Climate Change

New metaphors for sustainability: the sailboat

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This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

We continue our series of New metaphors for sustainability with the sailboat, suggested by James Marriott, artist, activist, member of PLATFORM. 

The boat for me is a very powerful metaphor. Sustainability is a rather grey and unclear term, but if it means anything, it means that we have to live with the finite resources of the earth. We have to deal with this in our generation and pass it on to future generations.

It is this sense of the finite capacity that I find interesting and comes to me through the experience of boats. I mean boats which are driven by sail and by oar – that use the motive power of the wind and the tide captured through wood and flax and hemp and use that to move from ‘a’ to ‘b’.

I’ve been learning to sail, and it’s been a wonderful experience. It makes you extremely aware of the forces of nature – it makes it very intimate. You’re at the mercy of the winds. You have to work with the tides – the skill comes from using whatever is there, that finite amount of power.

The finiteness, too, comes from the space of the boat itself. You have to pack everything in it that you might need or want. The boat frames my needs and desires about where I can go and how long it’s going to take me.

It concentrates the mind about the nature of the space in which I’m in, and about the wind and the water and the movement of the tide and the flow of the river.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

The editors are Robert Butler and Wallace Heim. The associate editor is Kellie Gutman. The editorial adviser is Patricia Morison.

Robert Butler’s most recent publication is The Alchemist Exposed (Oberon 2006). From 1995-2000 he was drama critic of the Independent on Sunday. See www.robertbutler.info

Wallace Heim has written on social practice art and the work of PLATFORM, Basia Irland and Shelley Sacks. Her doctorate in philosophy investigated nature and performance. Her previous career was as a set designer for theatre and television/film.

Kellie Gutman worked with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture for twenty years, producing video programmes and slide presentations for both the Aga Khan Foundation and the Award for Architecture.

Patricia Morison is an executive officer of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, a group of grant-making trusts of which the Ashden Trust is one.

Go to The Ashden Directory

TWO DEGREES Produced by Artsadmin – 12–18 June 2011

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Cycle Sunday: House of Hot Breath, photo by Erica Earle

 

Sitting between art and activism, performance and protest, this year’s Two Degrees festival takes over the streets of East London

Two Degrees is the first ever festival to bring together over 30 radical and political artists to respond to and intervene in the public debate on climate change and government cuts.

Transcending the gallery space and traditional definitions of ‘art’ this festival is about audiences actively taking part. From bike rides and haircuts to sharing food and stories, Two Degrees is a unique series of performances, films, installations, walks and interventions by artists and activists that offer a positive, alternative response to the current financial and climate crises.

Our consumption of food is increasingly a high-profile political issue, from food miles to fair trade. For one week only a pop up café created by Clare Patey will draw attention to some of the lesser known problems we face. Crayfish Bob’s stylish eatery invites dinner party conversation whilst highlighting the damage caused to London’s waterways by the invasive American Signal Crayfish. Elsewhere in the festival, Rebecca Beinart investigates herbal medicine and natural poisons in a performance that gathers powerful plants from London’s streets and the Otesha Project lead a food foraging cycle tour.

Finding new ways of sharing ideas and creating dialogue can mobilise change. The Haircut Before the Party is a hair salon with a difference. Customers at this temporary Whitechapel salon will be offered a free haircut in exchange for swapping their opinions, experiences and thoughts with their hairdresser.  Future Editions, an alternative human library at Toynbee Studios will allow you to actively engage with leading climate change specialists. Visitors to the library are met by a maverick librarian who selects for them a human book. Your book will then offer you a 10 minute conversation – a rare opportunity to ask questions or exchange views. Glasgow based artist and activist Ellie Harrison looks at our increasingly fragmented and precarious labour market in Work-a-thon; an attempt to break the world record for the most self-employed workers in one space, creating a social environment for workers to combat issues of isolation, lack of solidarity and unregulated hours.

Green transport is also part of the programme and Cycle Sunday (in collaboration with Arcola Theatre) invites audiences to participate in a range of performances, events and workshops, all made for bikes. From a grafitti tour of London to a bingo bike ride and bike powered smoothie maker – artists, campaingers, engineers and designers explore the possibilities of green technology and low carbon lifestyles.

Across the UK, protest and activism have hit the headlines in recent months, but what is the link between the economic crisis and climate change? Two Degrees asks this question, bringing together artists and activists working outside of the mainstream, proposing alternative and inspiring solutions to the problems we face today, bridging the gap between art and activism.

For further information and images please contact Penny Sychrava PR on 0796 791 5339 or pennysychrava@hotmail.com or Sam Scott Wood at Artsadmin on sam@artsadmin.co.uk or 020 7247 5102.

Crayfish Bob, photo by Dan Houston

 

ABOUT TWO DEGREES

Two Degrees is Artsadmin’s weeklong festival of art and activism, climate and cuts. Following the first festival in 2009, Two Degrees 2011 takes place from 12-18 June in and around Artsadmin’s Toynbee Studios home.

Two Degrees takes place as part of the activities of the Imagine 2020 Network of European arts organisations who are working together to encourage arts organisations and artists to engage more with the subject of climate change. The current partners in the network are Artsadmin; Lift, London; Bunker, Ljubljana; Le Quai, Angers; Kaaitheater, Brussels; Domaine d’O, Montpelier; New Theatre of Institute of Latvia, Riga; Transforma, Torres Vedras; Domino, Zagreb, Rotterdamse Schouwbourg, Rotterdam; and Kampnagel, Hamburg. www.imagine2020.eu

Two Degrees is supported by the European Commission Culture Programme and by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

ABOUT ARTSADMIN

Artsadmin is based at Toynbee Studios and is a unique producing and presenting organisation for contemporary artists working in theatre, dance, live art, visual arts and mixed media, also offering various support services for artists, including a free advisory service, mentoring and development programmes and a number of bursary schemes. Toynbee Studios is Artsadmin’s unique centre for the development and presentation of new work.  The studios comprise a 280-seat theatre, five studio spaces and the Arts Bar & Café, all of which host performances and events throughout the year. www.artsadmin.co.uk

the arctic is melting and everyone wants a piece of it « Mo`olelo Blog

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Two years ago, thanks to a grant from The James Irvine Foundation, Mo`olelo commissioned playwright Chantal Bilodeau to write a play that explores the intersection of race, class and climate change. Originally from Montreal, Ms. Bilodeau was already researching the impact of climate change on the Inuit communities of the Canadian Arctic. This commission supported that work. As she traveled to the arctic and did further research, she encountered the complexities and contradictions of climate change: ice versus maritime commerce, human rights and activism colliding with family obligations, sovereignty colliding with sustainability. The result was a new play, Sila. The title, Sila, is an Inuit word for the breath of life, the primary component of everything that exists.

Mo`olelo workshopped the first draft of this script last year; Ms. Bilodeau and Mo`olelo’s Artistic Director Seema Sueko journeyed to Montreal in January of this year to workshop the script at Playwrights Workshop Montreal with Inuit and Quebecois actors; and we will now host the third and final workshop reading of this script on May 24. We invite you to join us. For those who saw the reading in 2010, the script has gone through significant adjustments, with some characters “being fired,” and a tightening of the story.

Details

What: a reading of Sila by Chantal Bilodeau

When:   Tuesday, May 24, 2011 with 5:15 PM Potluck reception & mingle with the artistic team and 6:00 PM Reading

Where: The 10th Avenue Theatre, 930 10th Avenue, San Diego, CA 92101

Reservations: Space is limited. Email: tickets@moolelo.net or call 619-342-7395

Admission: Bring something to drink (bottle of wine, soda, whatever you fancy), food to share (cheese & crackers, hors d’oeuvre, or some other munchie), or make a $10 donation at the door.

www.moolelo.net

About the play:

The Arctic is melting and everyone wants a piece of it.

In the race to shape the future of the region, four characters – an ice scientist, an Inuit activist, an officer for the Marine Communications and Traffic Services and a polar bear – see their values challenged as their lives become intricately intertwined.

Unconference: “Re-Rooting Digital Culture”

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

13th of May at the University of Westminster

Over the last decade the awareness of anthropogenic climate change has emerged in parallel with global digital communication networks. By their very nature, the new tools, networks and behaviours of productivity, exchange and cooperation between humans and machines grow and develop at an accelerated rate.

The transdisciplinary panel will explore the impact of digital culture on climate change, developing themes adopted in grass-roots, emerging and established practices in art, design and science.

The ideas for the unconference have grown out of Furtherfield’s Media Art Ecologies programme. ”Unconference” thereby stands for a participant-driven meeting, which tries to avoid some of the aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization.

Furtherfield was founded in 1997 as the Internet took shape as a new public space for internationally connected cultural production and is now a centre where upwards of 26,000 contributors worldwide have built a culture around co-creation – swapping and sharing code, music, images, video and ideas.

For more information visit: www.furtherfield.org.

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)

– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)

– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)

– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

UK Green Film Festival

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This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

LAUNCHING IN CARDIFF, LEEDS, LEICESTER, LONDON

& GLASGOW at the GFT

The UK Green Film Festival, launching in 2011, is a not-for-profit, national film festival showcasing films and filmmakers engaging with environmental and climate change themes. We’re not here to preach. We’re here to challenge, inspire, educate, learn and entertain.

The GFT will be showing GasLand, With Landscape in Mind, Plastic Planet, Planeat and The Pipe about Rossport’s resistance to the gas pipeline. 

 

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.

Go to EcoArtScotland

Arcola Energy for Schools.

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We launched Arcola Energy for Schools during Climate Week 2011 (21 – 27 March).

Climate Week is a national campaign to get people taking action on climate change.  It has created some controversy due to its partners, see Guardian blog HERE.

Arcola has enjoyed the opportunity of bringing the excitement of the science of renewable energy to over 100 local school children. Full report coming soon on our latest news page

Go to Arcola Energy

U-n-f-o-l-d. A Cultural Response to Climate Change

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

Art exhibition and various events at Columbia College Chicago – March 14–April 23, 2011

Museum of Contemporary Photography (600 South Michigan Avenue) – Glass Curtain Gallery (1104 South Wabash Avenue), Chicago, IL (USA)

U-n-f-o-l-d. A Cultural Response to Climate Change presents the work of twenty-five artists who participated in Cape Farewell expeditions to the Andes and the High Arctic. Each artist witnessed firsthand the dramatic and fragile environmental tipping points of climate change.

Featured Artists: Ackroyd & Harvey, Amy Balkin, David Buckland, Adriane Colburn, Sam Collins, Nick Edwards, Leslie Feist, Francesca Galeazzi, Nathan Gallagher, Marjie de Haas, Robyn Hitchcock + KT Tunstall, Ian McEwan, Brenndan McGuire, Daro Montag, Michèle Noach, Lucy + Jorge Orta, Sunand Prasad, Tracey Rowledge, Lemn Sissay, Shiro Takatani, Clare Twomey and Chris Wainwright.

More info at: this website

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)

– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)

– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)

– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

‘Marbh Chrios – DeadZones’: Softday’s Lovely Weather climate art project in Ireland

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

Margaret Mc Laughlin, fine artist, has attended and written about an innovative sound work that was performed in Mooney’s boatyard, Killybegs, Co. Donegal, Ireland, on the 16th of October 2010. The work was part of the Donegal County Council’s Lovely Weather Art and Climate Change Public Art Programme (2009-10) . The project was co-curated by the Regional Culture Centre’s John Cunningham and Leonardo’s Annick Bureaud.  The sound performance pieces were based around the topic of ‘dead zones’, which are areas in the ocean in which aquatic life has been dramatically reduced. Artists Sean Taylor and Micheal Fernstrom, the Softday partnership, have extensively researched this subject.  As part of Leonardo/OLATS and Donegal Co. Council Lovely Weather Artist’s Residency, ‘Softday’ interpreted the sound of ‘dead zones’ into a tangible form for local audiences in a variety of sound forms.  Disturbingly there are 20 contested deadzones around Ireland, two of which are in Donegal bay and Killybegs harbour. The number of dead zones are increasing worldwide.

Read more at http://ecoartnotebook.com/?p=1624

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:
– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

ashdenizen: wanted: a portrait of the climate scientist as a real person

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In his preface to The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard makes the point that writers can have real political influence. His example is Turgenev’sSportsman’s Sketches, which Stoppard writes,

“were plausibly said to have done more than anything else to turn the ‘Reforming Tsar’ Alexander 11 towards abolishing serfdom.”

But the writing has to be precise and observant. Earlier in the preface, when discussing Alexander Herzen, Stoppard writes,

“What he detested above all was the conceit that theoretical future bliss justified actual present sacrifice.”

Twentieth-century history was on Herzen’s side. It’s easy to imagine, today, that many playwrights’ resistance to climate change as a political subject comes from this idea that it deals with a “theoretical future” and that it is being used to justify “actual present sacrifice”. Playwrights like to write about real situations, flesh and blood characters, the here and now. And they like jokes.

In some ways, then, the most interesting characters to put on stage right now are climate scientists: not a climate sceptic disguised as a climate scientist (as happens in The Heretic), but the climate scientists who are simultaneously appalled and fascinated by what they are discovering.

At last year’s TippingPoint conference in Oxford, climate scientists spoke candidly and wittily about how their work had altered their lives and their world views. If caught accurately, that kind of portrait might have real political influence.

via ashdenizen: wanted: a portrait of the climate scientist as a real person.

Going Green

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This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

Julie’s Bicycle just launched a publication, developed with the Mayor of London and Frieze Art Fair, on the visual arts.  This is one of a series of ‘how to’ guides across artforms.

Starting with work in 2007 that looked at the Greenhouse Gas emissions of the UK Music Industry, Julie’s Bicycle has researched and produced guides on CD Packaging, Audience Travel to Festivals, Performing Arts Touring, as well as Promos and Green Riders.

All organisations should be looking seriously at these issues, not only in terms of management of buildings, but also management of programming.  Whilst the recent glut of plays about climate change may have been met with some criticism, there are artists making interesting work focused on environmental crisis across all artforms.  The question in the end is whether this is didactic or whether it opens up dialogue.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland