Creu Cymru is the development agency for theatres and arts centres in Wales. It currently has 44 member organisations who pay an annual fee to receive a range of services. With support from the Welsh Government’s Support For Sustainable Living Fund, Creu Cymru is working with Cardiff University, Julie’s Bicycle and Cynnal Cymru-Sustain Wales to develop a project to support the theatres and arts centres of Wales in becoming more resilient in facing the challenges of the 21st Century, particularly addressing the following 3 areas: energy and waste – consumption & treatment, the supply chain – examining theatre production and touring, communicating to audiences the issues and potential solutions
This session is designed to give theatre makers and producers an opportunity to hear how the project is progressing and work together on collaborating over programming and artistic response. The event will be a learning seminar to share best practice and showcase this project to an international audience.
The Transition Network is a growing network of over a thousand communities around the world. The network “supports community-led responses to climate change and shrinking supplies of cheap energy, building resilience and happiness.†The summer issue of the magazine Transition Free Press, which was published on 1 May 2013, contains four articles about arts projects that relate to the topics of sustainability and ecology in various ways. In summary:
Art and Science meet at new Bee Festival
The Louth Festival of the Bees, organised by Transition Louth in the United Kingdom in May 2013, combines biological sciences with an art exhibition, exploring “the relationships between the aesthetic and the rationalâ€.
“We may not, single-handed, be able to stop war, cure disease, end hunger, or save the planet, but we can, each of us, plant some flowers that give insects a better chance and make our world a little more beautiful,†writes Biff Vernon, a teacher who grows vegetables and flowers in Lincolnshire, and is, according to the magazine editor, “attempting to save the planet one Facebook post at a time.â€
“If we are to make the transition to a truly sustainable post-industrial society, protection of biodiversity must be an urgent priority. The festival aims to raise awareness of biodiversity, focussing particularly on wildflowers and all their pollinators,†Biff Vernon writes.
Louth Festival of Bees includes a Family Fun Day, Conference Day and Art Exhibition with stalls, exhibitions, children’s activities, workshops, talks about wild bees, wild flowers, beekeeping and art.
Anne-Marie Culhane, a performer, activist and catalyser of projects who lives in Cornwall in the United Kingdom, tells about the projects ‘Abundance’ and ‘The Diary Keepers’, about the festival ‘Grow Sheffield’, and about exploring the dynamic relationship between the artist and the community:
When Anne-Marie Culhane talks about Art, it is not as it is commonly understood, a commodity to be bought and owned, but a narrative co-created by people seeking to bring the earth and belonging into an urbanised culture.
“I’ve always been uncomfortable with the perception of an artist as a solitary creator who’s outside society,†she tells Transition Free Press.
To be resilient in the face of ecological and economic challenges, communities need to be adaptive and collaborative. As climate scientists admit, “we’re not managing to communicate properlyâ€. Because what inspires us to change are not dry facts, but celebration, creativity, and most of all, belonging:
“We can’t go into any meaningful thinking about the future unless we are examining how we live now, and the diversity of the way different people in the community live now: really looking, taking time, slowing down, observing our place within natural cycles, seeing what we share. So we can say: OK, this is where we’re at. From this point we can look forward.â€
Anne-Marie Culhane developed a project, ‘Diary Keepers’, to engage people into thinking about these things by keeping a diary for a month, where they would be trying to answer questions about what it is like to live now.
For Anne-Marie Culhane everything began when she came across climate change as a student of geography: “I was overawed by what it meant,†she said. Characteristically her first piece of work did not appear in a gallery, but in a city park in Leeds – twelve installations, actions and performances during one year.
“I began to ask: How can I support people to grow their own food, to be more knowledgeable about what they’re eating, to start seed-saving and seed-sharing and using organic and permaculture methods which nourish the land and communities? This where the main energy for ‘Grow Sheffield’ came from.
The idea was to hold a big season of events around harvest, giving people from different backgrounds lots of points of access – some creative, some more practical. We had guerrilla gardening in the city centre, a film screening and open space session in a local cinema, poetry walks and Allotment Soup, a celebration of allotment culture, with artists taking up mini-residencies on different allotments.â€
Her creative project ‘Abundance’ started from an idea about harvesting unwanted fruit from street trees, but it also quickly took foraging and growing stuff to another level and became about doing and being with people.
Jeppe D. Graugaard writes about ‘The Telling’ which he describes as “a new kind of grassroots, power-down, artistic event which draws on various forms of storytelling, performance, music and craft to explore what living through a time of transition means.
“Born in the imagination of Warren Draper, The Telling is inspired by The Dark Mountain Project and created on a DIY ethos as a reaction against the debilitating effect of the entertainment industry on folk culture.
The enchanting performance of Mr. Fox is just one of many that evening set in the post-apocalyptic Church View courtyard, which is adorned by a large mural by street artist Phlegm, depicting an archer sitting in a giant horn shooting down human bones tied to floating balloons. And the evening programme is just the culmination of a series of events and workshops that ran throughout the day: a pop-up cinema, the Sheffield City Giants (15 ft large puppets), bread-making, make-do-and-mend, a singing workshop, a talk on peace, and my absolute favourite: making iron in a clay foundry.
This diverse mix of activities and performances makes The Telling a place to be inspired and to learn practical skills at the same time.â€
Jeppe D. Graugaard is a writer and researcher at UEA, with an interest in grassroots movements and projects. More of his writing is available on patternwhichconnects.com
Arts book in the making: mapping arts and ecological living
Fifteen artists and writers gathered at a Writing Residency at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire to lay the first tracks down for a groundbreaking workbook – mapping ways in which the arts inspire a different way of living within the ecological limits of the planet, reported Lucy Neal.
“At Lumb Bank we glimpsed an everyday ‘art of living’ which now remains to build on and articulate over the next few months, as the book and the project come together.â€
“Stories shape the way that we act,†says Shaun Chamberlin, author of ‘The Transition Timeline’, in this interview which is an excerpt from the film ‘In Transition 1.0: From oil dependence to to local resilience’ from March 2012.
A transition art piece
About the art piece Oil Memorial
Another excerpt from the same film, ‘In Transition 1.0’.
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
Riga’s Center for New Media Culture RIXC is welcoming submissions – articles, conceptual and artistic texts, research papers and visual contributions – from artists, theorists, scientists, researchers who are engaged with issues of social and ecological sustainability, and who are interested in a deeper understanding of technology, for the next Acoustic Space (Volume No. 12), a peer-reviewed journal for interdisciplinary research on art, science, technology and society, devoted with the theme Art of Resilience.
The conference exploring the topic — Art of Resilience — took place during Art+Communication 2012 festival in Riga, October 5-6, 2012 (http://rixc.lv/12). The forthcoming publication will include papers presented at this conference, but will not be limited to it and is open for contributions by other authors. It will be published in English.
“Today art is leaving its autonomous position behind the society’s quest for a sustainable future. Artists who once were in vanguard of exploring digital frontiers, today again are among the first ones who are actively engaged in looking for other ways how to make the world more sustainable.
Resilience is one of the key tactics that helps people to undergo unstable, uncertain times. The idea of a resilience is used as a guiding theme and as a point of departure for the discussions with which we aim at fostering deeper understanding of social, cultural and ecological, as well as technological sustainability issues.
We are questioning: How to enhance resilience – our capability to cope with today’s complex situation that has occurred in the result of rapid ‘techno-sciences’ development? Does art play a role of a ‘catalyst’ in this quest for sustainability, if it keeps actively establishing new connections with other fields – science and technology, architecture and design, rural infrastructure development and urban planning, social networking and global engineering? How these emergent art practices that are bridging not only different fields but also exploiting resilience experiences from different times and different cultures, are contributing towards developing a successful scenario for the future world?â€
Deadline for submitting full papers – March 15, 2013
However, abstracts can be submitted first – deadline for abstracts: February 11, 2013
Length of texts: between 2500 and 8000 words (i.e. 20 000 – 45 000 characters).
Submitted texts should include:
short abstract (ca. 250 words, i.e. 1500 characters)
5 – 6 keywords
short bio of the author (ca. 100 words, i.e. 800 characters)
References should be in APA style.
Language for submissions: English.
The publication will come out in October, 2013, and it will be presented at the Media Art Histories 2013: ReNew conference / Art+Communication 2013 festival, October 8-11, 2013.
The previous editions of Acoustic Space are available on amazon.com
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
Australian Artist Jenny Brown, currently residing in Berlin, Germany on a DAAD scholarship, is inviting to her exhibition Burnt Stars – Meditations on resistance, resilience and systems, curated by Adam Nankervis atstattberlin, an art space (in Berlin) dedicated to new forms of artistic expressions.
The opening event is on Thursday 17 January 2013 at 7 pm and the exhibition will stay open until Sunday 20 January from 2pm until 7pm.
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
The Nigerian playwright and academic Greg Mbajiorgu got in touch with us after reading Robert Butler’s blogs on Ashdenizen on the difficulties of writing plays about climate change. Greg sent us his play, Wake Up Everyone, which has a preface quoting from this blog.
Wake Up Everyonebegan as a commission by the African Technology Policy Studies Network, Nairobi, Kenya for their international conference on climate change in Nigeriain 2009.
That policy world is represented in the main character, Maukwe Aladinma, a retired professor of agriculture, now attempting to get the local government in the rural Ndoli area to build flood defences and advising communal farmers on using organic waste and planting stronger, non-GMO seeds. The professor, too, is a dramatist. In a play-within-a-play, the actors of his theatre company rehearse scenes describing the effects of climate change, those happening now and those anticipated: rivers dried, torrential floods, tornadoes, plagues, famines and poverty. The surrounding scenes are of a naturalistic theatre style; the rehearsals are a play to be performed as if in a dream or possessed.
A local official, Chairperson of the Ndoli Local Government Area, Hon. Edwin Ochonkeya, blocks the building of the defences. When the threatened flood sweeps the land, the farmers become an angry mob, running off-stage to extract revenge on the official.
Greg’s writing is purposeful: to support impoverished farmers, to educate, to build resilience against the effects of climate change in rural Nigeria.
The information on climate change is familiar enough, if uncomfortable. The role of the expert in presenting knowledge to farmers is familiar, too, the belief and disbelief, the sometimes awkward juncture of different kinds of experience, the social power implicit in different kinds of knowledge.
The depiction of the official, Ochonkeya, is what startles. His actions are presented as commonplace. A militant against the oil companies, he was on the verge of forming his own kidnapping gang when a massive oil spill damaged his family’s land and killed his father. He employed a lawyer to bring an action against the companies, who settled out of court for three hundred million naira and funded his campaign for local office on the condition that he didn’t make any further case on behalf of affected farmers. He won his campaign with the rhetoric of environmentalism: ‘Before this plague of climate change the oil companies had milked our land dry, but have given nothing to nourish it. All that is left (of my family’s farmland) is thick layers of oil, oil in our waters, oil in our wet lands, oil in our fragile soil, down to the roots of our edible crops, oil and more oil…’
And now, he is stopping any adaptation to or mediation of climate damage.
In a single character, the play conveys the immediate, turbulent, deceptive forces underlying oil production in Nigeria and in Canada, Baku-Tbilisi, Iraq, the Arctic, a world not wholly expressed by the activists against it, working across political boundaries.
It couldn’t be more topical. Last week, in The Hague, four Nigerians and Friends of the Earth began a lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell Plc for  its environmental record in the in Niger Delta, a case that may set a precedent for claims related to the activities of international corporations.
And on Friday, Wake Up Everyone received a first Individual Award in Arts and Humanities Research at the 5th Nigerian Universities Research and Development Fair in Mina, Niger State.
“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’.
From October 4 to November 4, 2012 Riga and Liepaja will be the host cities for the14th International Festival for New Media Culture “Art+Communication ’2012″.
The “Art+Communication†festival is renowned across Europe for its proposed innovative themes. Each year, the festival gathers around hundred participants from Latvia, Europe and other world countries, discussing the newest ideas and future development trends in the field of new media art. By continuing the festival theme of its previous editions, on art’s role in building sustainability, this year’s festival with the title “Art of Resilienceâ€Â looks at the scenario of sustainable development from the position of resilience tactics, re-approaches relations between nature and technologies, as well as discusses the role of art in addressing “techno-ecological†issues.
The main festival programme will take place in Riga, October 4 – 6 in Spikeri at kim? Contemporary Art Centre, RIXC Media Space and Spikeri Concert Hall.
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
Creative Camp in Aizpute, Latvia. September 13-15, 2012
AppleThink is a collaboration between The Center for New Media CultureRIXC, Latvian Contemporary Arts Center and Serde from Latvia, as well as Pixelache Helsinki from Finland.
Apples are one of the most harvest-rich, yet under-exploited resources available in Latvia and other post-kolkhoz (collective Soviet farms) countries. The AppleThink event aims to re-approach the ‘habitual’ apples from a variety of different perspectives. The event will bring together an international trans-disciplinary group of participants, who will be sharing their knowledge and experience by approaching apples as a ‘real’ resource of food and energy, as well as as a cultural metaphor for fecundity and wealth.
The AppleThink event will also include presentations and discussions by artists, curators, science researchers, and community activists who will be discussing different survival strategies ranging from the concepts of ‘downshifting’ and ‘withdrawal’, to the approach of ‘resilience’ and a ‘techno-ecologies’ perspective. The camp will end with a local outdoor market together with local farmers, where the artefacts created during the creative camp will be put out for symbolic sale-exhibition.
Call for participation: They are inviting participants who are interested in transdisciplinary collaborations, but they also welcome proposals for AppleThink workshops and presentations. Please send your proposals or letter of intent to participate to rixc [at] rixc [dot] lv, and/or rasa [at] rixc [dot] lv (Rasa Smite). DEADLINE: August 20, 2012
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
Join us in an intensive workshop merging performance, activism and the design science of Permaculture run by the infamous artivist collective The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Held as part of Kampnagel’s Summer Festival in Hamburg, the workshop is Act 1 of What is Enough ? the Labofii’s 16th experiment. At the end of the workshop, participants will have the chance to perform in a live piece of art activism (Act 2 – Natural Revenge).
Fear Me No More aims to make productive connections between artists and activists within the framework of Permaculture. A set of tools for building a postcapitalist society, Permaculture teaches us to mimic the efficiency, diversity and resilience of natural ecosystems. This fulltime workshop is an ideal introduction for those wishing to explore new forms of creative resistance and horizontal politics.
“It reminds us of the time when it was still possible for free theatre to try out a loving anarchic social utopia… This is about saying goodbye to representation and is therefore the most radical form of theatre†-Frankfurter Rundschau.
For more information and application forms (deadline May 31st) click here. The workshop will be run in english.
The Journal of Ecology and Society frequently has interesting papers, and the current issue includes “Toward an Integrated History to Guide the Futureâ€.
Abstract:
Many contemporary societal challenges manifest themselves in the domain of human–environment interactions. There is a growing recognition that responses to these challenges formulated within current disciplinary boundaries, in isolation from their wider contexts, cannot adequately address them. Here, we outline the need for an integrated, transdisciplinary synthesis that allows for a holistic approach, and, above all, a much longer time perspective. We outline both the need for and the fundamental characteristics of what we call “integrated history.†This approach promises to yield new understandings of the relationship between the past, present, and possible futures of our integrated human–environment system. We recommend a unique new focus of our historical efforts on the future, rather than the past, concentrated on learning about future possibilities from history. A growing worldwide community of transdisciplinary scholars is forming around building this Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE). Building integrated models of past human societies and their interactions with their environments yields new insights into those interactions and can help to create a more sustainable and desirable future. The activity has become a major focus within the global change community.
Key words: agency; anthropocene; backcasting; causality; contingency; holistic approach; integrated history; long-term perspective; resilience; social and ecological systems
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.
The conference Ecocultures 2012 takes place at the University of Essex from the 17th to the 18th of April.
The aim of Ecocultures 2012 is to show, how communities can adapt successfully to social-ecological change and thus reach the maintenance of resilience and the enhancement of wellbeing. Ecocultures live sustainable and we can learn from them regarding our lifestyle and in order to deal with the changes we are about to encounter e.g. climate change and resource degradation. These immanent problems need to be faced on the level of individual behaviour, community actions and state-level responses as well as international governance.
Multi-disciplinary perspectives of the barriers and bridges encountered by Ecocultures and how they can contribute to a global transition to sustainability will be presented at the conference. Furthermore the potential of concepts for creative and sustainable adaption to the new conditions will be discussed.
At the University of Essex the Ecocultures research program has the task to examine the responding of traditional and newly emerging communities to these challenges. Sustainable lifestyles and possible ways for transition are analysed.
Ecocultures 2012 is supposed to bring together members of Ecocultures, researchers and policy makers in order to develop alternative ways of development.
Submissions from academics, policy makers as well as from development practitioners engaged in work on resilience and sustainability are invited. Possible themes for Papers are the following ones:
Case studies on communities successfully adapting to social-ecological change;
Historic examples of highly resilient communities and their current status;
Analyses of the ‘traditional’ practices contributing to sustainable lifestyles, the stresses to which these provide resilience, and the barriers and bridges to the continued practice of such traditional lifestyles in today’s world;
The emergence of ‘new’ Ecocultures, such as cultural revitalisation initiatives, ‘back to the land’ initiatives and the transition movement; the barriers and bridges to sustainability within these initiatives, the potential for their spread, their contribution to well-being and to social-ecological resilience at community level and beyond;
Critical analyses of current and alternative notions of ‘development’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’;
Analyses of struggles for resources: how do, for example, the extractive industries and multi-national corporations affect the sustainability of communities;
Conflicts between different notions and practices of ‘sustainability’;
Meta-analyses of the social, economic, political and cultural barriers and bridges to sustainability;
Analyses of the role played by current policies, economic and corporate initiatives for ‘sustainability’, including the potential for sustainable governance, the links between international trade and sustainable growth, and the potential role played by consumer awareness, environmental regulations, new methods of environmental valuation and corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Deadline for paper proposals is the 16th of January 2012. They should be sent to Prof. Steffen Böhm (steffen [at] essex [dot] ac [dot] uk) and Zareen Bharucha (zpbhar [at] essex [dot] ac [dot] uk) with the subject ‘Ecocultures 2012’. Authors will be notified of acceptance by 30th January 2012.
For general inquiries, please email Zareen Bharucha (zpbhar [at] essex [dot] ac [dot] uk)
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
Fri 13 Sept 9.30 – 11.00
Australian Artist Jenny Brown, currently residing in Berlin, Germany on a DAAD scholarship, is inviting to her exhibition Burnt Stars – Meditations on resistance, resilience and systems, curated by Adam Nankervis atstattberlin, an art space (in Berlin) dedicated to new forms of artistic expressions.
