Creative Carbon Scotland

Mull – Weekend Residency, thinking about Art & Sustainability

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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Artist Residency Callout

Mull is a multi-disciplinary weekend-long residency which explores the question, ‘What would it mean to be an artist working in a sustainable Scotland in 50 years’ time?’ through artistic practice and conversation. We’re looking for up to ten artists to apply their curiosity and unique skills to imagining what being an artist in a sustainable Scotland might look like in the future – what that would mean, how it would affect artistic content, what infrastructure it would require in order to function and how artists and the arts will have shaped a sustainable Scotland.  Creative Carbon Scotland is partnering with Comar on the beautiful Isle of Mull to mull over these complex questions with artists who may or may not have previously thought about environmental sustainability in relation to their work.

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Background and context

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe artists and cultural organisations have a significant role to play in envisioning, inspiring and influencing a more sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

Over the past year Creative Carbon Scotland has initiated a number of artistically-led projects including the CO2 Edenburgh exhibition in partnership with Edinburgh Art Festival; a workshop with Imaginate and children’s theatre makers imagining and developing a sustainable children’s theatre network; and more recently Glasgow Green Teas(e).

Building on this, Mull will invite artists to imagine what it would mean to marry creativity and environmental sustainability in their practice. The weekend will be led by facilitators – composer Dave Fennessy and producer Suzy Glass – but will also be steered by those taking part, recognising the relatively untrodden grounds of the questions we’re asking.

The residency has a number of objectives:

  • To provide artists who may or may not have previously thought about environmental sustainability in their practice with the space and stimuli to consider how it might drive new ways of working;
  • To create a ‘greenprint’ of the skills and ways of working that might constitute a sustainable artistic practice;
  • To use this ‘greenprint’ as the starting point for thinking about how Creative Carbon Scotland and the cultural sector can best support and work with artists in this capacity;
  • To nurture a creative network which embeds environmental sustainability at its core.

What will it involve?

Mull takes the disrupted and changing climate as the starting point for thinking about how artists might do things differently. It asks how the world might look in 50 years’ time and what role artists might play in the changes to come as well as what unique skills they can bring to this new context. Considering approaches to making art, as well the actual content and the infrastructure it lives within, we’ll work to imagine the future and understand the necessary steps towards it to stimulate some initial responses to these questions.  By the end of the weekend we’ll open up our ‘greenprint’ and ideas to a wider public discussion.

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for inquisitive artists who can bring big ideas to a group setting and who are keen to ask questions of themselves and established ways of working. The residency is open to artists from any discipline, whether or not they have previously considered environmental sustainability in their approach to working.

What to expect

Artists should expect a relatively open-format two days with facilitation by the group as well as Dave and Suzy. There may be the opportunity for some artists to lead a ‘session’ during the weekend, bringing a particular response or angle to theme of environmental sustainability and artistic practice. Artists will not be expected to develop or produce anything specific during the two days– the residency is about being thoughtful. On the final evening, we’ll open the doors to a public conversation with the opportunity for presentation of a ‘greenprint’ and further discussion.

The residency will take place from Friday 28th – Monday 31st March 2014 at Comar on Isle of Mull, leaving Edinburgh or Glasgow midday on 28th and returning early afternoon on 31st March. Participants will be paid £100 for their attendance and travel expenses from within Scotland, accommodation and catering will be covered by Creative Carbon Scotland.

Application

Please read this section carefully and make sure you send the right information with your application.

Applications should include the following information:

  • Name and contact details (including email address)
  • An outline of your experience to date (no more than 500 words) and a CV
  • Some examples of your works or links to them online or related material (for example reviews etc. if your work is not able to be distributed online)
  • A short outline of why you would like to take part and what you hope to gain from taking part
  • A short proposal of a ‘session’ you might lead during the residency  in response to the question ‘What would it mean to be an environmentally sustainable artist working in Scotland in 2050?’ or a future artwork/project which engages with this question

Please send your application to Gemma Lawrence at gemma@creativecarbonscotland.com by 9am on Monday 3rd March. 

Image: Glen More, Isle of Mull, pennyghael2 and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

The post Mull – Weekend Residency, thinking about Art & Sustainability 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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Fourth Green Teas(e) Reflections

Creative Carbon Scotland,

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Last week Creative Carbon Scotland met for the fourth Green Teas(e) at GoMA for tea and biscuits and to build on the discussions had at the last meet, the aim of which was to identify some of the characteristics that might make up a sustainable Glasgow and cultural sector.  Once more the group had an exciting gathering of folk from across the arts and sustainability organisations in Glasgow including artist Nic Green, Steve Taylor, Festival 2014 Sustainability Manager, Ailsa Nazir and Claire Ferguson from CCA, and Fiona Sinclair from NHS and the Art in the Gart Programme.

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Four key characteristics identified previously were taken as the starting point:

  • Making sustainability the cultural norm through strong leadership, influencing audiences and supply chains;
  • Increasing the transparency of the trade-offs and complexity of decision making;
  • Education playing a key role not only in increasing awareness but engaging people in a way that does not ‘impose’ or ‘withhold’ the ability to live more sustainably;
  • Supporting/creating more local, closed loop economies.

This time Creative Carbon Scotland wanted to find out from the group what these characteristics would look like in concrete terms.

To set the cogs in motion artist Ellie Harrison told the group about how she has come to embed environmental sustainability within her artistic practice, not just in terms of content but also her approach to making work. She spoke about the conflict she experienced as being a maker of ‘stuff’ and sometimes ‘pointless objects’ and her desire to live more sustainably, but also the useful skills that artists have including the ‘ability to innovate and change’ and ‘arrogance and self-belief’. Much of her work now focuses on political activism and campaigning including projects such as ‘Bring Back British Rail’ which lobbies for public ownership and availability of cheap public transport.

The group also heard from Katie Bruce, Producer Curator at GoMA, about a new ‘Associate Artist’ project starting at GoMA this year in which an artist will be selected to work with gallery staff to challenge existing structures and explore new ways of working with the ambition of building stronger internal capacity for collaborative, participatory working practice, which make a difference to GoMA’s carbon footprint.

This model of the artist as researcher and catalyst of change within an organisation can be seen as a micro-level equivalent to our ambition of Green Teas(e) through which we aim to create new ways of working within the cultural sector which in turn influence a more sustainable Glasgow (and vice versa).

Looking backwards from 2020, the group asked what the above characteristics might look like in a sustainable Glasgow. We split off into groups and came up with the following points. (Note that the language and concepts and quite technical, complicated and sometimes difficult but that was the nature of the discussion.)

Some crosscutting themes which linked all of the characteristics were identified, including:

  • Nurturing non-material values and moving towards non-financial ways of measuring things
  • Encouraging agency (people’s capacity to take action and achieve things) and a shift away from dominant models
  • Creating a Glasgow in which space exists in everyone’s lives to develop their own agency

1. Making sustainability the cultural norm through strong leadership, influencing audiences and supply chains

The concept of ‘strong leadership’ was challenged here as adhering to dominant models which typically favour more ‘masculine characteristics’. However, it was also agreed that leadership is important in creating space for and empowering others to develop their own agency. Fiona Sinclair from Art in the Gart and NHSGGC Mental Health North Western spoke about the disempowerment of individuals that can exist in large organisations such as the NHS and the need to create spaciousness, whether in terms of staff time or the ability to be critical and reflective,  which might begin to instil a great ‘consciousness’ of sustainability. There was also concern around the term ‘norm’ in relation to cultural diversity in which different forms of and approaches to achieving a sustainable city was favoured.

2. Increasing the transparency of the trade-offs and complexity of decision making

Here it was discussed that the scale at which decisions are made needs to be appropriate to the scale of the issue, i.e. creating local and city-wide subsidiarity (the devolution to the lowest appropriate level of decision making) which the public have trust in through a transparency in the decision making process and why decisions have been made. This also links to the agency and empowerment at grassroots level up.

3. Education playing a key role not only in increasing awareness but engaging people in a way that does not ‘impose’ or ‘withhold’ the ability to live more sustainably

The group talked about creating a ‘new department’ within government, local authorities and other organisations which specifically deals with education and sustainability. In a broader sense, this concept of the ‘new department’, whether that’s new ways of working or new space given to embedding environmental sustainability into everyone’s consciousness, could provide a model for creating a more sustainable society. This links to Elinor Ostrum’s polycentric approach to environmental protection “where key management decisions should be made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible” (relating back to subsidiarity and agency again). The same could be applied to education and decision-making, where diverse nodes of activity are enabled to grow across different areas of society and eventually link up with one another.

4. Supporting and creating more local, closed loop economies

The need to create local currencies which feed into more local economies as well as developing a cradle to cradle system of resource use were agreed on as important components of a closed loop economy. In order to reuse and recycle our resources we would also need to develop a varied skill set which enables us to re-make, adapt and mend the stuff around us, thus combating the obsolescence currently built into many of the things we own.

These quite technical descriptions aren’t particularly art-focused and so the job for the next Green Teas(e) is to think about how the arts help achieve these various characteristics of a sustainable city.

List of Attendees

Penny Anderson – Writer/artist

Michelle Emery Barker – Wasps

Kathryn Beckett – GSofA

Katie Bruce, GoMA

Rachel Duckhouse – Artist

Claire Ferguson – CCA

Nicola Godsal – Community & Volunteer Development Officer at NVA

Nic Green – Artist

Ellie Harrison – Artist

Andy MacAvoy – Edo Architecture

Ailsa Nazir – CCA

Eilidh Sinclair – GsofA

Fiona Sinclair – NHSGGC northwest sector

Elaine Slaven – Carbon Management Awareness Officer, Glasgow Life

Ben Spencer – Velocity

Steve Taylor – Festival 2014 Sustainability Manager

Image: Ellie Harrison, Early Warning Signs, http://www.ellieharrison.com/

– Gemma Lawrence, 29.01.14

The post Blog: Green Teas(e) Reflections appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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Opportunity: Carbon Reduction Project Manager

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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Creative Carbon Scotland is looking for a Carbon Reduction Project Manager to join its team. Up to £27,000 pa, with up to 3% pension contributions. Fixed term to 31 March 2015 with the potential for extension.

Deadline 5pm 17 February 2014. Interviews in Edinburgh 28 February 2014.

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Creative Carbon Scotland works with arts and cultural organisations across Scotland to help them measure, report and reduce their carbon emissions and engage them in playing a full part in shaping a sustainable Scotland. We are looking for an experienced carbon manager to train and support arts organisations and individuals in carbon reporting and reduction and to maintain and develop our innovative web-based resource the Green Arts Portal. The CRPM will run training workshops and offer email, phone and face-to-face support. They may engage and manage freelancers to support them and will work as part of a small team based in Edinburgh, although remote working may be possible. Regular travel throughout Scotland will be required.

Click here to download the job description and application details.

Click here to download our Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form.

For more information please contact Ben Twist at ben@creativecarbonscotland.com or on 0131 529 7909

CCS is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation registered charity no SC042687

Image: This Land, courtesy of Edinburgh Art Festival http://www.edinburghartfestival.com/

The post Opportunity: Carbon Reduction Project Manager 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

Call Out for Associate Artist #climatechange

Creative Carbon Scotland, news, Open Calls, , , ,

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow is recruiting a freelance artist to work with the gallery to explore climate change, sustainability and environmental issues while we host Early Warning Signs, a work by Ellie Harrison.

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The successful artist will use their practice to help the gallery staff to learn new things about themselves as a community, and challenge them to explore the ways they work together as a staff team on environmental issues and sustainability in their programming. The ambition is to build a stronger internal capacity for collaborative, participatory working practice, which make a difference to our carbon footprint.

For any inquiries please see the contact details on the brief, although please note the gallery staff will be unable to answer any inquiries until after 6 January 2014.

Submission requirements
Submissions should be sent in electronic format to John Irwin (john.irwin@glasgowlife.org.uk )

Closing date for submissions: 12 pm Friday 24 January 2014
Interviews on Monday 3 February 2014

Image: Early Warning Signs by Ellie Harrison at GoMa

The post Call Out for Associate Artist #climatechange 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

AV Festival Announces ‘Extraction’ as 2014 Festival Theme

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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

EXTRACTION is the theme for the sixth edition of AV Festival in 2014, reflecting the subterranean map of the region from the mudstones, shales and coals of the Carboniferous coal measures, to the Ice Age boulder clay and marine limestone of the coast.

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AV Festival 14: EXTRACTION presents the work of artists who are re-imagining the geologic by responding to the natural landscape of the North East and beyond, from Neolithic rock art and glacial erosion to the remnants of the coal mining and minerals industries, and modern concerns with the global exploitation of material resources.  Through contemporary art, sound, music and film, the biennial event explores the raw materials that create our experience of the world, from their origins deep inside the earth, to their extraction and transformation through artistic, industrial and manufacturing processes.

The programme for 2014 features new commissions, UK premieres, solo exhibitions, group shows, concerts and film screenings by international and nationally renowned artists.

Running from 1 – 31 March 2014, the Festival includes over 10 exhibitions and over 50 concerts and film screenings, at venues including mima, Middlesbrough; Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland; Sage Gateshead, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Laing Art Gallery, Tyneside Cinema, Star and Shadow Cinema, Castle Keep, the Mining Institute and other places in Newcastle as well as found spaces across the region.

To find out more visit: http://www.avfestival.co.uk/

Image: Lara Almarcegui, The Last Coal Extraction in Newcastle, http://www.avfestival.co.uk/news/av-festival-14-announces-first-public-event-for-december-2013

The post AV Festival Announces ‘Extraction’ as 2014 Festival Theme 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

Third Green Teas(e) Reflections

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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

On 16th December Creative Carbon Scotland met for the third in a series of Green Teas(e) which bring together artists, arts organisations and people working in sustainability in Glasgow for tea, biscuits and discussion, with the view to sewing together previously disconnected projects and initiatives in the city. Green Teas(e) aim to give all sides of the group a new perspective on what others are doing and enable them to work together more effectively towards building a more sustainable cultural sector in Glasgow which might in turn influence a more sustainable city and vice versa.

2013-07-26_MakeWorks-NorthlandsCreativeGlass-StudioRoRo-0159-e1387538618782

This time round a group of twenty people gathered in the Mackintosh Building at Glasgow School of Art with an excitingly wide range of backgrounds and expertise to spur on discussion. Our invited speaker, Fi Scott, Founder and Design Director of Make Works set the tone with a quick introduction to what they have been up to over the past year. Make Works’ mission is to ‘make it easier for creative professionals to produce high quality work locally’ in Scotland. Earlier this year they embarked upon a 3000 mile tour, mapping the suppliers, trades and manufactures working in Scotland for the Make Works Directory which will make it simple for artists and designers to source factories, fabricators, workshops and facilities digitally.

With our first two events providing more general introductions to Green Teas(e), Creative Carbon Scotland wanted to use this third session to flesh out some of the components and characteristics that might make up a sustainable Glasgow and cultural sector. Make Works’ emphasis on building new links between Scottish artists and designers and manufacturers, making visible previously hidden possibilities for them to produce work more locally, thus potentially contributing to the sustainability of the product, was a good starting point for discussion.

So what might a sustainable Glasgow and cultural sector look like? Creative Carbon Scotland asked the group what sustainability meant to them, in their personal and working contexts. Ben, Director of CCS, started us off with the ‘triple bottom line’ of environmental, economic and social sustainability encompassed by a wider circle which can be understood within any number of frameworks including ‘culture’, ‘world view’, ‘values’ or ‘politics’.

Four key themes emerged from the groups’ definitions:

  • Making sustainability the cultural norm through strong leadership, influencing audiences and supply chains;
  • Increasing the transparency of the trade-offs and complexity of decision making (in the broadest sense);
  • Education playing a key role not only in increasing awareness but engaging people in a way that does not ‘impose’ or ‘withhold’ the ability to live more sustainably;
  • Supporting/creating more local, closed loop economies.

How do these feed into imagining a more sustainable city? More space for ‘thinking’ was one characteristic identified by the group. Chris Fremantle, independent producer and researcher, amongst others spoke about the pressure for cities such as Glasgow to constantly reinvent itself in order to maintain its position as an internationally competitive and appealing city to travel to or invest in. Chris gave the example of the plans for the new Clyde-wide Fastlink bus in Glasgow which would threaten the running of Govan Fair which requires a day-long closure of part of the bus route. Councils and organisations such as Glasgow Life face a huge challenge in keeping  up with the pressures to deliver ‘new’, ‘bigger’ and better’ events and programmes on increasingly tight budgets and staff time.

A ‘slower’ culture which values greater capacity for transparency in decision making as well as time to reflect, critique and make the most of what local resources and activities are already available was agreed upon as something which is currently lacking in Glasgow’s cultural landscape. This might in turn put greater emphasis on longer-term planning. Kenneth Osborne, financial director of the RSNO, spoke about their new building currently under construction which is estimated as functioning for only 60 years. How might we better approach such infrastructural changes so as to remove the financial driver as the over-riding position? A more locally driven engagement with city planning was one suggestion from architect Andy McAvoy, founder of Edo Architecture.

Bringing us full circle, Creative Carbon Scotland talked about grappling with the complexities of achieving triple bottom line sustainability. Fi Scott highlighted the many contradictions Make Works were faced with when learning about the processes of local production in Scotland. How does one value the financial sustainability of a rural community which itself is maintained through the importation and exportation of particular materials and products around the world? To Fi one of the most consistent forms of sustainability she has encountered is that of jobs available to more isolated settlements through the presence of local factories and manufacturers. Amongst the group there was the feeling that a first step towards a more sustainable city would be strong leadership which acknowledges these tricky trade-offs that we all face.

For the next meeting Creative Carbon Scotland will be back-casting from a sustainable Glasgow and cultural sector in 2020 to discuss how we might get there.

Green Teas(e) is part of a wider EU project called the Green Arts Lab Alliance. To find out more, click here.

Image: Make Works, Ross Fraser Maclean

The post Blog: Green Teas(e) Reflections 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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Sea Stories: Online Cultural Map for Barra

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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Launched on 16th Nov 2013, ‘Sgeulachdan na Mara / Sea Stories’ is an innovative interactive map that reveals Barra’s rich local knowledge, language and culture through the voices and experiences of the local community.

sea_stories_main2

Visitors to the map are encouraged to explore the audio, video, images and stories in any order they like and within a couple of clicks they can learn about Barra’s shipwrecks, listen to traditional songs, view images of the island’s dramatic landscape or even hear stories about lifeboat landings during the war.

Developed by artist Stephen Hurrel and social ecologist Ruth Brennan, in association with Voluntary Action Barra & Vatersay (VABV), central to gathering content for the project was local school pupils interviewing local Barra fishermen and older members of the community – a successful collaboration that’s set to continue in years to come.

Housed in Barra’s Heritage Centre, the Sea Stories cultural map is now a permanent feature within the community and will be updated as further ‘sea stories’ are gathered by Castlebay School’s media students in the future. It will also be accessible to the public at local cultural events and to the wider world online via the project website. Sea Stories: Barra is also featured in the current exhibition ‘Sea Change’ at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh organised by Cape Farewell.

Sgeulachdan na Mara / Sea Stories was funded through Creative Scotland’s First in a Lifetime programme and Comunn na Gaidhlig with support from The Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland.

The post Sea Stories: Online Cultural Map for Barra 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

Green Teas(e) Reflections

news,

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

2013-07-26_MakeWorks-NorthlandsCreativeGlass-StudioRoRo-0159-e1387538618782

On 16th December Creative Carbon Scotland met for the third in a series of Green Teas(e) which bring together artists, arts organisations and people working in sustainability in Glasgow for tea, biscuits and discussion, with the view to sewing together previously disconnected projects and initiatives in the city. Green Teas(e) aims to give all sides of the group a new perspective on what others are doing and enable them to work together more effectively towards building a more sustainable cultural sector in Glasgow which might in turn influence a more sustainable city and vice versa.

This time round a group of twenty people gathered in the Mackintosh Building at Glasgow School of Art with an excitingly wide range of backgrounds and expertise to spur on discussion. The invited speaker, Fi Scott, Founder and Design Director of Make Works set the tone with a quick introduction to what they have been up to over the past year. Make Works’ mission is to ‘make it easier for creative professionals to produce high quality work locally’ in Scotland. Earlier this year they embarked upon a 3000 mile tour, mapping the suppliers, trades and manufactures working in Scotland for the Make Works Directory which will make it simple for artists and designers to source factories, fabricators, workshops and facilities digitally.

With the first two events providing more general introductions to Green Teas(e), Creative Carbon Scotland wanted to use this third session to flesh out some of the components and characteristics that might make up a sustainable Glasgow and cultural sector. Make Works’ emphasis on building new links between Scottish artists and designers and manufacturers, making visible previously hidden possibilities for them to produce work more locally, thus potentially contributing to the sustainability of the product, was a good starting point for discussion.

So what might a sustainable Glasgow and cultural sector look like? We asked the group what sustainability meant to them, in their personal and working contexts. Ben, Director of CCS, started us off with the ‘triple bottom line’ of environmental, economic and social sustainability encompassed by a wider circle which can be understood within any number of frameworks including ‘culture’, ‘world view’, ‘values’ or ‘politics’.

Four key themes emerged from the groups’ definitions:

  • Making sustainability the cultural norm through strong leadership, influencing audiences and supply chains;
  • Increasing the transparency of the trade-offs and complexity of decision making (in the broadest sense);
  • Education playing a key role not only in increasing awareness but engaging people in a way that does not ‘impose’ or ‘withhold’ the ability to live more sustainably;
  • Supporting/creating more local, closed loop economies.

How do these feed into imagining a more sustainable city? More space for ‘thinking’ was one characteristic identified by the group. Chris Fremantle, independent producer and researcher, amongst others spoke about the pressure for cities such as Glasgow to constantly reinvent itself in order to maintain its position as an internationally competitive and appealing city to travel to or invest in. Chris gave the example of the plans for the new Clyde-wide Fastlink bus in Glasgow which would threaten the running of Govan Fair which requires a day-long closure of part of the bus route. Councils and organisations such as Glasgow Life face a huge challenge in keeping  up with the pressures to deliver ‘new’, ‘bigger’ and better’ events and programmes on increasingly tight budgets and staff time.

A ‘slower’ culture which values greater capacity for transparency in decision making as well as time to reflect, critique and make the most of what local resources and activities are already available was agreed upon as something which is currently lacking in Glasgow’s cultural landscape. This might in turn put greater emphasis on longer-term planning. Kenneth Osborne, financial director of the RSNO, spoke about their new building currently under construction which is estimated as functioning for only 60 years. How might we better approach such infrastructural changes so as to remove the financial driver as the over-riding position? A more locally driven engagement with city planning was one suggestion from architect Andy McAvoy, founder of Edo Architecture.

Bringing the group full circle, we talked about grappling with the complexities of achieving triple bottom line sustainability. Fi Scott highlighted the many contradictions Make Works were faced with when learning about the processes of local production in Scotland. How does one value the financial sustainability of a rural community which itself is maintained through the importation and exportation of particular materials and products around the world? To Fi one of the most consistent forms of sustainability she has encountered is that of jobs available to more isolated settlements through the presence of local factories and manufacturers. Amongst the group there was the feeling that a first step towards a more sustainable city would be strong leadership which acknowledges these tricky trade-offs that we all face.

For the next meeting Creative Carbon Scotland will be back-casting from a sustainable Glasgow and cultural sector in 2020 to discuss how we might get there.

Green Teas(e) is part of a wider EU project called the Green Arts Lab Alliance. To find out more, click here.

Image: Make Works, Ross Fraser Maclean

The post Blog: Green Teas(e) Reflections 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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AV Festival Announces ‘Extraction’ as 2014 Festival Theme

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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland
EXTRACTION is the theme for the sixth edition of AV Festival in 2014, reflecting the subterranean map of the region from the mudstones, shales and coals of the Carboniferous coal measures, to the Ice Age boulder clay and marine limestone of the coast.

AV Festival 14: EXTRACTION presents the work of artists who are re-imagining the geologic by responding to the natural landscape of the North East and beyond, from Neolithic rock art and glacial erosion to the remnants of the coal mining and minerals industries, and modern concerns with the global exploitation of material resources.  Through contemporary art, sound, music and film, the biennial event explores the raw materials that create our experience of the world, from their origins deep inside the earth, to their extraction and transformation through artistic, industrial and manufacturing processes.

The programme for 2014 features new commissions, UK premieres, solo exhibitions, group shows, concerts and film screenings by international and nationally renowned artists.

Running from 1 – 31 March 2014, the Festival includes over 10 exhibitions and over 50 concerts and film screenings, at venues including mima, Middlesbrough; Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland; Sage Gateshead, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Laing Art Gallery, Tyneside Cinema, Star and Shadow Cinema, Castle Keep, the Mining Institute and other places in Newcastle as well as found spaces across the region.

To find out more visit: http://www.avfestival.co.uk/

Image: Lara Almarcegui, The Last Coal Extraction in Newcastle, http://www.avfestival.co.uk/news/av-festival-14-announces-first-public-event-for-december-2013

The post AV Festival Announces ‘Extraction’ as 2014 Festival Theme 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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Sea Stories: Online Cultural Map for Barra

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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

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Launched on 16th Nov 2013, ‘Sgeulachdan na Mara / Sea Stories’ is an innovative interactive map that reveals Barra’s rich local knowledge, language and culture through the voices and experiences of the local community.

Visitors to the map are encouraged to explore the audio, video, images and stories in any order they like and within a couple of clicks they can learn about Barra’s shipwrecks, listen to traditional songs, view images of the island’s dramatic landscape or even hear stories about lifeboat landings during the war.

Developed by artist Stephen Hurrel and social ecologist Ruth Brennan, in association with Voluntary Action Barra & Vatersay (VABV), central to gathering content for the project was local school pupils interviewing local Barra fishermen and older members of the community – a successful collaboration that’s set to continue in years to come.

Housed in Barra’s Heritage Centre, the Sea Stories cultural map is now a permanent feature within the community and will be updated as further ‘sea stories’ are gathered by Castlebay School’s media students in the future. It will also be accessible to the public at local cultural events and to the wider world online via the project website. Sea Stories: Barra is also featured in the current exhibition ‘Sea Change’ at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh organised by Cape Farewell.

Sgeulachdan na Mara / Sea Stories was funded through Creative Scotland’s First in a Lifetime programme and Comunn na Gaidhlig with support from The Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland.

The post Sea Stories: Online Cultural Map for Barra 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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