Shelley Sacks

Invitation to participate in an Earth Forum with Shelley Sacks

This post comes to you from Cultura21

Within the framework of the Citizen Art Days Shelley Sacks offers twice a day the possibility to take part in an Earth Forum „Social Sculpture“ Process at the Freies Museum_öffentlicher Raum Berlin. From February 20th to 24th, in each case from 11 am to 2 pm and 3 to 6 pm, people are given the opportunity to create a humane and ecologically just future in groups of 8 to 12.

Artist and former scholar of Joseph Beuys, Shelley Sacks, invites people of every age and background to a process of creative imagination and exchange in order to bring room for new approaches of thought and action into being. After building an awareness in the group, the focus shall be put on questions directly related to the environment, the neighborhood, the city of Berlin and even the world.

Everyone is invited to participate in the Earth Forum process, whether as an individual or as a network of individuals and organisations who have diverse interests or as an organisation or group of individuals who have similar aims and views of sustainable development, but may have different ideas of how to achieve these aims.

Possible languages are English and German.

Background: The Citizen of Art Days from the 19th to the 24th of February 2012, offer the possibility for citizens to participate directly in the designing of their city by means of workshops, lectures, discussions and city excursions.
Registration and further information here:
www.citizenartdays.de / earthforum [at] citizenartdays [dot] de / 030-49 914 661
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Further projects of Shelley Sacks:
www.social-sculpture.org
www.universityofthetrees.org
www.exchange-values.org
www.ortdestreffens.de

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 version of 3rd Ring Out opens in Edinburgh

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

One of the winners of the 2010 Tipping Point commissions, 3rd Ring Out (which we blogged here and here) has now opened at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh. Its director Zoë Svendsen says:

We’ve now got a ‘strategy’ cell as well as a ‘simulation’ cell – we’ve split the use of the two containers into (1) short term crisis in a climate-changed future, under a business -as-usual scenario (which is the same format as last year but now about the Suffolk coastline); and (2) long term alternative futures about the city we are in, generated by ideas gathered from the public and others.

18-28 August, Edinburgh Fringe Festival
In the bright orange shipping containers. Grassmarket
Pleasance Courtyard
60 Pleasance
Phone 0131 556 6560

Other shows of interest at the Edinburgh Fringe blogged here
Zoë Svendsen’s metaphor for sustainability on this blog and the Ashden DIrectory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to The Ashden Directory

Cape Farewell expedition reaches half-way point

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Kellie Gutman writes: Cape Farewell’s journey to the Outer Hebrides has reached its half-way point. The crews have changed each week, but the Associate Director, Ruth Little is onboard for the duration.  Her latest post, filled with wonderful pictures and observations can be seen here.

For all of the expedition posts go here or follow it on our blogroll.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to The Ashden Directory

New metaphors for sustainability: nine so far

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory
From the ‘iron curtain’ to the ‘glass ceiling’, metaphors are one of the most powerful ways in which we frame the way we think.

Yet one of the key concepts in environmentalism – sustainability – seems to be remarkably short of vivid metaphors.

So we asked some artists, writers, architects, cultural commentators, environmentalists, activists and scientists to come up with their own metaphors for sustainability.

We’ve published nine new metaphors so far. More to follow.

New metaphors for sustainability: mercury
New metaphors for sustainability: symbiosis
New metaphors for sustainability: “Come into my house” (DVD)
New metaphors for sustainability: ‘art & grace’
New metaphors for sustainability: my sweet pea
New metaphors for sustainability: water on a fire – helping turn the page – a child asleep – the family – failing better
New metaphors for sustainability: the shopping divider at the check-out
New metaphors for sustainability: the sailboat
New metaphors for sustainability: the act of breathing

Watch a film about four of the new metaphors.

Please suggest metaphors of your own. As @TheMuseDailytweeted yesterday, “The drive toward the formation of metaphor is the fundamental human drive. – Nietzsche”

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to The Ashden Directory

New metaphors for sustainability: "Come into my house" (DVD)

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

When we asked Hester Reeve, artist and lecturer, to suggest a metaphor for our series New metaphors for sustainability, she offered to make this DVD, “Come into my house.”

The term ‘sustainability’ is rightly used first and foremost in the contexts of both local and global policy changes. Whilst acknowledging the crucial role played by activist pressure in ensuring sustainability is on the agenda in the first place, I see its implementation chiefly as the responsibility of politicians (shame on them).

I made my metaphor in my house. The camera is out on the street and I open each door/window in turn and call out for various thinkers to “Come into my house.”

As an artist, I am more interested in restoring richness to the ‘cult’ of everyday life and in incorporating the force of poetic imagination than in reflecting/interacting with culture at large. My metaphor therefore reflects this sensibility.

I suppose the only thing someone like me at this point in the environmental direness of 2011 can do is to come back to the doorstep, where the agency of the single being starts and to call for that paradigm shift in our thinking that might finally allow us to dwell as an act of loving the world.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to The Ashden Directory

New metaphors for sustainability: the shopping divider at the check-out

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Monik Gupta, environmental blogger and researcher has guest blogged for Ashdenizen. Here he suggests a metaphor in our series New metaphors for sustainability: the shopping divider at the check-out.

For me, thinking about sustainability, the object in the picture comes to mind. We come across it so regularly, however there is no word readily available to us to describe it (google suggests it to be termed ‘cashier divider’ by retail experts). Evidently, just like with ‘sustainability’, it is something very well known but much less engaged with.

What’s more important, both the shopping divider and sustainability mark the necessity for confinement of our own consumption and draw attention to others’ needs.

Maybe those two points, shallow engagement despite omnipresence and a focus on limitations of our consumption, are related. We are reluctant to make explicit the distinction between our needs and those of others, even though we are acutely aware of its necessity.

However, this is exactly where the beauty of both the ‘shopping divider’ and ‘sustainability’ could lie: in marking the confines of our needs, they enable us to direct attention to our fellow human beings. We begin to acknowledge that we are ‘in this together’, urgently needing to demonstrate our ‘ability to sUStain’.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to The Ashden Directory

The Southbank re-designed with the tides in mind

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Ella-Marie Fowler got in touch about her BA project on sustainability, and here she describes it.

I’m a graduating student from Design for Performance (BA Hons) at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London. For my final project, I chose to focus on sustainability within theatre and how the arts can affect climate change awareness.

I designed a proposal for a Sustainable Arts Centre on the Southbank, London (pictured). The centre would provide space for visiting artists, performers and theatre companies to respond to climate change awareness. The building would be constructed from reclaimed materials and use green energy sources. Visitors to the centre would encounter different experiences throughout the day due to the changing tide of the Thames.

Last year, I visited the Jellyfish Theatre and researched art organisations such as TippingPoint through the Ashden Directory. This sparked ideas about my final year project. As a graduating student in theatre design, I wanted my work to reflect contemporary issues and consider how to develop a sustainable approach to my future work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to The Ashden Directory

AGENTS OF CHANGE AND ECOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP – new summer school programme from 10 to 22 July 2011

This two week workshop:

  • provides an opportunity to explore the many different ways and levels on which we can be or become better `agents of change´ and how we can deepen our understanding of ecological citizenship
  • provides a form for exploring the importance of imagination in transformative work
  • enables participants to  develop forms of creative cultural action that relate directly to each of our own life-work situations

The workshop is embedded in the exploratory practices and research of the Social Sculpture Research Unit and informed by its network of active members and associates. In this sense it also provides an introduction to social sculpture and its role in bringing about a viable word.

The program me is led by artist Shelley Sacks, head of the Social Sculpture Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University, and Dr. Hildegard Kurt from and. Institute for Art, Culture and Sustainability in Berlin.

Please enrol as soon as possible. Places are limited.

Weimar Art and Sustainability Summer School « Sustainability and Contemporary Art

Learn about the Beuysian school of art and sustainability on this progressive summer course.

ART AND SUSTAINABILITY – new Summer School program in English within theInternational Weimar Summer Courses from 27 June – 10 July 2010.
From Goethe and Schiller through the Bauhaus to Social Sculpture. Forum for Creative Action: The Shaping of a Humane World as an Aesthetic Challenge
This 12 day `theory-practice´ program runs annually in the summer. It actively engages participants in an introductory exploration of social sculpture and aesthetic questions relevant to the shaping of an ecological and socially just future. It looks back to Goethe, Schiller, the Bauhaus and Joseph Beuys and forward to developing new forms of social sculpture / connective practive appropriate to the challenges of the 21st century.
The program is led by artist Shelley Sacks, head of the Social Sculpture Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University, and Dr. Hildegard Kurt from and. Institute for Art, Culture and Sustainability in Berlin.
Enrolment closes on 30 April 2010. Please enrol as soon as possible. Places are limited.

via Weimar Art and Sustainability Summer School « Sustainability and Contemporary Art.

ART AND SUSTAINABILITY – New summer school program in English

ART AND SUSTAINABILITY – new Summer School program in English within the International Weimar Summer Courses from 27 June – 10 July 2010.

From Goethe and Schiller through the Bauhaus to Social Sculpture. Forum for Creative Action: The Shaping of a Humane World as an Aesthetic Challenge

This 12 day `theory-practice´ program runs annually in the summer. It actively engages participants in an introductory exploration of social sculpture and aesthetic questions relevant to the shaping of an ecological and socially just future. It looks back to Goethe, Schiller, the Bauhaus and Joseph Beuys and forward to developing new forms of social sculpture / connective practive appropriate to the challenges of the 21st century.

The program is led by artist Shelley Sacks, head of the Social Sculpture Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University, and Dr. Hildegard Kurt from and. Institute for Art, Culture and Sustainability in Berlin.

Enrolment closes on 30 April 2010. Please enrol as soon as possible. Places are limited.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Dr. Hildegard Kurt
und. Institut für Kunst, Kultur und Zukunftsfähigkeit e.V. (und.Institut)
(and. Institute for Art, Culture and Sustainability)
Leitung Büro Berlin / Head Berlin Office
Koburger Str. 3
D – 10825 Berlin
Tel. +49 (0) 30 782 74 12
Fax + 49 (0) 30 78 71 26 95
www.und-institut.de
www.hildegard-kurt.de
www.wachsende-skulptur-lueneburg.de