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Event: Feeding the Insatiable

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

This international summit takes place at the remarkable Dartington Hall in southwest England from 17.00 on November 9 to 16.40 on November 11, 2016. This extraordinary site sits within some of the UK’s most spectacular landscapes, with more protected areas than anywhere else in the UK.

The event features thinkers and makers from across the world, with an opening keynote event from Land Art Generator Initiative (Robert Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian) with ecoartist / producer Chris Fremantle from eco/art/scot/land. Other sessions focus on Ecologies, Shaping the World, Artist projects, Communicating, Energy Generation and Poetics.

See more detail as it emerges in the programme at http://artenergysymposium.info/programme/

The Land Art Generator Initiative has become one of the world’s most followed sustainable design events and is inspiring people everywhere about the promise of a net-zero carbon future. LAGI is showing how innovation through interdisciplinary collaboration, culture, and the expanding role of technology in art can help to shape the aesthetic impact of renewable energy on our constructed and natural environments. 
The goal of LAGI is to design and construct a series of large-scale site-specific public art installations that uniquely combine art with utility scale clean energy generation.

Register here.

The post Event: Feeding the Insatiable appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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Opportunity: ECCA 2017 Call for Abstracts

Creative Carbon Scotland, Open Calls

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

The third European Climate Change Adaptation Conference 2017 Call for Abstracts is now open!

 

The theme of ECCA 2017 is ‘Our Climate Ready Future’. Our vision is to inspire and enable people to work together to discover and deliver positive climate adaptation solutions that can strengthen society, revitalise local economies and enhance the environment. We will bring together the people who will deliver action on the ground – from business, industry, NGOs, local government and communities – to share knowledge, ideas and experience with researchers and policymakers. Set in the cultural city of Glasgow, at the heart of a city-region that is putting climate adaptation and climate justice at the core of decision making, ECCA 2017 offers a unique opportunity to visit innovative local adaptation projects and share experience of how climate adaptation can work in practice.

ECCA 2017 is aiming to encourage broad participation and interaction across the science, policy, business and practice communities. ECCA 2017 invite both session and abstract submissions for the European Climate Change Adaptation conference.  Three types of sessions will be organised: Practice, Science-practice, and Science . All session and abstract submissions should link to one of theconference themes.

ECCA 2017 welcome abstracts from practitioners and scientists that show real-world examples of climate adaptation, and encourage case study abstracts to show how their experience can be useful to others, e.g. through identifying lessons learned, providing recommendations on best practice and considering whether the approach could be transferred to other regions or different contexts.

Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30th

More information and how to apply available at the ECCA 2017 website.

The post Opportunity: ECCA 2017 Call for Abstracts appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

#GreenFests: The Fringe Swap Shop is back at #edfringe

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

The Fringe Swap Shop (formerly known as the Reuse & Recycle Days) is an established sustainability initiative run by The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, with support from Creative Carbon Scotland and Festivals Edinburgh. It occurs each year at the end of August at Fringe Central and is a great opportunity for companies, individuals, and those that have participated in the Fringe to dispose of any unwanted props, sets and costumes in an easy, inexpensive and sustainable manner, whilst also sourcing new materials for future productions.

Unwanted props, usable furniture, gorgeous costumes, venue and set construction materials – we want them all! Every Fringe, tonnes of waste go to the bin when they could be reused elsewhere or recycled. A combination recycling depot and free rummage sale: bring what you have, take what you want.

Contact participants@edfringe.com for full details of what we can accept and how, or speak to Fringe Central staff.

Watch the timelapse filmed at the Swap Shop two years ago to get a feel for the day:

 

Whilst only Fringe participants are allowed to donate items, everyone and anyone is allowed to come and collect items of interest and use. The props and costumes are perfect for companies planning on putting on future productions, while the raw materials can be of great use to artists and craftspeople.

Last year, a whole variety of items from a wooden desk with wheels to a motorbike helmet were picked up by North Isle, an Edinburgh-based production company. They were planning a sci-fi production called Outer Spiral Arms that was trying to use 100% recycled and reclaimed materials for their set and props. Visit their facebook page for more information on the production, and look at the amazing work they did on the machete they found in the Swap Shop!

upcycled machete

Upcycled Machete – Image credit to North Isle Productions Ltd.

Have you participated in the Swap Shop in the past? If so, we’d love to hear what you did with the materials that you collected. Please send your stories to luise.kocaurek@creativecarbonscotland.com.

The post #GreenFests: The Fringe Swap Shop is back! appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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Festival Vision: 2025 Unites UK Festivals for a Sustainable Future.

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Over 40 UK music festivals have pledged to work together to create a more environmentally sustainable festival industry by signing Festival Vision: 2025 — the vision and roadmap for a sustainable future presented by industry think-do tank Powerful Thinking in its seminal environmental report, The Show Must Go On.

Festivals both large and small, with genres from rock music to words, are united around the vision. Bestival, Hay Festival, Shambala and Secret Garden Party have taken the pledge, and Festival Republic have signed up their entire portfolio of 11 UK festivals including: Latitude, V Festival, Reading, Leeds and BBC Proms in the Park.

The Vision: 2025 Festivals aim to halve festival emissions and reach 50% recycling rates by 2025. They have also pledged to reduce travel-related emissions and improve the sustainability of food sourcing. Integral to the pledge is the intention to measure, record and share key environmental impacts from festival operations using credible methods, such as the Julie’s Bicycle free Creative Green IG tools or by working with the A Greener Festival Awards, in order to track progress.

A full list of the participating Festivals and details of the pledge can be found on the Festival Vision: 2025 webpage along with key resources from The Show Must Go On report to help festival organisers make successful changes toward sustainable practices.

Festival Vision: 2025 Webpage: www.festivalvision2025.netfestival vision

About Powerful Thinking: Powerful Thinking is a not-for-profit industry think-do tank working towards an energy efficient, low carbon and cost effective future for festivals. They are a coalition of industry stakeholders, working together to drive positive change for businesses, audiences and the environment. Powerful Thinking’s steering group members include: Julie’s Bicycle, A Greener Festival, The Association of Independent Festivals, Firefly Clean Energy, Festival Republic, Shambala Festival, Bestival, Kambe Sustainable Events, The Association of Festival Organisers, The Production Services Association and The National Outdoor Events Association.

Follow Powerful Thinking on:
Facebook : @powerfulthinking.org
Twitter: @powerthinkorg
#FestivalVision2025 #PowerfulThinking

Further information:
www.festivalvision2025.net

The post Festival Vision: 2025 Unites UK Festivals for a Sustainable Future. appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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Power to the Festivals – Greener Alternatives

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Creative Carbon Scotland’s Guide to Temporary Power

Click here to download the guide

It’s summer, the outdoor music festival season is upon us and many festival organisers will be making a determined effort to reduce the carbon footprint of their events.

With the help of Jon Clark of BoldWorks we’re aiming to highlight ways to make your festival power generation smarter and greener.

Because we can see it, It’s easy to be aware of waste generated (and often left behind) during festivals and as part of the drive to reduce their environmental impacts and carbon footprint, festival organisers have made fantastic efforts to improve reuse and recycling habits among their audiences.

When it comes to carbon emissions, that’s only part of the story and many festival goers will be blissfully unaware of the power behind the scenes that drives everything from stage sound and lighting systems to phone chargers. Diesel generators along with travel and transport are the biggest contributors of CO2 emissions by outdoor festivals. Power generation emissions are likely to make up around 70-80% of the onsite festival carbon footprint and about 15-20 % of the overall footprint when travel is included.

Jon has checked out what’s available, what’s practical and what’s affordable. So let’s take a whistle-stop look at some truly green alternatives to diesel…

  • Understanding your power needs
  • Making a Commitment to reduce consumption
  • Reducing emissions from your outdoor power generation
  • Renewable sources of power
  • Novel Technologies

Find out more in our resources on Temporary Power

The post Power to the Festivals – Greener Alternatives appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

Voluntary Carbon Reporting for 2014-15

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Reporting back on the environmental information reported to Creative Scotland by arts organisations in Scotland

During our conversations with arts organisations, we have often been asked what are the best ways to reduce carbon footprints and how do we know whether we are doing well?

In this report, we’ve tried to answer some of those questions by analysing the environmental data provided last year as part of annual reports to Creative Scotland.

We were delighted to find that many more organisations had included information on environmental data as part of their annual reports with the number increasing from just over 50 last year to 90 this year. For many this was the first time they had attempted to collect the data and in a lot of cases the data were estimated but on the whole the Green Champions, who were largely responsible for the data collection and reporting, found the process much easier than expected. You can find out more about the process involved in our Carbon Reporting pages.

Although very few organisations were able to provide complete information as requested on water, fuel waste and travel we were able to see some trends emerging which will help us build up a picture of the carbon impact of the arts in Scotland. Find out more on what data should be recorded in ourGuidance for Carbon Reporting

Many organisations have requested information on how much fuel and water they should expect to use. To provide this and to allow a comparison with industry standards, rudimentary baselines and metrics have been calculated to provide an indication of the performance of the organisations which provided utilities data.

We found that although theatres and arts centres have a much larger carbon footprint overall, when looked at in terms of floor area, there was less of a difference. For each
utility, the values were broadly similar between all three groups:

  • electricity (100-120kWh/m2),
  • gas (120-260 kWh/m2),
  • water (0.8-2.6 m3/m2).

We compared these values with information contained in a recent report issued by Julie’s Bicycle. Although the sectors were defined differently, the calculated metrics for gas and electricity were roughly in line with the values reported by both CIBSE and Julie’s Bicycle for performing arts venues:

  • electricity (101-150 kWh/m2),
  • gas (139-420 kWh/m2).

Find out more on this report from our Resource page on Voluntary Carbon Reporting

The post Voluntary Carbon Reporting for 2014-15 appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

Ben’s Strategy Blog: Why Climate Change Needs the Arts

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Creative Carbon Scotland began by focusing on the arts and cultural sector, arguing why our colleagues in theatres, galleries, music groups etc and individual artists should start thinking about climate change. But more recently we’ve recognised that we must also talk to those involved in climate change from the scientific, technical, innovation, research and policy angles about why the arts and culture are important, and why they might want to call upon the arts in their work. My last blog touched upon this and I thought it might be worth explaining our thinking more clearly.

We’d argue that climate change is at heart a cultural problem. In 1982, UNESCO defined culture as part of its conference on cultural diversity. The Mexico City Declaration states:

‘In its widest sense, culture may now be said to be the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterise a society or social group. It includes not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs…’

This wider culture is, in effect, the way we live in the world – how we organise our societies, the values we hold and the way in which we see our place on the planet and our relationship with it and its other inhabitants. At present, we live in a culture of consumption: we take resources from the planet, use them and dispose of the waste into the land, seas and atmosphere. Climate change is one of the results. (This last is of course not new to anyone who works in the field of climate change, but it’s necessary to restate it for the next part of the story!)

The Mexico City Declaration mentions in its old-fashioned way the ‘arts and letters’. We’d include in this category what today are described as the arts – theatre, music, visual arts, literature and so on – but also museums and heritage, broadcast media, video and gaming and other similar areas. For the sake of this blog, let’s call these ‘the arts’.

The arts are an expression of the wider culture – in their myriad forms they express our values, our way of seeing the world and our place in it. Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells the players to:

‘…hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure…’ (Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 17–24)

The arts help us understand our way of being by expressing, exploring, contesting and debating it. My own field of theatre is in many ways a live ‘thought experiment’. Different ideas, situations and futures are played out, arguments and viewpoints tested, implications followed through. The arts in Europe have always been a forum for public debate, from ancient Greek drama, which set out the thinking behind how Athens was governed, and the packed theatres of Soviet Eastern Europe, which were where forbidden ideas were debated before the Wall came down, through to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where contemporary scientific ideas about the slipperiness of ‘reality’ were discussed in the cafes of the Parisian Left Bank and translated into Modernism in painting, music and dance.

One way or another we are heading to a massive shift in the way we live in the world. If we achieve the (almost impossible) carbon reductions required by the Paris Agreement our ways of living will need to become much less energy-intensive. There is a widespread reluctance to admit that business as usual, but using zero carbon technologies is not going to achieve what is required. Our diets, mobility and levels of consumption are going to have to change. If we don’t achieve those carbon reductions (and arguably even if we do), the impacts of climate change that we are already seeing will increase and will require a different cultural shift: what we eat and how we get it; where we live; migration from increasingly stressed areas (see IPCC AR5 SPM p16); and so on. Our wider culture will not be the same in the future as it is today. I described our view of the role of the arts in this great transition in my last blog, arguing that the arts should be seen as working not on individuals and behaviour change, but on changing the way we as society think about how we live in the world. To be more specific about this, we see the arts as operating to change the collective thinking of society by (among other things):

  • Synthesising complex political, social, scientific and philosophical ideas
  • Re-interpreting and developing these ideas and feeding them back into society’s thinking
  • Representing these ideas in concrete form in order both to explore their possibilities and to engage different audiences
  • Imagining different futures and playing out ‘thought experiments’
  • Holding contradictory ideas in creative tension in a way that other parts of society find hard
  • Making the invisible and implicit visible and explicit
  • Analysing how the way things are came to be
  • Innovating and thinking non-linearly
  • Breaking conventions & challenging established norms
  • Bringing communities together or helping to make new ones
  • And of course communicating emotional truths, where the arts are best placed to do so

These functions apply to the arts generally, not just to their engagement with climate change and the great transition, but they are useful and relevant to it. As well as informing their own practices and ways of working, these approaches take the arts out of their own field into other areas of society where they can make a useful contribution.

Getting specific about how the arts and those who work in climate change should get work together is a discussion for another blog but see my reflections on our exciting event with engineers, architects, planners, artists and the Land Art Generator Initiative for some starting points. And feel free to get in touch if you have thoughts about this – we’d like to hear and we’re here to make things happen!

And finally, another quotation from the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht (one of my favourites):

It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality.

(Bertolt Brecht – Essays on the art of Theater 1954)

* Image:Rising Tide, Jason deCaries Taylor

The post Ben’s Strategy Blog: Why Climate Change Needs the Arts appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

Artist Residency Open Call: Thinking through the Anthropocene

Creative Carbon Scotland, Open Calls

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

We’re delighted to announce the details of our annual Arts & Sustainability Artists’ Residency (30th September – 3rd October). This year we’re offering up to eight Scotland-based artists from any discipline with the paid opportunity to participate in a weekend of discussion and activities at Cove Park, exploring the relationship between their practices and environmental sustainability.

Residency description

“Human activity has been a geologically recent, yet profound, influence on the global environment. The magnitude, variety and longevity of human-induced changes, including land surface transformation and changing the composition of the atmosphere, has led to the suggestion that we should refer to the present, not as within the Holocene Epoch (as it is currently formally referred to), but instead as within the Anthropocene Epoch” (Lewis and Masin, 2015)

Co-facilitated by Jan Bebbington (Professor of Accounting and Sustainable Development, Director, St Andrews Sustainability Institute) and Lex ter Braak (Director, Van Eyck Institute, Maastricht, Netherlands), Creative Carbon Scotland’s third annual residency will use the spectrum of stories surrounding the Anthropocene as an entry point for discussing the relationship between cultural practices and environmental sustainability.

We are delighted to offer up to eight Scotland-based artists working across a variety of disciplines and contexts, who may or may not have previously worked in this area, with the opportunity to think about, learn from one another, and develop their practices in relation to environmental sustainability.

This year, the residency will be hosted in partnership with internationally-renowned artist residencyCove Park over a long weekend from 30th September – 3rd October. Selected artists will be paid a fee of £450 for their attendance and travel expenses from within Scotland, accommodation and catering will be covered.

Within the divergent responses to the Anthropocene, from the humble to the hubristic, we will seek to understand where points for fruitful artistic enquiry might emerge, building on existing examples and our specific geographical context.

Working in partnership with Cove Park, the residency programme draws on the group’s skills and experience, on-site activities and a range of reading materials to explore the diverse ways in which the Anthropocene could be considered through creative practice. Through this we seek to build understandings of how artistic practices might in turn effect wider social change in the transition to a more sustainable society.

This residency is funded by Creative Scotland and kindly supported by The Dr David Summers Charitable Trust and is run in partnership with Cove Park.

Picture1

Application deadline: 10am Friday 19th August

Apply to the Arts & Sustainability Residency

Residency aims

  • To offer the opportunity for artists from a range of disciplines, who may have or may not have previously worked in this area, to learn from one another and develop their understanding of the relationship between their practice and environmental sustainability;
  • To explore the ways in which cultural practices of artists can re-express the scientific, social and philosophical ideas and concepts associated with the transition to a more sustainable future;
  • To build participating artists’, partners’, and Creative Carbon Scotland’s understanding of the connections between individual creative practices and climate change, and their role in effecting wider social change in the transition to a more sustainable society.

What to expect

Timings:

The residency will commence at Cove Park mid-late afternoon on Friday 30th September and wrap up on the morning of Monday 3rd October. Travel arrangements will be made in coordination with Creative Carbon Scotland. Participants are expected to be able to attend the whole duration of the weekend.

Format:

Artists should expect a relatively open-format long weekend with facilitation by the group as well as Jan Bebbington and Lex ter Braak. There may be the opportunity for some artists to lead a ‘session’ during the weekend, bringing a particular response or angle to the theme of environmental sustainability and artistic practice.

Please note that participants are not expected to produce work during the residency period but rather use the time and space to reflect on their practice for future development.

The residency plays an important role in contributing to the community of practice of artists, cultural organisations and those working in environmental sustainability contexts which Creative Carbon Scotland supports across programmes including Green Tease and the Green Arts Initiative.

Following the weekend, we anticipate that participants will continue to build connections with one another and Creative Carbon Scotland to explore opportunities for collaboration and exchange. We will also work with partners from the University of St Andrews to evaluate the longer term impact of the residency on participating artists’ practices.

Activities will include:

  • Whole and small group discussions led by our facilitators;
  • Presentations by participants on projects which they are interested in developing and connecting to residency themes;
  • Visits to local sites of thematic significance;
  • Walking and hands-on activities as an alternative format to group discussion.
cp12750-e1310471982473-500x284

For more information on Cove Park visit the website –www.covepark.org

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for inquisitive artists who can bring interesting ideas to a group setting and who are keen to ask questions of themselves and established ways of working.

We encourage the participation of artists from a wide range of disciplines, and whether or not they have previously considered environmental sustainability in their approach to working. Applicants must be based in Scotland.

Through the generous support of the Dr David Summers Charitable Trust, at least one place on the residency is reserved for a poet or writer.

Equalities and accessibility

Creative Carbon Scotland has a rigorous Equalities Policy and we welcome applications from artists in line with the ‘protected characteristics’ named in the Equality Act 2010. This includes: Age, disability, gender reassignment, income, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation, socio-economic deprivation.

Our Equalities Policy is available here.

Cove Park’s brand new Artists Centre has been designed and built to be open and accessible to those with mobility issues, with ramped access to the entrance and level access throughout. There is accommodation and an adjoining studio attached to the Artists Centre, which will allow a wheelchair user on residency to make full use of the new centre.

Cove Park sits within a 50-acre rural site overlooking Loch Long and is hilly with some rough terrain and pathways. Residents are able to make use of the 4 X 4 truck to access the whole site and the nearby coast. The nature of the site and some of the activities we plan may present difficulties for some people with limited mobility but we will make every effort to overcome these and urge all to apply – we will discuss any details once the initial selection has been made.

About our facilitators

Jan Bebbington

Previously Professor of Accounting at the University of Aberdeen, Jan applies academic research in sustainable development to practice. She is Associate Director of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research.

Lex ter Braak

Lex ter Braak is currently the Director of the Van Eyck Institute, a post-academic institute for artistic development with an international outlook, located in Maastricht. The core values that the Van Eyck aspires to are meeting, connection, cooperation, engagement and process. From 2000 he was director of the Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture in Amsterdam. Previously he was director of the Vleeshal in Middelburg. He is a freelance writer/critic on literature and fine art.

Applicant specification

  • Artists at any stage in their career are welcome to apply, provided that they are at least one year out of undergraduate training or have equivalent experience.
  • Artists must be based in Scotland.
  • We encourage applications from artists working in a range of disciplines including theatre, dance, music, visual art, literature, poetry, TV/film, craft, design, community arts, participatory arts, digital, and other related creative practices. At least one place will be reserved for a poet or writer, thanks to support from the Dr David Summers Charitable Trust.
  • We encourage applications from artists who may or may not have not previously considered environmental sustainability in their practice.
  • We encourage applications from artists in line with the ‘protected characteristics’ named in the Equality Act, 2010. This includes: Age, disability, gender reassignment, income, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation, socio-economic deprivation.

Apply to the Arts & Sustainability Residency

Selection process

We will select applicants so as to achieve a good balance of the specifications outlined above, and on the basis of their responses to the application form questions, quality of work and previous experience outlined in their CV.

Applications will be shortlisted internally and then referred to our selection committee: Jan Bebbington (Residency Facilitator), Asif Khan (Director of Scottish Poetry Library – for special advice on the literature and poetry position funded by the Dr David Summers Trust), Catrin Kemp (Cove Park), Ben Twist (CCS) and Gemma Lawrence (CCS).

Phone calls may be made to some applicants if further information is required to support their application.

All applicants will be informed of the status of their applications by early September with feedback provided to unsuccessful applications.

Recommended reading

Defining the Anthropocene – Lewis and Maslin, 2015.

Read about our previous Arts & Sustainability residencies

2014

http://www.creativecarbonscotland.com/blog-mulling/ 

2015

http://www.creativecarbonscotland.com/mull-residency-2015-reflections/

http://www.creativecarbonscotland.com/mulling-on-mull-2015-artist-residency-reflections/

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/theatre/joyce-mcmillan-the-importance-of-creative-carbon-1-3726148

Image: Contains British Geological Survey materials © NERC (1990)

The post Artist Residency Open Call: Thinking through the Anthropocene appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

Ben’s Strategy Blog: Brexit, Climate Change and the Arts

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

After the Brexit vote, we learned this morning that the UK Government has committed to a fifth carbon budget, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 57% by 2030 against the 1990 baseline as part of the overall aim to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050. This would seem to go some way to allaying earlier fears that leaving the EU would mean a dilution of the UK’s commitments in this area. What does Brexit mean for environmental sustainability and action on climate change? And why are the arts crucial to this conversation?

First, we must recognise that in some respects Scotland is separate from the rest of the UK: we have our own Climate Change Act, separate plans to achieve the emissions reductions and separate adaptation plans. But much of our work here is tied up with that of the rest of the UK and the EU. Weimport from and export electricity to England, which may well come from continental Europe via interconnectors. Our Climate Change Act is ‘nested’ within the global Kyoto Protocol and the EU ‘bubble’. And Scotland has no official role in the UNFCCC climate change structure that delivered the Paris Agreement last December at COP 21: we’re part of the UK (at least currently…), which itself is (currently) part of the EU bubble.

But legislation and targets are one thing – what measures a country actually takes is another. The recent trumpeting of Scotland’s success in ‘exceeding’ its carbon reduction target for 2020 six years early masks the fact that as well as a warm winter and reduced industrial activity, much of this success in 2014 is down to a technical issue relating to how carbon credits across Europe are counted within our own calculations. On the same day that the UK Government committed to the new target, the UK Climate Change Committee warned that it lacked the policies to ensure that it meets it. It hardly seems likely that a new UK Government opposed to red-tape (aka useful regulation) and with the administrative and legislative burden of extricating itself from the EU will have the desire or the time to effect more radical carbon reduction policies.

There is however, perhaps more room for optimism in Scotland despite the Brexit vote. The Scottish Government has responsibility for meeting its own world-leading target. Regardless of the ‘success’ of 2014, the third Report on Policies and Proposals (RPP3, as it’s known) to be published later this year will aim to identify how both currently agreed policies and those proposals will add up to achieve future carbon reductions. And it’s here that I find the chink that lights up my Brexit gloom.

From any major change come both good and bad outcomes. Can we take the opportunity of the current uncertainty to make sure that preparation begins for a sustainable future in a world much changed by the effects of climate change? I’d argue that this is where the arts and culture need to play their part. The Scottish Government is beginning to convene a series of Climate Conversations to help steer and influence the RPP3 and perhaps more widely to consider how life should be in a lower carbon future. Most artists and arts organisations probably don’t know about these and many wouldn’t normally consider that they should be involved. But as Bertolt Brecht is (mis)reported to have said, ‘Art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it’.

If the arts are referenced in relation to sustainability it is usually assumed that the arts will be better than scientists and others at communicating the facts to individuals, who will then change behaviours and practices to reduce carbon emissions. But providing information is ineffective at delivering change, and it isn’t a job the arts are necessarily well qualified to do. There is talk of the ‘emotional’ capacity of the arts to make concepts such as climate change more meaningful, but even if this works, research shows that simply changing attitudes or beliefs is not enough to change behaviour, let alone deeper ways of being.

The role of the arts that we understand at Creative Carbon Scotland is not one which focuses on individuals, but one which seeks to change ways of thinking at a societal level in order to bring about the transition to a sustainable society. Art is nearly always a collective business of transformation. The performing arts have a collective quality built in, but even when a poem, book or picture is experienced by an individual, the artist has created it in order for more than one person to read or view. Nearly always an artist wants to change the world in some way, even though it may be microscopically: provide a new viewpoint, new knowledge, a new understanding. No artist works hard just to do the same as something that already exists. Equally audiences (including viewers, readers etc) seek to be changed in similar ways. A successful work of art provides that jolt of understanding, even if that is just a re-recognition of an insight we’ve forgotten. Really successful artworks provide new understandings each time we revisit them as each time the audience is, and in the performing arts the interpreting artists are, different.

Regardless of Brexit, and whether or not we achieve the transition to a low carbon future, our way of being in the world is going to be massively changed by climate change. If we are successful we will be living according to values that are not defined by perpetual growth, consumption and disposal – a way of living that is incompatible with a low carbon future. If we fail, the physical, social and economic impacts of climate change will have changed the world we live in. Either way, society is going to need to think in different ways.

Arts venues and the organisations that run them are places where society meets to debate, question and discuss. Let’s be part of the Climate Conversations. We’ll be working hard to ensure that the arts are involved: keep an eye on the Creative Carbon Scotland website for more information.

The post Ben’s Strategy Blog: Brexit, Climate Change and the Arts appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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PR Print and Design is Supporting Our Green Arts Sector

Creative Carbon Scotland, Fringe

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

We’re proud to announce that we have partnered with PR Print and Design as our sponsor for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Sustainable Practice Award and the Green Arts Initiative, and have been awarded a New Arts Sponsorship Grant to help grow our work towards a green arts sector!

We’re excited to be partnering with an organisation whose aims also serve the development towards a more sustainable Scotland, through its commitment to carbon neutral printing. This sponsorship will serve to grow the scale and quality of our work across the sector.

The partnership will see PR Print and Design become the first ever sponsor of these initiatives, both encouraging and enabling local, national and international arts organisations to make sustainable printing choices when considering the marketing and promotion of their productions. Funded by the Scottish Government, and administered by Arts and Business Scotland (themselves committed to improving environmental sustainability) the New Arts Sponsorship Grant scheme encourages private sector sponsorship of cultural activities in Scotland by offering matched funding to cultural organisations securing sponsorship from eligible businesses.

Established in 1987, and based in Glasgow, PR Print and Design is passionate about sustainable supply chains, renewable energy and carbon reduction. Generating over 80% of their own energy from 192 solar panels on their building roof, and with a waste recycling rate of over 96%,

The company is committed to enhancing sustainability in their own operations, as much as those of all they work with. For each order, any unavoidable carbon emissions are offset through a certificated carbon neutral partner scheme, with a certificate and official branding supplied to the ordering organisation.

Creative Carbon Scotland first came across PR Print and Design as a customer of their print work, and were impressed by their carbon-neutral production of our annual Green Arts Initiative report. Being able to highlight our environmental commitment through our own sustainable procurement choices is a key part of our operations.

PR Print and Design offers a variety of printing services for arts organisations, including:

  • Posters A4 to 60x 40
  • Flyers and leaflets
  • Postcards
  • Programmes
  • Tickets
  • Exhibition stands and boards

To find out more about sustainable print for the arts sector get in contact with Phil Brady: phil@prprint.net

More information about the New Arts Sponsorship Grants can be found on the Arts & Business Scotland website.

The post PR Print and Design is Supporting Our Green Arts Sector appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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