RSA Arts & Ecology

The Nature Conservancy

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Enter Our 4th Annual Photo Contest

The Nature Conservancy invites you to enter your stunning nature photos to our 4th annual digital photography competition.

We’re looking for beautiful nature photography representing the diversity of life on Earth. Your original digital images of our lands, waters, plants, animals and people in nature are all eligible for the competition.

We are especially interested in images that showcase the wide range of habitats across our planet, including all types of forests, grasslands, lakes and rivers, deserts and arid lands, rainforests, marine habitats and coral reefs in all seasons and around the world.

The winner’s image will be printed in the 2011 Nature Conservancy calendar – reaching nearly 2 million households worldwide.

The Best Nature Photo winner’s image will be featured on The Nature Conservancy’s website, nature.org, which is visited by more than 3 million people annually.

Find out more on the Nature Conservancy Website

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Actors wanted | The Waste Ed Roadshow

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Waste Ed Roadshow, charity creating educatioinal tools for young people, is looknig for two actors for pilot project

We are a registered charity creating exciting educational tools for teaching young people about ecology. Our new project - The Waste Ed Roadshow – is looking for two actors – male and female – to perform a 20 minute humourous dialogue about waste and how it effects ourselves and the environment.

Suitable people will be 18-25 years old, lively and confident, have some acting experience, and be genuinely interested in ‘green’ issues.

The performance will be part of up to 5 pilot runs of the roadshow, from end of May through June. Rehearsals will be led by our Project Leader (a professional actress). To keep travel expenses to a minimum, we are looking for volunteers from the West Greater London/Woking/Ascot area.

If you’re interested in getting involved contact us with a bit about yourself, your experience, and a photo if possible.

You can also visit www.waste-ed.org.uk for more information about the roadshow.

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HOW CAN WE ENSURE THAT CULTURE AND CREATIVITY MAKE MAXIMUM IMPACT ON THE UK ECONOMY BEYOND THE RECESSION?

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HOW CAN WE ENSURE THAT CULTURE AND CREATIVITY MAKE MAXIMUM IMPACT ON THE UK ECONOMY BEYOND THE RECESSION ?

- ENSURING MOST RIGOROUS IMPLEMENTATION OF CREATIVE BRITAIN

- CAPITALISING ON THE SUCCESS OF CULTURAL LEADERS

- DELIVERING CREATIVITY AT THE CORE OF REGIONAL AND CITY STRATEGIES

- MAKING BEST USE OF THE INVESTING IN CREATIVE INDUSTRIES? LOCAL GUIDE

Monday 26 October, 2009

– Royal Commonwealth Society, London

Contributors include

Sir John Tusa,Chair, University of the Arts London

· Emily Thomas,Director, Aequitas

· Anne Bonnar, Recently Transition Director, Creative Scotland

· Mark Davy, Director, Futurecity

· Alexandra Jones,Associate Director, The Work Foundation

· Anna Whyatt,Creative Futures Director, ERA

· Jacqui Henderson, Skills Ambassador to the Creative and Cultural Industries

· Chris Garcia, Head of Clusters, South West Regional Development Agency

· Phil Shankland, Managing Director, Inspiral, South Yorkshire

· Brendan McGoran, Creative Industries Officer, Belfast City Council

Issues covered

· How best should we capitalise on the huge contribution of culture and creativity to UK economy and society?

· What should we learn from the vast success of UK cultural leaders unlike those in other sectors?

· How do we ensure creative industries make maximum impact on economic growth throughout the UK?

· What are Government’s agenda and expectations?

· How effectively is the Creative Britain strategy being taken forward?

· What will be the impact of Digital Britain?

· How best can we sustain innovative and sustainable business models for the arts and creative industries?

· How best do we find, inspire, develop and sustain creative entrepreneurs and maximise their contribution?

· How important is cultural branding to regeneration and growth?

· How best to we ensure successful collaboration between artists, architects, public authorities and developers?

· What can we learn from the Ideopolis concept?

· How can culture and innovation make maximum impact to success, sustainability and growth of UK cities?

· How do we ensure creative and cultural industries make maximum contribution and impact on regional growth?

· How best should we use the local government guide Investing in Creative Industries??

· Where can we hope to be in ten years time?

How to Book

To see the full programme, speaker biographies, venue information and booking details Click Here

There are discounts for voluntary and community organisations and for block bookings

Please note

Any problems, please contact Louise Rushworth on 01422 845004 or email seminars@cppseminars.org.uk.

To unsubscribe please telephone 01422 845004 – we apologise in advance for any inconvenience caused.

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Invitation to local artists | Tatton Park Biennial 2010

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Tatton Park Biennial | Invitation to local artists
Artists from Cheshire and the North West are invited to take part in Open Competitions as part of Tatton Park Biennial 2010

Next year sees the return of this remarkable contemporary arts event in Tatton’s gardens. The inaugural Biennial, which took place in the summer of 2008, saw nearly 30 artists, performers and writers develop new works for Tatton Park, to considerable critical and public acclaim.  Tatton Park Biennial 2010 will take a site-specific theme of “Framing Identity” that explores our association with place.

For 2010, artists will be commissioned in three ways: by curator’s appointment, peer recommendation from leading organisations and via two Open Competitions, engaging artists from Cheshire and the North West. 

One competition is open to artists who have recently completed formal training and are either currently living or working in Cheshire or are originally from the county. The second is open to all artists living or working in the North West. Artists are invited to apply by developing their own site-specific proposals, based on the 2010 theme and can apply as individuals or as collaborative groups.   

Selected artists will be awarded a budget of £5,500 to cover fees, materials and expenses.  Most importantly, however, they will be able to participate in the prestigious 2010 Biennial, sharing a high-profile platform with other emerging as well as established national and international artists.

The submissions for the open competitions will be judged by Biennial curators, Danielle Arnaud and Jordan Kaplan from Parabola, Brendan Flanagan, Tatton Park and Visitor Economy Manager and Helen Battersby, Arts, Heritage and Museums Manager, Cheshire East.

Curators, Danielle Arnaud and Jordan Kaplan commented “We are so pleased to be able to offer this opportunity to artists! It is not the easiest option, but it is crucial to our ambition for increasing the scope and reach of the Biennial. Soliciting proposals from artists who are not currently known to us is just one of the ways the Biennial is working as a creative laboratory – positioning itself as a unique event and a new model for participation with contemporary art of the highest calibre”.

Brendan Flanagan, Tatton Park and Visitor Economy Manager said “’Framing Identity’ will explore our relationship with place, whether that be the Egerton family who owned Tatton Park, today’s visitors, or our own identity with place as an individual, community or business. Through the Tatton Park Biennial, Cheshire East Council can extend a unique opportunity to artists from the region.”

Proposals should be submitted via the Spaces Cheshire website

http://www.spacescheshire.com/spacesapp/commissions.aspx

The deadline for submission of applications is midnight Wednesday 30 September 2009. Interviews will be held on Thursday 15 October 2009.

Framing Identity

8 May to 26 September 2010

From 8 May to 26 September 2010, Tatton Park will stage its second Biennial of contemporary art, with up to 20 commissioned works responding to the site and notions of identity that emerge from it. Landscape as a social platform; social divides reflected in landscape; a sense of place in relation to the macro- and immediate vicinity of the Park; the relevance of the boundary wall that encircles its 1,000-acres; people who work at the site and know it intimately and those who live in the very different estates that ring Tatton and are not included among its current visitors are all subjects of enquiry. The opportunity to re-examine the site as a living and evolving subject rather than as an historical keepsake is at the heart of 2010. 

Partners from across the arts and cultural sectors in the Northwest and the UK are working with the Biennial to deliver a programme that will extend the reach of the event to national and international audiences. There will be several commissioning opportunities involving multiple sites and organisations like museums, universities and community groups. 

There are three commissioning schemes: curators’ invitation; peer recommendation and open competition, which will work to develop the artistic scope of the Biennial as it locates itself as a dynamic laboratory for experimentation and exchange. Artists working internationally will be commissioned alongside some of the most innovative emerging artists in Britain, with work taking on a variety of media, from large-scale installation to film, video, book & web-works and performance, with new collaborations throughout.

www.tattonpakbiennial.org



Tatton Park is managed and financed by Cheshire East Council on behalf of the National Trust.

This impressive historic estate receives in the region of 750,000 visitors every year all of whom come to enjoy its Georgian Mansion, Tudor Old Hall, award winning Gardens and 1930s rare breeds farm.  The 1,000 acre deer park is home to Red and Fallow deer and the estate also boasts speciality shops, adventure playground, restaurant and year-round events programme. 

www.tattonpark.org.uk

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Online workshop to create a collective artwork

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Pyranees | Art and ecology in the 21st century
Online workshop
September 12 to October 17

The aim of this workshop is to develop a collective artwork via the internet that will reflect on the transformations in the landscape caused by climate change. This work will be presented in an exhibition that will be mounted in 2010.

The online workshop is directed by Lluís Sabadell Artiga, an artist, curator and designer specialising in themes of Art and Ecology and in the use of virtual resources to realise collective creative projects via the Net.

This workshop falls within the project Pyranees: Art and ecology in the 21st century, which aims to use contemporary artistic language to disseminate current scientific knowledge on the changes that are starting to be evident in the landscape as a result of human activity, as well as discussing the sense and function that art can bring to our knowledge of nature and society in the 21st century.

The project Pyranees: Art and ecology in the 21st century is divided into two phases:

Phase 1: Scientific seminar: Evolution of the landscape, climate change and art (theory and practical) with the participation of the scientists: Jaume Terradas, Albert Pèlachs, Francisco Lloret, Jesús Camarero, Iolanda Filella.

Phase 2: Work period in residence with the artists: Edgar Dos Santos and Montse Vendrell (Catalonia), Carl Hurtin and Suzanne Husky (Midgia-Pirineus), Christel Balez (Languedoc-Roussillon) and Online Workshop
Pyranees: Art and ecology in the 21st century is a project organised by the Centre d’Art i Natura de Farrera in collaboration with Caza d’Oro and Accueil et Découverte du Conflent – «Les Isards».


Programme and organisational details

This virtual workshop is aimed at any interested person who, regardless of his/her field of work, wishes to become involved in a shared online creative process revolving around art and ecology. People from all disciplines are encouraged to participate in order to cross-fertilise knowledge and create a transdisciplinary collaboration. Artists, architects, designers, scientists, philosophers, naturalists, historians, naturalists, farmers…

http://www.pirineusartiecologia.org/

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People’s Palace Projects

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People’s Palace Projects

PEOPLE’S PALACE PROJECTS (PPP)

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR


People’s Palace Projects is looking for an exceptional and talented individual with passion, skill and a strategic mindset. Working with Artistic Director Paul Heritage, you will deliver collaborative, multi-faceted arts projects that respond to urgent contemporary issues, and produce a programme that integrates art, enquiry and debate.

You will play a key role in the local, national and international partnerships that are key to PPP’s success, including the implementation of a three-year programme in the UK with the Brazilian cultural warriors AfroReggae.

Based at Queen Mary, University of London – one of the UK’s leading academic institutions – PPP has an excellent record of innovative research and advocacy for art that advances social justice. 

You will therefore be able to bring your strategic, management and conceptual skills to academic, arts and social policy contexts.

Salary: c £40,000pa negotiable according to experience.


Deadline for applications: 18th June 2009


For application pack email: Rachel Sanger on r.m.sanger@qmul.ac.uk`


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Declining newspapers: arts moving into empty spaces

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bumblebee_page3_1000

Artists love disused space. Artists And Makers have been tweeting me about the Empty Shops Conference they’re running on October 19. Meanwhile here’s another example of a street artists moving into a disused property. The collapse of the newspaper market in the US has been even more precipitous than it has been here in the UK. Print ad sales fell by a horrendous 30% in the first quarter of 2009; titles have been disappearing at an alarming speed.  The newspaper is a strange but crucial part of the social glue in the US, a country where there is no such thing as a “national” newspaper outside of USA Today. Americans are losing a major part of the way in which they tell their stories.

Out of decline comes opportunity. Here’s an example of one street artist Bumblebee, who has been opportunistically taking over empty newsboxes on the streets of Los Angeles, to create a series of narrative tableaux, linking the declines of newspapers to that of another endangered species.

The art, it has to be said, is pretty grim. Nice idea, though…

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Environmentalism: towards civilisation, or “uncivilisation”?

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The environment movement is failing because it has only a negative vision of the future. Discuss.

That’s the nub of the argument suggested by Josie Appleton of the Manifesto Club in her essaythat we published last week, and one echoed by Emma Ridgway’s recent article for theRETHINK exhibition catalogue. Environmentalism, the argument goes, is about limiting possibilities. It’s about what we shouldn’t do. Appleton believes that art has a visionary role in thinking beyond this drought of possiblity; humanity must instead accept its place as the species that transformed the earth – we must take on that leap of consciousness when we start to think of solutions and not start from the romantic baseline of earth as a wilderness, despoiled by man. We must move forwards, not back.

A radical idea. And the polar opposite to another radical idea proposed recently by poet/writer/activist Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine. For them and their Dark Mountain Project, human civilisation itself is the toxic factor that has plunged the earth into crisis. In the blink of an eye – the five thousand years or so  in which  humanity has accelerated towards modern civilisation – we have so stamped over the intricacies of nature that the wheel is now flying off the machine. We must prepare our exit from civilisation, for “uncivilisation”. In the visual arts, this has echoes in the recent work of Heather and Ivan Morison, whose How to prosper in the coming bad years discussion takes place in The Black Cloud (see above) next weekend in Bristol.

Art, a place where the imagination can roam to extremes, is an excellent laboratory for ideas.  The Dark Mountain Project finds its inspiration in literature, particularly in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers – the Californian who shared a romantic vision of wilderness with environmentalist Edward Abbey, referred to below. It was Jeffers who had first suggested the idea of  “inhumanism” that  inspired the Dark Mountain Project. Human civilisation was, Jeffers suggested, always too self-centred to understand the complexity and beauty of the world around it. The Dark Mountain Project also plant their flag in the literature of Joseph Conrad and his “heart of darkness”.

There have been some interesting responses to the Dark Mountain provocation. In the New Statesman, John Gray responded to the Dark Mountain provocation by demonstrating that literature has in fact been much more successful at showing the catastrophic results of “uncivilisation” than eulolgising it. There is nothing romantic about the crumbling of civil society. Gray too cites Joseph Conrad, to make the point that Conrad, like J G Ballard – shows the genuine  horror of what a society in disintegration actually looks like. Both Conrad and Ballard were witness to the atrocities that happen when the crust of civilization is removed.

(On a sidenote, Paul Kingsnorth and I have disagreed elsewhere about whether Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road is a novel primarily about climate change. Gray’s line of argument  reminds you that MacCarthy’s book, in which baby-eating survivors scavage the land,  displays the awful consequence of uncivilisation.)

But as both suggest, it’s time to rexamine the givens. Environmentalism hasn’t produced the major shift in culture that the global warming era requires. Something radical has to shift.  Appleton’s idea is that to save civilisation we need more civilisation, not less:

The anthropocene is here, and there is no way back. To wish that we could retreat is the mythical fantasy of wishing that we never ate the apple or stole the fire. It is a wish that we were children again, back in a former stage of history. We cannot reverse out of the anthropocene but only go forward.

I doubt John Gray would quite see eye to eye with Appleton’s thesis either. Gray’s book Straw Dogs was a vigorous assault on the idea of that idea of human centrality in nature. Appleton’s argument is unashamedly anthropocentric; in fact the very notion of the anthropocene, by definition, is a human-centred concept. Gray follows James Lovelock: such assumptions of human supremacy over nature are fundamentally arrogant and hubristic.  Myself, I find the technological postivism of Appleton’s approach hard to embrace. Above all, I don’t believe, as she does, that, ” The climate moves slowly; we have time.”

The Black Cloud by Heather and Ivan Morison (Bristol, 2009)photographed by ac (y su camarófono)

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RSA AGM: Rethinking the community garden

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grow your ownTomorrow is the RSA’s AGM; the house will be full of RSA Fellows here to discuss the organisation, its future and the new charter. We’ve decided to shamelessly exploit the presence of all these experts being in a single place on a single day by running a series of brain-picking seminars.

I’m doing one with the excellentConnected Communities project which gives me a chance to start talking about something that I’ve been working on for a little while now. Back in the spring I was researching the subject of artists working in productive gardens, talking to people like Fallen Fruit, Amy Francheschini – and more recently Clare Patey of Feast. There is a huge enthusiasm around for this stuff. How can we create new ways to garden? How can we create new places to garden?

That connected with an idea that was put forward by a Fellow and so we’re now on the verge of launching our own project, Rethinking the community garden. The recession has meant that there is a lot of land – particularly building land – which is on hold in cities right now. How can we change the idea of gardens as permanent fixtures to something that’s more flexible, something that maximises land use throughout a city turning semi-derelict land into an asset?

We want to attach that to Fellow’s expertise and experience to make the project come to life in New Cross Gate, South London, an area that Connected Communities are already working in. If you are an RSA Fellow and you want to come along to this, or to any of the other seminars, it’s not to late to register. We need bright heads to brainstorm along the the following lines:

  • How can we persuade landowners to let us use small parcels of land for one, two or more years, and leave them confident that there’s not going to be local resentment when they need them back?
  • How can we persuade gardeners to pour their work into a piece of land they might only have for a single growing season?
  • How can we help the users design gardens in a practical way on land that may only be available for 18 months?
  • Research shows that successful garden projects are often run by a small group of people. How can we make a successful garden project that engages a wide slice of the local population?

Thanks to Harmen de Hoop for the use of Grow Your Own Vegetables – again.

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Encouragement of the Arts

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I’m wildly excited about two books, one coming out this month the other next year – both are radical insights about what environmental change means for the human relationship to the planet. One is Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto and the other is Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought.

What I find so vital in their work is that they are strongly against the misanthropy that seems to underpin much of the dominant narrative around the environmental movement. To my mind, the idea that humans are stupid, indifferent and deliberately destructive is not only an inadequate account of human nature it is heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking because it is debilitating at every level. At a time when we most need compassion and creative thinking the very sentiments that block these – pervasive cynicism and conservatism – are prevalent. (I’ve used too many words beginning with ‘c’ in that sentence, I’ll move onto the letter ‘R’ for a while).

What roots the rigorous accounts given by ecological experts such as Brand and Morton is that people are hugely capable of complex thinking, adaptive living, resilience and resourcefulness. We have created this situation of environmental change so now we must rise to challenge of transforming how we think and behave in response to it. And when I read documents like Peter Head’s Entering an Ecological Age, and see speakers at the RSA like Graciela Chichilnisky, not only do these extraordinary changes feel crucial they appear do-able.

Drawing on Brand, Head and Morton, I have written a short essay for the Copenhagen exhibition RETHINK: Contemporary Art & Climate Change.
Here’s a bit of it:  Art and ideas are not timeless, they are historically specific. The uneasy realisation of our current situation is that we are part of an ecological system that we influence more than we previously thought was possible. We are not outside observers, we are participants; we engage and affect systems whether we intend to or not. … we are the co-creators of our environment. Yet we do not yet fully recognise ourselves as such. This is a revelation awaiting to be fully explored through the arts.

It is the beginning of some work I’m developing for the Arts and Ecology Centre on what the arts may contribute  in moving us towards an ecological age.  Some of the ideas are controversial. And as part of this, writer Josie Appleton has been commissioned to write an essay for this website, as her work sets out to explore fresh thinking about human capability.The Challenge of Climate Change: Towards a New Human Consciousness – is a ‘thought experiment’, as she says in her blog – so comments are welcome.

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