Hundreds Of Years

Nordic art competition: Sustainable Consumption

This post comes to you from Culture|Futures

Nordic Ecolabelling launches a sustainability art competition — entitled ‘Nordic Art Insight’ — because they believe that artists are a key group in the process of changing attitudes. The main prize is 100,000 Swedish kroner.

nordic-art-insight_scrndmp1

‘Nordic Art Insight’ invites artists from the Nordic region to submit their artworks with the theme‘Sustainable Consumption’ before 31 May.

An expert jury will then select six finalist entries, which will be publicized on www.artnordic.org. From 1 July to 31 August 2013, a public voting opens and the artwork that receives the most votes will be the winner.

Why is Nordic Ecolabelling organizing Nordic Art Insight?
“Artists have throughout hundreds of years made society look with new perspectives on how we live our lives, and challenged us to open our eyes to new ideas. The environmental challenges that face us today are many. One of these is sustainable consumption, and how we can reach climate and environmental goals. Often it is a question of buying the right products, and doing it the right amount of times, or perhaps, not buying at all. The Nordic Ecolabelling Art prize, Nordic Art Insight, will inspire artists to submit entries that help us consumers raise our consciousness about how we can live a more sustainable life with a sustainable consumption,” explains Nordic Ecolabelling on the competition’s home page.

Who is behind this competition?
‘Nordic Art Insight’ is organised by Nordic Ecolabelling. Nordic Ecolabelling was initiated by the Nordic Council of Ministers in 1989. Each Nordic country has a secretariat that develops Nordic Ecolabelling criteria, licenses and markets the Nordic Ecolabel. In Sweden the secretariat is Ecolabelling Sweden.

Ecolabelling Sweden works on consignment of the Swedish government to administer and market the Nordic Ecolabel and the EU Ecolabel. The purpose is to work for a sustainable consumption and production. Both these Ecolabels have a life-cycle perspective, and today there are 8,500 Nordic Ecolabelled products and services in the Swedish market.

Read more about Nordic Ecolabelling on svanen.se

Challenging the artist

17 March 2013
Why is the Nordic Ecolabel challenging the art world? Interview with CEO Ragnar Unge at Ecolabelling Sweden, chairman of the jury.

For the first time ever in its over 20 year history, the Nordic Ecolabel initiates an art prize. Why?
– We believe that artwork can make a change in people’s mind and behaviour. Artists have always been engaged in debates. Look at Picasso’s famous painting ‘Guernica’ about the Spanish civil war. It made a great impact.

What is the theme of this competition?
– Sustainable consumption. We are looking for artwork that can make people react and give insights on how we can use our planet´s resources in a more sustainable way.

How do you explain sustainable consumption, is it just buying Ecolabelled products?
Yes of course you have to buy the right thing, such as Ecolabelled products and services. But it is also a matter of how many times you buy a product. If you throw out your Ecolabelled couch after two years, this is not a sustainable way of consuming

What is the most important thing in this competition, the artistic expression of sustainable consumption or how the artwork is made? Can the artist use whatever material even if it is not good for the environment?
– The artistic impression is the most important but of course it has to have a connection to sustainable consumption. We also consider what materials the artist is using. Where do the materials come from? What type of paints are used? How will it be possible to recycle? Re-use? Nordic Ecolabel has a lifecycle perspective, and we would like to see this applied in the art process.

So if an artist uses a piece of lead, will it be disqualifying?
It depends how the artwork is presented. If the artist can give a good reason for using this material, for example, as a statement to show how this material threatens our ecological system and is a hinder for sustainable consumption, we might consider it as an important part of what the artwork is trying to convey.
Submission deadline: 31 May 2013

• Competition guidelines

• Facebook page

Culture|Futures is an international collaboration of organizations and individuals who are concerned with shaping and delivering a proactive cultural agenda to support the necessary transition towards an Ecological Age by 2050.

The Cultural sector that we refer to is an interdisciplinary, inter-sectoral, inter-genre collaboration, which encompasses policy-making, intercultural dialogue/cultural relations, creative cities/cultural planning, creative industries and research and development. It is those decision-makers and practitioners who can reach people in a direct way, through diverse messages and mediums.

Affecting the thinking and behaviour of people and communities is about the dissemination of stories which will profoundly impact cultural values, beliefs and thereby actions. The stories can open people’s eyes to a way of thinking that has not been considered before, challenge a preconceived notion of the past, or a vision of the future that had not been envisioned as possible. As a sector which is viewed as imbued with creativity and cultural values, rather than purely financial motivations, the cultural sector’s stories maintain the trust of people and society.
Go toThis post comes to you from Culture|Futures

Powered by WPeMatico

Shifting Baselines Residency and Exhibition Project

This post comes to you from Cultura21

Gallery Talk & Exhibition Opening
Monday, January 7, 2013 – 6pm @ Santa Fe Art Institute

Shifting Baselines Exhibition
January 8 – 25 – Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm @ Santa Fe Art Institute

Shifting Baselines, an exhibition curated by ecoartspace founder Patricia Watts, opening on the 7th of January, 2013,  will show existing and new work from installation artist Hugh Pocock and painter Cynthia Hooper, a Northern California painter and video artist who teaches at College of the Redwoods in Eureka.

Shifting baseline is a scientific term used to describe the way changes in the environment can be measured against previous reference points (baselines) that represent significant changes from the “original state.” For example, places that swarmed with a particular species hundreds of years ago may have experienced long-term decline, but it is the level of recent decades that are considered the appropriate reference point for current populations. In this way large declines in ecosystems or species over long periods of time were, and are, masked. There is a loss of perception of change that occurs when each generation redefines what is “natural.” This term has become widely used to describe the shift over time in the expectation of what a healthy ecosystem baseline looks like.

The exhibition will also be the inaugural event of the Santa Fe Art Institute’s 2013-14 season of programming – Contested Space, focusing on arts role in communicating and exploring new territory in an already mapped out world.

To learn more about the Shifting Baselines residency and exhibition, please go to the Santa Fe Art Institute blog.

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

Powered by WPeMatico

On time and travel: anticipatory histories at Kilmahew Estate

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Benjamin Morris writes: 

Kilmahew Estate, located in Cardross, west of Glasgow, has long been a source of fascination. Despite having been a settlement of some sort for hundreds of years, featuring both a medieval castle and a Victorian stately home, the contemporary lives of the site, first as a Catholic seminary, and then a drug rehabilitation centre, have by comparison been surprisingly brief. St Peter’s Seminary opened in 1966 and lasted two decades; the rehabilitation centre, only half that before closing its doors. Since then, the site has become one of the most popular ruins in Scotland: serving as impromptu musical stage, all-night rave site, unofficial film set, squat encampment, and destination for urban explorers from far and wide.

Explorers, of course, being a broad church. Recently I was privileged to join a group of artists and researchers on a visit to the site, sponsored by the Invisible College and the Royal Geographical Society. It’s important to take the right book on a journey, and fortuitously, tucked away in my bag was a new volume of short essays exploring the futures of historic landscapes: Anticipatory History, edited by Caitlin DeSilvey, Simon Naylor, and Colin Sackett. I couldn’t have brought along a better guidebook.

That said, Anticipatory History is not a guidebook in the traditional sense. Its structure hews more towards a glossary – community-sourced and collectively-written – of terms that are central to ecological thought. Concepts such as adaptation, equilibrium, memory and uncertainty are joined by processes such as erosion, managed realignment, palliative curation, and unfarming. As a conceptual guidebook, it prompted new and novel ways of thinking about this dynamic site, particularly its history of constant change. For this is their aim: ‘History that calls attention to process rather than permanence may therefore help us to be more prepared for future change; to respond thoughtfully and proactively, rather than in a mode of retreat or regret.’

Indeed, it was difficult to cover the grounds of the site without feeling those tensions between pasts and futures, between the curated and the wild, play off one another anew. In the seminary building, for instance, the many different forms of engagement with the site were amply visible. Graffiti of more and less accomplished forms graced the walls; the altar had been broken and desecrated, and rubbish of all sorts lay strewn about, inviting impromptu archaeologies and conjectures as to who had left it there, and why. And, of course, what else would come in time. As the editors note, anticipatory history creates a means of approaching historic landscapes outside the bounds of grand narratives or authorised discourses. Rather, they suggest, it ‘leaves room for expressing the ‘small stories’ and ‘lay knowledges’ that are layered in place, and then linking these to a hoped-for future.’

Over the past half-century, some of those futures have already taken place independent of the human presence. Entering the site via the western approach, younger stands of trees, no more than twenty years old, have sprung up at the exact moment the rehabilitation centre had shut its doors in the early 1990s, and now encroach against the older-growth stands. Anyone looking to rehabilitate the site would have to first map the species onset, then determine how best to bring the site back to a more pristine woodland, keeping in mind, as the editors of the volume claim, that such narratives of purity, often defy the larger narratives of dynamicity that complex landscapes harbor.

An excellent example of these tensions centres on a rhododendron tunnel, considered a key feature of the landscape, indeed, part of its ‘heritage’, despite this species having only been introduced to the UKat the end of the 18th century. Despite their ornamental appeal, their introduction has had unintended consequences. As the entry on the species in the volume observes, ‘Rhododendrons have been able to out-compete many native plants in Britain, and because their leaves are inedible to many animals, their spread has proved difficult to control and they have become reclassified as pests.’

Entering the tunnel today, it is hard not to be impressed at the intricacy and scale of its design, as well as the atmospheric effect of the corridor. In full leaf, the tunnel feels as dark as an abandoned Tube station, or a holloway such as Robert Macfarlane has recently explored. Non-native species or not, one does feel changed by passing through this ‘natural’ architecture, recalling the theologies of transformation that would have been discussed at length around, and within, the grounds, and explaining why one man in the area, the site curator noted, has threatened to chain himself to the bushes should an order for ‘remediation’- clearance – come through.

Given these tensions, the futures for the site over the long-term remain unclear. Currently under consultation by NVA, Kilmahew looks set to become a multidisciplinary arts site encompassing arts research and practice in a variety of fields. The sound artist Michael Gallagher has recently produced a 45-minute audio documentary on the site, layering the voices of former inhabitants together, a compelling departure point for artists and future historians. With so many stories yet to yield from its past, this move would undoubtedly be a productive use of the space, particularly in terms of conservation, amid its ruination, the site still retains the serenity, grace, and seclusion that gave rise to so many of its lives, and any attempt to preserve that is worth the effort.

But thinking of its futures, other questions remain. Given its extensive grounds (133 acres, encompassing woodlands, fields and burns), its diverse constituencies (many of which are transitory and difficult to document or engage) and its architectural histories (a chapel, a castle and a stately home now demolished), the lives of Kilmahew collide and converge in ways that challenge both cohesive collection and swift, dispensable interpretation. The site precludes our understanding, no matter how many times we visit. As it should. For if anticipatory history teaches us anything, it’s that we should move in the direction of, from away from, those limits. The land always has more to tell us. If only we would listen.

A writer and researcher, Benjamin Morris is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

“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

Powered by WPeMatico