Everyday Life

Talking about climate change

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Jason's story

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes: 

One of the explanations offered for why climate change is not more prominent in people’s thinking is that it’s not physically seen. It doesn’t feel ‘real’ enough.

But a different view comes out in the stories people tell about how climate change is immediately altering their everyday lives. The climate is changing how they feel about the world and their decisions about what to do.

Project ASPECT, based at University College Falmouth, is gathering people’s stories about climate change from individuals and communities in Wales, northern England, London and Cornwall. Building a digital narrative archive, they are capturing on DVD how people talk about the climate in the context of their everyday lives.

There are those who watch. Heather continues the diary her mother started, recording every day what work is done on the family farm and the weather. Duncan and Matt are surfers in Cornwall, watching the storms. There are those who work with renewable energy, or, like Hanna, find green jobs for young people. Many are changing the way they grow food and eat: Mary from Incredible Edible; Owen with his backyard in Peckham; and masked night-time Ninja guerrilla gardeners. Singers, rappers, athletes tell their stories. Spontaneous acts of community kindness sit alongside the meticulous work of digitising the weather reports from World War I ship’s logs.

In these stories of everyday life, there is a cultural reality emerging, soft-voiced, but pressing.

“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)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

Between art and environment: Case studies from Thailand, Malaysia and India

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

The case studies are part of an Asia-Europe Foundation commissioned research project entitled “Linking the Arts to Environment and Sustainable Development Issues”.

  • Thailand: In Doi Saket, an artists’ residency programme brings together local communities and artists to reflect on diverse facets of everyday life to gain a more open perspective about their positions in the contemporary landscape. Read more on Culture360.org: Click here
  • Mumbai, India: Artist designers Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha break paradigms by denouncing rigidity and embracing fluidity to inspire harmonious postcolonial contemplation on the relationship between land and sea to better plan urban settlements. Read more on Culture360.org: Click here
  • Malaysia: In Tasik Chini, an NGO is building capacity to empower local communities to document their traditional knowledge and actively participate in the management and restoration planning process of their immediate environment. Read more on Culture360.org: Click here

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

SurVivArt – Art for the Right to a Good Life

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

Berlin

7th to 24th of February 2012

From the 7th to the 24th of February the exhibition SurVivArt – Art For the Right to a «Good Life» takes place at the galleries Mikael Andersen and Meinblau in Berlin.

International artists from Ethiopia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Thailand and the Czech Republic were invited to do a reflection on the meaning of the right to a «Good Life».  From these reflections arose various works of art and related communications on what the “good life“ means to them and people around them. Often the project started off the communication between artists and local communities about sustainable practices in their home country. The artworks touch upon many aspects of our everyday life: Habitation, food, clothes as well as consumption. The works will be shown at the exhibition, which opens at the 5th of February.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation developed SurVivArt with the help of its offices around the world. The project was inspired by the initiative ÜBER LEBENSKUNST from the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and aims at connecting sustainability, climate change and gender equity with the arts and culture.

Among others the works by artists Kebreab Demeke, Robel Temesgen, Alafuro Sikoki, Segun Adefila, Adebimpe Adebambo, Oeur Sokuntevy, Neak Sophal, Tith Kanitha, Nino Sarabutra, and Phyoe Kyi will be shown at both galleries.

“The art works narrate widely differing stories – about the quest for a “good life”; the quest for balance, happiness, and contentment; about the responsible as well as creative and playful handling of resources and new modes of consumption. They also tell us about the power of communities, their potential to survive, and their strength that inspires artists to contribute to a good life through their art.”

The conference Radius of Art takes place in parallel (February 8/9, 2012) and fosters international dialogue and exchange of ideas between culture, science, and politics.

Opening hours of the exhibition are Tuesday to Friday 12 noon – 6 p.m. and Saturdays 11a.m. – 4 p.m.
Opening: 5th February 2012, 6 p.m.

For further information: www.survivart.org and www.radius-of-art.de/conference

This post is also available in: German

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

New metaphors for sustainability: why we started

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This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes:

We began thinking about metaphor and sustainability when we noticed that there weren’t any strong or imaginative metaphors for the concept, or ones that we could easily use in conversation. Metaphors are pervasive in human thought and communication. ‘Sustainability’ stood out as an anomaly, a common concept with many definitions, but no metaphors.

So in April, we asked four people to suggest a metaphor and we filmed their responses. We weren’t looking for ‘the’ metaphor. We were experimenting to see whether it was possible to think metaphorically about sustainability, in all its promise, its limitations and paradoxes.

Since then, we’ve added 14 more metaphors, (18 if you count everyone in the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home), and will add another 6 through November and December, here on Ashdenizen and collected on the Directory.

Too, we’ll be posting comments on the project itself, which for some contributors was challenging; for others, playful; and for others, a delicate expression of meaning taken from their everyday life.

 

“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)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

Influential Element: Exploring the Impact of Water

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January 13, 2011 through April 3, 2011

Influential Element will feature 26 contemporary works by California-based artists who seek to explore the infinite ways in which water impacts our everyday life. The exhibition will feature works in a variety of media, including oil paint on a variety of surfaces, photography, video, color pencil, and mixed media. Furthermore, it is especially fitting that Influential Element: Exploring the Impact of Water debuts in a city in which water has historically played a vital and complex role, both from a recreational standpoint and as a major source of industry and commerce supporting Port operations. Not only will this exhibition offer breathtaking images of water, but it will also reflect upon our increasingly complex relationship with the element – immersing the audience in a visual conversation about this unique element. This exhibition has been sponsored by The Long Beach Water Department and Merrill Lynch of Seal Beach.

Sunset Highway, 3pm by Elizabeth Patterson

Artwork: Elizabeth Patterson, Sunset Highway, 3pm, Color pencil and solvent

Click here for a press release on the Influential Element exhibition (opens in a new window)

Exhibitions & Collections, Long Beach Museum of Art.

Why Eco Products

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Rather than just removing non eco products in the theatre, I thought it would be useful to provide a bit of info about why this is important.

“Many products we use in everyday life, from shower gel to T-shirts and even children’s toys, contain harmful artificial chemicals, which contaminate our air, food and drinking water before finding their way into our bodies. Most of the time we use them without even realising, or stopping to think about the long-lasting effects they are having on our health, and the health of the natural world. If you were to analyse the fat in your own body, you would be likely to find harmful chemicals such as brominated flame retardants, DDT, dioxins and many other persistent organic pollutants (POPs). POPs are chemicals that your body cannot get rid of, so they gradually build up over our lifetimes. Worryingly, POPs are even found in babies still in the womb.”
www.greenpeace.org.uk/toxics/problems

and

“Here at the health-report site we cannot condone the use of potentially toxic synthetic chemicals on the skin. It may be safer to eat the toxic chemicals rather than apply them to the skin. At least through the digestive system the body can produce specific enzymes to break down the toxic chemicals in the gut and excrete them. No such mechanism exists when chemicals are absorbed through the skin into the body. It is a well proven fact that chemicals applied to the skin are readily absorbed into the bloodstream where they can lodge in any part of the body or organ.”
www.health-report.co.uk/Dr_Samuel_Epstein.html

Rachel.

Go to Arcola Energy

A High Desert Test Sites Lecture & Workshop Series

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Saturday May 1st-Sunday May 2nd 2010

2-Day Workshop in Joshua Tree, 12 students, $120 fee

The New Everyday Live is an endeavor designed to both stimulate conversation and catalyze action by considering overlap between contemporary art and craft, sustainable living, survival skills, ecology and earth science, and cultural variation. Each participant in The New Everyday Life will leave with a new set of skills and inspirations, after intimately experiencing the Mojave desert’s unique context for life and living.

Only a few spots left as of 4/21. Email info.hdts@gmail.com

For more information go to: http://www.highdeserttestsites.com

Go to EcoLOGIC LA