This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

‘BY LEAVES WE LIVE’ AND BY TREE, ANIMAL, ENERGY

In addressing the carbon facts of climate change, the intimate, emotive and perplexing relations between the human and the other-than-human can be side-lined, out of reach of measurement and calculation. But these relations are inseparable from how the climate, and the human, is known. Stories, walks and installations continued the long-lived strand of performance about nature and human relations, in historical and contemporary performance forms.

Patrick Geddes’ passage on inter-relation inspired a slow, very slow walk in the garden of Dunbar’s Close, Edinburgh, led by Karen Gabbitas. Geddes wrote ‘This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live…’ As an interior rhythm, the words ‘by leaves we live’, accompanied the conscious step as it became less than conscious, as walkers connected within an urban garden and to the effects of slowing down. The event was completed by a walk out of the close, to a reading of poetry about gardens, walking and the environment by Andrew Sclater.

Ben Macfadyen with his Beuy’s oak seedling.

In Huntly, with Deveron Arts, the White Wood was planted by Caroline Wendling and the community earlier in 2015, a wood that included oaks grown from acorns from Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks. Storyteller Ben Macfadyen’s residency continues the project and connected Huntly directly with Paris in a hybrid of theatre and social practice that has characterised much of the innovative work relating performance and ecology. Ben, with a Beuys’ oak seedling, bicycled to Paris (from the ONCA Gallery in Brighton, also hosting weeks of workshops and seminars on climate change). The tree was planted in a protected new woodland near Paris. On returning to Huntly, Ben will continue The White Wood Story, working with the community to develop a story of the wood, trees, and peace-making that will last for 300 years, the span of the first stage of growth for an oak.

A convivial evening of stories about trees at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, harkened by the shaking of the bells on the branches of a pine, brought out tales of how human relations with trees expose human folly and are redemptive. The evening itself was like coming in to an extended family that just enjoyed the telling and listening, blurring performer and audience. In a somewhat chaotic group movement/ritual, the meeting in Paris was extended a collective energy before the evening came back to the long duration of trees and human stories.

Exercising a more troubled relation between the human and animal, Dougie Strang’s solo performance piece Badger Dissonance, part of the UNFIX programme at the CCA, Glasgow, invoked familiar but undomesticated animals with whom the human finds identity and meaning. This was, though, the animal as road kill, the shot and culled animal, including, too, Jyoti Singh, the woman raped and murdered by a gang in a bus in Delhi in 2012. ‘Cognitive dissonance’ is the concept that Strang used to explain disjointed human behaviour. ‘Dissonant’ explained, too, the unknowable and uncontrollable behaviour of the badger, fox, deer, rabbit, the buried and the unburied animal, disturbing human expectations.

Light Field @ Gayfield Creative Spaces.

The ecological also includes human relations with the inanimate, the materials, elements and energies of environments. In Light Field, in a dark room, Saffy Setohy and Bill Thompson experimented with giving people devices with wind-up torches that also emitted the sounds of energy production, and seeing what happened. The sounds were fascinating, the lights, less so, or less reliable. The event depended on a group of people willing to share and improvise, with no instructions, and to do so both as an art event, and as an experience that might connect with climate themes. It was an experiment, too, in how humans approach arts events, and for those who stayed with it, how humans approach each other in a strange situation, how they find alliances and make efforts at making meaning, when the authorial direction is intentionally missing.

Many of the difficulties that beset theatre and climate change were evident especially in Light Field, and throughout many pieces: how much information or instruction to provide when the public’s understanding is variable and constantly changing; does there even need to be any direct reference to the climate for a piece to effectively explore human responses to the situation; how can the subjects of climate change and sustainability change the relations between the work, the performers and the audience.

‘GOOD LUCK, EVERYBODY’

Nic Green & Laura Bradshaw performing Cock and Bull.

I live in Cumbria, and the floods in early December meant that I could not see Cock and Bull, Nic Green’s performance, with Laura Bradshaw and Rosana Cade. The following week, when waters subsided, roads opened and trains resumed, in Glasgow, Nic described the work to me in an unembellished account of what happened. She talked me through the first part of the piece, an exposure of corporate and governmental powers, of the weight of injustices of gender, class, ethnicities, shown through machinic movements and repeated choruses of party political texts, ‘hard working people/ pistons firing / we’re on your side…’. Then the energy and qualities of movements shifted, from something like an exorcism of aggression to a reprise, expressed in the softness of movements and an openness with the audience. The words changed to more of a dedication to the power between people, to ‘good luck, everybody’.

Flooding in Cumbria in December.

Those words struck hard, after days of the wrong rain, its intensity, direction and duration ripped out of any familiar pattern; of rivers without bounds, bridges breached, and winds slamming from the wrong direction. To wish someone ‘good luck’ in the face of uncontrollable situations, whether that of a malevolent politics or of a river that cares nothing for the lives in its path was not light-hearted irony. It felt more like an honest generosity, all that could be said to someone else in the circumstances, whether or not ‘luck’ exists. The words came closest to understanding something of the feel of being in the midst of a storm, expressing not a sentiment or intellectualisation, but an existential reality.

Had I seen the production, I may not have had this response. But having felt so immediately the effects of climate instability against my body, on my face and in the faces of my neighbours, imagining those words spoken to an audience, not as lines, but as an act of empathy, felt raw and right.

The UNFIX productions followed, and with the exception of Strang’s, were symbolic enactments of a future or indicative of apocalyptic disorder. While appreciating their intent and skill, those loud versions of an ending time belonged too much to a safe ‘theatrical’ stage and held no association for me beyond the room in which they were played. Their darkness felt contrived, familiar, not like the uncharted darkness for which luck may be necessary.

My impatience continues for theatre experiences that can do what that conversation did: prepare one for a moment through which some feeling rises that is unexpected, something is struck, something happens that is both rational and visceral and after which, something has changed. These are extreme expectations for theatre, and, of course, theatre has many layers of value. It may be that the everyday practices of making a communal kind of theatre, of workshops and walks are those that offer as rich a territory for what will be needed with increasing climate instability as that of theatrical productions with explicit themes. And I want to defend the apocalyptic, the utopian, the naturalistic, absurd and ironic, even the agit-prop, whatever theatre experience, as long as it, and the climate, do not become normalised and tamed.

But if theatre and performance want to move an audience, they will have to do more than provide information, or educate, or speculate about a life based on scientific models, or mine the fearing, warning and mourning rehearsals of an experience that has existed more in the abstract or as a prediction. My impatience is for more productions that feel like the experiment-in-progress that is life in a time a climate instability; that understand, in this human-to-human art form, that the human, itself, is changing.

ArtCOP Scotland offered many practitioners a short time to think about the climate. What would happen, if they were supported to think about it for longer, supported with access to the many strands of knowledge about the climate? What would happen if it was more than the central subject around which theatrical ideas were asked to form, embedding itself into other ideas and practices, allowed to worm away to make something that was not directly about the climate, but was inseparable from it? What if the very kinds of theatre that were being made started to change? My impatience, too, is for more diverse and imaginative methods for supporting practitioners, and for expanding the range of knowledge available for and from them. ArtCOP Scotland happened mostly where people were already working, which gave it a novel effectiveness; it is time now to think longer term if and how organisations can extend and intensify that more aesthetic rather than carbon-calculating support.

In the month of COP21, the situation changed. As storming waters brought the topsoil and river beds onto the streets, the climatic changes became material and rending of everyday life. Theatre will, and must, inhabit this new territory of immediate human experience, as it is undergone here, on this island, not simply to re-tell the stories of floods, but to pursue what those floods mean. The decision from Paris will not be enough. Fashioning a new sense of what humanity can accomplish, even if a vision of this is barely focused, is a task for theatre and its entertainments, in all its forms and locations.

ArtCOP Scotland Listings:

Stage to Page: Climate Change Edition
White Monochrome Kingdom, playwright Héloïse Thual; director Lou Mcloughlan
Timewatch, playwright Fergus Mitchell; director Alyson Woodhouse
The Heat is On, playwright Stewart Schiller; director Lisa Nicoll
performed readings
Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Glasgow

It’s Getting Hot in Here, Village Pub Theatre
Bluelines, by Sylvia Dow
Citylink, by Ellie Stewart
A Funeral for Snow, by Louise E. Knowles
Little Nellie: A Tale of Bleak Times, by Helen Shutt
On the Edge, by Sophie Good
Inge, by Clare Duffy
– plays from Climate Change Theatre Action:
An Average Guy Thinking Thoughts about Global Warming, by Neil LaBute
Talking to Dolphins, by Bryony Lavery
You Stink, by Amahl Khouri
director Caitlin Skinner; actors: Amy Drummond, Gerry Keilty, Matthew Leonard, Sarah MacGillivray
performed readings
The Pond pub, Edinburgh

The White Wood Story
Ben Macfayden and Deveron Arts
storytelling, community story-making, bicycle journey, woodland planning
Huntly, Brighton and Paris

Cock and Bull
by Nic Green, with Laura Bradshaw and Rosana Cade
performance
CCA, Glasgow

The Tree of Life
storytelling evening
Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh

Light Field
Saffy Setohy & Bill Thompson
immersive installation
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Green Tease: Gardens, Walking and Poetry
immersive walk led by Karen Gabbitas
Dunbars Close, Canongate, Edinburgh
poetry reading with Andrew Sclater
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Anthem: Tom Butler
workshop
CCA, Glasgow

Much Reduced and Getting Smaller
Firefly Arts’ Gasbags-in-Residence
performed by Laura Firth and Daniel Brown
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Report from a Threatened City
Ailie Rutherford and young people from Govan High School
video and spoken word
CCA, Glasgow

About Wallace

Wallace Heim writes, researches and teaches in the median zone where culture, art and human performance meet nature, the other-than-human and ecological thought. In these conjunctions, new forms of human experience can emerge, new modes of understanding and action take shape.

Wallace’s work is to analyse the experience of these art works and social practices, to consider how these events shape their social and ecological contexts, and to develop critical frameworks appropriate to the experience of culture in the time of climate instability.

Contact: home@wallaceheim.com

The post ‘Good Luck, Everybody’ – the theatres of ArtCOP Scotland: Part II 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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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

During COP21, Paris was a city undergoing the theatre that surrounds a critical decision, the political players negotiating values, profits and survival. Theatre filled the streets, too, replacing the cobblestones of other uprisings with the red lines of inflatables, banners and bodies. Activists breached the Louvre. Glacial ice melted on the Place du Panthéon (Ice Watch). Cape Farewell and COAL brought together scores of arts projects for ArtCOP. Many more, uncategorised artworks spread throughout the city, all articulating more than could be spoken in the meeting rooms and drafted in the papers of COP, fashioning other languages in different scales.

How could one stay at home and be together with all that? Creative Carbon Scotland devised ArtCOP Scotland, a festival of events, exhibitions, workshops and performances in Scotland simultaneous with the Paris meeting. ArtCOP Scotland was also a different way of doing a festival. It included performances by artists whose work already had an ecological dimension. But more than this, Creative Carbon Scotland took ideas of climate change and sustainability out to groups, artists and organisers already working with theatre and performance, but who had not yet incorporated ideas about the climate into their practices and productions. ArtCOP Scotland worked from where people were already enjoying the making of theatre, in meeting rooms, pubs, arts centres, schools, clubs. It asked practitioners to consider climate change as an idea they could play with, turn over, adapt. It showed that climate change is not merely a subject for certain strands of performance work, but is a subject that can imbue any work, in any place, for any audience.

Creative Carbon Scotland asked me to write a contextualising essay, offering not critiques, but a view of how a changing climate was expressed and what this might mean. The works varied in subject, audience, genre, intention; my responses loosely gather the works according to their form.

But the context itself changed in early December with Storm Desmond and my experience of it living in Cumbria. My responses to climate and theatre cleave around that and around a conversation that I recount below with Nic Green, whose performance I could not attend because of the floods. This doesn’t change how I thought about the preceding works, and their importance, but does change what I now expect, or need, from theatre. And my impatience with it.

‘THERE’S A POLAR BEAR IN THE BATHTUB’

Two events saw climate issues drawn into evenings of open rehearsals and readings that offer theatre-in-the-making for public enjoyment. ‘Stage to Page’ provides the chance for writers, directors, actors and audience members regularly to get together, take a scene from a newly-written play, hand it over to a director, choose the actors on the night, send them off to rehearse for an hour, and then play the scene to an appreciative and critical audience. For ArtCOP Scotland, Ben Twist, director of Creative Carbon Scotland, chose three climate change related plays from an open submission to get the ‘stage to page’ treatment: the consequences of a one-night stand of unprotected sex are set in a future world of rationed water and rigid economic hierarchies; a distressed polar bear is found on the street and brought home causing domestic trouble; a strange man in the woods hands a time-advancing watch to a young man who thinks it will help him in romance.

Stage to Page Actors

The plays kept to the convention that theatre is about human personal relationships, if absurdist, comedic and sci-fi influenced. The future has been a strong element in climate theatre, mostly to show and warn against dystopian prospects. But these plays leap-frogged over the transitions of the next decades to new world orders where the habits and expectations of human desires remain familiar, but are limited and frustrated by the controls of those necessary new orders; a post-climate-changed life. The public discussion that followed drew on both theatre ideas and climate apprehensions, and seemed as though at the beginning of putting those two together.

The second of these evenings, ‘It’s Getting Hot in Here’, was performed readings of short scenes from nine climate-related plays, held in a crowded pub back room. A couple choose a coffin for snow; a woman learns to listen, not talk, to dolphins; a couple with a house on a sea cliff come to know that ‘the sea takes back her own’; two Scots women talk about fossils while waiting for a bus; an average guy (American) talks over the facts of global warming. In a futuristic scenario, people walk ‘to the end of the line’, only to receive confusing hospitality. Activism is included in the one-hander of a woman from an oil-rich island in jail for protesting against oil extraction and contemplating suicide; and a Lebanese student comes back to his country warning of climate instability, but is not believed. An historical route is taken as a Victorian woman pub-keeper becomes a whistle-blower over pollution, and is betrayed by supposed allies co-opted by the controlling company.

Both evenings were good nights out, offering the enjoyment of theatre-making as a public process, as a local show among friends, with climate ideas seeping into the mix. Both evenings were firmly tied to naturalistic theatre. Some of the imagery and the settings, though, particularly in the ‘Hot in Here’ plays, felt fresh, as if a deeper layer of understanding was being exposed than that of relaying information, giving a warning, or proscribing behavioural changes that were such strong elements in early climate change works.

‘NOT IN MY NAME … BUT WITH MY MONEY’

Artist-activists have redefined disobedience and resistance over the past 40 years, and in doing so, challenged ideas of art and of the political. The contributors who offered more directly politicised actions to ArtCOP Scotland used the route of a workshop leading to a performance to bring out the immediacy of Scottish issues. The three shared in their movement from complex ideas to a mode of communication that was, or strived to be, authentic and a window through which to view a situation.

Anthem workshop attendees developing their protest song

Looking for the clarity of a protest song that could teach, mobilise and remember was the task of Tom Butler’s workshop, ‘Anthem’. In a few hours, with a group of strangers, myself among them, under his guidance, we talked over our thoughts on climate change, the economy, politics, honing the divergent responses and obsessions into a few stanzas and a chorus that we could sing, and did, on the balcony at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow. The historical legacy of song as communicator and container for social movements felt both archaic, given social media, but also a familiar ground. What emerged, on that day, with that group of people, was the unresolved conflicts within which one lives, that one can protest ‘not in my name’ against injustices, but the economic forces of neo-liberalism mean that the institutions and corporations using one’s money can act unimpeded against one’s intentions. (Watch their performance here).

The Firefly Arts’ GASBAGS’ piece, Much Reduced and Getting Smaller, performed by Laura Firth and Daniel Brown, came closest to an agit-prop event, a rap on consumerism, food waste and carbon footprints told through dialogue and physical theatre with a contagious, at times frenetic, energy. In another project by young persons, students at Govan High School worked with Ailie Rutherford and the short story Report on the Threatened City by Doris Lessing, in which an alien views earth society. They produced a looped stills montage of images of Govan, energy use, pollution and of their statements and imploring challenges, some read aloud at the CCA. ‘You think talking about a problem will solve it’, the alien says.

Laura Firth and Daniel Brown, Firefly Arts, performing “Much Reduced and Getting Smaller” at the ArtCOP Scotland Launch.

It was significant to have both these workshops included as a full part of this mix of events. The arts have been used to ‘teach’ climate change in the education system for many years. Having the acute observations and expressions of emotions as one among the many efforts at grappling with theatre and climate change was a reminder of how close the development of ideas by young persons is to that of the adult practitioners, and how meaningful it can be in their lives.

Part II will be released shortly.

ArtCOP Scotland Listings:

Stage to Page: Climate Change Edition
White Monochrome Kingdom, playwright Héloïse Thual; director Lou Mcloughlan
Timewatch, playwright Fergus Mitchell; director Alyson Woodhouse
The Heat is On, playwright Stewart Schiller; director Lisa Nicoll
performed readings
Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Glasgow

It’s Getting Hot in Here, Village Pub Theatre
Bluelines, by Sylvia Dow
Citylink, by Ellie Stewart
A Funeral for Snow, by Louise E. Knowles
Little Nellie: A Tale of Bleak Times, by Helen Shutt
On the Edge, by Sophie Good
Inge, by Clare Duffy
– plays from Climate Change Theatre Action:
An Average Guy Thinking Thoughts about Global Warming, by Neil LaBute
Talking to Dolphins, by Bryony Lavery
You Stink, by Amahl Khouri
director Caitlin Skinner; actors: Amy Drummond, Gerry Keilty, Matthew Leonard, Sarah MacGillivray
performed readings
The Pond pub, Edinburgh

The White Wood Story
Ben Macfayden and Deveron Arts
storytelling, community story-making, bicycle journey, woodland planning
Huntly, Brighton and Paris

Cock and Bull
by Nic Green, with Laura Bradshaw and Rosana Cade
performance
CCA, Glasgow

The Tree of Life
storytelling evening
Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh

Light Field
Saffy Setohy & Bill Thompson
immersive installation
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Green Tease: Gardens, Walking and Poetry
immersive walk led by Karen Gabbitas
Dunbars Close, Canongate, Edinburgh
poetry reading with Andrew Sclater
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Anthem: Tom Butler
workshop
CCA, Glasgow

Much Reduced and Getting Smaller
Firefly Arts’ Gasbags-in-Residence
performed by Laura Firth and Daniel Brown
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Report from a Threatened City
Ailie Rutherford and young people from Govan High School
video and spoken word
CCA, Glasgow

Images courtesy of: Thomas Butler and Stage to Page.

About Wallace

Wallace Heim writes, researches and teaches in the median zone where culture, art and human performance meet nature, the other-than-human and ecological thought. In these conjunctions, new forms of human experience can emerge, new modes of understanding and action take shape.

Wallace’s work is to analyse the experience of these art works and social practices, to consider how these events shape their social and ecological contexts, and to develop critical frameworks appropriate to the experience of culture in the time of climate instability.

Contact: home@wallaceheim.com

The post ‘Good Luck, Everybody’ – the theatres of ArtCOP: Part I 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

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Read Part I here: A Visual Arts Reflection on ArtCOP Scotland, Part I

Glasgow

December 12

Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich: The Conch [Sound Studio] 2010-11.

I take part in an event organised by Creative Carbon Scotland and the Scottish Contemporary Art Network (SCAN). The artists, Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich, talk about their projects including their work with a games designer and a change consultant in Orkney looking at the local response to the renewables industry, which has not always been welcomed. Bromwich explains that their concern with participation and engagement has its simplest roots in the fact that they make art together rather than alone. “If you work in collaboration your thoughts naturally turn to wider issues.”

The year is very old and everyone is very tired. It’s late. We talk about what difference SCAN might make and it is apparent that many of the artists, curators and educators present are already trying to reshape the landscape they live and work in. Many of them are actively modelling the future they want to see. The writer, Rebecca Solnit, argues in her essay Revolutions per Minute that such transformation is all around us, but sometimes it is hard to see. We must slow down to understand the shift in the tenor of our times.

The revolution is in part against the very speedup that has made us all busy, distracted, anxious, and unable even to perceive the tenor of our own times. So it is a revolution in perception and daily practice, as well as against the concrete institutions that spell the misery of everyday life for too many and the destruction of the Earth for us all.

Some of us imagine what slow art might look like. It would model the world differently from the compulsive models of western economies, the economies of consumption and of boom and bust.  It would realise that sustainability is about just that: about sustenance and it would; therefore, believe in long and deep investment in art and artists, stepping away from short termism and frenetic funding cycles. It would recognise waste: needless competition for certain limited resources, the thoughtless replication of tasks and functions. It would stop asking the arts to publicly perform their productivity, breaking the economy of presenteeism, but it would replace it with the politics of true and meaningful presence.

Glasgow

December 16

I think slow art would recognise that art communities are like ecologies, and acknowledge that their knowledge and experience is, like terroir or provenance, unique to a place or time, to intellectual environment and cultural climate. Encouraging specificity, rather than the sprawling globalised uniformity of world-spanning cultural agro-business.  It would recognise and encourage sharing and generosity, not the accelerated sharing economy of precariousness, but genuine generosity across institutions and between sectors.

There are things art needs help with: buildings that must be reshaped, rebuilt or rethought for sustainable purpose rather than show, a development of models that are less reliant on air freight or energy intensive technology, a shift in a compulsive cycle of short term exhibition-making to longer and deeper support for artistic practice and a break in our habit of compulsive travel. But as healthy ecologies often need migratory species, art needs travel and conversation and we should find more sustainable ways to make sure that conversation can continue.

The truth is that for all our earnest anxieties about doing the right thing, the art world is largely a low carbon environment. We know that the transformation needed to halt climate change is on a global scale and it is to governments, corporations and global polluters we must address our demands. It is systems and systemic failures we must attend to. In Huntly, Ian Findlay, a longstanding climate change activist, quoted Buckminster Fuller: “If you want to change the system you just make it irrelevant.”

How do we begin?

We can begin from below. By leading symbolic and practical changes in the way we think, talk and do.

I’ve learned much of what I know from artists and what they have taught me above all is the idea of practice: the small routines and habits that over a lifetime become a way of doing and seeing things differently. The choices and private sacrifices made for a productive public breakthrough. The little daily labours that result in big changes.  The determination that one day looks like contrariness and the next turns out to have been foresight and vision.

Thomas Butler’s “Anthem” workshop part of ArtCOP Scotland

Art has also taught me that art is at its best when it understands that it alone cannot change the world.

When art serves only an agenda and not the artist it is no longer art but something else. Art is a small community in itself, but it is not one of conformity or consensus: what it has always done best is to speculate and to argue and to think aloud by doing.

In Huntly, I meet a sociologist, Dr Liz Dinnie, from the James Hutton Institute. She is part of an international research project looking at the community projects that are tackling climate change. She tells the meeting: “Often what motivates people to do things is not just necessarily addressing climate change itself. Because climate change is a massive problem, it’s huge; it makes me feel very insignificant when I think about it. But addressing a problem that is real for them, that is local for them.”

Exhaustion is major factor in community projects. Later, over a bowl of beetroot soup, when I ask her what single factor best ensures the success and survival of such community activism, she answers in a single word: “leadership”.

Glasgow

December 17

The artist, Ellie Harrison, is dressed in a boiler suit. She exudes energy and action. She is at CCA to launch a new project The Radical Renewable Art and Activism Fund, “it aims to be a real working funding scheme for artists, but in the way it is set up it is also a critique in the existing funding structures. It aims to support more radicalised and politicised forms of creativity.”

Ellie Harrison at the RRAAF Launch

Using a crowd-funding scheme, Ellie has commissioned a preliminary report from Community Energy Scotland, a registered charity that provides practical help for communities on green energy development and energy conservation. She plans to support her fund through the generation of energy through renewables, issuing money to artists so that they can work without institutional compromise. She quotes one of the RRAAF founders, Chris Fremantle, ecoartscotland, “This is a great initiative to use the production of one sort of renewable energy to support the generation of another sort of energy.” “As an artist I’m interested in systems,” she says. “Whether it’s political systems or economic systems.”

Glasgow

December 21 

It’s late.

I’m late. I, who prides myself on meeting deadlines, have missed this one. Sometimes I’m a slow thinker. Tomorrow will see the Winter Solstice and the shortest day of the year. Ian Findlay told the Huntly audience about Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, the Swedish doctor and cancer scientist, who founded the international framework for sustainable development known as The Natural Step. Findlay had once asked the doctor what kept him awake at night. His response was immediate: “Loss of stories of meaning.” Robèrt meant loss of culture, loss of knowledge.

The White Wood in Huntly

I think back to the lesson of the White Wood. It might not be in the oaks that will eventually stand there. It might not be in Ben’s story, even if it is still told three centuries hence. I think it is in the rocks that will push up through the soil. The modern word sustain comes from the French soustenir: to lift from below. I like to think that of that slow lifting, that rising from beneath. Every tiny movement is cumulative. I think how it might become a mighty push.

With thanks to the artists, curators and organisations who met with me and hosted me throughout ArtCOP Scotland.

Images courtesy of Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich, Thomas Butler, Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund and Deveron Arts.

The post From Below: A Visual Arts Reflection on ArtCOP Scotland, Part II 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

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

The first in a two-part series written by Moira Jeffrey on ArtCOP Scotland as she travelled throughout Scotland visiting galleries and organisations participating in the two week long event.

“The old concept used to be: first we make the political revolution and then the cultural revolution. Now we have to think about how the cultural revolution can empower people differently.”

Grace Boggs

“The fantasy of a revolution is that it will make everything different—and regime-changing revolutions generally make a difference, sometimes a significantly positive one—but the making of differences in everyday practices is a more protracted and incremental and ultimately more revolutionary process.”

Rebecca Solnit

Huntly

November 28th

I’m tired. It’s dark. It’s late on a Saturday night. It’s late November.

It’s late. Tonight, I heard from someone, the naturalist, Cliff Jones, who has seen the melting of the permafrost at first hand.

I’m sitting up on a borrowed bed in a cottage in Old Road. My seamless aluminium MacBook pro is on my lap, I know about aluminium. I learned about the energy-intensity of bauxite mining, and its colonial histories, from the work of the artist, Simon Starling, more than a decade ago.  This lovely super light modern material has a dirty past. Starling understands the world as a contradictory flow of energies and histories and ideas and materials. So he drove to Les Baux in France to pick up some rocks and he taught himself to smelt aluminium in a lab in Dundee.

Artists tell stories of sorts and they learn by doing.

I’m checking my email and drafting some notes. A few weeks ago, I learned from a film by the artist, Yuri Pattison, about the coal-fired power stations that drive the data centres that in turn drive the cloud. Tung Hui Hu’s recent book A Prehistory of the Cloud tells me that even back in 2008 cloud computing was responsible for 2% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. He writes: “The long term consequences of the cloud are a world away from the seductive ‘now’ of its real time systems.”

I know I must learn to think beyond the now.

Located within the Bin Forest is the White Wood forest planted by artist Caroline Wendling. Image courtesy of Deveron Arts Facebook Page.

In Huntly, I meet the storyteller, Ben Macfadyen. He is in the Aberdeenshire town on a residency with Deveron Arts, which has been supported by ArtCOP Scotland. Last year the artist, Caroline Wendling, planted The White Wood near the town for her project Oaks and Amity. The wood will spring from 1000 oak tree saplings. 60 of them were grown from acorns collected from Kassel in Germany where the artists Joseph Beuys planted his work 7000 Oaks across the city beginning in 1982.

Beuys placed each oak beside an upended basalt rock. Before they were placed in the ground, the basalt rocks were piled high in public, a visible scar on the city’s public face and a visible measure of how far the project was progressing. Beneath the Scottish soil, Wendling planted rocks gathered from the battlefields of the Western Front. One day, the oak roots will push them up to the surface.

A forest is nothing to look at when it is first planted. It will be 300 years before The White Wood is mature and 1000 years from now when it dwindles and dies. Ben’s job in Huntly is to devise and tell a story that will keep the dream of the White Wood alive while it is slowly, and invisibly, growing.

Ben has organised a public meeting in the town on the theme of Patrick Geddes’s famous aphorism “Think global, act local.” He introduces the meeting with an extract from the Epic of Gilgamesh. The epic, like the bible, includes the story of a flood.

Ben Macfadyen posing in Paris with the Oak. Image courtesy of Deveron Arts Facebook Page

Ben tells me: “Stories are a powerful tool to shape our way forwards.” Ben is cycling to Paris among thousands of activists gathering for the COP21 talks on climate change. “Just before I set off from the White Wood, carrying an oak sapling all the way to Paris, I heard the news about the Paris attacks,” he recalls. “Suddenly, my whole journey shifted and I hoisted a big white flag on my bike. What started as a journey about climate change instead became something else. On my way instead of talking about fear, or retaliation we talked about peace.”

In the morning, we talk: Ben is 25 and has inherited a world that I, at 48, have helped create or perhaps, a world that I haven’t helped changed enough. He has been a climate change activist since he was 14. Lately he has worked in Glasgow schools helping children learn about nature through drama and storytelling. Ben has suffered from chronic fatigue and has experienced serious illness: he learned to care about the planet alongside learning to care for himself. He understands intimately that our resources are not unlimited. What is the relationship between his work and the question of climate? “I’m trying to think about living that relationship,” he tells me, “and how we can create work that reflects the way we want to be.”

He tells me about an encounter one morning as he cycled through rural Perthshire. He came across three strangers, a woman and her two children. The woman had a falcon on her arm. “It was a hunting animal and an animal of war,” he recalls. “But we talked about peace. It was a very beautiful moment, she was so careful and so conscious in her conversation.”

On the 23rd of January, Ben will be telling the first White Wood Story where the trees are planted in Huntly. More information here.

Edinburgh

November 30th

ArtCOP Scotland Launch at Gayfield

In Edinburgh, at Gayfield Creative Spaces, December is almost upon us. The gallery has an extensive programme for ArtCOP Scotland. It’s dark and wet again. But we are cheered by a performance by two young people form Firefly Arts in Livingston. At Gayfield, there is an exhibition Re: See It 3 by the artist-led organisation, Edinburgh Palette. There are lovely things on show: upcycled clothes made from recrafted tweed by Rose Hall, and Derring-Do medals: little medals of ribbon and vintage materials. Above me origami butterflies fly. They are crafted from obsolete banknotes.

But looking at all of these things begins to confuse me. It is something to do with the aesthetics of proliferation. I am reminded that there is a danger in the ever-increasing volume of stuff no matter its excellent provenance. Sometimes, the response of arts organisers to any kind of call to action, to crisis or opportunity, is to make more: to commission more activities or spread messages thin and fast rather than working deep and slow.

If we are to build a sustainable future for artists can we also re-imagine art commissioning that practises thoughtful restraint as well as production? Can we make pause purposeful? Can we support slow and significant and meaningful moments of creation and change as much as buzz and activity?

Perhaps I am just tired. I seem disproportionately interested in a commissioned project To Sleep Lightly by the designer, Dawn Ellams, who is reinventing the domestic mattress. I am horrified that the abandoned mattress is a global problem for which there is yet no recycling solution. Ellams is working with Zero Waste Scotland to imagine a future in which mattresses are re-designed to be part of the circular economy. I long for my bed. In Huntly, much of the talk amongst local climate change activists was about exhaustion. Action is tiring: we must learn to manage our personal resources as well as our global ones.

Dumfries

December 9

In the second week of December, it rains. And rains. And rains. On television a woman in Cumbria is crying as her home is inundated with flood water. On the radio, I hear a worker from the Red Cross who has set up an emergency shelter. In Dumfries, the railway line is flooded. I speak to someone whose train ride has become a three-hour diversion.

The Whitesands area on the banks of the Nith is flooded again, a problem that is so persistent that Dumfries and Galloway council is in the middle of a huge controversy about how to deal with it, recently opting for the design of a raised bund as a flood barrier for the town. I love the name Whitesands. It takes me a while in the town to understand that much of the area is actually a concrete car park.

Image courtesy of the Stove Network

Before the latest flood, curators from The Stove Network, a network of 250 artists in the area, had already chosen their subject for ArtCOP Scotland. Their exhibition called SUBMERGE brings together a number of artists whose work considers water, from the impact of increased rainfall predicted by scientists for the area, to the water quality of the local rivers.

The Stove sounds cosy and rural, but it is actually set in a shopfront in the High Street, which, like hundreds of high streets in small town Britain, has been eroded by supermarkets and out of town developments, the petrol economy and by internet shopping. The shop was empty for five years before The Stove Network moved in.

At the heart of SUBMERGE is a modest proposal entitled We Live with Water.  The project takes the form of a document from the perspective of 2065, speculating that the town has long decided to embrace the river’s flooding capacity and has transformed its waterfront by allowing the river to be wider and its banks re-wilded.

“We are looking at the place getting wetter and wetter,” explains the artist Katie Anderson who has curated the show. “These once in a lifetime flooding events will happen more and more. This is a river-facing town, and the river is potentially one of our most beautiful places, the town has turned its back on the river and we are really excited about how we can engage with that.” The Stove Network has not taken a public stand on the flood barrier proposals instead it is promoting a wider conversation about what the river means for Dumfries.

The artist, Matt Baker, sends me a blog he has written about SUBMERGE. “Richard Arkless, MP visited his constituents in Dumfries on Monday 7th December 2016 to inspect the aftermath of the flooding from the previous weekend. He heard rumours of an alternative plan for the town and the river during his visit and collected a copy of We Live With Water to take back to Westminster as a potential way forward for our town.”

Glasgow

December 10

I admit I have struggled a bit with my visits to the country. In Scotland’s cultural frameworks, I think the idea of the rural risks the country becoming a symbolic place rather than a real one: a place where art sometimes acts out a fantasy of a better, purer world. What I think I saw in Dumfries and Huntly was only too real. These are complicated communities locked into the same global problems, places that are often under duress or contradiction.

If culture is to confront climate change, nature must not just be a place of privileged retreat or a dreaming place for an elite culture. We must understand the pressure on our countryside in a more nuanced way. And we should remember that wherever we are, our future can be built here and now, not there and then. Globally in the cities we can and should make change. It is in the cities and The City where we must make a difference.

Part II will be available shortly.

With thanks to the artists, curators and organisations who met with me and hosted me throughout ArtCOP Scotland.

The post From Below: A Visual Arts Reflection on ArtCOP Scotland, Part I 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.

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