need me to survive, but I need them. I need to feel a tiny bit of responsibility for the microhabitat of my backyard, I need to feel like I am helping in some way. It is so quiet, besides the house sparrow and red-winged blackbirds chirping and arguing. I feel helpless and out of touch with the normal flow of time and existence. But when I look out at my birds, I feel the ground beneath my feet again.

— Finley Baker (Lochbuie, Colorado)

(Top photo: The gift of a lazuli bunting.)

* * *

RUN

I used to run to be a part of something. I used to run to be happy. Then one day I stopped. Who’s to say why, but I always felt as though something was missing. Now that my days are endless, within the same four walls, running has found me again. Now I run to stay sane. Now I run to see the world. My world, my neighborhood, becomes much more beautiful with each crack and crevice I pass. Running will always make everything feel alright.

— Talisa Flores (Fullerton, California)

* * *

BECOMING CO-CONSPIRATORIAL

Isolation gives cause to become curious about our personal, environmental and circumstantial contexts; the subsequent actions we enact from in-between these spaces have tangible impact upon the people we encounter and the places we traverse in life. How does our tending to various terrains shape our ways of being in the COVID-19 world? Something special happens when you find a co-lab-orator, co-con-spirator – more importantly when in isolation. Tending to ideas, imagining across sites and being curious through digital connections offers new spaces to create that were not found before. Being between opens a co-space.

— Kathryn Coleman & Abbey MacDonald (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia)

* * *

FISHTAILING

On the final day courthouses were open I became legally divorced for the first time. Next week marks the one year anniversary of my then-new husband’s shocking departure.

Relying more on bubble wrap than good sense, I packed up boxes of his pans, clothing, his late wife’s ceramics. He says I broke nothing.

I’ve reorganized closets for one, bookshelves by theme, with no sweet mementos of us.

Yesterday I found six kitchen bowls, his, then texted him a photo. No ransom, I’ll deliver.

High road weary from giving, returning, and cheer. He says he loves me; this misery loves isolation.

— Eileen E. Schmitz (Sequim, Washington)

______________________________

This series is edited by Thomas Peterson. One of the editors of Artists & Climate Change, he is also a theatre director and researcher whose work focuses on the climate crisis.

 

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Julia Levine

I thought I had retired from my Persistent Acts series. Then a pandemic happened, and I felt many a creative spark! This installment looks at my very personal sense of home, reviving Persistent Acts after a year-long hiatus, and focuses on one of my favorite creative-action tools, Beautiful Trouble.

Over the course of this pandemic, I’ve been reflecting on my role in the municipal, national, and global theatre ecosystems that I occupy. I am a generative theatre artist – I develop and direct new work out of collaborations and research. I am an arts administrator, managing a marketing department at a performing arts venue in downtown New York City. I am driven to support a culture shift toward a more just and sustainable world, which I get to do as Artistic Producer of The Arctic Cycle. 

Over these past few years, my personal theatre work has taken a back seat to my arts administration work, and I’ve been expanding what theatre and the arts in general mean to me. I’ve also been volunteering with Sunrise Movement, supporting young leaders for a Green New Deal (GND), by sharing resonant stories across social media and by phone banking for GND candidates. Galvanized by Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns in both the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, I am determined to see GND champions elected to public office this year.

At the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic, I felt like my mind, body, and soul were preparing for crisis-mode. Like others across the country, I wanted to prevent the spread. I was like one of those matches in the animated depiction of physical distancing. Then I burnt out. Not because of COVD-19 directly, but mentally and emotionally. My entire nervous system got overwhelmed, similarly to how my laptop overheats and crashes because it hasn’t been replaced in a decade.

What I’ve been experiencing over the past eight weeks or so is all relatively manageable, given that I’ve been able to move and get out of the city that I’ve called home for nearly five years. I had to and got to take a break, thanks to my incredible network of supports – my family and friends. I’ve spent more time outside in these past few weeks, I’ve been making changes to my diet, I’ve been reevaluating my routines. The extended quality time, with people I care about, has been glorious.

I’ve been noticing my tendencies, and reflecting on the more-than-human world. I’ve needed a lot of space in my life to heal – which looks different for me now than it ever has. I’ve stepped back from work and the news, taken screen breaks and social media breaks. Yet, my creativity flourishes; the joy and pride that I take in my collaborations has been a motivating fuel. I’ve been returning to my creative spaces with care – both for myself and my collaborators – as we all negotiate these uncertain times.

I’ve hit a reset, because of my burnout. I’ve been reintegrating mindfulness into each of my senses, including my sense of self. It’s been scary as hell, and hilariously absurd. In addition to nurturing creative collaborations, I’ve been curious about my conceptualizations of home. Home is my apartment in New York City. I don’t have a childhood home to return to, and that’s been the case for the entire time that I’ve lived in New York. So when I needed to take a break from home, where could I go? Where could I take refuge?

In my apartment, I was flourishing. I was consuming some amazing art: The Overstory by Richard Powers, Beyonce’s Homecoming (the documentary-concert and the music), Dear Climate visuals. I was picking up my camera again. I also realized that I needed a huge break from this place I had called home for three years. Thankfully, my partner lives in a safe, welcoming home in Connecticut, about an hour from the city. Even then, it was challenging for me to leave, because I wasn’t going to a home that I grew up in, and frankly, I didn’t feel ready.

I’m so grateful that I have been able to take this break from the city. Fortunately, home is with me, whenever and wherever I need it. In finding my renewed sense of home, I’ve also found joy and solace in Beautiful Trouble, a toolbox for revolution. This project “exists to make nonviolent revolution irresistible by providing an ever-growing suite of strategic tools and trainings that inspire movements for a more just, healthy, and equitable world.”

Earlier this year, I attended the launch of Beautiful Trouble’s Strategy Card Deck, and I’ve been turning to these cards throughout this shelter-in-place time. While I love the deck because of how shareable it is, I have been taking a step back from my activism and advocacy, in order to heal. In order to not burnout again. 

I’ve been turning to Beautiful Trouble for perspective during this unprecedented time. I pose questions to the cards in order to better understand the contents of the deck, and how I might put it to use during my current and future creative processes. Using the Strategy Card Deck, I’ve found inspiration. I’ve used the card deck in conversations with friends and creative collaborators, and in turn I’ve found a reinvigorated sense of imagination, vulnerability, and resiliency. Ultimately, I’ve found a supportive structure for my springtime energy.

So, yes, I took a break. I’ll be taking more care around my healing needs, which includes organizing my tools as an artist and advocate. I’ll continue to read, explore, and find peace during this already tumultuous time. In addition to Beautiful Trouble, I’ve found particular solace in Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy and in the Dear Artists, #wfh in the time of COVD-19 workbook. When I get overwhelmed, I return to my senses, to what my body is telling me. Recovering from the overwhelm, for me, has started with fresh air – opening a window.

Resources to watch/listen/do:
Earth by Lil Dicky Music Video
World famous Stupid warm up dance
Dear Climate
Beautiful Rising

(Top Image: Morning view from my New York City apartment.)

This article is part of the Persistent Acts series which looks at the intersection of performance, climate, and politics. How does hope come to fruition, even in the most dire circumstances? What are tangible alternatives to the oppressive status quo? The series considers questions of this nature to motivate conversations and actions on climate issues that reverberate through politics and theatre.

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Julia Levine is a creative collaborator and vegetarian. Originally from St. Louis, Julia is now planted in the New York City downtown theatre realm. As a director, Julia has worked on various projects with companies that consider political and cultural topics, including Theater In Asylum, Honest Accomplice Theatre, Superhero Clubhouse, and Blessed Unrest. She is the Marketing Manager at HERE and is Artistic Producer of The Arctic Cycle. Julia writes and devises with her performance-based initiative, The UPROOT Series, to bring questions of food, climate, and justice into everyday life.

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Barbara Bogacka

The notion of a glacier is rather abstract for most of us. We often associate glaciers with increasing global temperatures and melting, but we do not quite know what they are like on an experiential or sensorial level. I had been fascinated by documentary films showing the vastness of ice caps, the harsh weather conditions, and the scarce life there. Still, I could not quite connect to glaciers. I needed to be close to one, to touch it, to smell it, to experience the weather, the light, and the ice.

In March of 2018, I went for a photo-tour in Iceland, which included a visit to the glacial caves of Breiðamerkurjökull, one of the outlet glaciers of Vatnajökull, the largest ice cap in Iceland. The two caves we visited, in the area called Treasure Island, were just amazing. I came back home understanding the glaciers better, but this short visit was not nearly enough to appreciate them fully. Overwhelmed by what I saw, I did not pay enough attention to detail. It was only when working on my pictures at home that I noticed how much was hidden there. A fragment of one image in particular was emotionally striking. At the bottom of the cave wall, in black ice, I could see a shape of a woman, which reminded me of an ancient figurine of a Goddess of Fertility I saw many years ago in a museum in Ankara.

How symbolic, I thought: an ancient icy goddess reclining under the glacier with dripping icicles hanging above her, indicating that her time was coming to an end. The reality of the threat of global warming struck me. Sometimes, a powerful symbol may convey a message just as well as scientific evidence can. This discovery triggered my desire to return to the glaciers, and this desire has not changed since. I wanted to capture on camera the unique impression of the moment and the place, a close view of the ice and its secrets.

Glacial caves vary greatly; some are wide open to light and some are more enclosed. Some have a wide entrance with a narrow tunnel going far into the glacier. The flickering light and the structure and color of ice make the caves alive and mysterious. The ice at the lower parts of the cave walls is often black, sometimes even opaque, the upper parts are lighter in color and more transparent. Shades of sapphire and of blue are mesmerizing, but we also see green, yellow, or brown, depending on the incoming light and the surroundings.  

We can see air bubbles, stones, volcanic ash, and even parts of plants caught in ice. Glacial caves reveal much about climatic history. The air bubbles contain information on the concentration of various gases in the atmosphere from many hundreds of years ago. The layers of ash indicate volcanic activities and the tree fossils say something about the flora before the ice age. Scientists take ice cores from the Arctic to research the climate’s past, but I could also see it through my lens. I will not make any scientific discoveries from my images, but they allow me to better understand the importance of the research based on ice cores. At the same time, I can enjoy the complexity of the ice’s content, its color, and the plethora of imaginative features changing as the ambient light changes.

I was particularly moved by my experience in a cave called Blue Dragon in Skeiðarárjökull, another outlet of Vatnajökull consisting of several tunnels. A short time on my own in one of the tunnels made a special impression on me. It was dark and quiet, just a delicate trickle of water somewhere nearby and tons of ice above and around me. A ray of light was coming from the entrance to the cave and my eyes started to adjust to the darkness. The outside world disappeared for a moment as I was surrounded by what seemed to be Icelandic fairy tale beings, trolls and frozen creatures blinking their weird eyes at me. I wondered what they wanted to tell me.

I set my camera on the tripod and got close to one of them, hoping it did not mind being photographed. It was their kingdom and I was an outsider, but I did not feel like an intruder. I felt their friendly welcome, even some warmth in their icy home. I wished they could talk and tell me their story. After all, they were much older than me, at least several hundred years. What had they experienced over time? Could we understand each other?

I pushed the shutter button and waited for 30 seconds; this is how long it took to get a picture with a low ISO. The camera screen still showed a rather dark image, but I could see that the shine of the eye was there. How privileged I was to be in their home and to photograph it. I tried to respect the place, not to tread too much on the icy ground, not to break it. My camera was making too much noise but the trolls did not complain. How kind they were.

Photographing in such a dark environment is somewhat hit and miss. The exposures were long, but the camera recorded what was there, well-hidden from the naked eye: creatures floating in dark blue ice, momentary impressions of real physical entities.

The caves I visited in 2018 and in 2019 in the Treasure Island area on the edges of Breiðamerkurjökull do not exist anymore. They disappeared together with the retreating glacier. The creation of caves and under-glacial tunnels is a dynamic process and new ones form while the old ones change or disappear. The two caves I visited this year may not be accessible next year. Blue Dragon Cave on the side of Skeiðarárjökull and Sapphire Cave on the very edge of Breiðamerkurjökull have rather small chances of surviving the summer in their current forms. I could see the meltdown occurring rapidly over my three annual visits to the same area. The place was quite different each time, with the lagoon Jökulsárlón enlarged and packed with floating icebergs calved from Breiðamerkurjökull’s terminus.

The images I froze in my camera stay, while the subject of my photography melts. These pictures cannot be taken again, but they can be seen. I want to show what is so fragile, unique, and valuable, and what we must try to save. 

None of this work would have been possible without the wonderful help and support of my guides: Haukur Snorasson in 2018, Einar Rúnar Sigurðsson over the three years, and Solla Sveinbjörnsdottir and Guillaume Martin Kollibay in 2019 and 2020. Einar’s beautiful pictures can be seen in his recent photography album Crystal Ice Cave, published by Blurb.

(Top image: Blue Dragon Cave. One of the tunnels of the cave on the east side of Skeiðarárjökull, February 27, 2020.)

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Barbara Bogacka is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society. She is interested in a wide spectrum of photographic genre, particularly abstract images of nature. Since retirement in 2015 from her academic job at the University of London, she has revived her interests in the environment and in climate issues. Pollution and its effects on the meltdown of glaciers are of her special concern. Currently, she is working on a photography project to bring remote and unfamiliar views of ice closer to our homes. Barbara is a Polish citizen based in Northern England.

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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.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Mitchell Ward, Shaunael Milton, Sophie Gledhill, Valerie Cihylik 

Reader-submitted stories of the COVID-19 pandemic, in no more than 100 words. Read past stories here. Submit your own here.

A MIRROR OF PRIORITIES

On March 12, I started manically offloading my thoughts into my phone. These times – the penny had dropped – were not ordinary. Rereading these thought-bites has been a process of defining what is important. And, through the restriction of “locking down” at home, I’ve been granted freedom to subconsciously create a space which shines a light on my priorities: books I’ve taken off the shelf, half-finished rainy day projects I’ve resurrected, people I’ve gravitated towards through cyberspace. With the filler of “normal” life stripped away, we create a home-based microcosm of the world we wish to sustain upon release.

— Sophie Gledhill (Erith, London, UK)

(Top photo: Books liberated from shelves: a mirror of priorities)

* * *

THE CAMPFIRE

Living with others in a flat never felt cramped when schedules differed. Four people unemployed makes for tight living. You long for community, just not the one rubbing your elbows. A change of venue! We threw on backpacks, rolled sleeping bags. Our little camp among the wilderness flipped perspective. We got to forget, to breathe. Solitude shrunk with isolation. We laughed again. We felt new kinds of fear – together. Nights later we returned to the flat. Our elbows touched and we remembered. The world grew again. When I look in my roommates’ eyes now I still see the campfire.

— Mitchell Ward (Chicago, Illinois)

* * *

DEAR GENERATION ZOOMERS

Dear Generation Zoomers,

A cool breeze rests under the leaves
Full of life
Technology cannot sync up our heart
So out of touch
So out of reach
Adults told us: Get off your phones. Face to face is not FaceTime
We thought it was fine
We had choices, free will
No, there is no way to escape these electric bars
If only your touch could soothe my pain
So please let’s stay in touch even if we are out of each other’s

Love,
Your future

— Shaunael Milton (Inglewood, California)

* * *

THE EYES HAVE IT

I was exiting Central Park after an afternoon walk with Pumpkin The Punk Pup. As the new normal, I was wearing a bandana to cover my nose and mouth. I fancy myself a bandit. Just as we were about to leave, a woman, a complete stranger, stopped me and said, “I can see by your eyes that you have a beautiful face.” What a gift! For a moment I actually felt beautiful.

— Valerie Cihylik (New York, New York)

______________________________

This series is edited by Thomas Peterson. One of the editors of Artists & Climate Change, he is also a theatre director and researcher whose work focuses on the climate crisis.

———-

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

Powered by WPeMatico