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Transcription

THERE IS NOTHING THAT IS BEYOND OUR IMAGINATION
First Published 2015 by
ArtinSite, Transforma, Largo de Sto António, 24-26, 2560-632 Torres Vedras, Portugal
Edited by
Claudia Galhós (PT)
Contributors
Adrienne Goehler (DE)
Amelie Deuflhard (DE)
Amy Sharrocks (UK)
Artúr van Balen (DE)
Beki Bateson (UK)
Christian Mousseau-Fernandez (FR)
Christopher Crimes (UK/FR)
Chus Martinez (ES)
Chloe Cooper (UK)
Cyril Dion (FR)
Driss Ezzine de Blas (FR)
Ellen Walraven (NL)
Gil Penha-Lopes (PT)
Gregor Zoch (DE)
Guillaume Gatteau (FR)
Guy Gypens (BE)
Henrietta L. Moore (UK)
Isa Fremeaux (UK)
Jean Lambert-wild (FR)
Jeroen Peeters (BE)
John Jordan (UK)
Jon Davies (UK)
Judith Knight (UK)
Laurence Mellinger (FR)
Luís Firmo (PT)
Michael Pinsky (UK)
Neil Callaghan (UK)
Nevenka Koprivšek (SI)
Phoebe Davies (UK)
Renata Salecl (SI)
Richard Houguez (UK)
Sónia Baptista (PT)
Stephen Emmott (UK)
Stijn Demeulenaere (BE)
Tobias Kokkelmans (NL)
Theresa von Wuthenau (DE)
Uta Lambertz (DE)
Vera Mantero (PT)
Zane Kreicberga (LV)
Zvonimir Dobrović (HR)
Transcriptions
Claudia Galhós (PT), Mark Godber (UK)
Translation
“What can art do in the face of Climate Change?”, by Cyril Dion (FR) and “Rising To The
Challenge of Impotence”, by Christian Mousseau-Fernandez (FR) – both translated from
the French to the English by Claudia Galhós (PT)
“Conceptual Thoughts on a Fund for Aesthetics and Sustainability”, by Adrienne Goehler
(DE), translated from the German to the English by Sonja Linke (DE)
Revision and Proofreading
Alexandra Bochmann (UK/PT)
Design and Art Direction
O Bichinho de Conto (PT)
Printed and bound by
M Creative Corp (PT)
Cataloguing
THERE IS NOTHING THAT IS BEYOND OUR IMAGINATION, Edited by Claudia Galhós
Keywords
Activism. Art. Artivism. Climate Change. Community. Creativity. Culture. Dance. Dialogue.
Ecology. Economy. Film. History. Immigration. Integration. Intercultural. Nature.
Participation. Performance. Performing Arts. Permaculture. Photography. Politics. Public
Art. Public Space. Site-Specificity. Social. Social Sciences. Space. Survival. Sustainability.
Theatre. Transition.
Number of Pages
336
Copies
600
ISBN:
978-989-95397-6-1
Legal Depot nr.
393576/15
© 2015 | Selection and editorial matter: Claudia Galhós (PT) | Chapters: the contributors.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form,
electronic, mechanical or other, without permission in writing from Transforma or the
Imagine 2020 - Art and Climate Change network.
IMAGINE 2020 is funded with support from the European
Union. This publication reflects the views only of the author,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use
which may be made of the information contained therein.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
WHEN LIVING BECOMES A QUESTION AND THE SUSPENSION OF SUSPICION
10
by Claudia Galhós
IMAGINE 2020 - ART AND CLIMATE CHANGE: AN INTRODUCTION
24
by Theresa von Wuthenau
CURATED CONTRIBUTIONS
THE ART OF ECOLOGICAL LIVING
34
Artsadmin | by Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination - Isa Fremeaux and John Jordan
HOW TO CREATE CLIMATE FOR CHANGE
56
Bunker | by Henrietta L. Moore and Renata Salecl
ART AND NATURE ARE NEW GENDERS
68
Domaine d’O | by Chus Martinez
MAKESHIFT COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
92
Kaaitheater | by Jeroen Peeters
CONCEPTUAL THOUGHTS ON A FUND FOR AESTHETICS AND SUSTAINABILITY
104
Kampnagel | by Adrienne Goehler
WHAT CAN ART DO IN THE FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGE?
118
Le Quai | by Cyril Dion
THE ART OF SHARING KNOWLEDGE
130
LIFT - London International Festival of Theatre | by Stephen Emmott, Amy Sharrocks and Jon Davis
NEW FOREST IN THE CITY
150
Rotterdamse Schouwburg | by Tobias Kokkelmans (Actors Group Wunderbaum)
A BODY MADE OF BONES (SCIENCE) AND BLOOD (ART)
Transforma | by Gil Penha-Lopes and Vera Mantero
168
INSIDE VIEWS
ONE THOUSAND YEARS ABOVE YOU
191
WHO OWNS THE WATER?
203
Artsadmin + LIFT | by Michael Pinsky, Phoebe Davies, Chloe Cooper, Judith Knight and Beki Bateson
Bunker | by Nevenka Koprivšek
LOOKING BACK ON IMAGINE 2020
211
Domaine d’O | by Christopher Crimes
INTRODUCING CLIMATE CHANGE TO ARTS IN CROATIA
219
Domino | by Zvonimir Dobrović
IMAGINE THE POLITICAL
225
Kaaitheater | by Guy Gypens
LET’S TAKE ON TOO MUCH!
233
Kampnagel | by Amelie Deuflhard, Uta Lambertz and Gregor Zoch
RISING TO THE CHALLENGE OF IMPOTENCE
241
Le Quai | by Christian Mousseau-Fernandez
THE LONG BEAN
247
NTIL - New Theatre Institute of Latvia | by Zane Kreicberga
IN SEARCH OF A GREEN THEATRE OR JUST GREENWASHING?
255
Rotterdamse Schouwburg | by Ellen Walraven
ON HAPPINESS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERGING WAYS OF SEEING
263
Transforma | by Luís Frimo
OPEN DIALOGUES
A POETIC EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD
276
by Jean Lambert-wild
IMAGINE 2020: PERSONAL AND ARTISTIC VIEWS
302
by Artúr van Balen, Driss Ezzine de Blas, Guillaume Gatteau, Laurence Mellinger, Neil Callaghan,
Richard Houguez, Stijn Demeulenaere, Sónia Baptista and Richard Houguez
BIOGRAPHIES
316
WHEN LIVING
BECOMES
A QUESTION
AND
THE SUSPENSION
OF SUSPICION
by Claudia Galhós
“Thoreau was wrong when
he observed that most
of us lead lives of quiet
desperation. Most of us, I
think, lead lives of denial.
Like children passing a
graveyard, we hold our
breath as we pass the
shadow of meaninglessness
that darkens our lives.”
in “Search for Meaning”, by Dennis Ford
This is where we start. THERE
IS NOTHING. The emptiness
of meaning. The inaction. The
perspective of no future...
It is related to the paradox
anthropologist and cultural theorist
Henrietta L. Moore talks about
in the lecture she gave, here
transcribed, in the context of the
forum “Still Ready to Change”,
organised by Bunker (Ljubljana)
in 2014: “As I see it, the world
may be warming, but politics is
frozen. The climate is changing,
but people are not. This seems
to be the problem. We talk
endlessly of climate change and
yet we have not created any
climate for change.” Renata Salecl
(philosopher, sociologist and
legal theorist), in her lecture at
the same forum, points out the
action and attitude of denial of
human responsibility towards, for
example, the economic crisis, as
if it were “a natural event, as if
it were not instigated by social
changes”. With this in mind, how
to change mentalities? The point of
12
departure is the THERE IS NOTHING.
A mentality of denial, of inaction,
of catastrophe or simply apathy
that resonates all around us. But
there is so much more beyond
that, as this publication will prove.
The point of departure
is the THERE IS NOTHING.
A mentality of denial, of
inaction, of catastrophe
or simply apathy that
resonates all around us.
But there is so much
more beyond that, as this
publication will prove.
The network IMAGINE 2020 – Art
and Climate Change proposes,
among other things, to raise
awareness about the question of
climate change through dialogue
with art. And they know – as the
texts here testify – there is still a
lot to be done. Human creativity,
recognised as Art or as pure
practice of imagination in daily life,
contrary to nature, still has many
more resources than those used.
IMAGINE 2020 - ART AND CLIMATE CHANGE — INTRODUCTION
We can conclude that it is a case
of huge resources wasted. And this
NOTHING which is the beginning
of this publication, relates not
to the first texts (that is not the
dramaturgy of the book) but to
the common frame of mind that
feels it is easier to demise any
human responsibility from ecologic
changes, changes in nature, or in
our ecosystem. This is the logic
that will lead us to the NOTHING.
And this could not be further away
from the truth. If there is a generic
perception that an economic crisis
is a consequence of natural causes,
how can people feel responsible
for events, disturbances,
destructions, which belong to the
world of nature? More difficult
even when the tendency - a
wrong one - is to think of nature
as an entity external to us.
We start this collection of essays,
interviews and conversations
with the image of the threat of
human extinction on the planet,
the attitude of not acting and not
We start with the vision
of a possible end to
humankind. The planet
will outlive us. We start
at the exact moment
we are dangling over
an abyss. This is what
scientists predict.
assuming responsibility for human
action. We start with the vision
of a possible end to humankind.
The planet will outlive us. We
start at the exact moment we
are dangling over an abyss. This
is what scientists predict. “Many
scientists who have produced
these different studies (pollution,
degradation of arable land,
population increase, climate shifts,
collapse of biodiversity...) now talk
of the possible disappearance of
part of humanity between 2040
and 2100. They also estimate
that we have a period of only 20
years in which to react.” This is
a quotation from Cyril Dion in his
essay, “What can Art do in the face
of Climate Change?”
13
That future emptiness is the
first text image, that “THERE IS
NOTHING”, on the cover page of
the publication, leaving almost
no space for the use, at least,
of one of various exceptional
human talents: to transform its
environment through imagination
and collaboration.
Fortunately, as the texts succeed
one another, the future becomes a
possibility. While consciously facing
the hard times we live in and the
real threat we have imposed on
ourselves through an irresponsible
relation with nature and with the
other(s), also while exposing a
raw analysis of the facts... all this
is accompanied by extraordinary
examples of action (in different
areas of knowledge), inspiring,
unique in the engagement and
persistence in the struggle for
a better world.…. In his historic
view of this disaster, in his essay
“Imagine the political”, Guy
Gypens (director of Kaaitheater,
in Brussels, project leader of
14
That future emptiness
is the first text image,
that “THERE IS NOTHING”,
on the cover page of
the publication, leaving
almost no space for the
use, at least, of one
of various exceptional
human talents: to
transform its environment
through imagination and
collaboration.
IMAGINE 2020 – Art and Climate
Change) points out the fact that
“in the decades following 1989,
the individual allowed himself to
be seduced by a desire for ‘ever
more, faster and cheaper’.” It is
what Portuguese artist Rui Catalão
calls “In Goods we Trust”, in his
lecture-performance “People
versus Power” (referred to in
the text “On Happiness and the
Importance of Diverging ways
of Seeing” by Luís Firmo, from
Transforma, Portugal).
We propose a journey into the
t
opening of multiple possibilities
in the future to come. So as the
reading of the texts progresses,
OUR IMAGINATION becomes
a power which fulfils the
nothingness from which we
started. This substantive content
is founded on the collective, on
the collaboration. That is why
it is ‘OUR’. And this publication
is the result of that practice of
collaboration in all diverse aspects.
It goes from overcoming distrust,
something very present in our
society, into a real, engaged,
committed, shared work. This
was practiced across the network
in general, but was particularly
present in the Summer Labs
organised by IMAGINE 2020. It
was also present in the artists,
scientists, economists, curators,
theatre directors, activists,
artivists... who with great
generosity, gave their time to
open themselves up to a stranger
and share a profound questioning,
sometimes trying answers to
questions for which they did not
yet have the right response. The
richness of such encounters is now
shared with the reader of this
book.
So as the reading of the
texts progresses, OUR
IMAGINATION becomes
a power which fulfils
the nothingness from
which we started. This
substantive content
is founded on the
collective, on the
collaboration. That is
why it is ‘OUR’.
The connection between art and
climate change is a question of
human behaviour and, most of
all - as Isa Fremeaux and John
Jordan, from the Laboratory of
Insurrectionary Imagination, talk
about in “The Art of Ecological
Living” - it has to do with relations,
and what they learnt from
permaculture, which became
the third element added to their
art+activism, in 2009. “It is related
15
to the change we think has to
happen culturally: to no longer see
the world as a series of objects
and things and individuals, but as
a rich network of relationships.
We have to think of the world
relationally, in its relational quality.
Some people call permaculture
design ‘the art of creating
beneficial relationships’.”
For a network which deals with
nine European countries, which
means different cultures and
languages – as Theresa von
Wuthenau (coordinator of IMAGINE
2020 – Art and Climate Change for
over six years) explains in more
detail in her introductory text
about the network, the process of
coordinating this publication also
revealed good will, commitment
and availability from all the
partners, which was expressed
in the way the English partners
– Artsadmin and LIFT – dedicated
their time to reading all the texts
and commenting on them. The
richness of the content was only
16
possible because of this generosity
and collaboration.
First of all, there is the
constant articulation and
dialectics between art and
voices coming from other
worlds of knowledge.
There was also a concern
in the design to make each
text, each voice, unique,
praising their differences.
The same with the bios.
There is no standardisation
here.
This is the result of a community
of individuals engaged in making
a difference. The network IMAGINE
2020 – Art and Climate Change
represents the convergence of
many different voices, sensibilities,
fields of knowledge, ways of
perceiving the world. It has
practised this attitude throughout
the years of its existence and
now it is a responsibility for
this publication to respect that
commitment and the values it
d
ch
.
on
implies. That is why there was a
desire to translate the essence of
the network and the ethics and
knowledge and its identity in the
organisation of this publication.
First of all, there is the constant
articulation and dialectics between
art and voices coming from other
worlds of knowledge. There was
also a concern in the design
to make each text, each voice,
unique, praising their differences.
The same with the bios. There
is no standardisation here. This
was only possible thanks to the
constant exchange, complicity,
the rigour and the excellence of
the work of the designers from O
Bichinho de Conto, Pedro Maia and
Mafalda Milhões.
In the journey from THERE IS
NOTHING to OUR IMAGINATION,
the reader will go through three
sections, which are discretely
identified at the bottom of the
pages. The first is dedicated
to “curated contributions”. It is
organised alphabetically (according
to the names of the partners of
the network) and it means that
each partner chose someone or
a collective from whichever field
of knowledge they decided, with
whom they had a connection (if
for nothing else, for valuing their
work and/or world of thought),
a voice which could represent
the identity of the theatrical
structure, to either write a text,
be interviewed or engage in a
conversation with another artist,
scientist, economist...
This method of
choosing the content
and collaborators in the
publication resulted
in a group of very
different perspectives
on how the subject of
Art and Climate Change
was approached
This method of choosing the
content and collaborators in the
publication resulted in a group
of very different perspectives
17
The second major section is called
“inside views” and consists of texts
written by each partner, bringing
a personal perspective on the
subject from the inside. Also here
the engagement of the partners
was particularly touching: because
all organisations which are part of
the network participated, which –
from experience in other networks
– seemed a utopia and an
impossibility to accomplish in the
beginning. Each one approached
the subject the way they felt
closer to their hearts and interests.
two English structures, Artsadmin
and LIFT. What they did was
a conversation, entitled “One
Thousand Years Above You – A
Conversation about ‘Plunge’”.
“Plunge” was a public art project
in London, commissioned to artist
Michael Pinsky by both partners,
in February 2012. “The project
was an artist’s vision of a time,
1000 years in the future, when the
effects of runaway climate change
have completely changed London.
Pinsky marked an imagined
28-metre sea level rise on three
London monuments with simple
blue rings of light.” Now, in a
conversation for the publication,
five members of the team
behind “Plunge” - Michael Pinsky,
Phoebe Davies, Chloe Cooper,
Judith Knight, and Beki Bateson –
revisited the various aspects and
questions raised by the art project.
There is one exception, a very
interesting one, which is the
sharing of the corresponding space
of their inside view between the
At the end we leave you with
“open dialogue”, where the
poetic and touching imaginary
of French theatre director Jean
on how the subject of Art and
Climate Change was approached,
corresponding to the expanded
complexity of the subject and
treating some aspects with more
detail than others, depending on
the personality and interests of the
author.
18
Lambert-wild expands the vision
(which is recurrent throughout
the publication) of belief in
the possibility of a future. This
conviction is sustained in the
human scale of our actions, in an
intimate relationship with nature
founded on care and attention,
forming a unity with us and not
considering nature an externality.
It means to use the immensity
of the power of imagination and
living each day in love with the
world we are part of.
At this point I should mention
that the partners of IMAGINE
2020 included in the publication
are current ones but also the
ones, or one, who meanwhile
left the network. Domaine d’O,
in Montpellier, was – as I am
told – very dedicated and active
in IMAGINE 2020. But, and this
is related to all that has been
written before in this text, the
engagement was not from the
institution, but from the person
behind it: Christopher Crimes. He
was also one of the most active
and engaged, and an accomplice
in the making of this publication.
I have a lot to thank him for. Jean
Lambert-wild came, with an open
heart and complete trust in the
stranger he met by Skype, me,
because of the careful mediation
done by Christopher.
Each reading is an
experience of hope.
You will find this in
all texts. My mind is
full of meaningful
references, clarifying
reasoning and hopeful
visions for this earth
we live in. I believe the
reader will discover, as
I did, amazing human
beings and individuals
engaged in really
making a difference.
I highlight Christopher Crimes’
name, but my heart is thankful to
each person (directors, partners,
and all the contributors) who
19
were involved in this book: for
each person for themselves,
the ethics and the humanity
dimension of their being, and for
the greatly enriching, inspiring
and enlightening analysis of the
subject in question, Arts and
Climate Change. Each reading is
an experience of hope. You will
find this in all texts. My mind is
full of meaningful references,
clarifying reasoning and hopeful
visions for this earth we live on.
I believe the reader will discover,
as I did, amazing human beings
and individuals engaged in really
making a difference. I do not
mention names, but they are all
in the pages of this publication
20
and I think the reader will feel
this is the materialisation of
the “art of creating beneficial
relationships”, repeating a citation
from Laboratory of Insurrectionary
Imagination.
At the end, we close with answers
from various artists, artivists... who
were engaged in some way with
IMAGINE 2020, to questions about
their opinion concerning what has
been done, and so contributing to
the new chapter that is starting:
IMAGINE 2020(2.0), which begins
in July 2015 and will be continuing
the work already done, for four
more years.
“The capacity to detect the
presence of impersonal
affect requires that one
is caught up in it. One
needs, at least for a while,
to suspend suspicion and
adopt a more open-ended
comportment. If we think
we already know what is
out there, we will almost
surely miss much of it.”
in “Vibrant Matter – a political ecology of things”, by Jane Bennett
IMAGINE 2020
ART AND CLIMATE CHANGE
AN INTRODUCTION
by Theresa von Wuthenau
Over the past five years
eleven performance,
theatre and art
organisations in nine
European countries have
joined forces, initially to
raise awareness of climate
change, the socio-ecological
crisis and, increasingly,
about their underlying
systemic causes. The
network “Imagine 2020”
was formed in 2010, but its
origins date back to 2007.
The tipping point: once it is
reached, we will no longer be
able to turn climate change
around. The term defines a space
in time in which substantial
change is still possible. But how
much time is left? This was the
question at Oxford University back
in 2007 when artists, scientists,
writers and curators gathered for
one of the first “Tipping Point”1
meetings to discuss art and
climate change. Representatives
of six European performing arts
organisations met under the
“Year 2020” banner: the “2020
network” was born. After a twoyear pilot programme called “Thin
Ice”, five additional members
joined the network, to found
“Imagine 2020 – Art and Climate
Change” in 2010, with funding
from the European Union Culture
Programme.
Our network spread across
nine European countries and
brought together diverse cultural
institutions: Kaaitheater in
26
Brussels, Belgium, as the project
leader; Artsadmin in London, UK;
Bunker in Ljubljana, Slovenia;
Domaine d’O in Montpellier,
France (up to 2013); Domino
in Zagreb, Croatia; Kampnagel
in Hamburg, Germany; Le Quai
in Angers, France; London
International Festival of Theatre
(LIFT), UK; New Theatre Institute
of Latvia (NTIL) in Riga, Latvia;
Rotterdamse Schouwburg in
Rotterdam, Netherlands and
Transforma in Torres Vedras,
Portugal.
Our network spread
across nine European
countries and brought
together diverse cultural
institutions.
2020 seemed a realistic
date to work towards the
implementation of changes
necessary to stabilise the climate
and secure a sustainable future.
There were reasons other than
the initial meeting of like-minded
people under a “2020” banner, to
keep the horizon 2020 in the title
and at the heart of the network’s
perspective. While working on
defining the network’s objectives
and its programme just before
the Copenhagen Climate Change
Summit at the end of 2009,
climate change was at the top
of the European media and
political agenda. 2020 seemed
a realistic date to work towards
the implementation of changes
necessary to stabilise the climate
and secure a sustainable future.
Political targets were set at the
time across the EU to decrease
carbon dioxide emissions by
20%, save 20% of energy
consumption, and increase the
share of renewable energies to
20% by 2020. Those were clear
objectives. We asked ourselves
what would be behind those
figures? How would change
happen in a positive way?
Art, we believed,
should provide a
physical and imaginary
space where people
could take a step back,
away from corporate,
commercial and
educational agendas.
A space to exchange
and engage with each
other. A space where
audiences could be
involved in a playful
yet serious way. And
above all a space for
art and action to create
positive energy and a
momentum for change
through a sense of
common purpose
and hope.
Artists traditionally confront
issues of high social importance
and often act as a catalyst for
social change. But what role
could the cultural sector as a
whole play in the process of
drastically reducing carbon
27
emissions, slowing down climate
change and increasing resilience
to the effects of peak oil? Quite
idealistically, the IMAGINE 2020
network members shared a sense
of responsibility and wanted
to use their connections within
the art world and other areas to
add their voice to the European
climate change debate and push
the cultural sector to act.
Art, we believed, should provide
a physical and imaginary space
where people could take a step
back, away from corporate,
commercial and educational
agendas. A space to exchange
and engage with each other. A
space where audiences could be
involved in a playful yet serious
way. And above all a space for
art and action to create positive
energy and a momentum for
change through a sense of
common purpose and hope.
We wanted to use the creative
potential of artists, curators,
scientists, authors, activists,
28
philosophers etc. to raise
awareness and provoke change
within the cultural sector and
beyond, involving the general
public both as an audience and as
a participant.
Since 2010, about five
hundred artists (and two
thousand performers) have
been involved in IMAGINE
2020 projects – that means
two thousand artistic
ambassadors across the
European arts scene raising
awareness and promoting
change among their peers.
Since 2010, about five hundred
artists (and two thousand
performers) have been involved
in IMAGINE 2020 projects – that
means two thousand artistic
ambassadors across the European
arts scene raising awareness and
promoting change among their
peers. Choreographers, directors
ve
ns
ng
g
s.
and visual artists of international
renown, including Anne Teresa
de Keersmaeker, Christoph
Marthaler, Robyn Orlin, Michael
Pinsky, or Philippe Quesne
to name just a few, were coproduced and presented by the
network. Close to two hundred
artists, scientists, and academics
were part of the four IMAGINE
2020 Summer Labs in France,
Portugal, Croatia, and the UK.
Inspired by the New Economics
Foundations’ The Great Transition
report2, a series of successful
events with commissioned
artistic work combined with open
conferences and debates on how
to live differently took place in all
network countries. Over a million
audience members from all kinds
of backgrounds, many of them
young people, attended shows,
workshops, lectures or visited
installations and exhibitions.
Many more were reached
through films, social media,
documentation, and general
media coverage.
The network has also provided
constraints and therefore
opportunities for its members
and artists to include climate
change concerns in their
everyday working practices, to
explore new ways of producing,
performing and presenting art,
and often act as ‘green pioneers’
in the cultural sector in their
countries.
Today, the year 2020 is fast
approaching and much still needs
to be done. Climate tipping points
come closer than ever before and
have maybe even arrived. Turning
around climate change seems
a more and more unrealistic
ambition. At a time when COP21
in Paris3 is just around the corner
and equally hailed as a last
chance in the climate debate
(just like Copenhagen in 2009),
governments still do not often
prioritise climate issues and
environmental concerns. Despite
29
being closely related, other
issues such as the debt crisis,
unemployment, social exclusion
and poverty, are excuses to back
out of prior commitments.
Despite all the campaigns to raise
public awareness, CO2 emissions
reach all-time highs year after
year.
However, in the cultural
sector things seem to shift:
addressing climate change in an
artwork, and taking ecological
considerations into account
during the creative process,
has become more and more
common.
The network therefore wants
to take a step up. The process
of change that its members
have gone through in the past
five, sometimes seven years,
the local and international
connections developed with a
wide range of partners, and the
experience built up in artistic
strategies is the basis for the
30
more ambitious programme that
IMAGINE 2020(2.0)4 is putting
forward for the coming years.
Most members stayed on board
for this new phase, showing
their commitment and proving
the benefits of working together
across Europe. New members
have joined, broadening the
artistic spectrum even further.
From analysing the
current crisis and raising
awareness around it,
Imagine 2020(2.0) - Art,
Ecology & Possible Futures
will focus even more on
imagining, studying and
making prototypes of
possible futures, while
remaining firmly rooted
in cultural practices.
From analysing the current crisis
and raising awareness around it,
IMAGINE 2020(2.0) - Art, Ecology
& Possible Futures will focus even
more on imagining, studying and
making prototypes of possible
futures, while remaining firmly
rooted in cultural practices. Set
to start in July 2015 for four
years, work done through the
network wants to speculate
about a sustainable future by
modelling it on artistic creations
and experiments that allow
alternatives to emerge.
TippingPoint is a network-based organisation
aiming to be a year round ‘connector’ of the arts
and climate science worlds. www.tippingpoint.
org.uk
1
NEF is the UK’s leading think–tank promoting
social, economic and environmental justice. www.
neweconomics.org
2
The United Nations Climate Change Conference
known as COP21 will be held from November 30th
to December 11th 2015 in Paris. It is said to be the
last chance for politicians to preserve the climate
target of 2°C by 2100.
3
Funded under the European Union’s Creative
Europe programme, the network IMAGINE
2020(2.0) - Art, ecology & possible futures is the
continuation of Imagine 2020 – Art & Climate
Change.
4
31
Curated by Artsadmin
THE ART OF
ECOLOGICAL
LIVING
by Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Lab of ii)
Isa Fremeaux (IF) and John Jordan (JJ)
(testimony collected by Claudia Galhós)
ON ART, PERMACULTURE
AND ACTIVISM
Isa Fremeaux: In 2009, we held an event with Artsadmin in the Two
Degrees Festival, called C.R.A.S.H.1, ; a global title for a series of projects:
there was, for example, the C.R.A.S.H. contingency which was a 10day training with about 25 young unemployed precarious people and
students, and the C.R.A.S.H. Conversations, a series of lectures...
It all came together under the umbrella of synergies between art,
activism and permaculture. Basically the 'Lab of ii' is a collective that we
founded 10 years ago which aims to bring together artists and activists
to co-create creative forms of resistance. Of course we feel that the
notion of artists and activists is complicated and they are identities
we ultimately would like to dissolve. There is an issue with the idea that
artists have the monopoly over creativity. We believe, contrary to this
idea, that everybody is creative and an artist; it is merely a matter of
finding one’s own creativity. On the other hand there is also an issue with
the idea of activism, as if activists had the monopoly on social change.
We believe that social change belongs to and needs to be grabbed by
everyone. All our work brings activists and artists together. We feel
that artists have a lot of creativity, imagination, and a great capacity to
think outside the box, but at the same time they very often tend to have
big egos, because this is how they have been trained, and they are not
courageous enough to be really politically and socially engaged. Despite
all the discourse around social engagement practices, they very often
remain in a safe space, or frame, which is the frame of the arts world.
Activists on the other hand, are much more audacious, engaged,
35
courageous and informed, but often lack creativity and have a tendency
to repeat the same old forms. However when they are brought together
– artists and activists – their joint synergies can be really powerful
and new forms of resistance can be created. That's definitely what
happened with C.R.A.S.H., however it was also the first time we added
the permaculture dimension to our work.
For five years, we had been working on the fusion between arts and
activism, but bringing in permaculture really only happened in 2009. The
reason why we felt it was so interesting was the fact that permaculture
brings a powerful ethical framework to the notion of arts and activism,
and there is something very productive and beautiful in the way it
encourages one to no longer think of nature as an outside thing. It makes
you really see it as a teacher and enables you to reintegrate yourself as
a part of nature. It makes a shift. It is no longer about this thing called
the environment, something that would surround us, and not be a part
of us. It activates the opposite reasoning, which is what's correct: we
are part of it and we think of nature as a teacher. Bringing in the notion
of ecology is really powerful in an instructive way. So this is something
we started in 2009 and have tried to maintain in many ways in our work
ever since.
John Jordan: I think this is also related to basic perceptional shifts
which occur when a person works in permaculture. It is related to the
change we think has to happen culturally: to no longer see the world as
a series of objects and things and individuals, but as a rich network of
relationships. We have to think of the world relationally, in its relational
quality. Some people call permaculture design 'the art of creating
beneficial relationships'. That is one definition of permaculture.
36
IMAGINE 2020 - ART AND CLIMATE CHANGE — CURATED CONTRIBUTIONS
We never call our pieces ‘art work’ or anything in that family of naming.
What we do are 'experiments', because we think the basis of creativity
is to give yourself permission to fail. And if you don't allow yourself to
fail you can't be creative. So in all our experiments there are always
questions. What beneficial relationships are we creating through our
work? How can the work exist within an ethical framework? Etc.
We apply permaculture not only to our experiments but to our lives. For us,
we try not to separate the means and the ends. The work itself is designed
using permaculture principles, and embedded in the ethics, which are:
earth care, people care and fair share – the equitable redistribution of
what is produced. All this brings everything together around an idea of
limits. Everything has to be constructed within limits: there are physical
and ecological limits to our actions. This also applies to our everyday lives;
we live in a yurt in an ecological community and we haven't flown for 10
years. So these ethics really influence the way we live and work.
TEN YEARS WITHOUT FLYING
IF: I don't think it is that hard to live without flying, even for art activists
such as us who travel significantly. It is very often more a question of
not wanting to face the consequences connected to the convictions
each person has. People fly because they want to be able to do lots
of things, in lots of places, in a minimum amount of time. This is the
most common argument that people who fly a lot put forward: I would
not have the time to do all this without it. And one of the things one
learns when we look at permaculture is that if you try to get closer to
natural time, then you have to accept that you can't be everywhere at
37
all times. Flying is very much this illusion that one can be everywhere
pretty much simultaneously. For me it is also a question of consistency
with one’s values.
If you work on climate change and you fly, there is a tacit message in
that contradiction that is: I am more important than what I am talking
about. What it says is this: I think climate change is really important and
therefore we all need to reduce our contribution to carbon emissions
but I will not start with myself, because what I have to do and what I
have to say is so much more important than climate change. For John
and me this doesn't make sense and that is why we decided not do it.
Deciding this meant that there are invitations we cannot accept because
for instance there is not enough money in the budget to take trains,
which are more expensive. We have also refused invitations when the
festivals, theatres or events are funded and sponsored by airlines, or
the fossil fuel industry, or even banks which fund fossil fuels.
Even for just one collaboration, we refuse to be a part of institutions that
accept being the PR [Public Relation] wings of the fossil fuel industry.
This also means that we have accepted that it affects our profile. I think
it is a matter of just being coherent, it is not a question of trying to be
pure. We are definitely not pure, we would never claim this, but I think
there are lines in the sand that one needs to draw for oneself. For us,
flying is such a basic and fundamental part of the fossil fuel culture
and I think this argument about how it is really complicated and there
is nothing I can do but fly is, personally, an argument that I don't accept.
JJ: For us the art of ecological and political living means being coherent
between what we think and what we do. And bourgeois society is filled
38
with incoherence between what people think and say, especially in
the public sphere, and what they do. Again, it is not about being pure
at all, but about being coherent. Imagine we were here in a network,
let's say in the XVIII century, defending the end of slavery. Let's say we
were artists doing our artwork which was developing a culture against
slavery, but at the same time we had a couple of slaves at home. That
would be really messed up... “but ahhh... As an artist against slavery I
was creating art about that... but... sadly... ohhh... I don't have time to do
all the housework... you know... I am an artist after all”. For us, this is the
same as what is happening today, because climate change is a war on
the poor. It is a catastrophe that affects those least responsible for the
actions that cause the consequences. So for us it is a question of justice.
At the same time, we don't think that personal consumption choices are
political.
IF: I don't agree. Personal choices are political.
«YES» / «NO»
THE CREATION OF ALTERNATIVES /
THE CREATION OF RESISTANCE
JJ: OK, but it is not about saying “I don't fly, I buy organic vegetables,
recycle, collect rainwater and so on and this is my politics”. We think
this is not actually a political act, we think – or I think – it is simply and
absolutely what we should be doing as ecological art activists anyway,
because we should be coherent between what we think and what we do.
What is political is attacking and resisting the structures that force us
39
not to live the way we believe we should. The political work is actually
forcing the structures to stop pulling fossil fuels out of the ground.
Because we can make all our permaculture gardens and live ecological
lives, but the water will still rise and still flood our gardens and transition
towns if we don't destroy the fossil fuel industry. So the political work
is to destroy the fossil fuel industry. A fundamental thing in our work
is, «yes», we must have creative alternatives, make people desire a
different way of behaving and to live in the world but, at the same time,
each person has to resist and say «no». The DNA of our work is these
two strands, the «yes» and the «no»: the creation of alternatives and
the creation of resistance.
IF: I don't agree when John says it is not political because I am a feminist
and I very much believe in the personal being political, but that is not
enough. I think we live in a society where we too often delude ourselves
into thinking that it is enough, “I’ve done my part, I’ve recycled, and
if everybody does their little part, then it’s going to be OK.” I strongly
believe this is not going to be OK. This system is actually much more
profound and complex and already damaged than that. If we all do our
part and limit our action to our own personal lives, it is just not going to
be sufficient. But I still think it is political.
ART ACTIVISM
ARE THERE FRONTIERS
BETWEEN THE TWO?
IF: I think it all depends on the concept of art you are talking about. I
think it has to do with the conception of art one defends. We have been
40
very interested in the concept of art John brought to the Lab, which is
defining art as the act of paying attention. It is not about being part of
the segmented logic of the art world. I think this is something we decided
we would not care about, whether the art world chose to define what we
do as art or not. This is not an identity that I care about. At the same time,
I am not saying we escape art. I am saying we are not interested in the
art world in that sense, and the art market. That is a completely different
subject.
John used to be a performance artist and now some people say he
escaped art. We haven't escaped art. It’s just that art is really the art of
paying attention to what you are doing with the utmost consideration,
attention and care. It means doing things as best you can. Then it
becomes art. I think that when you actually do that, whether in the art
space, public space, or whether in a garden, then it is art. It’s a process
not an identity for us.
Personally for me the identity is something I'm not very attached to. I
was not trained as an artist. These are the kinds of identities and labels
that can make us lose our sense of what matters. Whether something
is going to be called art or not, I could not care less. Whether what we
are doing is beautiful and effective, considerate and transformative...
this is what matters to me. Then it actually brings to the surface all the
dimensions we want. This means not just saying, “this is a good and
effective political action”. The result is more fairly defined by saying
“this is a political action that is also beautiful, also irresistible, also
desirable”. If that is the case, if that is what we have produced, then
whether we label it art or not, personally, I don't care.
41
JJ: I was a 'Beuys [Joseph Beuys, 1921-1986] scout', and Beuys talked a
lot about the expanded concept of art. He was my first teacher in a way.
We have to expand this concept of art, which is related to the way we think
about art now. The dominant contemporary concept of art is an incredible
blip in Human History. It is not even a blip. We were hunter-gatherers for
99.8% of our time on this planet and the concept didn't exist then. We are
all using a very western and Eurocentric concept of art, separated from
everyday life and it's only about 500 years old. It is for these very reasons
that it has to be highly criticised, because it immediately constructs an
elite of creators. Suddenly it means that gardening, cooking, taking care of
a child, making love is not an art practice. This returns us to this idea of the
importance of paying attention.
The relevance of paying attention to art actually comes from Allan Kaprow,
who said “art is simply paying attention”, and relates to permaculture,
because one of the bases of permaculture is observation. Before you
intervene in a system you have to get to know it very well. In order to do
so, there is the need to pay attention, to know it really deeply before you
begin any kind of intervention. That is the same as the practice of art. An
artist will observe and work with her/his material, the body, the stone,
whatever, and she/he really has to know the thing. John Berger says that
in order to transform something, you need to know the texture of the thing.
I think that comes back to this. To actually transform society you need to
know the texture of all its components, and that requires attention, paying
attention. And paying attention for us is art. It is more like a verb, not a
noun. Art is simply a way of doing something, not the name you give to
something. And I think that in an ecological society, where we see the
world more as a series of relationships, we see the world less as nouns.
Therefore these crazy abstract nouns, such as art, need a correct context.
42
IF: This is related to another thing permaculture teaches you: to reject
constant competition. The notion of art is really rooted in competition.
It means showing that one's idea is more interesting than the idea
of another artist, that it is more special, more unique than others’.
Permaculture really demonstrates the extent to which so much of
ecosystems and the natural world is actually based on collaboration
and symbiosis. And when you try to think in terms of creating beneficial
relationships, then again this label of what I am doing, if it is art or not,
doesn't really count anymore.
JJ: And it comes down to artists being terrified of instrumentalisation,
terrified that their work will be instrumentalised for political objectives.
This is a concept which is just over 100 years old and comes out as an
absolute paradox because people who are scared of their work being
instrumentalised often produce art that is part of the art market: being
sold and marketed. So it is instrumentalised by the culture industries
or the art market anyway. The idea of a non-instrumentalised pure
autonomous work of art is still a kind of myth within the art world but it
doesn't take much thought to realise that it is actually a myth based on a
way of seeing the world outside relationships. It goes back to a conception
of the world where everything is compartmentalised, art is autonomous,
and has no connection to other spheres of life or knowledge.
ABOUT THE DOCILE BODY AND THE
IMPORTANCE OF DISOBEDIENCE
IF: The notion of disobedience is fundamental to our work. Not
disobedience as a value in itself, but as a fundamental attitude to
43
have in order to fight the system that is destructive and undignified.
Disobedience is about being able to go against the values we have
imposed upon us in the dominant paradigm of our society. So it is a
mental attitude, but also a very physical and bodily function, because
very often obedience starts with the body that doesn't want to move... I
think that in the work we do, the body is very much at the centre of this
encounter between the mental and emotional attitude. That's what is
important. It is related to the 'docile body' Foucault mentions. He really
talks about the meeting point between the emotional and rational, and
the fact that we are being taught to be polite and not make waves.
We claim the right to be impolite and to make waves because one of
the things we never ever forget is that every little thing we take for
granted in our society, from women wearing trousers to women voting,
to the right to strike... all those rights were gained out of disobedience.
Maybe at the moment, the most important is not only to act through
disobedience, but through people taking risks, putting their bodies on
the line. At the very beginning, such ideas as women voting seemed and
sounded ridiculous and an outrage.
The first person who said that black people should no longer be slaves
was saying this at a time when the church was saying black people had
no souls. When the first women said “we want to vote”, we were still at
the point where they were accused of having smaller brains. So I think
that this docility is something that we really want to shake, because it
seems to us that there is an obsession at the moment with wanting to be
liked, to be nice, and not be offensive. I think it is important to remember
that we do not really change fundamental systems of oppression by
being polite. That has never happened and I imagine will never happen.
44
The disobedient body is fundamental in all this history.
JJ: The catastrophe of climate change, the collapse of our life support
systems and erosion of social justice issues is a result of people not
acting. It is due more to docility than anything else.... As a young
artist I was very much influenced by people like Chris Burden, Marina
Abramović... all those figures of the 70s and 80s body art... Most of my
books were about body art. That was what I was doing in the late 80s.
So I think there was a very important moment for me when I discovered
there were people literally attaching their bodies to bulldozers to stop
them from destroying ecosystems. I realised there was something there
which made sense and created meaning: it was that exact same use of
the body as a kind of tool. The body as the centre of the artwork, as the
material of the artwork. But it was pragmatically making a difference. It
was real, not just symbolic.
Literally putting your body in front of the machine, in real social
situations of conflict, as opposed to placing your body in a fake abstract
conflict in an art gallery, makes sense to me. I realised that each time
I did it in a gallery there were the same 400 people who came to see it.
So it became evident that doing this in a public space on a bulldozer to
stop the destruction of an ecosystem has a completely different kind
of audience. And most importantly for me, an aesthetic question: it was
beautiful. That is what makes these experiments particular and special:
beauty. Beauty is there when you creatively resist the destruction of an
ecosystem; beauty is there when a forest remains and is not replaced
by a motorway; beauty is there when a squatted social centre is not
ripped down to make luxury flats... It's still an aesthetic question for us
and that is really important.
45
HOW TO CREATE THE DESIRE TO
LIVE IN AN ALTERNATIVE WAY?
IF: I think first of all this is about making the alternative, but also the
resistance, desirable. I think that there is a paradigm that has made
resistance a dirty word. In our very industrialised world, there is an
obsession with comfort and wellbeing, where everything needs to be
nice and comfortable. And it is difficult to go against this.
However it seems to me that most often what is more desirable is the
enthusiasm and joy of other people. So it is our responsibility to keep
the joy of what we do, and it also comes down to something a dear friend
of ours said. She is about 60 years old now and has been an activist for
40 years of her life. When we asked her how she kept going, she said,
“I will always have more fun being on the side of those who fight than
with the others”. And for me there is a lot of truth in that. We don't do our
experiments with the guarantee that they’re going to work and that we
are going to win, but it is more fun to do it like that.
The question of desire is very much linked to work on emotions. This is
one of the things that artists are very good at. Activists have a tendency of
obsessing with facts and figures. They tend to think that if people know and
have more information about how wrong things are, then they will be moved
to act. However, people are more likely to act through emotions, values,
desire and fantasy...This is what artists can be very good at activating. This
is what makes us keep bringing artists together with activists.
JJ: I propose putting the question the other way round: we can say one of
our jobs at the Lab of ii is to make artists desert capitalism. One of our goals
46
is to get artists to desert a system where they end up making business
as usual more beautiful. Most art is making capitalism sexier and because
of that, business as usual can continue. One can argue that everything
currently in the Tate Museums is working for the PR wing of big businesses,
and that's what it is doing. It is working for the PR wing of British Petroleum
or any of the other companies funding it: BMW, Unilever, etc.
For us a lot of the work is making artists desert and stop their work
from becoming instrumentalised by capitalism, and start applying their
creativity to alternative ways of living, alternative ways of resistance,
to something that isn't business as usual. At the same time, there are
diverse ways and alternatives. So we live in a yurt on an organic farm
and commune and use permaculture, and have compost loos... of
course not everybody will want that. It’s not about promoting that for
all. But there are things in our personal everyday life that are perhaps
desirable, maybe more desirable than the compost loos. The fact that
we try to live with a different idea of time and a different idea of money
and property, and in a relationship with nature, the fact that we live with
other people... For us issues of loneliness are less present, and this is
just one example...
We are very influenced by the Zapatistas, and one of the things that
came out in the Zapatista movement very early on, was this idea of one
«no» to capitalism and many «yeses», many alternatives, meaning
that the alternatives depend on the context in which they exist. The
alternative in a neighbourhood in Lisbon is not the same as in our valley
in Brittany, not the same as a Sudanese peasant, or a Chinese worker...
All these alternatives are different, and must be contextualised and
diverse. This comes back again to learning from ecosystems - the
47
importance of diversity. The problem with our culture is the monoculture of it, and when something is mono-cultural, it is no longer
resilient and collapses very quickly and easily. Capitalism has this great
myth of choice, but it is actually about creating a mono-culture across
the world, a mono-culture that is enforced with violence.
ABOUT THE INCORPORATION
OF RISK
IF: Risk is absolutely linked to what we were talking about before: the
need to obey. We feel that we live in a system of oppression that is real
and stronger than ever before. We are in the claws of the fossil fuel
industry, of neo-liberalism, of hyper government surveillance. We can
see that repression is tightening on everyone who dares to disagree
with the paradigm and we've made a choice that we will not shut up as
long as we have the strength to do it. Yes there are risks to take, but the
risk of not doing anything is so much more destructive. And let’s be very
honest, the risk we take is absolutely minimal compared to most of the
risks a lot of people are taking around the world. People who just keep
on living, just surviving: if you are a farmer in some parts of the Global
South you've taken much greater risks just trying to keep on living, than
what we are doing.
I think it’s important to bear in mind that we have been told there is
nothing worse than being arrested and spending some time in prison.
When you are the kind of people we are: white middle class people
currently living in an eco-village in Brittany (France), that just isn't true
compared to what is at stake.
48
Being arrested is not a terrible thing. And I am not minimising the
experience of spending time in jail for most people. I am not trivialising
it, but I think that at the same time we’ve been taught to fear it more
than we should, and that fear makes us forget what the actual risks are.
So we disobey. When we built “The Great Rebel Raft Regatta” - a flotilla of
boats to shut down a coal fired power station - the risk one person takes
is of getting wet and spending a few hours in a cell. That is basically
what we risk. So it is important to put the value where it belongs, and
to remember that what is at stake is life on earth. And it might sound
really grandiose but that's what we’re looking at. We feel we should be
taking greater risks. For us the challenge is to feel more confident to
take greater risks and feel that we can mobilise and make those risks
desirable for other people, because this is absolutely what is needed.
JJ: I was a great fan of Situationism and I think that what we learnt from
Situationism was the importance of play and adventure within politics,
not only to dissolve this difference between arts and politics but to see
the process of political action being one of pleasure. In a way the risk
brings adventure and people come with that... A lot of our work is a kind
of window into action for people who normally would never do it. A lot
of people joined the Clown Army2 because they wanted to learn to be
clowns, lots of people joined the “Bike Bloc” in Copenhagen because they
liked bikes and wanted to make bikes. A lot of people were in the “The
Great Rebel Raft Regatta”... because they wanted to dress as pirates, and
so on... We often find ourselves to be a window into civil disobedience,
and there is often a sense of adventure connected to it which makes
people want to do it again. We know many people who took part in our
actions and yet 7 or 9 years later they continued and they dedicate their
lives to activism. Now that's what they do, because they had such a
49
great time. Bertolt Brecht talked about the importance of training people
in the pleasure of transforming reality, and that's really fundamental for
us: how we make people enjoy that process of transformation. Risk is
part of it. They don't have to go to Disneyland and go on a roller-coaster;
they can get their dose of adrenaline from meaningful actions.
WHAT IS A CREATIVE PROCESS
FOR ART ACTIVISM?
JJ: Each one of our projects is very different, and some have been more
successful than others. I think in theory, and sometimes in practice, we
try to create a conceptual and formal frame which we then throw open
to a social movement, and to a public. In that phase it gets developed
and is taken into action through non-hierarchical forms of organisation.
An example is the project “Put the fun between your legs: become
the Bike Bloc”3 in Copenhagen, during the UN Conference on Climate
Change in December 2009. We had the idea through thinking about the
materiality of a bicycle. How can we transform a bicycle into a tool of civil
disobedience? How do we just go beyond the body? What can happen
when there is a body and a machine? And how can the machine, in this
case a bicycle, take on a kind of disobedient form? We had already spent
some time in Copenhagen, and observed that people abandon their
bikes everywhere. In permaculture 'waste' should become a resource,
nothing is ever wasted in natural systems. And so we decided this would
be the key material, something local and available.
We often begin our experiments with a text that describes the concept
– in this case transforming bikes into tools of disobedience. For
50
us the writing and text are very important. In a way there is a very
strong aesthetic around the writing of the first proposal. Then people
get engaged and excited about it and we start talking to the social
movements, organising meetings to present the idea. Then people
develop it and we work on getting the funding or whatever we need and
we make it happen. For the “Bike Bloc”, around 200 people were involved
in the process. But all that process, when the idea was out there, was
completely horizontal. There was no leadership beyond the initial idea.
Or maybe it is more correct to say there was a shared leadership led by
lots of people, but with no director, no one in particular saying this was
how we wanted to have the bikes, this is how we wanted it to look. There
were open workshops for the design, construction and development of
the choreography. The conception of the strategy was all completely
open. The beauty for us, the most powerful thing, is actually when we,
the authors of the initial frame, become useless.
When the author of the initial idea becomes useless, that is fundamentally
important for us. In the “Bike Bloc” process, on the second or third day in
the Arnolfini Gallery (Bristol), where we were doing the first workshops
to design the prototypes that were to go to Copenhagen, we went for
coffee, came back late, and the 50 people from the workshop were
already in a circle developing their own discussion, using the tools we
had taught them the day before about facilitation, and the process was
going on. For us that was perfect. And if you asked the people a few
months later in Copenhagen what they were doing, they would always
say, “oh it’s the ‘Bike Bloc’”. They would never say, “oh it’s The Lab of ii
even the publicity doesn't say it’s an action of the laboratory...
IF: We genuinely believe in modelling ways to re-learn how to build these
51
beneficial relationships between people. That is the true art. And when
that happens, we feel the satisfaction of an artist who has created a
piece of art. I think maybe the difference is that we don't feel the need
to put our stamp on it, to claim that it was us, or ours. That is never
the case, we are the trigger, we are the facilitators, but the magic is a
collective thing. To actually merge into the collective, is something that I
feel much more satisfying than having our name on it...
JJ: But at the same time to go back to the circle of risk, it’s interesting
where the question of responsibility comes in there. People are going
to put themselves into very dangerous situations. The Copenhagen
contemporary art centre who commissioned the project, ended up by
pulling out because they did not want us to actually do desobedience,
just make the bikes for the museum. So we ended up being based at the
Candy Factory, a legalised squat. One of the neighbours came and said
“police have come into my flat and they put a camera in my flat that is
filming you all”. We said thanks to the neighbour and we were conscious
that we were bringing people into a dangerous situation.
The night before the action a thousand people were arrested on the streets
of Copenhagen during a legal march. Governments don't want people to
deal with climate change, they want the multinational companies and
the state to deal with it. They don't want popular movements to deal with
it or find a solution for climate change which would affect their control
and profits. So a thousand people were arrested; and later the police
raided our workshops. They took a lot of the bikes; a friend of ours was
arrested for having a tool in a bike workshop and was deported from
Copenhagen! And during the action the next day people were attacked
by police dogs on their bikes, one person was injured by them, and a
52
load were arrested and put into cages, which the Danish state had built
especially for that occasion. They built cages in an old brewery to put
people in, they knew they were going to have these massive arrests.
Of course people are going into a dangerous situation because this
really is a war of capitalism against the climate, the economy against
ecology. Related to this, there is a question of responsibility towards
others. Training is fundamental for us. It is interesting when you have art
and activism and permaculture, and you add into this equation another
element beginning with 'p' which is 'pedagogy'. For us, in a sense, we
see pedagogy as an art work. That goes back to Beuys and his thinking
that “education is art”. This is very central to our practice. Training
people to be able to deal with these kinds of risk situations is also really
important, because the future is going to have more and more of these
moments of resistance.
1
“C.R.A.S.H.” was commissioned as part of “2 Degrees” festival through the Imagine 2020 – Arts and Climate
Change Network
2
“For 2 months in the lead-up to the anti-capitalist protests against the G8 summit in Scotland, in July
05, the Lab toured the UK. In 9 cities, we presented interventions and an information centre in a bespoke
caravan which transformed into a stage for our evening performance. The free show took place in town
squares and parks and included: a spoof academic lecture on the history of civil disobedience, the Clown
Army’s Ridiculous Recruitment Show, free chips and films of creative activist actions. In each city we ran a
two-day intensive training in rebel clowning and battle of the story workshops, with the weekend culminating
in a Prayers to Products action. By the end of the tour a Clown Army platoon of more than 200 rebel clowns
made it up to Gleneagles for the protests” (Transcription from The Laboratory Of Insurrectionary Imagination
site, at http://www.labofii.net)
3
“PUT THE FUN BETWEEN YOUR LEGS: BECOME THE BIKE BLOC” was an experiment that put artists, engineers,
activists and bike hackers together to design and build new tools of civil disobedience out of Copenhagen's
53
thousands of discarded bikes for the RECLAIM POWER day of mass action. Following weeks of working with
the CCAC, they dropped the project when they realized that when we said ‘civil disobedience’ we really meant
it; we were not ‘pretending’ to do politics: we were going to build the machines and use them on the streets,
they were not going to be commodities to contemplate in a museum, but practical tools of resistance.
Thankfully the Candy Factory, an incredible creative social centre in an old factory was less timid and
offered to host us for the building part of the project. (Transcription from The Laboratory Of Insurrectionary
Imagination site, at http://www.labofii.net)
54
Curated by Bunker
HOW TO CREATE
CLIMATE FOR CHANGE
Transcription of part of the lectures and the beginning of the
dialogue by Henrietta L. Moore (anthropologist and cultural
theorist) and Renata Salecl (philosopher, sociologist and legal
theorist) in the context of the forum “Still Ready to Change”,
organised by Bunker (Ljubljana) in 2014.
PART I
BY HENRIETTA L. MOORE
CLIMATE IS CHANGING
BUT PEOPLE ARE NOT
I would like to begin by reminding us of some ideas that were current in the 1990s
and in early 2000s, just as a way of provoking you into engaging with this discussion
about the question of change. Let us start with a few simple propositions.
As I see it, the world may be warming, but politics is frozen. The
climate is changing, but people are not. This seems to be the problem.
We talk endlessly of climate change and yet we have not created any climate for
change. This is a kind of paradox for us. Of course we all know it is not for lack of
information. We all know that the costs of doing nothing about climate change
could rob the globe of 20% of its economic performance annually as we go forward.
Which would mean every year we could be decreasing by 20%.
One of the things that is interesting about politics, particularly when we think of
politics in relation to the arts, is that politics is about story-making.
A new politics would require new stories. So what do our current
stories look like? Perhaps the problem is with our current stories. In this frame of
mind I immediately thought of Cormac McCarthy and “The Road”, both book and
film (rather a horrible film, even if it was widely praised everywhere). I thought
of it because it is a story about a post-apocalyptic America. It is about a man and
his son on a journey across a horrible apocalyptic landscape. The point about this
journey is that it has no goal, it’s futile; they are going nowhere. The man and
the boy in the story have no names, they remain unnamed throughout the whole
pilgrimage process.
Now, in contemporary political life, apocalyptic imaginaries
infuse the whole climate change debate. In fact they infuse the whole
debate about the environment and human-environment relations. So if we do
nothing, the earth as we know it will come to an end, and humanity will come to
57
an end. That’s the basic story. Of course these kinds of apocalyptic visions, as we
all know, have a long history in Christian thinking. But in the Christian apocalypse
what happens is that there is always a promise of redemption afterwards. There is
always a new dawn, some event will change history, and something new will come
out of it. But currently in the way we tell this story about climate
change, there is no new dawn. It is as if we were walking into a kind of
post-apocalyptic landscape.
It turns out that climate change politics are not really about climate at all, but
mostly about how to transform the way we think, and about how we are going to
develop new concepts and new ways of thinking to transform social institutions
and social practices. If we know that, why don’t we have any new stories
to take us forward? What stories are we telling? What are the
alternative stories?
Casting our minds back to the 1990s, several useful kinds of theory did emerge and
took their place in the thought process of this subject. They were not about what
the future could hold for us. They were about why, in the face of urgent necessity
to change, we had actually evacuated the future. We had actually nothing much to
say about that future except that we needed to change.
GLOBAL WARMING
VERSUS FROZEN POLITICS
As I suggested at the beginning, I think part of the problem, at least in Europe, is
that these apocalyptic imaginaries create a frozen politics. Frozen politics is the
result of the way we think about the future. Much of this happens because at the
symbolic level, apocalyptic stories of this kind both disavow and displace dissent
and diversity, partly because they start from the proposition that we are all in it
together.
So the crisis of humanity prevents us from achieving what we most urgently
need: Where are the voices? Where are the voices from below?
Where are the voices of people from different classes, different
nations, different countries, different political ideologies?
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All of these people are actually affected very differently by climate change and
perceiving and experiencing climate change very differently.
But we don’t hear that difference; that diversity is not there in the
story about climate change.
The story we have about climate change is a curiously flattened one, and because
of that we don’t get that sense of diversity coming in to build up these alternative
stories. So we don’t actually have a real politics around climate change; not of
diversity, different approaches, or different scenarios laid out in front of us. We
actually have a kind of strange and uneasy consensus. This consensus is very
disabling for us, both individually and collectively. This uneasy consensus is one of
the reasons why Ulrich Beck argued quite extensively in the 1990s, and continues
to argue, that “any chance that we have of greening societies in
the future will require new forms of cosmopolitan solidarity
across differences and diversity”. The question, then, is how will these
forms of solidarity be built and sustained? I think one of the difficulties here is
that when we have this crisis of climate as a crisis of humanity - of all humanity
- then the crisis itself gets depoliticised. It becomes outside politics because it is
not about the specific things we should be doing, it is not about choosing one
trajectory over another, it is not about proposing specific kinds of socio-ecological
projects.
When I say that, I am not denying or moving away from the kind of activism
that takes place at a local level. There are plenty of examples around the world:
transition towns, great art projects, all sorts of alternative ways of developing
exchange systems, of dealing with carbon neutral enterprises for the environment
in small quartiers in cities all around the world, and so on. There is a rich diversity
of development projects that go on in the world looking at how to cut deforestation,
and how to be more careful about the conservation of fuel and energy. All of these
things often work fantastically well at the local level. So we have fantastic
ideas. But the problem is we cannot scale them up. So all of these
initiatives are happening here and everywhere but they are not coming together,
there is no coherent story or vision that is forming around them.
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ACT NOW OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES
What do we end up with on the climate change agenda? We end up, I think, with a
kind of mobilisation, a kind of anxiety, an agitation around climate change which
we can all feel and experience, but it does not include real politics, no real diversity
of approaches, no cornucopia of alternatives. There is nothing we can actually
choose between; we don’t even have alternatives to allow us to debate which way to
go. So that’s what led Alain Badiou back in the 2000s to say that all this discussion
around ecology and the green environment was what he called the ‘new opium
of the masses’. He referred to something that filled our minds, our souls and
our spirits with great agitation but didn’t do much or anything for our politics. All
this means - and this is provocative to think about - we are inhabiting a strange
kind of space where we have been called on to act radically, to change radically. In
other words, to act now or face the consequences. But these demands
only exist within the contours or frameworks of the existing state of affairs.
This was what Jacques Rancière, writing at about the same time, called the ‘partition
of the sensible’.
‘The partition of the sensible’ is, in this case, of course, the framing device of
capitalism. So we have been asked to change our lives radically but without having
any developed idea as to what these new social, economic and political institutions
are that will be needed to safeguard our future on the planet. We really don’t
know what they look like. We see this most clearly in those kinds of arguments
on climate change that propose a stabilisation of the climate through returning to
business as usual, in other words ensuring the continuation of capitalism. This is
what most ideas of how to deal with climate change are about.
Stabilise it, and then we can continue as before.
By continuing as before, we keep within the same system, not proposing an
alternative. Even more obviously, we can see this in the way it works where people
who talk about how we can tackle climate change, actually propose that climate
change will be tackled by mobilising the inner dynamics and the logics of the very
system that created it. What are their solutions? Their solutions are the privatisation
of CO2, the commodification and market exchange of biocarbon and various forms
60
of carbon offset trading. In other words, a vision, quite literally, where getting the
prices right will solve everything. This demand to respond to potential catastrophe
without any idea of how to do it exhausts our imagination, as Badiou says. It
exhausts our political imagination and actually prevents us from creating new
stories, because we cannot change radically within this kind of straitjacket that
we are held in. This idea that we have to have change, in my view, stops it dead in
some way that we find very difficult to manage.
We end up in a strange place, where it is actually easier to imagine the
end of the world than it is to imagine how we might transform capitalism. Now
that really does seem like a kind of lack of imagination on the part of a lot of very,
very talented people around the world. It is easier to imagine how we could end the
world than how we could transform capitalism, build new social institutions, and
build new ways of collaborating with each other. But, I do think that the reason
why we feel frozen is because we are in this impossible situation where we
demand that change should happen individually and collectively, and yet we are in
an iron grip of something which doesn’t let us think hard enough about what the
alternatives would really be.
PART II
BY RENATA SALECL
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE FEAR OF DEATH
While you were speaking of how we envision the future, I started thinking about
how we lack playing with scenarios regarding the future. We cannot envision how the
world will look in a few decades. What about in 50 years? What about in 200 years?
And we have become more and more frozen. First of all because of a perspective
change towards risk and death: as soon as you look at the debate on climate change,
you come to the problem of anxiety over demise, death.
A lot of our traumas of inability to cope with climate change
really circulate around our personal problems, the fear of death,
61
decay... We can sort of say – as you, Henrietta, said – that we are able to imagine
the end of the world but not the end of capitalism. Even with regards to certain
natural changes, the act and attitude of denial is one of the strongest things I
have observed. We have been talking for decades of climate change being something
that was happening pretty much everywhere. Of course, we first had a fantasy that
climate change might happen in such a way that temperatures would steadily rise.
Only later did scientists working on climate change realise this would not be so.
What is happening and will happen, are huge changes, turmoil, sometimes a little bit
warmer, then much colder. Mostly what is happening is unpredictability,
even with regards to what kind of crops we might envision, what will grow and what
the seasons may be like. One of the fears is that then we will have new political
conflicts, mostly between south and north. The south will definitely
be more affected, also because it doesn’t have the infrastructures to cope with the
kind of devastation this unpredictable weather brings.
The strength of scepticism in regard to climate change is that
it plays on the idea that in science there is always a need for
doubt. While science introduces new knowledge, it needs to keep questioning
this knowledge. Conservative politics which fuel climate change denial very much
play on the need for scepticism. Of course, this discourse is heavily supported by
the marketing campaigns coming from big industries. If we study the logic of this
marketing campaign, we can see there is a similarity between this scepticism and
the type of scepticism that was present a few decades ago in the tobacco industry.
In regard to the theory that tobacco causes cancer, the tobacco industry responded
with scepticism in regard to scientific research that was connecting tobacco,
smoking, and cancer... Doubt is today played out in a similar way in regard to
climate change.
THE OBSESSION WITH RISK MANAGEMENT
Today’s society is obsessed with risk management. I remember once meeting a professor
at a large UK university who was leading a department that dealt with various risk
studies. When we spoke about risk, I became interested in how humans deal with
62
it. Sadly, however, the discourse about risk that this specialist was concerned with
did not include humans at all. It was all about structures, cooperation and society,
and how organisations should deal with risk. There was nothing in this analysis that
touched on human anxiety and what risk basically means for people.
Often we have a perception that we can prevent risk. In our private
lives, for example, we are constantly obsessed with learning how to prevent illnesses
or risks which come with emotions. How to manage our children, our love affairs, our
passions... How to think about personal health... At the same time there is also
a whole obsession in the market towards risk prevention.
A few years ago, just before the 2008 crisis, there was a huge belief that we had
almost perfected computer programmes which were studying risk in the finance world.
One of the programmes, or software, called “VaR - Value at Risk” was the one which
almost all financial institutions around the world were using when dealing with
investments. The programme was supposed to be 99% accurate. (However, when
someone tells you something is 99% accurate you should think
about that 1% left as margin for error...) The 1% in this programme was
that no one thought that the market could actually collapse. And added to that issue
was the fact that all the data they used in this future investment forecast was based
on the last few decades of continuous growth. That data didn’t go back far enough
to the crisis in the late 20s... And that is why they didn’t even imagine a possibility
of market collapse.
RISK AS AN ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY
At the same time as becoming much more risk averse, we are also becoming
quite risk-seeking. We can observe a particular enjoyment, especially among
the upper classes, in constantly exposing themselves to risk, and a kind of illusion
that we can actually master death. For example, we have more and more people who
die while climbing mountains every year in the most adventurous way possible. We,
Slovenes, are quite an adventurous nation in this regard - climbing the Himalayas,
for example, in a way no one had climbed it before... These last two years, this
desire was a little lost but before, every year, a group of a few people would get
63
stuck somewhere in the Himalayas and then phone with their satellite phones to
get a rescue team to save them.
A lot of this passion for risk has to do with the illusion that we can
master death. In the mountains it looks as if we can almost touch the limit
between life and death. And in some way a lot of the ideology behind it plays with
the idea that nature is kind of a human being with whom you get in touch and, in
this sense, the mountain accepts you or not.
In the developed world, this desire to seek extreme experiences, can also be
observed in other sports. In ski resorts many people are going off designated areas,
often finding enjoyment in transgressing the rules and testing their ability to avoid
injury.
The inability to think about the future, together with the fear of
death, is strangely coupled today with the ideology and fantasy of an
all-powerfulness of the person. One can observe here narcissism coupled
with all mastery, extreme arrogance, even to the point of seeking moments of selfdestitution; moments where a person truly comes close to death.
PART III
BY HENRIETTA MOORE AND RENATA SALECL
EMPATHETIC BUT RUTHLESS
TOWARDS THE OTHER
HENRIETTA MOORE: I think it was the philosopher Gillian Rose, in her last
book “Love’s Work”, who said “modernity is a moment in which we
are infinitely sentimental about ourselves, but methodically
ruthless about others”. I think this is an interesting problem. It is about
the relation between self and other. For example, one of the very good things
about the kind of interconnected mediated world we live in, is that we can
know a great deal about other people’s lives. We can enter into forms of
cosmopolitan solidarity with others, of the kind which perhaps Beck
64
wants. We can support what is going on in Syria, we can support what is going on
in Zuccotti Park, we can support what is going on in political protests around the
world. We can also express outrage, we can empathise with other people’s hurt.
In all these things we have an enormous capacity for empathy
and identification. The mediated world we live in of super inter connection
actually enhances that wonderful capacity we have for empathy and connection.
But alongside that is this kind of methodical ruthlessness about others that we
still have. For example, we all know climate change is pushing over the edge
those people who are least responsible for it; in other words, people in the global
south.
We know there is increasing uncertainty, exactly as Renata said: we can no
longer deal with uncertainty as if it were risk. It is not risk, it is
radical uncertainty in certain cases. But actually, when we are having the debate
here in Europe about what we will do, how often in that debate do we hear those
diverse African voices, for example? How often do we hear in that debate their
views on climate change? Do we actually take their views seriously into account
when we start to think about how we will formulate actual changes that we want
to bring about?
Of course, all of you in this room will know that is what is happening in Africa.
You will also know the poor are more affected by climate change than you are
yourselves. But we still have a tendency, in the way the debate is run, to take
that geographical specificity, the particularities of context that we know about,
and use it as yet more examples of the universal predicament that we are in.
So we say: there we are, what is happening in Africa shows that humanity is
really at risk, rather than saying, what are the actual interconnections here?
How much of the discussion are we actually having between ourselves in Europe
and the global south about what the alternatives are? I think this is connected
to the point Renata is making: we are turning back, in a sense, to a subject
which is worried by the risk of extinction, by death. We do have a
certain sentimentality towards that subject, but a kind of ruthlessness
towards others, whether we intend it or not.
65
THE NATURALISATION
OF HUMAN GENERATED CRISIS
RENATA SALECL: Another important aspect is our perception of the economic crisis.
We tend to naturalise human generated crisis. Economic crisis appears
to happen as if it were a natural event, as if it were not instigated by social changes.
We live in a moment where we are forgetting culture and social dimensions. At the
same time, we cherish a certain fundamentalist view of the market.
Going back to climate change, I myself think change in the future might really
happen, precisely, because of the causes of climate change. This is a crucial
moment. We can either move in the direction towards more solidarity; or
we can change for the worse, into a more totalitarian leadership, become more
ruthless, and have an even greater division between rich and poor. I think we are
at the precise moment where the change will go in either one or the other direction...
66
Curated by Christopher Crimes
(Domaine d’O, Montpellier, France)
ART
AND NATURE
ARE NEW
GENDERS
Chus Martinez
interviewed by Claudia Galhós
ART THAT IS ABOUT
HOPE AND COMPLEXITY
When you were appointed head of the Institute of Art
at FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel (2014),
you addressed some aspects about how you perceive
art and a couple of questions you have about it. For
example: “How can we best address the changes in
art practices today? How can we best foster a practice
activity concerned with both displaying the world and
inquiring about the world?” You also stated that “the art
school of the XXI century should not only be dedicated
to the development of artists, but ultimately to enrich our
public life”. Can you develop these ideas?
It’s all part of a complex idea, because it is
not enough for public opinion and public life
to change cosmetically. That would mean it
would only be transformed from the outside.
This is the problem with an art which presents
the public with what they want. I defend the
opposite of that: an art which challenges the
public with what they don’t know, and what
they didn’t think they wanted to know about,
but which is very necessary. One could say
we are talking about how art could change or
challenge the meaning of what we understand
as the public sphere and public opinion. Also
69
it asks how far can we stretch and explore the
concept of what is public?
Certain structures, certain languages, certain
logics... challenge it. These are those that are
not reproducing what already exists.The public
is made up of institutions... We understand the
public as an institutional public and institutions
aren’t proposing change. The way we are
sending messages to these institutions, and
the way the institutions are communicating,
is with discourses and practices that are born
from an already existing way of formulating
ideas. This is just going to make them more
conservative. How we challenge this is very
complex. It demands new alliances among
people that believe in complexity, and are ready
to become complex and provide new structures
inside already existing structures. You need to
plant a challenge inside an existing structure,
simultaneously creating new challenges on
the outside, and then relate what is happening
outside with what is happening inside, in
the hope that this will originate a different
structure. This is not an easy exercise.
We can easily say “art can do that”. But why
should art do that? Art can do that because
artists are actually very good ‘connoisseurs’ of
existing structures. Art practices, historically,
70
are linked to commissioners, linked to public
opinion... So historically, art knows how the
establishment works, how the market works,
because art is part of it all. Part of what art is,
is to be it: establishment and market. Another
part of what art is, is to deny it. To create
tensions and conflicts with it. In that dialectic
of being it and denying it, the activism of art
and the conceptualism of art, the synthetics of
art and the combination of all these products
and factors, makes art a very flexible enterprise
and very difficult to define. The possibility that
art gives us to be elastic allows for hope. This
is my first tentative answer.
With regards to what you just said, there are two strong
statements of yours which I would like you to comment
on: “an intellectual context where complexity should be
a goal and a challenge, not a condition to avoid; we need
a discipline of risk, that is, a social space where we can
take risks”.
We just have to look back at what happened in
Paris. [note: the interview was conducted a few
days after the morning of 7 January 2015, when
two Islamic terrorists armed with assault rifles
and other weapons forced their way into the
offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper
‘Charlie Hebdo’, killing 11 people and injuring
71
11 others, and shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for
“God is [the] greatest”) during their attack] That
is the clear evidence that if you avoid complexity
what you get is pure terror. Violence is a kind
of fundamental tool for avoiding complexity.
It functions by very simple means, I am not
talking only about those who are identified as
terrorists. I am talking about both sides, it’s one
simple way people behave in society and how
the forces of security and institutions act. We
need complexity. It is as simple as this: this is
a complex world. The question then is: How?
Where? How is this going to be made into a
habitus in society? I think we need to invent
new ways... That is clear.
We are in a really complex moment in history
and we need to start thinking about what we
inherit. We need to add a different taste, a
different invention, an invention that affects
collectivity and relations.There is no use saying
“let’s have dialogue”, because that’s false and
nothing comes of it. We need to invent new
ways of producing relations. Art knows how
to produce new relations, among disciplines,
among the senses, among materials, among
words, among individuals... Art is a discipline
at the core of the human sciences, ready for
us to produce sources. If we are conscientious
72
of what artists have been doing for the last
hundred years, there is a lot to learn from it.
So, what is the next command? A connectivity
among individual forces. This is the most
difficult part.
The bigger challenge we are facing is how to
connect individuals again. How do we create
groups of individuals who are ready to share
and produce a language that would convey this
intention of going along with it, in the sciences,
in the arts, in politics, in the media... It’s really
difficult. It means something different from
replicating languages that we know are absurd,
which have been proven and proven again to be
absurd, but we keep replicating them because
they are fast and it is simpler to do that. We
say certain things and everyone understands
us. We know we need to face an impressive
animosity towards intellectualism, but this can
only go forth if we produce works that are also
able to convey a certain enthusiasm, a certain
hope, and a certain ground from which you can
build. It is really difficult. And since there is
no money for doing certain things, these ideas
that need networks are very slow in uniting
people, in making the relations possible. It is a
massive challenge. On the other hand, we can
say, “well, there is nothing to lose”.
73
ABOUT
THE FIRST SOCIETY
OF POST-LABOUR
CONDITION
Is this related to your theory about people needing to
dream differently from the way they have been dreaming
up until now? The fact that we are not dreaming our
dreams, but the dreams of economic models that define
our dreams...
When we think about the case of the crisis
in Spain and Portugal, we can approach this
moment as the first time in history when the
hope to get better can also become a way of
pressure. The hope to get better has been
there not only as a possibility but, for some
years, as a pressure. But how to get better?
What does this mean? Are we living according
to the responsibility of what is expected from
communities like ours? What are the standards
we need to match? Are they European
standards? Are they American standards? Are
we supposed to create new models, or are we
supposed to just replicate existing models?
Then, what does it mean to grow? To get bigger,
is that to grow? The result of following this idea
74
is that we have found ourselves completely in
the dark because of the amount of pressure
that came from the model of growth which we
have to follow. Now we fail.
This failure is very interesting. It is not only
a bad failure, but an interesting failure. Are
people outside our communities going to
explain our failure in positive terms? No. It
is for us to do that. It is for the people inside
the community to define why this failure is an
interesting moment in our history, or in our
artistic production, or in the history of our
institutions. And then how to carefully and
very specifically, address this failure in positive
terms? How to convey a message related, if seen
in an immediate way, to a certain moment of
discontent, and transform that into moments of
possibility? It is also complex. Can it be done?
It could. I really believe in it. The possibilities
are there.
I came to understand much more about certain
conditions which define the identity of Spain
now, rather than ten years ago. This interests
me because it implies connecting differently
as well as respecting differently. I think you are
at a disadvantage if you expect something and
you don’t get it. But this disappointment can
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be used at the service of an ability we do have:
we are also able to start different exercises in
dreaming. Perhaps we need to start dreaming
about something else, perhaps the dreams we
were dreaming were not the right ones. Or
maybe they were not even ours. Perhaps one of
the problems is that we have been preventing
ourselves, auto-censuring ourselves, to dream
according to what we want to dream. This is
an interesting thing. It relates to canonic ways
of thinking, institutional ways of thinking, and
the economic models that define the dreams
and expectations of any one of us.
We lack voices capable of giving form to this.
It cannot be one or two individuals. We need
to just sit and repeat that action of sitting. The
second action, which is problematic, is how can
we sit together? When I say sitting together it
implies repeating the same words, telling these
kinds of things, telling us tomorrow and telling
us again the day after tomorrow, and the day
after... So the continuation of the meeting and
the presence of the people and the retelling of
the story is much more important than buildings
and roles. The possibility of connecting this
human presence to other aspects of our society
is really important right now, as environment
and nature are important. And now with the
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crisis, people ask: “Hey, why do you care about
climate now? We need to get food, labour, these
are our major concerns. Why are you talking
about something that is not immediately
related to labour?” We are probably going to
be the first society which needs to face the
post-labour condition. We are not going to be
able to work in the same manner our parents
did, because there isn’t work for everyone in
the way the industrial development promised.
We really need to understand our context in a
completely different perspective.
Is that why you say the laws of the imagination are not
the laws of the convenient?
The problem is how to re-imagine ourselves?
You look at the map of Spain and say “it really
relates to Europe”. But how does it relate to
Europe? It is interesting to have these massive
neighbours: Africa and Europe. How are we
relating to that? Here enters the need to belong.
The question of belonging doesn’t solve any
problem. Imagine someone saying “I want to
belong to Europe”. A person’s wish doesn’t
define what is going to happen. Someone else
says, “no, no, no, I want to belong to Africa”. It is
the same. Belonging, and the wish to belong, is
not how you can frame a person’s position in a
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context like this. We have to find other ways of
relating.There is no need to belong to one or the
other. Belonging is not what is going to define
the possibilities that we have of establishing a
productive imaginative relationship with our
context. This is just a basic example...
TECHNOLOGY
AND NATURE
AS NEW GENDERS
As an expert in visual arts and also a curator, do you
see artists of the XXI century questioning the world and
dealing with the themes you have been referring to?
Artists are pioneering the question of extreme
singularities. In the past we used to call them
geniuses, or masters... Artists have become
extremely critical of this, with extreme interest
in the particular, in singularities. On the other
hand, artists have been very generous in
giving us a critical vision and a valorization of
extreme singularities, which is fundamental.
We are living in a strange moment in all areas
of life. From industry to politics, everyone is
talking about leadership, the collective and
the market. People are looking for extreme
singularities that can fulfil this kind of dream
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of an individual giving us enough, giving us
what we think we need. In contrast to this, art
has been educating us about the conditions of
many extreme cases of hybridity that, again,
art has been introducing. This is the case of
‘gender’. I should introduce here one important
question: “Do we want to be educated?” I just
leave the question for thought... But going back
to the idea of ‘gender’... I am not talking about
gender as a distinction between feminine and
masculine, but as a condition of the meeting
point between desire and a certain body.
I would say machines are not tools but ‘new
genders’. You have conditions that would
define nature as a ‘gender’, that technology is a
‘gender’, and so on... Artists have been training
us for the possibility of relating to those things
as not pure externalities. Technology is not
purely external or purely industrially defined as
a tool. In that sense, art has been trying to train
us to imagine that we are in a post-industrial,
post-modern society, in the sense that we have
surpassed dreaming that industry is going
to rescue us according to a specific model of
economic definition and growth. We are also
in a time after the knowledge of the western
world as the defining model. We are not that.
We know that countries that have not been at
79
the centre of the narrative of the History of the
world are also ruling, decisive, and are also here.
They are also thinking, they are also dreaming,
they are also wanting, and we are confronted
with that from Asia to Africa. They also have
different models of belief that they practise
all day long. What other than art introduced
us to these possibilities in an integrated and
critical view? But then we have to ask another
question: how can we absorb even more? We
can say we are in the first stage. We manage to
absorb an intuition of this condition. Now we
need a new language for it.
Historically speaking we developed a language,
an art historian’s, critical, language. But we
need to develop a language that surpasses the
model of criticality, around culture. We can
no longer say that production, or industrial
production and capitalism, are bad. I mean, of
course we can say it, but it is redundant. We
matured from the phase of criticality. What is
the new phase we are in now? It is linked to
finding a way to producing an understanding of
these ‘new genders’. It is a modern relationship
with technology that made us part of a system
that understands labour and defines our life,
further and further towards the instrument
and towards the machine, in completely
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different terms. The same can be said for the
way we are going to understand the hybridity
of certain belief systems... We are at the point
of a great beginning. Or at least I feel we are at
the end of something and at the beginning of
something else. It is some kind of intellectum
and, yes, artists have the knowledge of it.
In terms of the language which needs to be
reformulated, do you have examples of alternative
expressions or terms that could be introduced in our
discourse about art and the relation between art and life
today?
I call it language because I am limited and I
don’t have a better alternative. I cannot imagine
it as something else, but I don’t mean words,
it is not language in that sense. That is why I
use the term ‘gender’ because we need, first, to
develop new feelings. It is the sensorium. There
is a new system of how to feel and perceive
everything. If technology is a ‘new gender’, then
it relates to us differently. If nature is a ‘new
gender’ then... the same. That modifies all of us.
This modification is what is ultimately going to
define what we feel. Right now we feel exactly
the same. We are not living in the modern
era... Feelings change a lot, but not enough, so
to speak. How to challenge that? I think the
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answer to that is precisely the function of art.
Why I think artists are political or artists are
crucial and are at the centre is because of
this organum. It is because art is that very
organum, that sensorium. It is a possibility, our
new feeling bank. It is the new brain that is
becoming bigger inside us, allowing for things
to grow. This is not coming from economy. I
don’t expect economy to be the new sensorium
of society, even if every discipline contributes...
Economy did teach us how to feel about certain
things, about productivity, about consuming,
about labour, about free time... Of course
economy is an important element. Whatever
and whenever you understand the word
economy and whether you will understand the
word economy in a hundred years from now...
it will always be important. But art is definitely
the organum and I have an impressive belief
in that. This is something very personal,
I believe in it, and I believe art is very capable
of providing us with possibilities.
THE IMAGINATION
OF A NEW LOVE
You consider nature in the same way you consider
technology, as a gender. What does that mean? In the
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XX century, discourse tended to see technology as an
extension of the body... for example.
We have been trained to think internally and
externally. In that frame of thought the body is
in a relationship with the mind in a condition
of exteriority. The computer, technology, any
instrument... is always external to the body.
The body itself, the human, has a condition
of externality versus nature. These are only
metaphors, just a way of imagining it. By
imagining these things in terms of ‘genders’ –
then we have five, six... big ‘genders’ – we are
able to imagine new ways of breaking this fixed
framing of internal/external. I don’t think of
‘genders’ which are not external to me. They are
complementary to me. This complementarity
also imagines a new love and this is a love that
demands a clear position from things.
If someone asks me: “Are you an ecological
person?” My radical answer is,“no way”, because
I don’t relate to it ideologically. I am from the
north of Spain, not far from Portugal. I am a
rural person. I would never think in external
terms about nature. I grew up in nature, with
animals in my house, in my living room, in
complete wonderful chaos. We cannot have an
idea about what should be done with nature.
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We should feel part of it. And in that sense it
is not an external idea, but a complementarity
that needs to be imagined from the inside. If
you feel you are part of nature, you are not
defending something exterior to yourself. You
don’t defend your right hand from your left
hand, they are equal parts of an organ. How
could that be possible? It doesn’t make sense.
Not wanting to simplify the question – which is what
you defend for all levels of life and art – there is a trend
which defends an action towards a more ecological
nature-friendly life as opposed to the dominant politics,
which means opposed to the capitalistic system and
everything ruled by economy. How do you feel about this
idea of oppositions?
It is not entirely true because politics are also
us, and the fact that we can make a change is
a too simple statement and, just because of
that, easy for me to agree with, but that would
lead to nothing. It seems as though there are
a few good people and then a bunch of bad
people. Structures change probably in an
organic way. Things can be done but it is not a
question of all of us waking up and a decision
being made only by us, for us. We need public
guidance in how to imagine things differently.
Art changes our feelings, and our feelings
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are what ultimately change our actions. It is
a much more complex thing than a group of
people without feelings, like rocks, sitting and
thinking only in numbers. These are all very
interesting questions, which do not touch only
the time of the biography that we are living in.
It will not be resolved in our lifetime, as it is a
much more complex thing. That is why even
if there is a generational change, you cannot
be sure that the structure will change. All this
is not about those individuals who don’t want
to give in to the idea of economic growth. It is
very complex...
ART ACTIVISM
IS THE ACTIVISM
OF IMAGINATION
Does this complexity relate again to the essence of
art as knowledge, comfortable in dealing with the
unknown?
We have a problem of imagining things
interrelating. In each relation which doesn’t
work, we have a problem. This is because we
don’t know how to imagine it otherwise. The
fact that we don’t imagine these connections
and these relations differently is preventing us
85
from thinking that there are new possibilities.
This is not a question of intentionality, of waking
up and saying “I would like to think about
economy differently”. It does not work like
that. The activism is an activism of imagination,
of how to be active in imagining things, and
there are pioneers who tried to introduce us
to those imaginations, from philosophers to
artists. How does this penetrate the common
language? That is the challenge. It requires an
impressive amount of time. It’s happening, but
many other things are happening too.
I would like you to explain your idea of artistic research.
Do you see it as an alternative concept that is related to
the notion of new genders?
It is related to what I was saying about artists
and organum. When I started writing about
this four or five years ago, I was wrong when I
used the term ‘artistic research’. I thought one
needed to distinguish between the research
that humans do and the research that this
activity or this entity called art is doing. Art is
thinking, we are thinking. I thought these were
different ways of thinking which coexist, but
what became clear to me after was that what
I meant was understanding art as a ‘gender’.
This is more powerful.
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Art is an organum. This means that it is feeling
and thinking and acting in the world, in
coexistence with us. This coexistence produces
an epistemology and this epistemology
is different from our epistemology. This
coexistence of several of them is what we need
to be touched or transformed by. This is why I
am very positive. It doesn’t matter to me if art
is business or not, if artists want to do business,
they can. They can always do as they feel.
But this is not what is defining the thinking
of art as a research practice. It is a phase of
art to research, sometimes as an academic,
sometimes as a pseudo-academic, sometimes
in an etymological way. This is definitely not a
problem. I do not thematise things that are in
the life of art. I think art lives, it interrogates
matter in many different ways, I would not really
bother calling it artistic research, it is obvious.
Art is a ‘gender’ and art is an organum; it is less
obvious and much more polemic and expresses
a more paradoxical condition, which is much
more fair to its essence. This is what I meant.
I was not able to articulate it this way before.
But the thinking was already there and it’s
completely irrelevant to say ‘artistic research
is research artists do’. Affirming this only
produces the institutionalization of it. There is
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a more profound intimacy to what artists are
doing and I have no interest in making art into
an institution because for me, art is completely
beyond these structures. Artists are the ones
that escape and enter structures and then
teach us how to do it.
I JUST WANT A KITCHEN
You have this new challenge in which you are living in
the Institute of Art at the FHNW Academy of Art and
Design in Basel [note: the interview was conducted at the
end of 2014]. What are you doing there?
I am trying to figure that out myself. It is quite
early on, but I have some intuitions which are
very powerful but quite complex. It demands an
impressive effort and this effort is by activating
things that are normally not activated or which
I did not activate before. It also has to do with
forcing myself to do things I haven’t done, to
think in ways I haven’t thought, to talk and act
in ways I haven’t talked or acted in... The first
steps are always very simple, just everyday life,
trying to change little by little, structures and
so on... These are all very commonsensical and
very banal. It is working little by little. To find
the organicity in which one can move takes
time.
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What are these intuitions? One of the objectives of
IMAGINE 2020 is to create alternative and/or new spaces
where art and life and different fields of knowledge can
meet...
I can give an example of one idea. One more
very important thing is ‘to meet’. And to
facilitate that in a meaningful purpose I am
becoming interested in food in a really strange
way. Or in cooking, or doing things that are
very similar and very simple but in different
ways... I am very interested in habitus. I think
the repetition of certain simple actions that
are, simultaneously, nourishment and social, is
important. I am very interested in producing as
many informal meetings as we can. Meetings
that don’t have a briefing at the start and a
goal for the finish. This is what I would like
to implement. I am looking for partners that
would want to help me to do that. Then people
want to know why and what I am doing and
I just want to meet. I am not able to get what
I want because not everybody understands
what I am doing. I just want a kitchen.
I would like to put the kitchen at the centre
of the school, operating as a studio, and as a
public programme. The kitchen as a complete
place, where everything that has to do with
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a presentation and content would happen in
order to break the conventional format. If you
are cooking and talking at the same time or if
you are eating and talking at the same time, it
doesn’t matter who is at your table and you are,
at the same time, presenting content. Then all
content of what’s presented is going to change.
This is a very simple thing.
Yes, so simple that it is so difficult for it to be understood
and created.
Exactly. No one understands because everybody
wants a conference room and I don’t want a
conference room. I don’t want that, or a meeting
room, or anything that is not related to simple
ways of relating to quotidian life, like a kitchen
or a living room, or places where you would
actually act privately and with others. This
notion of being completely private because
you are doing your thing but other people are
doing their thing interests me.
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Curated by Kaaitheater
MAKESHIFT
COMMUNITIES
OF PRACTICE
Notes on “Sitting with the body 24/7”
by Heike Langsdorf and radical_hope1
In the frame of Burning Ice #8, 8-15 February 2015
by Jeroen Peeters
In February 2015 I clipped a newspaper article about a giant ball
pool, installed during two weeks in a bright gallery space in west
London by the design office Pearlfisher. The image shows a circle
of eleven adults partly submerged in what appear to be 81.000
white, small plastic balls; all of them are cheering as they keep
their bodies afloat, reminisce about their childhood, or enjoy the
oblique approach to that day’s meeting. A blogger commented
after visiting: “I felt supremely calm after exiting the pool, which
has so far been used by people of all ages and for several business
meetings. I can definitely see how it would aid creativity, it’s a bit
like being in a vacuum, with no distractions just your own thoughts
and sense of space.” All the talk is about creativity, multi-sensorial
experience, reconnecting with childhood – yet this ‘experiment’
was also a stunt by a creative agency, the whole environment a
billboard of sorts, fully embedded in today’s experience economy.
Our society seems to crave such spaces of relaxation that provide
alternatives to demanding work schedules and the stress they entail.
Yet, what kind of alternatives do we want? Can we ourselves have a
say in these experiments and the ways in which they are fashioned?
***
Around the same time, under the umbrella radical_hope, dancer
and artist Heike Langsdorf and a group of collaborators set up the
project “Sitting with the body 24/7” at the Monnaie Centre in
Brussels. This ‘retreat in public space’ happened in the framework of
Kaaitheater’s Burning Ice Festival, placing its questions in relation to
sustainable development: “Our lives are governed by an economy
that never sleeps. What is the impact on our relationship with time,
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work and our body?” “Sitting with the body 24/7” created a space
for practising everyday activities that involve the body: sitting,
lying, standing, walking, resting, making, dancing, speaking and
seeing. All of it was organised according to a strict time schedule
that allotted two hours to each practice from 6.30am to 11.30pm,
observed by a timekeeper sitting solemnly in the space with an
hourglass and bell.
Installed in a shopping mall with large windows to the street, the
space was furnished with white carpet, pillows and blankets. Welldesigned information panels at the window introduced the practice
space and its time schedule in four languages, but the space itself had
a somewhat generic outlook, which made it hard to tell precisely what
was going on inside: a dance studio, meditation centre, gym, yoga
classes, art gallery? Perhaps all of it, but not the familiar practice of
shopping… In the public space, amid advertisement panels, public
transport, shopping windows and the hustle and bustle of the city –
how do we recognize practices in their specificity? How can we tell
artistic practices apart from everyday practices outside the common
institutional framings of art? Does the difference matter?
To meet the confusion, there was always a host outside on the
sidewalk to engage in conversation, explain the project to interested
passers-by, or hand out brochures. “You are invited to watch our
activities or enter the space and delve into action yourself.” Some
of the practitioners were collaborators of Langsdorf’s, others were
visitors who could join in for free for a single session, a whole day,
or several times during the week. Some were experienced in certain
corporeal practices and could deepen their embodied knowledge,
others would explore the basics after being teased into the space by
the project’s brochure or posters presenting the practices with an
94
image, a drawn manual and the promise of a Chinese fortune cookie
– take for instance ‘walking with the body’: “Getting many things
out of the way and instead, following one thing.” Some would
come inside and simply observe, yet others would stay outside and
observe everything through a large window, discuss what they saw
or simply pass by and not bother. If the strict score of “Sitting with
the body 24/7” organised the various practices in a precise and
decisive manner concerning time and technicality, the project as
a whole left leeway for choosing if and how one participated in it.
What did “Sitting with the body 24/7” produce as an experimental
space of practice and a work of art? The project sought to propose
alternative approaches to time, work and our bodies, but what
exactly is it the people participating in it were practicing?
***
Starting in the early morning with ‘sitting with the body’ and then
followed by lying, standing and walking, each particular activity
was introduced by a ‘teacher’ who would guide the practitioners
through the two-hour session. The preparatory phase involved
specific warm-up exercises, followed by half an hour of doing the
practice according to a single task that created focus. Sitting, lying
and standing were still meditational practices that produced nearly
sculptural imagery. They reminded me of the work of Brazilian
artist Lygia Clark and her ‘rites without myths’, sessions in which
she would prepare people’s bodies with objects in an imaginative
practice that paired sculpture and therapy. Take ‘lying with the
body’, in which someone would lie down on their back for half
an hour, supported by blankets and cushions, the legs propped
95
up with a pile of books, eyes covered with a small sandbag, open
palms held to the ground by stones. Or ‘standing with the body’,
which creates a still image, but also arouses in the practitioner an
active negotiation with gravity and an attention to small impulses
and patterns in the body. ‘Speaking with the body’ and ‘seeing with
the body’ built on similar principles of physical training, perceptual
focus and corporeal self-observation.
Although this way of working is familiar to dancers, practices and
the ‘techniques of the body’ remain difficult to share and discuss.
The embodied knowledge of training and deepening of a particular
practice over many years cannot be compressed into an image or
language – what could a temporary practice space of one week
offer in this respect? Or in the case of everyday practices such as
walking, speaking or seeing – what exactly is the ‘expertise’ one
could develop and perhaps transmit? Heike Langsdorf had asked
all her collaborators to bring three books that mattered to them,
which constituted a small and heterogeneous library with reflections
on practice. Between sessions, reading and informal conversations
accompanied the physical practices. Every evening “Sitting with the
body 24/7” closed the day with an open conversation with guests
to discuss a particular (artistic) practice, starting with the question:
“What is the resonance of a dedicated practice on an individual
and group of people?” These corporeal practices afford sustained
attention and give a sense of the body as an internal technology
one can own and develop. Repeated over a long period of time
they become an ingrained skill and a craft that facilitates choice and
freedom.
‘Walking with the body’ left the solemn atmosphere of the gallery
and its ‘living sculptures’ behind, precisely because it was close to
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the walking bodies of passers-by, spectators or anyone entering
the space. The practice itself led the gaze upon oneself and
upon everyone else, in an embodied contemplation of what the
anthropologist Marcel Mauss coined ‘techniques of the body’ in the
1930s; those corporeal attitudes learnt over a long period of time in
which physical and social elements intertwine to produce individual
traits, and thus as many different ways of ‘walking with the body’ as
there are bodies. In “Sitting with the body 24/7”, walking directed
the gaze quite literally outward, through the window and towards
the city and its urban practices.
***
How can we tell artistic practices apart from everyday practices
outside the common institutional framings of art? Does the
difference matter? After 1pm “Sitting with the body 24/7” hosted
a silent lunch, followed by a space of rest where people could take
a nap, bring their knitting or read the paper. It ended every day at
3pm with ‘making with the body’, the construction of a mandala, a
symmetrical pattern with all the objects in the space. After a hesitant
start and the careful placement of objects, the whole space would
mostly be crammed after five minutes – how to spend the remaining
25 minutes? The following subtle adjustments and negotiations
through doing were always different and always wonderfully poetic,
often with people placing themselves as objects in the mandala,
handling themselves as living stuff amid the stuff. People forgot
about the technicality of craft and corporeal techniques, yet their
attention remained focused on caring for this makeshift community
of practice.
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I found these moments always liberating, also for the reflection they
offered on practice. They came close to what sociologist Etienne
Wenger terms ‘communities of practice’, in which a group of
people with specific competences, both varied and overlapping,
cooperate to achieve a certain goal. “A shared practice thus connects
participants to each other in ways that are diverse and complex.
The resulting relations reflect the full complexity of doing things
together. They are not easily reducible to a single principle such
as power, pleasure, competition, collaboration, desire, economic
relations, utilitarian arrangements, or information processing.”2 The
group is concrete, its goal can change during the process, which
is negotiated through actions (rather than discussion) that create
a ground for informal exchange and a shared learning process.
“Practice resides in a community of people and the relations of
mutual engagement by which they can do whatever they do.”3
The concrete, makeshift quality of constructing the mandala
provides a lens to look at the other practices, but also at “Sitting
with the body 24/7” as a community of practice that precedes the
week it opened up to the city, and that continues to exist afterwards
– inevitably in a transformed and expanded form. The group of
collaborators who set up “Sitting with the body 24/7” was a motley
crowd indeed. Heike Langsdorf and the core group of practitioners
have hybrid careers and practices that they brought to the project.
Many people offered advice or support, or worked as volunteers
to take care of the space and keep it running 24/7 – a glance at
the credits of the project suffices to realize it challenges the usual
economy of artistic production in the subsidised field.4
It seems to me that it is perhaps not so much in the rituals of
learning processes and ingraining skill but in the ‘experiments’
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with collaboration that today’s performing arts hold a promise
for society. The essayist and dramaturge Marianne Van Kerkhoven
never tired of pointing out the importance of “slow, sustained
practices” in the performing arts for building social networks: “The
processes that lead to stage activities are almost always the result
of a collective practice with a limited group of people: designing
and performing the work are closely connected; there is direct
personal communication between everyone involved in the project;
everyone can more or less create an idea of the work as a whole,
and in that way retain a connection with it.”5
“Sitting with the body 24/7” can hardly be called a piece, yet it
doesn’t come as a surprise to me that most of Heike Langsdorf’s
collaborators have a history in the performing arts. What they bring
along is an appetite for experimenting with ways of spending time
and organizing work, and especially with models of collaboration.
How to own your life, work and practice as an artist or researcher
and do this in a relational context? Explicitly framed as a ‘retreat in
public space’, “Sitting with the body 24/7” brought about questions
of practice and collaboration in relation to citizenship.
The makeshift community of practice constructing a mandala
together also offers a glance into the diversity of visitors participating
in the project. Even though active participation in the physical
practices was met by many visitors and passers-by with some
inconvenience at first, inhibitions diminished during the course
of the week. This growing involvement made it abundantly clear
that many people in a city like Brussels are constantly looking for
meaningful ways to spend their days (or part of them): commuters,
businessmen and working people, unemployed people and
volunteers, artists and activists, bloggers and photographers,
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teenagers and the homeless… What binds them in “Sitting with
the body 24/7” is a mutual engagement in a ‘disinterested’ activity
outside daily routines. They use an artistic space of practice as an
opportunity to negotiate the freedom to spend their lives, time
and labour in ways alternative to the productivity of capitalism that
exerts pressure on the welfare state as we know it. The sustainability
and Zukunfstfähigkeit of these makeshift communities of practice
might reside in developing skills of collaboration and a repertoire
of “routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures,
symbols, genres, actions, or concepts” that enables them to
negotiate meaning and choose the kind of cooperation they want
in today’s world.6
***
Once more: How can we tell artistic practices apart from everyday
practices outside the common institutional framings of art? Does
the difference matter? Every day at 5pm “Sitting with the body
24/7” experienced its performative peak with ‘dancing with the
body’, half an hour of continuous shaking to a live soundtrack
(by Philippe Chatelain). At rush hour, the practice drew a lot of
attention from passers-by and elicited a mixture of rejection and
fascination. People shaking with their heads covered and dressed
in loose patchwork dresses made of silk scarves – this appears to
be both a familiar (“Ah, this is dance!”) and a profoundly foreign
image that exceeds the quotidian imagination.
While a group of people danced inside the space, another crowd
gathered outside the large window, as a mirror group pondering
the image and practice, watching and discussing. It struck me how
100
people were using their smartphones in various ways: passers-by
staring at the tiny screen shuffling past with a slow, stooped gait,
seemingly unaware of how the device affects their physicality;
others taking pictures as if shielding off the unfamiliar, then filming
to hold on to the uncanny fascination a little longer, or why not,
taking a selfie (“I was there!”). Most interesting were small groups
of teenagers making little documentaries (which they just act out,
and perhaps post on the Internet, perhaps not) in which they
comment upon things, experimenting with these new technologies,
with a sense of self, with ways of behaving in public space – in the
streets and in the cloud. They were most deliberately acting like
a community of practice, negotiating their freedom and defining
their citizenship, and this, crucially, in relation to an artistic project
and to other urban practices.
In such moments, “Sitting with the body 24/7” created a complex
dynamic in unexpected ways, in which leaving leeway for choosing
if and how one participated in it suddenly took on a larger scope
than the naïve proselytism of so much participatory art. “Sitting
with the body 24/7” did not only install a space of practice, nor
simply frame other urban practices; at best it provoked a situation
of ‘artistic citizenship’ in makeshift communities of practice.
***
1
This text was written on the invitation of Heike Langsdorf with the support of Hiros (Brussels).
2
Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning, and Identity, New York, 1998, p. 77
3
Ibid. p. 73
Credits “Sitting with the body 24/7”: Concept, development and realization: Heike Langsdorf.
In collaboration with: Philippe Chatelain (body practice advice), Helena Dietrich (graphic design,
images), Sébastien Hendrickx (dramaturgical advice), Lilia Mestre (choreographical, dramaturgical
4
101
advice), Christoph Ragg (scenography, technical development), Agnes Schneidewind (assistance),
Jeroen Peeters (outside eye). Research: Renée Copraij (mental and physical coaching), Heike
Langsdorf. Advice: Shadow, Michael Schmid. Practitioners: Isabel Burr-Raty, Philippe Chatelain,
Helena Dietrich, Dolores Hulan, Fleur Khani, Heike Langsdorf, Jo Massin, Wayaba Tokpwi, Lilia Mestre,
Elke Van Campenhout, Isabelle Wahedova, Dieudonné Zoko. Photography: Quentin de Wispelaere.
Illustrations: Raquel Santana de Morais. Production: Hiros (Brussels), radical_hope. Support: VGC
Brussels, Atrium, apass, Bains Connective, nadine, Sacrofilms, Shiatsu Dojo Bruxelles, shopshop,
ZSenne artlab. Co-production: Kaaitheater,Vrijstaat O. Thanks to: AG Real Estate, Brussels Boxing
Academy, Charlotte Bouckaert, Hans Bryssinck, Kathleen Deboutte, Khadija El Bennaoui, Robin
Amanda Creswell Faure, Nelle Hens, Isabel Hoornaert, KVS, Kunsthumaniora Laeken, Ariane Loze,
Jan Mayer, Christophe Meierhans, Gilles Polet, Anna Rispoli, Emiel Rooman, Einat Tuchman, David
Weber-Krebs, Adva Zakai, Putters International NV.
Marianne Van Kerkhoven, ‘When is there a path?’, in Idem and Anoek Nuyens, Listen to the Bloody
Machine. Creating Kris Verdonck’s End, Utrecht/Amsterdam, 2012, p. 33
5
6
Cf. Wenger, Ibid., p. 83
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Curated by Kampnagel
CONCEPTUAL
THOUGHTS
ON A FUND
FOR AESTHETICS
AND SUSTAINABILITY1
by Adrienne Goehler
1
The concept for a Fund for Aesthetics and Sustainability has been published by the Heinrich Böll
Foundation both in English and German and is available as an open source in order to facilitate
discussions with an international audience to help build the broad alliances for aesthetics and
sustainability, that are necessary to identify innovative solutions beyond the existing structures of
decision making and funding (http://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/Fund_for_Aesthetics-engl.pdf)
“Only when people
are in a position
to use their own
creative potentials,
which can be enhanced
by an artistic imagination,
will a change occur [....]
Art can and should strive
for an alternative
that is not only
aesthetically affirmative
and productive
but is also beneficial
to all forms of life
on our planet.”
Rasheed Araeen2
Rasheed Araeen, Eco-aesthetics. A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, Third Text Publications,
London 2010
2
What the UN Brundtland Report stated in 1987 has not lost any of its
urgency: “In the middle of the 20th century, we saw our planet from space
for the first time. Historians may eventually find that this vision had a
greater impact on thought than did the Copernican Revolution of the 16th
century, which disturbed the human self-image by revealing that the Earth
is not the centre of the universe. From space, we see a small and fragile ball
dominated not by human activity and edifice but by a pattern of clouds,
oceans, greenery, and soils. Humanity’s inability to fit its activities into that
pattern is changing planetary systems, fundamentally. Many such changes
are accompanied by life-threatening hazards. This new reality, from which
there is no escape, must be recognized – and managed”3.
Then “Earth Summit”, an unprecedented UN conference by the name
of “World Environmental Conference”, took place in June 1992 in Rio de
Janeiro (Brazil), with the presence of around 2,400 NGO representatives
beside heads of state, and about 17,000 people attending the parallel
NGO Forum. Through the Summit’s message, that a transformation of
our attitudes and behaviours would bring about the necessary changes,
governments finally recognised the need to redirect international and
national plans and policies to ensure that all economic decisions fully took
into account any environmental impact4.
Since then a lot of experts have asserted in numerous manifests and
publications that the cultural and aesthetic dimension of sustainability
is indispensable for raising humanity’s awareness. However, almost 23
years after the UN summit in Rio, the potential of the arts remains largely
unaddressed. In addition to the potential of the humanities the cultural
3
4
http://www.un-documents.net/our-common-future.pdf
http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html
106
and social sciences are carelessly under-estimated and under-used when
it comes to the need for sustainable action.
Subsequently I shall not speak about Climate Change. Instead I shall speak
of the broader term of sustainability, as the crisis that is threatening our
planet and its inhabitants cannot be looked at as an isolated case, but
only in its entirety.
We are facing several kinds of displacement caused by globalisation: the
division between the localised poor and the globalised rich (Zygmunt
Bauman); the growth of the world population and simultaneous decline
of vital resources such as energy, water, land and forests, which are
no longer common goods and the migration that results from this;
the increasing number of both shrinking cities and megacites, and the
desolate landscape between them (Jean Ziegler).
The cultural ramifications of Climate Change will have retroactive effects
as long as the dignified existence in education and health of every single
individual is put below the need for capitalism. These all raise existential
challenges to policy making, to which the current discussion about Climate
Change does not do justice.
To develop sustainability as a powerful tool for change we should resort
back to St. Francis of Assisi’s detailed definition – he who was perhaps the
first ecologist in history: “... per lo quale a le tue creature dai sustentamento
(...through which you give your creatures sustenance)”5.
One could also refer back to Joachim Heinrich Campe, teacher of Wilhelm
5
Saint Francis of Assisi, Il Cantico di Frate Sole, 1224 – 1225
107
and Alexander V. Humboldt, who called sustainability what “you hold onto,
when nothing else holds”. Foresters have been defining sustainability
more simply and economically over the last 300 years: “Don’t cut down
more trees than can grow back”.
We could also resort back to Albert Schweizer, who calls sustainability
“the capacity to look ahead and to provide”6. For the philosopher Rudolf
zur Lippe, sustainability is a term that changes the negative impact of
harmful capitalism into something positive.
As we can see, the broader notion of the idea of sustainability has been
discussed by humanity for centuries before it became a popular term
of political jargon after “Earth Summit”. It then became meaningless
immediately afterwards because of the inflationary and undifferentiated
use of the term. It is therefore hardly surprising that for most individuals,
issues of sustainability are seen as non-essential and unconnected to
their lives. It is not yet understood as a space of possibility because it
is not yet linked to the sensuality and passion of personal action, but is
still mainly seen as an appeal to the super-ego or the well-filled wallet.
This point of view also includes the majority of artists and others in the
creative professions.
The greatest impasse in relation to the calculable and provable failures of
governments and other responsible parties concerning sustainable goals
are, however, the fears of individuals. They might have different faces
on the different continents, with fears of varying intensity, but they all
circle around hunger, displacement, and lack of protection and around
Ulrich Grober, Die Entdeckung der Nachhaltigkeit, Kulturgeschichte eines Begriffs, Verlag Antje
Kunstmann, München 2010
6
Allora & Calzadilla | anschlaege.de - from »Under Discussion« 2004/05, © courtesy the artists
108
109
the feeling of not being needed, wanted, or consulted. They ask questions
such as: “How do I, as a subject, even appear in the restructuring of society,
with what I know and what I can do, with what I have learned and what
I have experienced, and with what I could provide? Who consults me?”
Sustainability requires a social vision. The multiple links of the existing
wealth of knowledge and experience can only truly unfold in what I call
‘the cultural society’7 over the long term, and only if they are open to
change and transformation.
Sustainability that understands itself as intervening and fashioning
something new cannot work without arts and sciences. They teach how
to think in transitions, interim solutions, models, and projects. Arts and
science are capable of getting to grips with their mistakes; something
we are lacking in politics. However in order to distribute the possibilities
of arts and science socially and evenly, there is a strong need for a
political counterpart that will help them reach their political realm and
sustainability goals.
Re-loading the notion and the debate around sustainability through
aesthetics is a great way to protect the term from losing its power to
convince. All sustainability is the result of thinking new things and seeing
the familiar from a new perspective. Sustainability is the continuous
renewal and it is “our most original world cultural heritage”8. Sustainability
can only exist when we relate with other people, other beings, other
processes and other things in the world, with whom and what we have
Adrienne Goehler, Verflüssigungen, Wege und Umwege vom Sozialstaat zur Kulturgesellschaft,
Campus, Frankfurt Main 200
8
Ulrich Grober, ibid. 2010
7
110
and can, should want and would want to live with. The cultural dimension
lies exactly within these relationships between civilisation and nature,
where the individual and the community are necessary and possible.
Since we cannot leave the world to the experts and the institutions, we
need new alliances between artists, scientists and inventors, combined
with the knowledge of the NGOs. We need new spaces and longer time
frames for developing creative solutions for our planet.
Why are we in need of the arts? The interpersonal communication
is based on words, images, gestures, speech, language and
nuance. The combination of the arts with these casts a new, wider
redistribution of the sensuality, and extends above the given.
Artistic questions and approaches have, for a while now, been aimed at
expanding the spaces of social resonance. Central themes are: arts in
the public interest; the relationship between nature and technology; the
relationship between arts and science, the relationship between economics
and ecology, the relationship between globalisation and regional identity;
as well as questions of social participation and the democratisation of arts
through participation. In this way arts become a motor, enabling new forms
of interaction between subjects and social organisms.
Artistic strategies are the best for radically opening contexts and dealing
with gaps which are the characteristics of ‘fluid modernity’. This is how
the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman is characterising the present. Being
interstitial means tolerating ambivalence, and artists have more practice at
this than others because they are specialised in transitions, intermediate
certainties, and laboratories.
111
As never before, contemporary art is using the political, ecological, and
economic crises for its own work. Artists take on the tasks of listening,
observing, and publicising world events that have moved beyond the
focus of daily attention.
My considerations for a Fund for Aesthetics and Sustainability are based
on different assumptions, observations, and experiences:
We live in an era of comprehensive social transition, in an era of the ‘not
anymore and not yet’. There is no longer a hope of ‘more, better, faster’.
There will be no return to the time of care-free consumption of resources,
of full employment and welfare structures that focus on human dignity.
The most important resource of the 21st century is creativity. It
is not a natural resource found in the ground, or something that
can be stored. Rather, it flows and requires supportive conditions
in order to continuously renew itself and thus be a source of
sustainability.
Creativity should not be understood as an exclusive good. It needs free
access to an education and environment that understands creativity
as an ability inherent to everybody; one that needs to be fostered and
developed. The goals are multidimensional and experimental, connecting
the various fields of artistic, social, ecological, and economic creativity.
Kindergarten and schools are therefore places where it is determined
whether creativity acts as a processor in the development to something
that is socially larger as well as economically more potent.
112
As sustainability, like most of today’s big challenges, will not be achieved
as a one-department-issue, it will need a multi-disciplinary, multi-layered
perspective. We need new scopes, new rooms, new containers for this
urgently needed cooperation.
These thoughts on aesthetics and sustainability are also deeply rooted
in my experience that politics is not driven by a holistic perspective and
overall responsibility. Instead, governmental thinking and its actions are
determined by dividing reality into hermetic departments and segmenting
things that belong together. “This does not fall into my jurisdiction”
or “This is none of your concern” are the most commonly expressed
attitudes, not only in the field of sustainability!
The cultural dimension was and still is widely ignored both politically
and scientifically as well as in the manifesto of the environmental NGOs.
Unfortunately it is not only politics that is guided by this logic: most
public and private trusts, foundations, sponsors or funds follow the same
principles. In these cases, they respond to the segmentation and exclusion
criteria: “This is not in our profile”, or “Sorry, not corresponding to our
portfolio”.
The main cause for this widespread ignorance is therefore a lack of
foundation; no political department and no grant-giving body feels
responsible for connecting aesthetics and sustainability. Instead, the
current mono-disciplinary criteria for awarding support monies from
political programmes and foundations excludes the aesthetic dimension
and refuses to integrate it in the intended efficacy of sustainable
thinking, economic management and life. This also becomes evident in
the priorities of the European governments and programmes which do
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not even mention the cultural dimension in their agenda goals; nor is it
mentioned in the documents of The United Nations Decade of Education
for Sustainable Development.
Also, research programmes within universities and extra-curricular
research projects still work with a three-pillar- or three-silos-model of
sustainability: ecological, economical, social. However these silos cannot
communicate with each other. They are static.
It has taken a lot of World Climate Conferences, 19 to be precise, until
finally last year in Lima, as part of COP20 meaningful time, space and
efforts were dedicated to showing, through artistic means, the cultural
impacts of the multiple crises the world is facing today. Its side programme
did not only include exhibitions, festivals and site specific art projects
in Lima9 but was also present in other important cities in Peru such as
Cuzco10. As a comparison, the Climate Conference in Warsaw in 2013 did
not include any arts or culture in its whole agenda11.
This will hopefully hone the focus towards initiatives such as ‘Save the
World’, a theatrical congress that took place at Theater Bonn in October
2014, where, after sharing a space of intellectual and playful exchange,
artists, scientists and politicians offered alternative ways of survival out
of the global crisis12.
9
http://cdn.inventarte.net.s3.amzonaws.com/cop20/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/AGENDACULTURAL-COP20-WEB-28.11-1
10
http://cdn.inventarte.net.s3.amazonaws.com/cop20/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/TrujilloEspañol-1.pdf
11
http://www.cop19.gov.pl/exhibits & http://www.cop19.gov.pl/side-events-220
12
http://issuu.com/theaterbonn/docs/save_the_world_ph_din_lang_final
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Your network IMAGINE 2020 has already created several frameworks to
share knowledge, develop thoughts and experiment with time frames.
The question is how will we create a long-term research context and if
so, who will provide the necessary funds? Well, if there was a Fund for
Aesthetics and Sustainability... However, even though these and other
existing examples are encouraging, we still have a long way to go. This,
as we mentioned, is partly due to the lack of fostering frameworks which
combine artistic knowledge with ecological facts.
Currently funding criteria of political programmes or public
and private foundations does not incorporate an aesthetic
dimension into the intended efficacy of sustainable thinking,
ways of life, and economic activity. Environmental foundations
fund environmental research, communications, and technology,
as well as nature conservation. If they deal with culture at all it is
limited to the preservation of cultural heritage. The reverse is also
true: hardly ever do cultural foundations mention sustainability
as part of their funding criteria. As of yet, there is no foundation
that feels responsible for those projects that, by combining art
and sustainability, could develop great efficiency.
Aesthetic sustainability targets the creation of linkages.
Sustainability needs to be built on a foundation of the senses.
Sustainability needs new forms of learning.
Sustainability has to deal with new forms of labour.
Sustainability poses new tasks for university teaching and research.
Sustainability needs to combine knowledge, experience and action.
Sustainability means generating permeability.
The diagnosis of ‘not anymore... not yet’ is the point of departure
for implementing aesthetics into the debate on sustainability.
115
The Fund for Aesthetics and Sustainability sees itself as a step
towards exploring this hitherto neglected dimension towards
an aesthetic practice of sustainability, and is committed to
‘productive action‘ (Hannah Arendt). Aesthetics is understood as
the consciousness of the senses, the participation of all senses
in feeling, perceiving and fashioning the world, and here the arts
have to be understood more and more as agents of aesthetics,
and artists as the procurators of social awareness.
The goal is to find and invent new overlapping strategies that will lead
to other – sustainable – models of life and work. For this we need
funding structures which create space for possibilities where, through a
transdisciplinary and transsegmented, holistic approach, different forms
of knowledge and action can be tested, because universities nowadays,
with their diktat of acceleration and usability, are no longer the places
that give room for experimentation.
We need new forms of funding; we need deceleration, also in the
production of art. We need to have an open discussion on whether
European society – which is known to lack both natural resources and be
rich in creativity – can afford to forgo the power of the arts to solve these
urgent questions of sustainability.
Ideally the Fund for Aesthetics and Sustainability would rest on the
shoulders of different public and private foundations as well as ministries.
It would have cross-disciplinary juries. The fostering would not stop at
European borders.
I therefore imagine the year 2020 with a Fund for Aesthetics and Sustainability
116
that helps, initiates, takes up, and strengthens a dialogue of aesthetics and
sustainability that receives regional and international attention.
Like Peter Weiss, author of “The Aesthetics of Resistance”, I am
convinced “that the biggest quality of art lies in its capacity to
interfere in reality, in order to transform it”13.
Berlin, Germany
23 February 2015
13
Peter Weiss’ answer to the German and partisan politician Wilhelm Girnus in an open letter in 1965
117
Curated by Le Quai
WHAT
CAN ART DO
IN THE FACE OF
CLIMATE CHANGE?
by Cyril Dion
Even if we, westerners from Western Europe, do not yet feel it in our
daily lives, the ecological threat (which is not only limited to climate
change) is without a doubt the greatest challenge humanity has ever
been confronted with.
If we persist in current gas emission strategies which in turn lead to a
greenhouse effect, we will in 2100 experience the hottest temperatures
the planet has known in its first three million years of existence.
Neither humans nor most mammals would have existed under such
conditions... Numerous studies estimate henceforth that our climate,
and in consequence our capacity to be nourished through agriculture,
will be affected, a part of our land submerged, and our whole social
structure destabilized.
If we keep on living the way we do: forcefully destroying our natural
resources at such a swift rate, consuming much more than we need,
more and more people will have no water, food, access to energy...
(unfortunately this is already the case in many regions of the globe).
Extensive migration will disrupt several continents and mingle with the
aggressive movements of nations and enterprises to monopolize lands,
oil fields and mineral deposits, causing new conflicts.
If we persist in destroying ecosystems on the ground in order to stimulate
economic growth, many plant and animal species will continue to
disappear (fifty percent of wild mammals have already disappeared in the
last 40 years as a result of our overuse of resources and environments),
unbalancing the ecosystems that enable our survival.
119
At the same time, we dive deeper into economic depression every
day. The debts of our countries, businesses and households weigh
ever more intensely on our economies, leading to all the evils that
we recognize: recession, bankruptcy, unemployment, reduced public
services, increased inequality... Never before have such disparities been
reached. Eighty-five people now own as much wealth as 3.5 billion less
fortunate people, collectively.
Social fabric falls apart in this context, exacerbating frustrations and
threatening to become explosive.
Many scientists who have produced these different studies (pollution,
degradation of arable land, population increase, climate shifts,
collapse of biodiversity...) now talk of the possible disappearance of
part of humanity between 2040 and 2100. They also estimate that
we have a period of only 20 years in which to react. However our
responsible politicians and leaders of the world’s largest enterprises
continue to implement measures of another age, deploy schemes that
have already demonstrated their ineffectiveness and even danger, as
if they have no awareness of the gravity of these issues. Meanwhile, a
growing gap between elected officials and their constituents adds to
this democratic crisis, with all the perils already mentioned.
WHAT TO DO?
In the face of such colossal threat, what is it that we can undertake to
do? And what positive role could art play?
120
For many years I have asked myself this question, having found that
the strategies implemented by activists (of which I was one; creating
and leading an NGO for 7 years) do not really come to fruition.
Neither have the protests, petitions, pressures on political parties,
awareness campaigns, documentaries or other actions halted the
phenomena of ecological and economic degradation in the last twenty
years. Worse still, they are amplified.
Trying to understand this phenomenon led me to meet many
personalities: scientists, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs,
philosophers and artists... I was especially passionate about my
meeting with Nancy Huston, novelist and essayist, whose many books
I had read. “The Tale-Tellers: A Short Study of Humankind” (2008)
[in French: “L’espèce fabulatrice”] had struck me in particular. This
short essay established the premise that our species thinks, breathes
and conceives the world as a series of fictions. Being the only species
aware of its own death, the human being apprehends its existence on
this planet as a continuum in time: a beginning, a development and an
end. In short, a story.
According to Nancy Huston, this unique perspective on reality leads
humans to bring together each event and every bit of information,
to create multiple individual and collective stories. Far from being
rational, these fictions meet their aspirations, their fears, and embody
their phantoms and neuroses. Terrified by their own demise, human
beings feel the need to construct meaning, to justify their existence in
the heart of the mysteries that surround them. Religions, governments
and political parties never cease to develop narratives which,
when widely shared, become the foundation of social and cultural
121
constructions. The most powerful stories, and those most likely to win
the support of many (such as Christianity in the West), form entire
civilisations, and shape the trajectories of millions of men and women.
They constitute the basis of cultures spread over the entire globe.
If it has always been thus (this is at least a point of view I am
inclined to accept), then our modern era is no exception to the
rule. The narrative of our current civilisation was formed, 60 years
ago, in a sufficiently attractive way in order for us to be led into the
embodiment of it. But how?
Oral, then pictorial tradition, followed by the book (the Word of the
Bible), have all long held a place of choice in the diffusion of these
stories. The appearance of the novel accelerated this phenomenon to
give it the official position of ‘fiction’ (generally opposing essays or
other kinds of writing, which is actually quite debatable).
After the 1930s and even more since the 1950s cinema has acquired
an increasingly larger role in this story-telling capacity developed by
human beings, thus shaping millions of others’ imaginations. In many
ways, what we used to call the ‘dream of progress’ is a fiction which,
by its ability to make most of humanity dream, has transformed our
entire planet. And cinema has played a great role in its promotion.
If film stars are now so popular, if we carry them socially to the
skies, (while the services they provide could be considered much less
important than those of surgeons, teachers, farmers…) it is probably
for this reason. They embody our new pantheon, our modern
mythology, the one in which we seek meaning in our lives.
122
Americans, like the Germans or Russians, fully understood that
storytelling through this medium was a formidable weapon. Stalin
did not hesitate to say that: “Film is the most effective tool for stirring
the masses. Our only problem is to know how to keep that tool under
control.” For his part, Hitler said that “Art should attract the attention
of the multitude [...], its action must always appeal to the senses and
very little to reason [...]. The art of propaganda consists in being able
to awaken the public imagination by appealing to people’s feelings,
finding psychologically appropriate formulas that attract the attention
of the masses and touch the hearts [...]. The image, in all its forms, up to
film, has even more power in this respect. There, man should even less
involve his reason; it is sufficient just to watch.” This assertion is highly
questionable: for once it is by no means required to abandon one’s
reason when looking at pictures or when approaching a work of art.
There are various examples of art which do not miss the opportunity to
stimulate reflection, and it is likely that true art has nothing to do with
the propaganda these dictators speak of. But the same assertion still
carries with it a share of lucid observation on the emotions of human
beings, prone to let themselves be led by his/her passions. Sometimes
this is absolutely tragic, as in the case of the Third Reich.
While Nazi fiction (which had unfortunately aroused so much
excitement among many Germans) was militarily defeated by the
Russians, the British and the Americans, it was America which ended
up winning, alone, the Propaganda War. In 1947 Eric Johnston,
president of the American Chamber of Commerce and the Motion
Picture Association of America, sent to France during the negotiations
of the terms of the Marshall Plan, stated before the Committee on
123
anti-American activities: “American cinema is and must be more and
more a weapon against communism [...]. American films provide
tangible evidence of lies of totalitarian propaganda. The old legend
of the decadence of capitalism in the United States collapses as soon
as the public has a chance to see our movies and draw conclusions.”
Although this statement is openly manipulative (it belongs to a
time when very few spectators possessed a culture of image and its
manipulation) it was premonitory. The massive fictional export
entitled ‘The American way of life’ came about as a result of the
Communist narrative, and hastened the fall of the Eastern bloc.
Thanks were due in part to Eric Johnston who, apart from provisions
for the payment of billions of the Marshall Plan, negotiated with
Europe the right to dispose of sixty percent of the screens from the
old continent, for the dissemination of Hollywood productions. A
formidable tactical move.
A few decades later, consumerism, free trade, the worship of wealth
and appearance, meat diets... have swept the world. Hundreds of
millions of people have incorporated American culture into their own:
clothing, food, cinema, town planning (shopping malls, hypermarkets,
shopping areas outside the cities surrounded by car parks, the reign of
the automobile …). In Europe, a civilization dominated by petroleum
and dollars has developed and spread throughout all the channels we
know: film, television, novels, photography, advertising...
Today billions of Chinese, Indians, Brazilians and even Africans aspire
to replicate this model, which they consider a form of accomplishment,
even if a very ambiguous, love-hate relationship with the United States
is maintained. The aversion felt towards an often imperialist and
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belligerent policy does not prevent impregnating a part of their culture
with that of America’s, yet it is this model exported by the US and the
West in general, which now leads our humanity into the abyss.
A NEW CULTURE
The magnitude of the crisis we face presents us with a simple choice:
metamorphosis or collapse. Adjusting the margins of our model,
which would allow for limiting the damage without questioning
the fundamental principles of our societies, will not suffice. It is our
conception of the economy, our relation with nature and animals,
our conception of education and of democracy which needs to be
re-thought. We need to gradually abandon a pyramidal, industrial,
centralised model which considers the planet as a deposit that can be
endlessly plundered to generate profits. In this model, we must also
end the situation where power and wealth are concentrated among
just a few hands, where education seeks to conform children to just
make them grow. And we must nurture a way of life more inspired by
nature where, to paraphrase words attributed to Lavoisier “nothing
is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”. In this model,
human systems, whether agricultural, economic or administrative,
organise themselves into autonomous and interdependent networks.
They are no longer structured in chains of pyramidal and industrious
command. The idea is to draw from the power of the elements rather
than the depths of our basements to produce energy…
To do that, we need these new collective narratives, in order to develop
another imagery, powerful enough to inspire billions of people and
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give them the impetus to engage in these pathways.
Muhammad Yunus (Bangladesh pioneer of lhe concept of microcredit
and Nobel Peace Prize 2006), declared in 2012: “Unfortunately we do
not write societal fiction (social-fiction). If we did, our world would
have already changed! Because imagination is one of the most powerful
things. We must make films which imagine what our society should
look like. And then we would say: ‘Let’s make it real!’ All impossible
things were accomplished because we wanted, we imagined and desired
them intensely. This is what the young generation must do today. And
then we’ll get there!”
Yunus developed the theory that science and industry often try to
replicate what science fiction started. We first imagined going to the
moon and one day we actually did.
As such, art is probably one of the most powerful mediums to help us
imagine this new culture, to build it, to share it with as many people
as possible. Artists who, through their disciplines, have the power to
touch, to move, to make people think, to mobilise, are essential in the
times we face.
Never, perhaps, have we had such a need for these actors of culture, to
create a new culture on our planet, as now.
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A NEW RENAISSANCE
As in the great periods of transformation in History such as the
Renaissance, where art, science and social organisation experienced
joint mutations, we need artists to bring a philosophical reflection
on the world around us, to express the sensitive reality of what we are
going through, and project the visions which will encourage us. To
translate the reality of our time outside mechanistic contingencies
and the drought of materialism and financialisation, we need to
repoétiser the world, to make the world more poetic, and so to awaken
the resources that lie within each of us and which a simple intellectual
reflection cannot mobilise. Art has the ability to speak to the multiple
dimensions of our being.
In many respects, climate change is an abstraction for many of us, as it
is the collapse of biodiversity. For all the people in the world who live
in urban environments where nature is absent and soils are artificial,
in latitudes where extreme meteorological phenomena have not yet
become frequent, apocalyptic announcements as I described at the
beginning of this text may seem purely fanciful. However this is not so.
Art and artists have the opportunity to make these realities tangible, by
translating them into emotions. Emotion, as its Latin root suggests, is
what moves us, what makes us move.
Now we already know most of the solutions that could ‘save us’: a
revolution of free currencies, local and high output farming systems
without oil or mechanisation, regions producing more renewable
energy than they consume, government models allowing hundreds of
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thousands of citizens to participate in the drafting of their countries’
Constitutions, circular economy , pioneer schools … This world is within
our reach if together we choose to make new narratives for humanity
and put all our energy, all our ingenuity into its realisation. Art can help
us in this quest. Our future depends on it.
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Curated by LIFT
THE ART OF
SHARING
KNOWLEDGE
A conversation between Stephen Emmott
(neuroscientist by training, Head of Computational Science, Microsoft
Corporation and leader of a multi-disciplinary research laboratory,
which spans stem cell biology, immunology, molecular programming,
biogeochemistry and Earth System science, author of book “10 Billion”)
and Amy Sharrocks
(live artist, sculptor and filmmaker, author of “Museum of Water”),
mediated by Jon Davis, from LIFT.
CHAPTER I
STEPHEN EMMOTT
AND “10 BILLION” ON STAGE
SCIENCE ON STAGE
Stephen Emmott: I was on the board of NESTA1 and one of the other Trustees was
Nicholas Star, one of the National Theatre directors. When we met, I said I was a
scientist and he explained that he knew a theatre director who was interested in
seeing how artists and scientists can work and collaborate together. We decided to
meet at the National Theatre and it turns out the director was Katie Mitchell. She
was very keen to hear about what I did in my lab and why, so I explained about
modelling Earth’s Life Support Systems.
Katie said she was keen to discuss further how artists can learn from scientists
about their craft, and how scientists can learn from artists. After listening to
me talking about what I did and my practice, she explained she’d worked with
neuroscientists but she had never heard anyone explain the problems we are set
to face and how they are all related, in such a clear way. She said she thought
everyone should be given the opportunity to hear this. This was when she asked
whether I was interested in doing something in a theatre. The idea was basically
me giving the talk I had just given to her, but to an audience. I just said “you can
fuck off, not under any circumstances”.
She asked why and I said the idea of being on a stage in a theatre was terrifying.
Don’t get me wrong, I give scientific talks at large conferences, so I’m not worried
about giving a talk, but I’m not an actor. Katie explained how it would be a
disaster if I tried to act and suggested that we get an actor to play me. So I
NESTA is an innovation charity with a mission to help people and organisations bring great ideas to life. See
more at: http://www.nesta.org.uk
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agreed and we spent a few days with, unbelievably, Simon Russell Beale. However
it quickly became obvious it didn’t really work.
Amy Sharrocks: Why didn’t it work?
SE: I don’t know.. It just didn’t come across with any sort of conviction or domain
authority. Katie Mitchell and everyone else agreed that it wasn’t going to work.
So she said the only way it would, was if I would do it. Just me on stage with no
acting. I eventually said yes.
Interestingly, during this time, the National Theatre put on a play called “Greenland”
which was partly about my lab. And somehow, it failed to really work.
THE ISSUE OF CLEARLY
COMMUNICATING CLIMATE CHANGE
Jon Davis: Why did Greenland fail? Was it just a bad play or was it
bad in its depiction of the science behind climate change?
SE: It was trying to get the climate change message across but it was just too
confusing. It had these four parts and they were all interwoven: one about a
scientist, a lobbyist, other scientists who were post-doctorates in my lab at the
time, as well as scientists in Antarctica who were tagging albatrosses, and I think
what was meant to be a government minister for the environment, if I remember
correctly. And it just got confusing. The lobbyist and the minister (or was it a
journalist?) were fucking each other at a climate change conference... I wondered
what that had to do with anything. It was verbatim theatre and I was very surprised
and shocked to hear everything I’d said, down to the last expletive.
AS: How appalling to have all your words played back to you. What
did you think when you heard yourself?
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SE: Well, I wished I’d known it was going to be used verbatim, as I would have
thought more about what I’d said.
JD: Did you feel that your words didn’t translate your ideas properly?
Did it try to cover too many angles?
SE: The entire story was just odd.
JD: Is this because they hadn’t understood the issues well enough?
SE: They didn’t understand the issues well enough. Had I known that, I would have
explained that we needed to work harder in getting the issues right. The reason
I mentioned “Greenland” is because the idea was to put on “10 Billion”2 at the
National Theatre, but they felt it was just too difficult. As a result it went to The
Royal Court Theatre.
SCIENCE FOR THEATRE AUDIENCES
JD: How did the dialogue between yourself as a scientist and
Katie as an artist work? Do you feel that this exchange helped you
communicate more effectively with a wider audience?
SE: We had a lot of conversations with Katie and the associate director Lyndsey
Turner. I was on stage at the Royal Court. But it was surprising how well the show
was received.
JD: What consequences did it cause, the fact that you were delivering
your information in an artistic framework, in a theatre? Did it change
the way in which you handled the material, or the way you spoke to
the audience?
Stephen Emmot is the writer of the book “10 Billion”, published in 2013, about the potential consequences
of a population of ten billion people.
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SE: It was certainly very different. In a scientific conference you can use any
number of names and concepts you want to, and everybody in that audience is
familiar with your vocabulary. It is not possible to do that in theatre. If I start
talking about ‘CMIP 5’, everybody is going to be thinking what the hell is CMIP
5? I can even say it is a Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5. But that won’t
mean anything to anybody either, so we had to think very carefully about how to
communicate in a way that didn’t dumb down the issues or the audience. That was
actually quite a tricky thing to navigate.
JD: What did you feel you were able to do more there, in comparison
with a scientific context? Did you feel you were trying to provoke an
emotional response? If so, did that shape the way you approached
it or not?
SE: Not for me. But Katie was keen to provoke an emotional response, and that
was done more by the lighting, sound and music, rather than the words, I think.
AS: What kind of direction did she give you?
SE: Just things like the rate of delivery, because normally I tend to speak very
quickly. Then, although I was not acting, Katie and Lyndsey were very keen to say:
“at this point, when you are talking about this issue, you really have to slow down
and give people a chance to let them understand it”, or “after saying so, just don’t
say anything for about 20 or 30 seconds”, so there would be total silence, and I
would have never done it like that. There were theatrical techniques I would never
have come up with myself, and it seemed to work.
SITE-SPECIFIC DIALOGUE
AS: I have questions to do with the framework. One is: How did it
feel? - Was it different from your usual large lectures? How did it feel
to do the talk on a stage? Because that changes the frame. The second
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question is related to the response from the audience. I imagine that
obviously there is applause and clapping in both situations, but is
there a possibility for questions? Was there communication between
you and the audience at the end of the play?
SE: It is an important thing to bring up because if you give a talk at a scientific
conference, you really have to give time to your peers to ask questions. In
the case of theatre there was nothing like that. One evening we opened up a
conversation with the audience and there was an hour of Q&A. It was interesting.
Of course they asked different types of questions, but it brought a very different
feel to the talk. I wished it had been at the beginning of the run, because I
ended up wondering if these were the kinds of questions people would have
asked every night.
JD: Do you feel it brought your research and knowledge to a broader
audience?
SE: Well, a different audience. In terms of audience type, then clearly, broader
than just scientists. But in terms of broad ‘reach’ then not really. The capacity was
only 88 people per night, because it was upstairs at the Royal Court, and only for
20 nights... That’s not a lot people.
JD: It is a different community of people?
SE: Yes, but I suspect strongly that I was preaching to the converted. People go
there because they want to be told everything is going tits up. I am sure some
came because it might be a bit unusual having a scientist on stage...
AS: It is an attempt, a combination between science and theatre... The
scientist Chris Rapley did something at the Royal Court just last year
(2014), which I didn’t see...
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SE: I read all the art reviews of Chris’s talk with Katie and they drew inevitable
comparisons with “10 Billion”.
THEATRE CRITIC
FOR A SCIENTIFIC PERFORMANCE
JD: Did you feel uncomfortable for your work and research to be
judged in a theatrical and artistic manner?
SE: One of the reasons why I eventually said yes to doing “10 Billion”, and which I
enjoyed most about it, was that it was an experiment in how artists and scientists
can work together. It was not the first experiment Katie had tried, and I know about
other cases, but it was a first for me. And from that perspective it was an enjoyable
experiment from which I learnt an enormous amount. I don’t know how Katie views
it, it was very different from the kind of things she has done in the past.
AS: It is very interesting considering the artistic licence it gave you,
and I also like the fact that it was reviewed in the arts pages, which is
not where you normally appear in the newspapers...
SE: What is interesting is that Katie didn’t warn me about the press night. I think
it happened on the second or third night, and I felt something was odd, because
she said, “I really want tonight to go well”. I said “OK, all right”. And then it did go
well. Only after it had finished did she tell me “by the way this was the press night,
there were loads of journalists”. I just thanked her for not telling me beforehand.
I asked what kind of press people had come, imagining she was going to say, the
science editor of the Daily Telegraph or the New Scientist..., but she said, “theatre
critics”. I immediately reacted, “you are joking, they’re going to say, ‘who the hell
is this clown on stage?’”.
AS: I completely sympathise with that. That was what I felt - a strange
situation - when I collaborated with LIFT. Precisely because of the
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context of LIFT being a theatre festival, there were a lot of theatre
reviewers, which I was unprepared for. I am much more used to being
a sculptor, a visual artist... The feeling of being in a different context
was surprising. Because of the nature of my artwork, it is more usually
seen as visual live art, not a performance piece, although I see that
many times my works have heavily performative elements.
SE: It was interesting when “10 Billion” opened, the Radio 4 programme Front
Row had Sarah Hemming, Arts critic at the Financial Times, on. and she was asked
about “10 Billion”. She said something like, “I haven’t seen it but the idea of a
scientist on stage doesn’t appeal to me at all” She wasn’t very complimentary,
adding something like “it sounds utterly dull”. Then she saw it, and in her own FT
review of “10 Billion” she described it as (I might be paraphrasing here) “the most
disturbing evening she had ever had in the theatre”.
JD: So were you surprised by the emotional impact?
SE: Yes I was. The reviews started coming out about a week after we started. I
was surprised by the fact that the theatre critics wrote that it was very emotional,
although I had not thought of anything to do with any emotional response or any
emotional aspect while trying to communicate those things. It proved that Katie was
spot-on in achieving what she set out to achieve with “10 Billion” at the Theatre.
CHAPTER II
AMY SHARROCKS AND MUSEUM OF WATER
ART THAT CARES ABOUT PEOPLE
JD: Amy, I feel that your work has human connectivity and interaction
at its core, particularly with “Museum of Water”, which deals with the
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emotional connection between people and water. How does science
and that notion of personal engagement come together?
AS: What I am most interested in is people and how we feel. I am
exploring the impact we have on each other and the world, and I like
to notice things together.
“Museum of Water” is a collection of publicly donated water, each with
its own story. It was originally commissioned by Artakt and London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for the celebrations to mark
the bicentenary of John Snow’s3 birth. So right from the start, the
Museum has been in dialogue with science.
For more information visit Museum of Water at
http://www.museumofwater.co.uk/
John Snow discovered that cholera was spread through the infected water
which people drank. The Museum is also an attempt and an experiment.
It was very interesting making it in this framework, in the sense that
there is this resonance with John Snow’s walking the streets of London,
his footsteps in Soho in 1854 echoed by all the footsteps of those people
who have collected water for the Museum. We use some of the same
methods to explore, though we are making different discoveries. Of
course the artwork was never intended only for scientists - everyone
has a stake in it.
“Museum of Water began in March 2013, and is an itinerant collection, travelling across the
UK and Europe, showing its wares and gathering water. The Museum started on a street corner
in Soho, commissioned by Artakt and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as
part of the Bi-Centennial celebrations for John Snow, who, by walking the streets of London,
painstakingly plotted the journey of cholera from water pumps right into our stomachs, and
in so doing saved hundreds of thousands of lives”, quoted from Museum of Water website, at
http://www.museumofwater.co.uk/
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STORIES IN A BOTTLE WITH WATER
AS: It is an invitation for people to bring water - any kind of water - in
any kind of bottle4. It is an invitation to each person, to decide what
exactly it is about water that he or she likes best, which would be
different from what you, or I, might choose. So now I have 604 bottles
in the collection [note: the conversation took place at the beginning of
2015; the collection is still growing] and they are all entirely different.
Each one is personal to that person or group of people who brought
it to me. In the diversity of the collection there is this extraordinary
exploration of different aspects concerning water and our relation
to it. I didn’t predict how extraordinary it would become. Somebody
called it ‘a mosaic of the universe’, and that is lovely: it is built up by
these tiny little bottles and when you see them all together, or even in
a small grouping, they become something else.
There are incredibly touching and amazing stories behind some of these
bottles. For example, there was this woman who gave me her birthing
water – both her breaking waters and the water her baby was born into.
It was an extraordinary moment, which she caught in her bottle5.
One time, a brass quintet came into the Gallery when the Museum
was in Lancaster, and played these incredible songs they had written
and practised together, each with a bottle down by their feet. At the
end, they poured their collected condensation from the instruments
into one bottle and gave it to the Museum6.
Donating to Museum of Water is easy. Choose what water is most precious to you.Find
a bottle to put it in.Come and tell us why you chose it.We will keep it for you.” (from the
Museum of Water website, at http://www.museumofwater.co.uk/)
4
No. 589 – Alice Booth, 12th June 2014 – This bottle contains the breaking waters & the water
my daughter Ada Belle Quick, was born into.
5
No. 600 – Tom Barnish (trombone), Gill Hancock (sax) Sue Holden (sax) Joe and Ben
McCabe – from a performance by brass instruments 22.2.2015. It’s not spit, it’s condensation!
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In all those bottles there is this sense of Museum of Water both as
an activating force and as a piece activated by the engagement of
others. It is a two-way street. The Museum is an invitation to go and
do something, and what usually happens is that each person has
that journey before ever meeting me. They go off. There is something
about the invitation that has appealed to them enough to actually get
up and get out the door. That is quite a massive thing to bother to do:
go on a journey to get something and then bother to come and meet
me, and tell the whole story behind it. I’m very impressed by them.
JOURNEY THROUGH
A PERSONAL HISTORY OF WATER
AS: There is another part of the process, which is the conversation,
where the retelling of that journey to me or to one of the custodians
takes place, and then there is the accession into the museum. The
artwork has different parts or phases: the first part of it is the
experience the person goes through to get the water, perhaps in
complete solitude. There was this woman who walked to a frozen lake
in Snowdonia by herself, orienteering by map for the first time, in
driving wind and rain7. She couldn’t see further than a foot in front of
her face and she literally said to her friend, “if I am not back by 11am
you might want to call someone”. And off she went on her own, in an
attempt to rediscover a lake that she had found the year before. It
had been frozen, and she had had to smash the ice in order to jump
in, but she had felt that experience to be extraordinary and magical.
The bottle she brought me was her way of revisiting the footsteps of
No. 220 Jane Porter, 02/-3/2014 – ‘Magic Water’ from Llyn Cwmffynnon, Snowdonia. One
February I broke the ice in this lake with an ice axe, and for a dare jumped in with a friend.
And straight out again! It gave me an extraordinary high for the rest of the day. On 2.3.14 I
set out on a lone quest to gather water from the lake – it was hidden by clouds but emerged
from the rain just when I though all was lost.
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this first enormous journey, to bring me back a bottle which kept the
memory of this magical moment she had lived a year before. I like the
echo of all these people’s journeys in John Snow’s footsteps around
Soho. Footsteps that this live art experience echoes, in parallel with
the scientific epidemiology from 200 years before.
I like this frame of the scientific and medical history and the tracing
of things back through movement, keeping a relativity to the notion
of distance – of time and space – wondering and thinking what all
this interconnection could be... There is something in the air, maybe a
sense of a scary miasma involving all this past and the path of Snow’s
wander in the streets: having conversations with people around Soho,
mapping little black bars on the streets of London and then tracing
the connection to our bodies, cutting people up to discover what
caused the epidemic wasn’t something which went into the lungs but
into people’s stomachs. From that whole journey, he knew that there
was something in the water, which I’ve tried to trace back to. There is
something in the water, and maybe if we all look hard enough we’ll all
be able to see it together. We can explore together, whatever it is. We
are using similar methods of mapping, walking and talking, to begin
a different kind of cartography.
CHAPTER III
ARTISTS VERSUS SCIENTISTS
ART THAT RECONNECTS PEOPLE
WITH LIFE
AS: I feel very strongly that the methods of artists and scientific
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methods are not a million miles from a kind of priest’s methods. I
was in Lancaster participating on a panel where, beside me, was a
social scientist who dealt with water, a water scientist who dealt with
molecules of pure water, ‘cell samples’ he called it. This different
phrasing, the language, is very interesting to me. There was also a
priest, who talked about water as a symbol in the sense of a parable
and allegory. I talked about metaphor and a lot about the language
but in a way of affirming the importance of noticing together. Both
scientists talked about the questions of what is a water expert, who is a
water expert8? Are we all water experts? These were the questions we
were all asking. Who is making the decisions for our water? Because
actually we are all invested and we are all experts in many different
ways... We need to look at the questions and the value systems we are
using to make decisions about something as fundamental as water.
Concerning the multiple ways we feel about things, science is one
of them, and the scientists tended to argue in a way that seemed to
imply there was only one perspective and approach: the scientific
one. And I feel very strongly that everything happens in a context; I
don’t make art that is not part of the world, it is absolutely to do with
how we resonate off each other, how we impact each other. Despite
the discourse I heard, I also feel very strongly that the scientists were
talking in the same way, they sense the impact we have on the world,
our footsteps of human life...
SE: I think one of the problems in the way scientists communicate typically in the
scientific world, is that everything is couched in probabilities. Scientists rarely say
anything more unequivocal than that, it’s more like “we predict this might have
an effect on that...”
The panel consisted of Amy Sharrocks, Ben Surridge, Emma Westling, Rev Canon Paul
Embery.
8
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I feel this particularly when it comes to things like climate change, ecosystem
degradation or desertification. I think the time has long gone for dressing things
up with these kinds of probabilities; we are able to say by now with some certainty
that the climate is changing and I do think scientists don’t help the situation by
couching everything as ‘probably’, rather than going for something more affirmative
like “we are indeed in trouble”. Artists are not afraid of saying things like that, to
make an impact, an emotional impact.
JD: Was there a moment, with “Museum of Water”, with all the
scientific and human implications, when you became conscious of
how amazing it is, expressing how water is relevant in our lives in so
many different ways?
AS: I do think that the Museum reconnects people with their
surroundings, with their lives. I also hope we are aware of how
fortunate we are that England has this excess of water. This is the
kind of thing one takes for granted. I think a reconnection has been
made and the amount of people that come to me and express it proves
that. I had no idea of all the different connections people would make,
and I don’t know how that translates into action.
I think it’s possible to get to quite a scary place through the Museum.
You can look at the archives and at the bottles the scientist from the
British Antarctic Survey gave to me from different times in the Earth’s
history: from 129,000 years ago, the last warm period in Earth’s history,
or from 19,600 years ago, from the last Ice Age9. He drew a map of his
own for us, a kind of graph of the Earth’s history as a series of ice
ages. We see a wave that projects a future timeline, where all this fear
No. 397 – Dr Robert and Libby Mulvaney, Dec 2004 – This water is 19.490 old. I collected it
from Berkner Island in Antarctica in December 2004. At the time this snowfall fell, the earth
was in the grip of an ice age. No. 399 – Dr Robert and Libby Mulvaney, Jan 2012 – Ice from 649
metres down in the ice sheet at Fletcher prom in Antarctica. This water is 129.000 years old.
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gains an image, for there we see the Earth will have another ice age.
We are only a part of the story, and we are now living the difficulty
and fear of that moment in the future. This is a small part of the story
the Museum tells.
I can give another example from another bottle. Someone brought
me a bottle from the highest tide of the last 30 years. It came from
Morecambe Bay and it was brought still cold from the sea. He went to
get it that morning and came straight to me, and he told me the story
of the cockle pickers who had died on Morecambe Bay and the work
that he has done since with the local community10. So, the bottles all
these people gave create various possibilities of knowledge, thought
and feelings in the Museum; but there are other layers of meaning,
through connecting the possibilities of how we relate to time through
those bottles in the graph where we see the 30- or 18-year waves or
even thousand-year waves of changes.
I think there are extraordinary and explosive moments that can leave
you very disturbed and with the feeling that we are not safe, that we
live on shaky ground. This feeling makes sense but I think one of the
things that art can do slightly better than science, is perhaps this sense
of not paralysing people with fear. It can be very paralysing if you only
get the narrative of horror and the difficulty of what we are facing. To
actually take on board what is going to happen, the ‘definitives’, of this
world and how we are dealing with it for the next hundred years and
what it’s going to be like, can stick your head fast into the sand.
TO NEED OR NOT TO FEAR
SE: I agree with that but I feel there is a need for fear, and I agree fear can be
10
No. 604, Pete Moser – A wish for 23 lives. Gathered 3670 days after the event.
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paralysing but I think we should all be fearful of what is coming. And one of the
criticisms of “10 Billion” was that it was so stark that it didn’t leave room for hope.
It is not my job to give hope, I am just communicating the issues.
JD: Are you saying that by communicating through an artistic
framework you were surprised by the emotional response and
fear? Did you feel that in a scientific environment that wasn’t
communicated? That only when you put it in an art context you got
that emotional impact?
SE: Yes.
JD: But perhaps it wasn’t about hope or fear, it was about facts.
SE: It was about the way in which the facts – notwithstanding the fact that
there are uncertainties about some of the ‘facts’ and the impacts we face – are
communicated. The problem is that what we were trying to do with “10 Billion”
was not only to talk about climate change. The subject was not climate change,
but about us, about us being the drivers of every problem we face, whether risk
to food security, ecosystem degradation, desertification, deforestation, pollution,
over-consumption, energy, water... It is a long list, and all these things we are
altering, they are all inextricably interrelated. So it wasn’t about climate change,
it was about this much bigger, highly complex picture: Earth’s life support system,
and the fact that we are all of us modifying every single component of it.
LISTENING TO A SOUND
WE CANNOT QUITE HEAR
JD: Amy, how did scientists take part in your project? How did
they feel about their research or field of knowledge – water – being
filtered through an artistic framework?
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AS: I think they were really amazed by it. One woman, a brilliant
scientist from LSHTM, came every day, and stood by the Water Bar. We
have a Water Bar at the Museum where we offer free glasses of water,
as refreshment and respite, in celebration of our access to fresh water
here. She works with malaria and she sat and watched how people
interacted with the artwork and how we talked with people, and she
was amazed. I had that sense a lot with the scientists. I discovered
what they can learn from art - how to talk to people with a wider
vision... We need to open wider questions, wider concerns, and think
about the impact we have on each other, how things are interlinked
and how we can be able and bear to take that on board.
I participated in a conference with UCL and environmental science PhD
students and there was this scientist who was exploring turtles in Cape
Verde11. He was following turtles and he had put a very small listening
device on the backs of baby turtles and we were all so taken with that
idea, with those beautiful baby turtles... We all had an extraordinary
emotional response. It reminded me of a book I was reading which
proposed that all art is listening to a sound we cannot quite hear.
That is really true in my work, that sense of really trying to listen very
carefully, and listening together. I felt this scientist with his turtles
was entirely involved with listening carefully to the turtles. That is our
shared process. What he took away – which also happened with me at
the end when some students came to talk to me - was the importance
of communication and how to challenge people about what their work
is. So I felt we were all impacting on each other, artists and scientists.
I feel very strongly that artists should be in every public programme.
There should always be an artist on the board and perhaps they should
have a scientist on board too, in the sense of encouraging people to
11
Christophe Eizaguirre
146
think in a different way, because I think that is what got us into this
trouble: not connecting ideas, not understanding actual resonances.
Later on, when this happens well, one can see it brilliantly around
cities and all landscapes which change from art events. When it’s
done well with artists on board, I think that it is life changing for all
areas of existence...
SE: Unfortunately, many of my colleagues in the scientific community are not very
good at communicating what they do to non-scientific audiences. There are some
notable exceptions of course. It does create a barrier to engaging non-scientists in
a debate. If you are a scientist working in a field like ecology, biology or chemistry,
or agricultural science or epidemiology, I don’t think you can get away with that
anymore. The issues are so important and now non-scientists are starting to talk
about them and looking for people in the scientific community to clarify things
and communicate in a way that can engage everyone.
When I listen to the ‘Today’ Programme on BBC Radio 4 in the morning, every single
day there is something about science, whether it has to do with obesity, bees,
climate, or statins, or three-parent babies... I listen to these scientists – and even
though I know what the the issues related to this subjects are – I am frequently
left thinking “no wonder some people end up utterly confused about what the
science and the scientist is saying!” – The scientific community’s difficulty in
communication is a recognised problem.
That said, in most of the life sciences PhD programmes, students are now taught
how to communicate their work to non-scientists, but as far as I am aware there
are no artists involved in this. They do tend to engage journalists, ex-reporters of
the BBC or Channel4, who come up and give mock interviews and all that does is
frighten everybody to death. Because they come with cameras or microphones and
start shooting interviews. It is in my view, the wrong way to deal with tackling
this problem. I have always advocated that artists should be more involved in the
communication of science, and we don’t have as many as we should.
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AS: There was a very frightening moment on the panel I participated
in recently. There was me and there were scientists talking about
scientists working with curiosity and the fact that it is not enough
anymore in order to get a grant funding; they have to prove what it is
for, with a discourse of justification and evidence. And I was thinking,
I’ve had that conversation for 15 years: ‘What is that for?’ ‘What is
art about?’ I had no idea that scientists were being asked the same
questions... and I wondered if the answers would be the same. That
we are questioning what impact we have on each other. Exploring
what and who we are and what we are hearing or seeing now, and
taking everything on board that we’ve been sensing in the air that we
breathe...
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Curated by Rotterdamse Schouwburg
NEW FOREST
IN THE CITY
Tobias Kokkelmans (dramaturg of Actors Group Wunderbaum)
interviewed by Claudia Galhós
THE INVESTIGATION
OF A POTENTIAL NEW SOCIETY
One of the projects your collective is working
on is called “The New Forest”, presented as “an
investigation into a potential new society in the light
of the current crisis”. So, what is this artistic group
called Wunderbaum? What is this investigation into
a potential new society?
Wunderbaum is an actors’ collective: Five actors who started out when
they were still in their early twenties in 2001, almost 14 years ago. They
met in art school... The logic of the collective is that they do everything by
themselves - writing, directing and performing - and the performances
Wunderbaum do, have always been based on current things happening
in society.
For more information about Wunderbaum, visit the page:
http://www.wunderbaum.nl/
Three years ago, they decided to intensify what they already did: that
all their work is based on research, interviews and collaborations, with
people from outside the arts, scientists, sociologists... Different groups
from different domains within society were always a source of inspiration.
What happened until three years ago was that the public of a Wunderbaum
performance only saw the output of the process that had taken place
151
before, in the form of a performance. However all the collaborations’
processes with these societal domains are just as interesting. They
wanted to create a project where all these different networks are brought
to the foreground and not left in the background. The whole process of
making these performances is politically, socially, ecologically... engaging
and the whole process is also part of the experience.
That was the basic idea of “The New Forest”: to come up with a new
project with a four-year life span. It began in 2013, and the name
refers to everything we do in these four years that includes not only
the performances, but also seminars, a film project, a huge amount of
contextual programmes, online content, etc... All the performances we
do are linked and all these contextual programmes are interconnected.
We wanted to show audiences the processes of engaging on the inside
of societies. In order for us to do so, we imagined “The New Forest” as
a new kind of society, where we ask ourselves questions: If we had a
chance to recreate society, what would it be like? What kind of alternative
ways of life would we have? What kind of changes are possible to create
a better society? How can we talk about change in different domains,
such as social, economic, political, etc? Basically everything we do is
centred around this question of change, of a changing society and
looking for alternatives.
Why did you choose the name “The New Forest”?
In English, our name Wunderbaum means ‘wonderful tree’, and a
thing we hang inside our car, which smells nice. The name was chosen
a couple of years ago when they were in a cab. They were going to do
an interview over the phone and had to find a new name, and someone
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said, “well, there was a Wunderbaum hanging inside the car and that is
actually a nice name”. And it stayed. “The New Forest” is not one tree
but many trees including us, people. This global view of a new forest - to
think about a forest as a rhizomatic society, or as a group or community
of many trees. The name eludes to the fact that there is not only one
Wunderbaum anymore, but actually a growing organism of many trees.
By trees do you mean people from different areas of
knowledge, diversity, or do you keep to an ecological
domain?
First of all, it has a symbolic meaning, but I think that the ecological
domain is as much a part as the economic or social. It is all part of what
it is to be a society, you can translate it into many things.
You are the dramaturg of Wunderbaum, correct?
Yes, I would say my role is as a ‘spare part’ partner when it comes to
content. I do interviews and make programmes with audiences and
seminars. The only difference is that I am not an actor, sometimes I am
on stage but most of the time I am not, I am mostly behind the scenes.
But you are referring to Wunderbaum as ‘they’?
That’s right. And it is not completely correct. It is because I joined
Wunderbaum later. Sometimes I say we, and other times I say they,
and ‘they’ refers to the five actors who are the face of Wunderbaum on
stage. But you are right, I am also part of Wunderbaum and I am also a
part of the current Wunderbaum face.
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“TUINDER”: THE NEW APP FOR
SELLING AND BUYING VEGETABLES
When you were describing the first phase of
Wunderbaum’s work, I associated it with the
trend in theatre, which is now less fashionable, of
documentary theatre. But what you added after, made
that categorization – documentary theatre – reductive.
With that in mind as well as one of the main
questions of the network IMAGINE 2020 - “How
can art be used to create awareness about climate
change?” – What strategies do you implement and
what ideas do you have concerning the question of
the arts and climate change? I know this issue is just
a part of the questions you work with.
About climate change, we use it in a broad sense, because when we
talk of nature or ecology, they are all interconnected. Sometimes we do
projects which are more focused on ecology. A year ago we did a project
called “BLA BLA BLA... ACT NOW!” (created in the context of IMAGINE
2020, in 2013) which refers to the demonstration flyers people were
handing out in front of the meeting halls where the G8 Climate Change
Summit was taking place. It is saying stop talking and do something
about it. We worked together with people who organized these big
climate meetings, and we re-enacted one of these meetings. There was
a big show with a lot of contextual programme, but at the heart of it
was a theatre piece where we put the climate conference on the agenda.
Basically what we wanted to show audiences is that so many nations
are brought together, and at the end they come up with a document or
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even new laws to reduce carbon, but what happens afterwards? So we
wanted to show why it is so difficult. We also interviewed politicians
who participated, as well as organizers, Greenpeace, etc... We wanted
to dedicate the programme to this notion of why they always go “bla bla
bla” but don’t actually act on anything. This is one example where we
worked very specifically on the idea of conference and action connected
to the issue of climate change.
The second project we are working on now [note: the interview was
conducted in January 2015] is a mobile phone application called
“Tuinder”, which means ‘gardener’ in English. It is an app for rooftop
gardening and peer-to-peer networking. It’s a kind of dating site but
not for matching people together, but rather vegetables and people. The
idea for this application is the trend of rooftop gardening that we have
here in Rotterdam. It exists in many other towns too, of course... We
wanted to come up with a project where people can really have a peer to
peer network where they can actually buy and sell their stuff to others
who want to have this healthy, self-produced food. That is the basic
idea. We are now in the middle of creating the app and we also have
investors who are interested in the project, investing next year (2016).
By the end of the year we will have this application, which will actually
be used for selling and buying home grown vegetables in towns.
The app is part of a larger context. We are making a film, “Transition is
the mission” (scheduled to premiere at the Rotterdam International Film
Festival in 2016) which is about discoveries in “The New Forest” so far.
For the past two years we have worked with numerous innovators and
people from transition movements inside Rotterdam and we wanted to
have them all together. We thought a film would be the best way to do
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it, because it allows for a large number of people to be involved. We can
really connect in a way we can’t on stage. So we are making this film,
and it’s actually about a group of actors who decide to stop acting and
to do something for real, in the real word.
This fiction you are creating actually reflects a
recurring theme among contemporary artists: the
need, while still being an artist, to act in the real
world.
Yes. Of course it is a question of where your political engagement
is. Where does art stop and real life begin? I think it is an important
question to ask and there are many artists who use art projects which
don’t appear to be art projects, or seem to be other actions which
wouldn’t be considered art. We can see it in many places where artists
are and operate. To be or not to be, that’s somehow still the question:
where does art stop and life begin, and what does that say for my
involvement in life?
I think that what is happening right now is that art has two aspects.
One is the autonomous aspect of art. That means art is art is art. It
has value in itself. And then there is the heteronomous aspect. This
relates to the way art evolves with life, stretching out its tentacles into
all levels of life which are not art. This is the heterotonomy of art, not
only flirting with what is in the real world but really engaging with it
and searching for where we can place the boundaries of art and how we
can stretch it, to go to the furthermost edge of where art stops. We have
the feeling that on the one side we are so intertwined with so many
aspects of life that we have many different identities and, on the other
156
hand, we sometimes feel trapped in this understanding of society as
a segmented one, an issue-based society. This would mean art is one
issue, ecology another issue, housing another... Of course we know that
this is not the reality of things. So we want to bridge those gaps or tear
down the halls between those different domains and aspects of life.
“TRANSITION IS THE MISSION”
Does the film explore the subject of the transition
movement?
The title of the film, “Transition Is The Mission”, comes out as an ironic
title because transition is such an everyday word... to the point that we
can ask “what does it really mean?” In the movie, the group of actors
stop acting to take real action in real life. They are followed by a team
of cameramen in their personal quest for the ideal transformation. But
– and this is the story of the film – what turns out as a battle against
society ends up as a crisis of the group itself. So, the idea about change
is a large one. It asks how we can change as a group. How can we
stay together throughout this whole process of transformation? Are we
losing our previous identities or not? There are many questions that are
also in the ‘Transition Movement’, we are either talking about ecology
or other spheres.
It also questions how we can escape from negativism. Where is the
balance between idealism and personal gain? When do we step over
the line? What happens when alternative becomes mainstream itself?
Should we think bigger or smaller? All these questions are asked, and
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are the themes of the film. It is not only about the projects we are now
working on in real life but also the question of the group itself: how
do we keep our integrity while changing so much? This is basically
it, but in the film, the spectator will follow the actors while they are
working on different projects. There are basically four projects, like the
“Tuinder” application I just talked about. The film started out as a story
we wanted to create, which included the rooftop gardens app. While
building this story, we thought we should really materialise it, which is
why we are working on this application and making it really work. So we
now find ourselves talking to web developers and investors. Something
that started out as an art project, is not an art project anymore. Now it
is a real life project.
I challenge you to reconsider that statement: “it
started out as an art project and it is not an art
project anymore, it is now a real life project”. Is it
really not an art project anymore?
I agree. It is still an art project. The second theme of the film is in fact
where the boundary lies between fiction and reality.
Which is something art has been questioning a lot,
either on stage or not.
Yes, it is the suspension of disbelief. It exists particularly in the mimetic
arts - theatre or film - and is the question of the boundary between
reality and fiction. We can also say that all life is built on many fictions.
Politicians are selling fictions. And going back to what we were talking
about - the question of being art or not, related to the fact that life is
158
constructed on many fictions - when you say something is art or an art
project, it gives a completely new perspective to what you’re doing. It
completely changes the meaning of what is happening. With this in
mind, in the specific context of Wunderbaum and the film, of course we
will remain artists throughout the whole project, because the reflection
on the society is always there. This aspect of self-reflection, which is so
crucial to art, implies a reflection on life, while at the same time it is
also somewhere outside of life because it is in the artistic domain. This
never ends...
ART REVEALS THE SOCIETY
We are creating projects that are not considered art in a traditional way,
but perhaps we draw them into art. I have an interesting example of a
colleague artist of ours who was very inspiring to us: Jonas Staal. He
is a visual artist and one of his projects was “New World Summit”, a
summit for so-called ‘terrorist’ organisations. The idea of terrorism is a
very broad definition, there are many gradations and his idea is that if we
have a democratic society, we should hear all voices. Even if they are very
abject and very wrong, they are part of the political process. So as an art
project he started out these “New World Summit” groups to be politically
active and part of the bigger political scope. He did another one, “The
Geert Wilders Works (2005-2008)”. Geert Wilders is a politician.
What happened was that several lawsuits were filed against Jonas
because he was working on the boundary lines of the law, between what
he could or not do. Just as a kind of anecdote, but with relevance to this
discussion, I heard from someone that when he was in front of the
159
judge for his own defence he said, “I hereby declare this court session
to be part of my art project”. What happened was that all the lawsuits
and the actual going to court became part of the art project. I believe
in that. You are making art when you say you are making art. Then
there is the question of whether it is good art or not. But that is another
question... In the case of Jonas, I would say: very good art.
For more information on the work of Jonas Staal and court case, see:
http://www.jonasstaal.nl/
and http://newworldsummit.eu/
I read a lecture you gave in a seminar where you
challenged the status quo of how easily we accept
dogmas. You commented on the fact that there is a
negative image surrounding art in public debate. And
this is a widely repeated statement, so much so that
nobody now questions it. You asked, and now I ask you:
what is the solution? You gave a solution, a proposal
to change common discourse and reclaim a different
perspective and change the way things are understood...
I think about the ways we can reclaim art as an act of public importance.
“The New Forest” for me is a very inspiring project, just by showing
how much the art we are doing is already so inter-connected with so
many different domains in society. The people we are working with are
inside that society. The people who are coming into our performances
160
are inside, substantive and play an active part in that society. They are
labourers, doctors, scientists... They are from all fields of society.
I propose a metaphor. Let’s imagine we are in a theatre and there is
a curtain which goes up. From the audience’s side we always have
the impression that actors appear, the curtain goes up and reveals the
actors. But from the actors’ perspective, one could say the curtains go
up and it is society who appears. Actually it is the society that appears
inside the theatre - I am talking about theatre, but we can more broadly
talk about art. I would say that art also makes society appear, and
brings people together in this temporary community, which is looking
at or experiencing art. What we want to do is to put the focus on this
apparition of society inside art. I think a lot of the focus has been on
actors. In this sense, if we talk about financial support for art, we are
talking about financial support for the society to have these temporary
communities think about life and be challenged about life or challenge
the artists about their views on life and society. This is art, and society
is already there. With “The New Forest”, the only thing we do is pull the
perspective more onto this social process, which is part of the arts or
experiencing the arts. For now, I would say this is my positive approach
to giving the arts its rightful place in society.
THE ART OF CREATING
PUBLIC SPACE
In an article you wrote in 2013 about how theatre
is doing, you defended the following idea: “the
decreasing support of the arts by governments
161
doesn’t mean there is a decrease of power because
there is an increase of public interest in the arts”.
On what do you support this statement?
I challenged that idea by turning that concept around and showing,
with facts and figures, that there is actually increasing support towards
the arts. This argument that art is losing power is basically bullshit,
but then the question remains: “why should we think art is something
people care less about?” It all has to do with public goods. If we talk
about a main political economic discourse, then all that is defended
in society is people seen as free entrepreneurs, related to what people
commonly refer to as a neo-liberal discourse. I refuse and reverse this
idea with the simple fact of noticing that there is an increasing need for
people to create public space and not private space.
What we see right now is that everything – society in general – is being
argumented or thought, especially in mainstream political discourse,
as a gathering of individuals perceived as entrepreneurs with their own
private interests. If everybody follows their personal interests, as is
understood in liberal discourse, we will have balance in society, which
we would call the good life. In this case the good life is the good lie.
My challenge is that there is need for more public space. This is the
place where there is no preconception of what that space can be. It is
the place where people have coincidental encounters with other views
in life. I think that is the meaning of the public space which finds itself
at the heart of democracy. We should have this public space where one
can meet other real people, other real opinions, where we feel happy to
be challenged in our own ways of thinking.
162
In this article I show that there is an increasing interest to engage in the
arts and we can say this means that people are in need of more public
spaces where they can challenge their own ways of life or of thinking.
That is what I could say on a philosophical level of what my thought is
about: the re-acknowledging and protecting of the public space. It is not
about thinking that public space is a waste of space, which should be
filled with the private interests of entrepreneurs, etc...
THE EXPERIENCE
OF BEING THE OTHER
I hear in that statement a defence for each civilian
to encounter another person with a different
perspective, but symbolically it is also the role of art:
this repeated cliché, in which I greatly believe, that
live arts, performing art and are the last resort for
bringing people together in a shared experience with
different perspectives and possibilities of life. Do
you agree?
Yes. When I was a little boy I always dreamt of being an actor and when
I was a little bit older I considered it not actually a very good idea. But
when I was 8 I thought the perfect job for me would be to become an
actor. I thought that if I was an actor, I could also become a policeman,
a fireman, etc. I could be all these people in society. In this idea is what I
feel about art, still today: art can really address all these different aspects
and points of view and that is really the power of art in its essence. It
can dress up and engage with so many different, interesting aspects
163
of life. In art you can be a policeman, and... whatever..., and you can
always look for things, and experience being someone that you are not.
Can you develop the idea of what the role of art is in
this defence of the public space?
I think art presents a discourse inside public space. Art organises the
public space because it puts the focus on a certain theme, being life and
death or a very specific political subject, or... I think it puts a focus on
filling this public space temporarily with meaning. Also doing an art
project means creating this public space. So I see art in its essence as
a public phenomenon which is never finished without a public. It is in
its essence a public and not a private phenomenon. Art is something
you cannot enjoy only for yourself, you have to share it with others,
otherwise there is no art at all.
BREAK UP OR LOVE
IN THE LAST TRANSITION
Going back to the beginning of the conversation
and “The New Forest” project: do you propose
an alternative new society resulting from your
investigation?
To answer I have to describe how the film develops and how it ends.
During the film “Transition is the Mission” we see the other projects
artists create. Besides the “Tuinder” app there are three other projects.
One is called “Tear Bar”: a café, bar, where there is a place for failure,
164
sorrow and grief. Where people come together basically to cry. It is like
a juxtaposition or answer to this society where we always have to be
successful, happy and positive. We started this “Tear Bar” concept in
the film, but it becomes too successful and too happy and people are
enjoying themselves too much in the bar. So you see, this alternative
project that gets out of hand. Similar to what happens with “Tuinder” is
that the very good ideas are being hijacked by big corporations. There
is an actor that lets himself be hijacked by a big corporation, so he is a
sell-out in a way because he smells and goes after the big money.
There is another project about assisting the lower classes in the south of
Rotterdam, which is really a disadvantaged area. One of the actors goes
there and tries to help people out of the whole swamp of bureaucracy,
but she becomes stuck in bureaucracy all day. The fourth project is
called “Action/Department”. This is about very extreme actions, about
consumerism and big corporations. One of the actors organises protest
demonstrations but they become more and more fundamentalist, so he
also becomes marginalised.
By following the four projects, which the film does, we see that they are
actually becoming successful but too much so, which sometimes just
creates loneliness... So we see both sides while we follow the group.
When we get to the end of the film, the group is not being held together
anymore. They decide to break up and stop everything. So they worked
for 14 years but during this last transition they cannot find each other
anymore. And in the last scene, there is a terrible breakup as one of
them is moving to Italy, while the others are going on by themselves,
which is very unfulfilling.
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It’s quite hopeless.
Yes, it seems like that, but the very last shot is when the four are together
again looking for a new place to start a new project. So basically, the
answer in the film is that we show failure, but also continuation because
people do not want to give up and there is a strength that resists all in a
good working relationship. This sounds very corny, but at the end love
will prevail. At the same time it is also very ambiguous. At the end there
is this question of whether it was all worth it, and if they went too far...
I think the question is not whether we should or should not continue.
We have to continue, there is no doubt about that, but failure is also
part of the process, and it is important to look at failure. So, I would say
it is not a happy ending but an open ending. They start with a utopian
idea, most things fail and some things work out. Utopia fails, but at the
end, at least they don’t give up on it, even if it is different. There is a
lot of damage we do when we are attaining utopia, but perhaps there is
also some collateral good. So I would say the film is not about collateral
damage but about collateral good.
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Curated by TRANSFORMA
A BODY
MADE
OF BONES
(SCIENCE)
AND BLOOD
(ART)
A conversation between
Gil Penha-Lopes
(GPL, biologist)
and Vera Mantero
(VM, choreographer and dancer)
ABOUT WHAT IS UNKNOWN
Gil Penha Lopes: I feel today we live, mainly in the western world, in a
heartless society. We see but we do not feel. People often know what to
do, but there is no urgent panic that gives them sleepless nights, unless
they do what they know they need or should do. I feel it’s through art that
this state of things can change.
With a group of international partners, we founded ‘ECOLISE’ (European
Network for Community-Led Initiatives on Climate and Sustainability)1. It
is a network that works as a platform of initiatives and projects which are
local anchors and structures that promote events on this subject matter.
Although mainly targeting international networks of local initiatives, two
founding members are not network initiatives: they are the Foundation of
the Faculty of Sciences in Lisbon (Portugal) and the European Association
for Information on Local Development - AEIDL (Belgium). Interestingly
it was these two that started this whole process while the latter was
creating a monitoring report of what is happening in Europe. They spoke
to me because at the Faculty we had created the “Converge Network”1
in Portugal, and they wanted to create a European map of
the networks that promote the ‘Great Transition’.
Vera
But getting to you, Vera: How do these
Mantero:
scenarios enter the world
Actually I do not know
of contemporary
exactly. That is what I am looking
dance?
for, what I am trying to understand. One
of the things the project-performance-installation
“More for less than for more” (2014) meant, was that we had
an artistic event which includes sustainability initiatives. In
A BODY MADE OF BONES
(SCIENCE)
AND BLOOD
(ART)
169
this case it was important to work on the imperative of getting
food back into the city. It was an action contrary to the trend
of what is happening with food, which is being increasingly
produced away from the place where it is consumed. Therefore,
one of the initiatives was to create permaculture gardens in
the centre of the city of Lisbon. But there was performance,
dance, music... This was produced by two theatres in Lisbon,
Culturgest and Maria Matos Theatre, although most of the
activities happened outside the theatres themselves.
In fact, I don’t have an answer to that at all. I know I want to
work with those questions, but I do not know exactly how to do
it in the context of art. We have set the hypothesis of the artistic
context being a pretext to create sustainability initiatives in
the city. We thought there could be workshops on how to build
mini-producers of wind energy. We wanted to touch some of
those issues. For example, how can we live a more sustainable
life, without leaving the city, without having to move to an ecovillage? The idea was to make a radical activist change.
On the anniversary of Culturgest (2013) we occupied all of the
large auditorium - both audience and stage - and set up a brick
construction from an organic fertilizer workshop on the stage.
People who wanted to take part had to take off their shoes
and step on the wet mass of clay. This action had the symbolic
purpose of, in communion, building the stone foundation, the
first brick of a possible future house... These concerns have
been present in my artistic creation, on and off the stage. It was
interesting because it was more user-friendly. People literally
170
dipped their feet in the mud. There were people who went there
and kept their feet full of mud and just let themselves be, lost
in conversation. It was like the kitchen at parties. In terms of
sensitive experience it is very nice, it feels like a foot massage…
DANCE
IN PERMACULTURE GARDENS
GPL: It is interesting because we have transformed tools and being,
dehumanising tasks. Painting a house, making wine or building a wall. All
activities were complete in themselves and involved the body, sharing,
conversation... It was a full experience of body and mind. And we separated
them. Today painting a wall is a physical job. Many years ago it was also a
social work, shared with friends; or spiritual, in the sense that the person
was with his or herself, opening up a space for introspection. Now it is
purely functional because it has to be effective and therefore done
as fast as possible. Before, it invoked other experiences
VM:
connected to the act of doing; other senses,
So there
and other consciousnesses of
are all these posinvolvement in the act
sibilities that I am considerof doing...
ing. One is art as the trigger to create environmental sustainable initiatives, and
then put art in the middle of life. It was what I was trying
with “More for less than for more”. I really wanted movement
and dance happening in the middle of the cabbage. There is
this image I wanted to create which implied seeing a body
in motion, with an aesthetic thought, although still at a very
initial stage of construction, alongside cabbages and lettuces.
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Body and food mixed in the same framework. Something of
substance is being activated there. One hears texts beside the
food that is still in the land, which is not yet in the basket, not
yet in the market to be sold... This was important for me: being
together.
In that same year I did a performance at the “Festival Todos
- Caminhada de Culturas”, also in Lisbon, within Parliament,
because I had read the book “Prosperity Without Growth:
Economics for a Finite Planet” by Tim Jackson, where he states
that more equal societies are less likely to be consumerist
societies. We have to make a move to a greater equality not only
motivated by a social or ideological quest, but also because it
is an environmental issue. Equality is an environmental issue.
I found this to be very interesting.
Tim Jackson spoke of “The Spirit Level” by epidemiologists
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, where they defended the
spirit of equality. One aspect that I found very interesting was:
it is better to be rich in a more equal country than in a more
unequal country. I think this is information that the rich should
have in order to contribute more to equality. Usually it is those
at the bottom of the social scale that fight for equality. The
book is made up of statistics and graphs and one of the facts it
reveals is that the health of the rich is much better in a more
equal country than in a more unequal country. In that context,
the life expectancy of the rich is greater. In this festival I gave a
lecture-performance which is not yet sufficiently artistic.
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GPL: What does that mean: “It is not yet sufficiently artistic?”
VM: It is around 80% lecture and 20% art. If I compare this with
another lecture I give, “The Serrenhos do Caldeirão, exercises
in fictional anthropology” (2012), it is more balanced with the
artistic side. I have more artistic actions in the lecture than in
the other on equality and inequality.
ART AND LIFE
GPL: Those boundaries are complex. Everything has to be imbued
with art, as everything has to be imbued with science. If you visit the
oldest eco-villages, everything the people living there built - the houses,
the gardens... - are artistic pieces. The most emblematic example is
Damanhur2, an eco-village in Italy where residents excavated temples
inside a mountain at night, by hand. They worked during the day. In
addition to the extraordinary beauty of this temple, they built their ecovillage houses only in metal or wood. So many of them spent the night
digging. When it became public this was happening, the police intervened
and forbade them to continue because what they were doing was legally
considered destruction of natural heritage. It was forbidden. There, one
of man’s masterpieces was born. People who knew nothing of art made
stained glass, carved sculptures... Everything there was born from living
daily in a creative state of mind. It’s not just a matter of wanting to be
more artistic or thinking that making a square, white house is boring. It
has more implications than that. It is probably also ineffective. So there
are also scientific facts to consider. If we look at a flower, we think God
is an artist or the seed is an artist. However, the wonders of the flower
and of other elements of nature, are filled with science: in the shape they
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grow, in their colours, in the placement of the leaves with one on top of
each other forming a spiral, etc…
Another very important aspect is that we must all be more truthful and
genuine than we are today. It is the only way to achieve two objectives.
One is to stop being cynical and false to each other. This alone may result
on meetings which take five hours to come to a decision and then nothing
happens. The worst example is meetings between scientists who have all
the data, who know that the planet is warming up, with all variants and
consequences well identified. The meetings take place, two years go by
and nothing happens. People who attended the meeting were not truly
there. If they had been there it would have been impossible to receive
knowledge of this data and not act. It’s similar to knowing that there is
genocide in our home town. There is a meeting because of it, and at the
end of the meeting they only think about where to spend their holidays.
We are either disconnected or in favour of the genocide happening.
Assuming that it is not the latter, we can only be disconnected. I think that
in a healthy way, art reconnects us with us, with others and with the world
around us. This is crucial, even when it might generate conflicts. Because
if we are reconnected we may react more. But maybe we have to have a
period of conflict. Maybe we need to ‘beat each other’ in order to free
ourselves from whatever it is that does not allow us to be and act
upon this information that science is bringing us. The
VM:
information is not reaching people, because
And how
a lot of scientific information hits
can we fight this
protective shields.
state of affairs? How do
we articulate proof and validation of
facts which science provides, with the input of
people from different fields of knowledge?
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GPL: It is something I value but includes a problem of which we are aware:
it is not only objectivity that will drive us out of here. In transition groups
[in the “Great Transition” workshops], I say, “if we create a vision with the
interception of all our visions, the more people we bring into our sight
the smaller the vision becomes. This is because the common intercept
is increasingly smaller. We end up having practically no common vision.
What we need to create is a co-vision, which is the result of a combined
overview of different points of view and not a reduction of what we share
or agree. I do not want science to be the ‘science of almost nothing’. We
still have a connection with different social areas but there is the risk of
reaching a point where not even science can make this connection.
VM: But going back to the idea that everything has to be
imbued with art and science. Ultimately, and with the context
of our conversation as a reference, does it still make sense
for artistic and social forms to involve the ritual of going to a
theatre, watching a show, doing art for the sake of art?
GPL: One does not invalidate the other. It makes as much sense as the
scientist continuing to have his lab where he does specific experiments. But
this example is more associated with the creative process or the moment
of rehearsal or creation of a show in studio... Perhaps the performing arts
are more similar to a scientific conference where we end up transmitting
what we worked on in the lab? However, as science brings information to
an audience, the show also seeks to bring a process, of transformation or
not, to an audience. For me, art has two important aspects: the awakening
of the individual, activating awareness and sensitivity in the individual,
and the fact that it is communal. Why do people feel good when they go
for a walk in nature? Because what there is, is art. That’s what I feel.
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VM: Art used to be more part of everyday life. I am also thinking
about handicrafts. For example, many of our everyday objects,
a spoon for example, had a strong individual component of
investment; creative, sometimes even artistic. Everything was
much more ornamental. It’s something that only lives on in
handicrafts. They offered me a beautiful wooden spoon from
Serra da Estrela (north of Portugal), with a small sculpture on
the handle. When you find an object such as this one, it stands
out, it is extraordinary, and it becomes in itself an event. But
traditionally, before, this was everywhere. I relate handicrafts
with folk rituals which still exist. The artistic, in a broad sense,
was more present.
I have been working with other artists on a scheme which
explores how to open ‘that thing’ which I cannot define in
humans but which implies a more refined sensitivity and
artistic availability. I tried to answer the question: “What is the
wealth of spirit?”. The question began long ago, around 1997...
and it was being built with the dancers and collaborators who
were working with me. They were adding things. At the same
time, as it was being built, we realised that it is a scheme that
attempts to answer other questions: What is important in life?
What is it worth? What must we remember, celebrate, point
out, name? What makes a person want to live? What makes
us vibrate? What brings out desire? What produces this
vitality? What are we doing in life? What is a life well lived?
All this actually has to do with things that open other places of
possibilities in us. Like any scheme has its problems, I feel that
what might be called ‘a practice’ was kind of lost here. There
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is here a significant place for the body, being the place which
provides us with activation of the senses and thought, and
intensifies the relationships with all that is around us. There
are proposals for practices about which you can stimulate that
body into motion. All this has to do with what creates energy,
movement, intensity and desire, and that creates meaning.
Recently we built another scheme. We’d been reading the
German sociologist Norbert Elias and the book “On the
Process of Civilisation”. He argues that when, in the history
of the world, the notion that it is better to have good manners,
appeared with etiquette manuals in the XVIII century, the
type of economy and political organisation we have today
also emerges. For him, good manners result in the closing of
the body. One cannot say bad words, cannot burp, cannot say
what is in one’s mind. It is very interesting when he associates
this closed body to the emergence of a political and economic
structure that has now been established. The scheme we
started to build addressed that: a capitalist economy is related
to a closed body; an alternative economy corresponds to an
open body. This was a working hypothesis. This is all still in
rough, I do not know exactly where it goes…
When we did “More for less than for more”, we were designing
it in a way which allowed us to try to understand what, in art
and life terms, we should propose through our artistic work,
realising more what we wanted to defend. It also had a lot to do
with understanding how to mitigate greed. How do you override
these trends that are very present in people in general?
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At the end, there are some artistic endeavours because we
start to find some ideas of possible answers to these questions.
This body is closed and aseptic. ‘Good manners’ means being
clean. It is the image of sweeping under the carpet. Hence,
I think there’s a lot of art that has to do with the opposite of
this; a strategy to criticise the concept and open the body. I
am referring to art that has to do with dirt and dissonance.
That has nothing of this aseptic quality, it wants to raise the
carpet, because they can no longer handle this cynical attitude
of sweeping under the carpet.
ART AND SCIENCE
AS A HUMAN BODY
GPL: What I often feel, in relation to what you’re saying and which makes me
react is: any system tends to be in balance. This can lead us to understand
why we’re all so separated from the centre. In a group, if there is someone
very organised, there must be someone more disorganised. One is more
cognitive, others are more emotional, etc... This logic is behind the ‘Theory
of group transitions’, which implies realising that within the group there
has to be diversity in order for there to be harmony. Often when society
is one thing, art tries to counterbalance and reveal something else, the
opposite. And opposites create conflicts that do not exist by themselves.
There is a greater organism that encompasses this smaller sphere that will
create the balance. When we are apart, we have the feeling of being in
conflict, but the whole being is always minimally balanced.
If art is only subjective thought, alternative, etc., then maybe science is
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quite clean, organised, proper. It is as if we were at the top of a board
which has only one equilibrium point in the middle. What I find important
to start to do is to go into the middle, but we will only manage to do this if
we do it all at the same time. I think the exercise we should undertake in
a coordinated manner is not so much to demonstrate opposites,
because they would move further and further away from
VM:
each other, but begin to take steps towards
But dothe centre. And I feel that this
esn’t that mean
is more difficult than
conforming to the standdeparting.
ard? Submitting to dominant trend?
Reproducing the monotony of what has already been done and already established? Because art
claims precisely the value of the margin, of the difference.
GPL: No, because reality is multidimensional. The more we approach the
centre the more we find ourselves on the ends. It is the logic of Eastern
thought, where everything is paradoxical, and the logic of quantum
physics; it is one thing and then, when tested, another. Today we live much
more in competition for monogamy, individuality, always very far apart
from one another. If we come to the centre in a balanced perspective, we
begin to collect all the colours in the centre... So it depends on how it is
seen. The centre is the singularity of multiplicity.
I often use the metaphor of the human body. We have millions of cells,
many completely different from each other. Bone cells have a fixed
structure, they do not move, are highly conservative in their whole
functional processes, with great longevity. We have other cells in the
human body, which are individual and traverse the whole body, carrying
oxygen and ’living’ for 180 days. This set of cells can create a highly
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harmonious system, whose total is more than the body itself. I know we
have to be able to create a society that is highly diverse in its characteristics
and properties, individual and intrinsic, but united to the point of being
interdependent of each other. There is a confidence level that is required
for the survival of the organism. In human systems, if there is this trust,
we can go beyond the level of survival being able to reach other levels of
human potential. For me, the interesting paradox is here: we have people
that behave like bone cells: conservative, family people, where there is a
structure, good etiquette, etc... Other people behave like blood cells and
have all but this etiquette and structure.
For me science is bone cells, and perhaps muscle. It might also be the
cognitive and the brain. In this metaphor, art is the blood cells, the
heartbeat, that nurtures the whole human body. Some argue that the
heart is much more than just the pumping of blood cells, that it also
creates a magnetic field which harmonises a whole other dimension of
being.
I know that without art we will not do this ‘Great Transition’, which is
why I have tried to bring art to science. We are at a stage where there is
already relatively accessible knowledge, but it must be inspiring. It has
to do with adaptation measures but it has to be done in a way that the
adjustment made is not measured by its effectiveness, because it has more
biodiversity, or is cheaper. The change has to happen because it makes
sense to people, because it is good, because that is the world where that
person would like to live. Behind all this there is a lot of science, but it is
important to be concerned with communicating it in a friendly manner
for people to implement it.
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Art has to help communicate information, to inspire and demonstrate that
inspiration artistically, to be transported into the most profound being of
each person, so everyone can be an artist. Better: an artivist, an activist
artist, something of this kind. We spend time devoted to what we love
without effort. This is how the transition has to be made: with passion. I
think science cannot reach that level of commitment.
ART AND THE GREAT
TRANSITION MOVEMENT
VM: I still insist on the question of how art can be more part
of life. It was great in “Introductory Course To Transition”,
overseen by you which I attended, because I realised what was
at stake in the transition process, what the initiatives were, to
work on making people more open to the question, to create
curiosity, to explore a wide variety of materials, for example
‘language’ or ‘space’. It was interesting because I had been in
another initiative with similar objectives where we artists did
not know what our role was very well. People from the water
resources, from agriculture, everyone had an important and
clear function. And I felt: “I really want to be here but I do
not know what I am here for. I’m good for nothing here.” It
was hard to realise the function of the artist in that context.
In your course it became clear. But there is one question that
remains: in concrete, where does art come in?
In Graça, one of the oldest and most charismatic neighbourhoods in Lisbon, we have a super-initiative of transition. The
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neighbourhood is very involved, there are many gardens, many
relationships created with the concept of proximity of culture,
the buildings take advantage of rainwater, there is
GPL:
already the use of renewable energy... But
I answer
where does art go? Does it come in
you with a question:
to post-work activities?
Where has art been, concerning
It is not clear.
saving our planet?
VM: If we look at the history of dance in the twentieth
century, the whole series of movements of the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s,
the early decades of the century when all is revolutionised, and
then in the sixties and seventies... there is a lot of movement
in dance in these times related to the communities. There is
the departure to the countryside, gardening... Followers of
Laban, the German Expressionists... Not only do they perform
shows on stage and in unconventional spaces, but they try to
create another form of life. There is a mixture of art and life.
There is the great utopia of the 30s, which deals with and
more profoundly activates the body, wherein the release in
the body occurs. We see photos of that decade and they are
all naked people running in fields, living in communities and
growing what they eat. There are folk dances that still preserve
part of this essence. This ritual expression interests me a lot
but it is true that with the evolution of human history, art has
been separated from the ritual, if we think of ritual as popular
expression, such as folklore. This aspect has always interested
me. There was a time, when I began to choreograph, that I had
a boyfriend who was studying anthropology and used to bring
home videos of dances from Amazonian tribes. These are lives
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where all expressions of being are in unison, all intertwined. I
saw the videos and said, “This is what I want, it’s all connected.”
I came to say I wanted to move to a tribe. Then there is also an
extreme experience of this ritual where people go to other states
of consciousness, entering into other states of relationship with
space. There is art which also does this. But what I loved was the
fact that it happened in the normal daily lives of those people
and not in the context of something targeted as ‘a crazy bunch
of artists’ who are allowed to behave in what is considered most
times a strange way in a society, within a controlled frame,
where those practices and behaviours are acceptable.
I come from a very bourgeois family, for me some guys rolling
in the mud making strange sounds together is radically the
opposite of the life of the petty bourgeois. And that’s what we do
too, or at least it is the kind of art that I practise. We have always
been going to this kind of place, searching for these other states
of consciousness, other types of relationships between people,
other perceptions and experiences of the body, of different
bodies’ relationships to space ... It is researching persistently in
order to be able to have a life that is not only standing, sitting
and lying down. Where sometimes legs are thrown up into the
air and the head upside down. But poetry is also this, moving
the word upside down, changing the order of words, putting
them in places where they should not be, putting one word next
to others in a way that does not make sense... Or we can create
a new order in an apparent disorder. This existed in the ritual
and the ritual was part of life and yet, meanwhile, there was
this division and now it’s all separate.
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PARTICIPATORY ACTION
RESEARCH ART/SCIENCE
GPL: Your essence corresponds to what, in science, we call participatory
action research. This expression helps combat the need for scientific
research to be separated from all action and participation. One thing I
feel is that humanity has to know how to integrate. What does this mean?
The answer is the same as the answer to your question: “How can science
and art be integrated into daily life?” Maybe one day it will be through
something called participatory action research art.
I like to bring art to science. In one of the conferences I organised, I invited
musicians, but I knew then I was approaching it at an initial stage; it would
be more to communicate data and scientific information. But I want to go
further. I would like to use art as ‘scientific methodology of knowledge’,
although I do not yet know exactly what this means. We have an objective in
science. The concept of participatory action research implies abandoning
full objectivity and dilutes the separation between the researcher and his
object of study. The object of study becomes the reality, and the reality
is objective and highly subjective. Taking all this into consideration, the
participatory action tries to apply a minimally objective methodology.
We need someone who is somewhat on the outside to
VM:
see what is going on, it may be through the
It seemed
use of cameras or some sort of
you were describdocumentation of what
ing a rehearsal when you
people share.
spoke of the need to film because we
are in a creative process and afterwards you
need to go out and look from the outside to analyse and
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build something from what we experimented. I use improvisational processes; sometimes we enter other states of consciousness. For this reason, even when I am creating, when I
am at ‘the moment of doing’, I have no capacity to see exactly
what I’m doing. And I am talking about dance, where we’re
even more within what we are doing. We are inside and we
are the thing we are doing in itself. It is essential, afterwards,
to look from the outside. I create many pieces this way. I often select material from what happened in improvisation and
use excerpts of it, sometimes I rework what has already been
done...
GLOBAL WARMING
IS A NEW GLACIAL PERIOD
GPL: We build possible climate change scenarios. These are challenging
areas in real contexts. These scenarios correspond to what science can
currently say about the subject. But what we call ‘global warming’ can
easily become a glacial period. There are mechanisms of the complexity of
the planet Earth which guarantee that what we think is going to happen,
can change completely. It even means we can quickly switch to cooling
down, and we have clues which indicate in that direction, as is the case,
for example, of the frozen mammoths found still with fresh food in their
mouths.
We do not know how this planet will react. Now, with what we know
and the information we have, there is a scenario that we can predict as
being likely to happen in the coming decades. With all these variants and
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imponderables, when I’m facing politicians, institutional agents, fishing
communities, for example, I feel a bit like an artist standing in front of
an audience of real people. I feel it has an impact that has
VM:
the potential of changing people. Similarly the
But what
rehearsal, when you are in the process
are these activities
of creation, can change
with these fishermen and
you as an artist.
other communities?
GPL: Research. It is this participatory action. I can tell you what it
means to me: it is to use science as a transformative process of society
in which my subject is not examined in the laboratory, for example, but
occurs in relation to concrete reality. The aim is not to make science elitist,
but to be in direct dialogue with reality, and make this reality – comprised
of individuals or groups of people – participatory. This implies there is
a part dedicated to education, involving several months of interaction
with different scientists. And it must be done by a multidisciplinary team.
This diversity allows science to communicate, receive and exchange with
reality. Usually I act when there is an issue that needs transformation. For
example, the coastal area of the sea has been rising slowly and suffered
a brutal erosion process. We have towns and villages by the sea, and we
have beaches, dunes, ecosystems... What I do as a scientist is propose a
specific question. For example: How can we properly manage this system?
What is the integral solution for this situation and what are the actions
and changes we need to undergo, which are the most likely to achieve
good solutions? Then I take scientific information on how a particular
system works, about what’s going to happen in the future, about the cost/
benefits of large measures. Later in the process, together with politicians,
residents, non-governmental associations, local universities, surfers,
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environmentalists... the knowledge is shared among all. Each one of us
has always only a partial knowledge of each subject, including scientists.
SCIENCE WILL PROVE
TO BE 95% WRONG
GPL: I find it interesting that science can be one of the few groups
respected by the various classes of society. Sometimes I feel there is a
difficulty in getting people to believe it will be useful, but on the other
hand it is one of the few groups that I do not have to prove and it is quite
easy to have meetings, either with politicians, residents of
VM:
a neighbourhood... It raises many questions, but
I also feel
it has not as many enemies compared
something similar
to other societal groups.
with art. This happened with
the construction of the permaculture
gardens. The fact was that an artistic proposal
opened many doors. We had a garden in the centre of
the city, in a wasteland, behind a set of buildings.
GPL: Do you feel, as an artist, that you have easier access to politicians?
VM: No. In that case it is different. Science is valued because it
has a solid and objective basis. At this level we are on opposite
sides. Science is credible, art is not. Art is part of the imagined
world, it is invented.
GPL: But it is more likely that what science says today, in a hundred years,
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will be proved to be 95% wrong. If there is a field of knowledge wrong
from the outset, it is science. Art, by its nature, is impossible to prove to
be wrong.
1
http://www.redeconvergir.net/
http://www.damanhur.org
The Federation of Damanhur, often called simply Damanhur, is a commune, ecovillage, and
spiritual community situated in the Piedmont region of northern Italy
2
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ONE
THOUSAND
YEARS
ABOVE
YOU
A Conversation about ‘Plunge’
Dialogue resulting of the collaboration between
Artsadmin and LIFT (London, UK)
In February and March 2012, IMAGINE 2020 partners LIFT and Artsadmin
commissioned Michael Pinsky to create the public art project ‘Plunge’ in London.
The project was an artist’s vision of a time, 1000 years in the future, when the
effects of runaway climate change have completely changed London. Pinsky
marked an imagined 28 metres sea level rise on three London monuments with
simple blue rings of light. Alongside the public installation, the artists’ group
DARTER (Chloe Cooper, Phoebe Davies and Louise Martin) were commissioned to
run an associated series of events with education and community groups, and
also created interventions alongside the ‘Plunge’ sites.
In January 2015, five members of the team behind ‘Plunge’ came together to
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IMAGINE 2020 - ART AND CLIMATE CHANGE — INSIDE VIEWS
revisit and reflect the success and problems of the project: Michael Pinsky (MP),
Phoebe Davies (PD), Chloe Cooper (CC), Judith Knight (JK), and Beki Bateson
(BB).
Judith Knight: LIFT and Artsadmin are the only two IMAGINE
2020 partners in the same city so it made sense to share a project.
We wanted to do something that was really visible so we asked
ten artists to put forward ideas. We assembled a panel to look
at the proposals and unanimously agreed that ‘Plunge’ was the
project to go for.
Beki Bateson: Another reason for joining forces was to enable us to
develop a large scale project. There are lots of brilliant artists doing
great work on climate change but it’s often shut away in a black box
theatre. We knew that working together, we could create something
really visible and to do this we quickly started moving towards a visual
artwork rather than something performed. Over the period of the
IMAGINE 2020 network we’ve seen that theatre often struggles with the
themes and concepts behind climate change. When we saw Michael’s
idea and his use of light and scale within the public domain we knew it
was the right project.
Michael Pinsky: The original proposal I put in was much
simpler – to put a blue line of light across several buildings
– but when I was asked to refine it, what I really wanted
was an idea which was much more efficient. So this idea
of drawing a long line seemed a really inefficient way
of getting the message across. And efficiency is really
important when you’re talking about ecology because this
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is really what a lot of ecological thinking is about. If you’re
inefficient you’re going to consume more. This is why I
gravitated towards the idea of using monuments which are
really charged with a sense of history and have an emotional
context which is linked to the idea of the expansion of the
British Empire.
There was a massive shift in my proposal before I was
interviewed by the panel, from something which was
didactic, showing where the water level will reach, to
something which is much more about symbols and icons,
and works on a different level altogether because these
monuments are already symbolically charged and the
work was just running on the back of that energy. This
way I gained so much more in terms of visibility because
the locations of the monuments are at focal points of the
city. Seven Dials Monument is really small and hardly a
monument at all, but it is surprisingly visible. I was amazed
how it would catch my eye when I was on Shaftesbury
Avenue, the reach of it was so much greater than just this
little ring. It’s quite incidental in terms of scale. The Duke
of York ring was a big piece to put up, and challenging from
a logistical point of view, but all of the rings were really
challenging from a political sense with the work we had to do
to get the permission to mount them.
JK: The reluctance of some people surprised us. Maybe we were
being naïve, but being optimists we thought everyone would be
keen to join us. The thing I loved about ‘Plunge’ was the simplicity
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of it, its beauty; the way it would catch the eye and the important
message it was giving. And of course we thought that everyone
would want to be involved and that we’d be able to put rings on
several monuments. It was much harder than we had originally
thought to get the permissions. It was such a shame not to use
Nelson’s Column (in Trafalgar Square) but the three we did
get were brilliant in different ways. One was right by St Paul’s
Cathedral, one in the centre of ‘theatre land’, which gave so much
more than its little size, and one very near Buckingham Palace.
Those three were incredible so it’s great we got those, but it was
hard to understand why everyone didn’t wanted to be involved.
MP: In retrospect, perhaps we could have approached
mounting ‘Plunge’ in a totally different way – building a
completely false narrative of what the project was about. Then
we could have got them up and then had a ‘narrative hijack’
at the very last minute. Being serious though, there is nothing
offensive about having these neon rings on the columns.
BB: We were also surprised about the narrative; because we work
artistically, it was exactly this symbolism which drew us to the project
and that made it incredibly exciting, engaging and public. And yet
when we started talking about the specifics of ‘Plunge’, people had real
trouble with our decision to work on an imagined future sea level height
of 28 metres in 1000 years, because no scientist would be willing to say
anything so specific about such a long time in the future, even though
of course we were actually trying to achieve the same goals. Because it
wasn’t ‘true’ to scientific research, we found that some people couldn’t
really make that leap.
195
MP: It was an interesting problem, and you can see this issue
in a lot of the comments in the newspapers about ‘Plunge’.
Obviously this kind of thing is a polarised position and
Marine (Thévenet, lead producer on ‘Plunge’ at Artsadmin)
always called it the ‘Achilles heel’ of the project. The project
isn’t about an actual figure, it isn’t about a thousand years. It
is just saying that if this happens, then that will happen. We
wanted to try and escape the conversation about the project
just being limited to the discussion of time and height.
BB: What I loved about the project was just the process of standing
by the Duke of York column and thinking “I could be underwater”. It
was that connection of the self to something that is just huge in terms
of scale and also global. And this was certainly one of the ideas we
were trying to engage people with. We were trying to create this selfawareness of our own individual roles which have an impact on our
climate rather than shouting down at people.
JK: You’re right. It is a very gentle piece, it wasn’t about pointing
a finger, rather a beautiful and gentle reminder that we need to
be thinking about climate change. Perhaps this is why we were a
bit naïve, because we were not solely concerned with the number
of metres or the height of London.
Chloe Cooper: This is interesting because we took the formal
quality of the work, the time and the height, as the subject of the
work, but also this connection of the self. Phoebe and I worked
with two young men from Centrepoint, a charity for young homeless
people, and we went to Seven Dials and hung around with them.
196
We talked about general current affairs and about different ways
you can express yourselves and be passionate. Naïvely I hadn’t
thought they’d have been engaged by reading about politics and
current affairs, but they were. We made this thing called a “Prop for
Reflection” and it was a long stick with a mirror taped on the end.
We did it so that the mirror reached just above the height of the
‘Plunge’ ring. I like this idea of looking down on yourself, where there
is this opportunity to travel a thousand years into the future and look
down on yourself.
Phoebe Davies: The reality of this was that it was me and Chloe
and these two lads and this really tall, thin wobbly stick on a
Saturday morning. It was really early so we’d had to get them out of
bed and take photos of ourselves reflected in the mirror. DARTER
had been talking about the way artists activate spaces and start
dialogue and conversations. With the different groups we worked
with, we wanted to look at the issues ‘Plunge’ raised and the main
thing we looked at was agency. Everyone we worked with came out
with different responses to this. One school we worked with made
fake documentation for the stealing of water across the school. It
was a real mix of simple documentations and actions. We worked
with London Metropolitan University and they performed actions
outside their building. For me it was interesting as the older groups
we worked with were able to have more agency and say what they
wanted to do. This was also especially the case in an educational
setting, as young people would often ask “are we allowed to do
this?” and “am I allowed to voice this?”, “am I allowed to act in a
certain way?”
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CC: So we were encouraging them to work with an alternative future
model. When you’re young you can feel like you don’t have the
ability to change. It was also really good to do things at the ‘Plunge’
sites as well because, as you say, it was a beautiful and quiet thing.
When we were there with the stick, people would ask us what we
were doing and so that was great to create a loud activity around it.
MP: There were lots and lots of tourists who would crowd
round the Duke of York column and wonder what it was. I’d
go up to them and tell them. And you certainly heard a lot of
people saying “What is that?”. London is very particular, for
example if you were doing this in Edinburgh or Manchester,
there isn’t such a huge tourist contingency, and where these
were placed, they were very close to ‘tourist land’ so it’s not
where London residents are generally going back and forth
to work.
PD: It’s also interesting to think about how works spread and this
piece was able to initiate a few things. Often work which is about
issues comes to people in a different way. London is complicated
because we are bombarded with images but art works still have the
power to start conversations.
CC: We did one project with free newspapers – with the copies of
the Evening Standard that were distributed around the columns.
When they are delivered they leave them by the bus stops so I
started drawing a ring around everything I could, on copies that
were going to get picked up later, as a guerrilla action. I was trying to
repeat the motif of the blue ring. There was a widely circulated image
198
of Adele giving someone the finger in the press and so I drew a blue
line around her finger.
PD: Giving people a voice is really interesting. How do you give
people agency to speak their minds? So some of the people we were
working with would write statements to politicians and then make
images of putting politicians in headlocks.
MP: The beauty of a project like this is that now we have
great images of ‘Plunge’, and a film, and these things can be
reinvigorated. I always envisaged that this would go somewhere else and pick up momentum from that.
[At this point in the text, we invite the reader to go online and watch the film at:
http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artsonline/151/plunge-on-film]
JK: We all thought that ‘Plunge’ was incredibly photogenic, and
that its beauty and the striking images would carry it in the press.
The initial film and photos were so stunning that we felt that
choosing this method rather than plastering posters around the
rings was better. The project needs to speak on its own and we
thought that it would and it does but of course there were a load
of things going on in London and it kept on being bounced out
of the papers. We were fighting with the coverage of the Occupy
movement and the Olympics coming up.
BB: Another thing we did which was successful was to give confidence
199
to other stakeholders. Everyone knows that the issues of sustainability
are important and this conversation within the sector has moved on a
huge amount. I definitely think that what we’ve been doing through the
IMAGINE 2020 network and ‘Plunge’ is part of that wider conversation
with people like the Arts Council and the Mayors Office. People were
genuinely pleased about the fact that we were doing this big public
piece of work when others were doing it with performance and debate.
Getting profile and visibility in London can be tricky but I think we
managed it.
PD: The fact that it was in the public realm is really important.
Work like this has to be public.
JK: We still talk about ‘Plunge’ a lot now. Every time there is
a talk about art and climate change people always refer to the
project, and the strong images really help with that. It is a really
strong piece of work.
PD: We did one activity with London Metropolitan University with
loads of different groups that we worked with. You ask a certain
question and say “stand up if you believe in this” and we did a
lot around climate change. For example “stand up if you want to
commute to school” or “stand up if you’re worried about being
employed post college”. Then we ask everyone to ask their own
questions and they are really broad. Here is a mixture:
“Stand up if you ever thought about giving up.”
“Stand up if you are a passive audience member.”
“Stand up if you ever thought of changing your sex.”
“Stand up if you understand critical reports.”
200
“Stand up if you want a good future for your children.”
“Stand up if you think gay marriage should be legalised.”
“Stand up if you have a practical way of reducing climate change
other than cycling.”
“Stand up if you have a spare room.”
“Stand up if you earn a living through art.”
“Stand up if you lie.”
“Stand up if you think art and politics don’t mix.”
“Stand up if you have ever hugged a tree.”
There are tons more of these but when we are working with groups
of more than 30 this just gives you an idea of the questions which
came out. What is key for me is the way in which this project can
engage people even if they don’t think they are concerned about
climate change or art and politics.
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WHO
OWNS
THE
WATER?
By Nevenka Koprivšek,
from Bunker (Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Society is constantly changing for good or bad. And so are we.
Access to new technologies and discoveries is making our lives easier,
longer, more interesting maybe, but also creating great discrepancy,
inequality and alienation amongst the people. Effects of economic,
social and environmental crises are simply multiplying and constantly
intervening with each other, pushing people to and over the edge.
We pretend that we have nothing to do with unacceptable human
tragedies such as, for example, farmers in India showing their drastic
suicidal protest against seeds corporations by drinking pesticides in
public squares; or hundreds of refugees drowning daily in front of our
very eyes at the gateway to Fortress Europe in the Mediterranean Sea.
The way we get used to it is even more unacceptable. What we do as
individuals, artists, cultural activists, and humans, may seem so little,
so insignificant.
I wonder if our sometimes too fragmented actions are just patches in
those grey areas of bad conscience, assisting the neo-liberal society,
giving even more power to politics overruled by big corporations
dominating the world. Although massive movements and protests
have been undertaken across the globe in recent years, little has
changed or been proposed: states of affairs have even regressed. The
questions to ask are: How can we fight against apathy and greed?
How can we shift apathy into empathy? Is this desire too idealistic?
The wish to run for the creation of new autonomous zones where
imagination and brave thoughts can possibly evoke new potentials?
A kind of permanent laboratory where new ideas can not only be
thought but also tested, where the wealth and resources could be redistributed and relations re-invented, trained for better times, for a
more humane society?
204
Our first attempt in terms of climate change issues in Bunker came
in 2007, just a few years after being put in charge of the new
space in Ljubljana - Stara elektrarna (Old Power Plant) - a technical
monument transformed into a performing arts venue. We organised
the open forum “Si(e)nergy”: a week of talks, workshops, films and
exhibitions on the theme of new renewable sources of energy and
relationships between arts, science and technology, where humanistic
and pedagogic approaches could be combined and stimulated by
art practices. I still remember that among artistic communities we
were somehow perceived as ‘new age - weirdos’ and these sessions
were mainly attended by already convinced environmentalists. We
quickly understood that paving the way to more attentive ecological
awareness was going to be a long process.
We put forward this worry and made an alliance with other
concerned partners from across Europe, co-creating firstly the
network, followed and enlarged by IMAGINE 2020 - Art and Climate
Change. This engagement empowered us not only through European
funding but also through the conviction that we were not alone in
the matter. At the same time we were faced with strong scepticism
and denial amongst local artists who were reluctant of an eventual
instrumentalisation for a cause. This may have been due to local
history, when artists were often used for political propaganda,
creating an aversion to receiving commissions for an already selected
subject, or being told which causes they ‘should’ defend.
At the start it sometimes seemed easier to invite already engaged
artists from abroad and place them with local communities as well as
local professional communities. Within that logic, we would invite
WHO OWNS THE WATER?
205
an artist or activist with a certain methodology, who would in turn
engage with the local community. Together they would research
a concrete local subject or local burning issue, such as in the case
of controversial American artivist Reverend Billy, who was invited
together with Aksioma in the frame of the Mladi Levi Festival, in 2012.
Through this collaboration, the polemic concerning water and to
whom it belongs in Slovenia was brought to the public agenda.
Working with a Slovenian team of activists, Reverend Billy learned
that Halliburton had acquired a hydro-fracturing concession with
financing from big Euro-banks. His recollection of that experience
can be read on the Aksioma site - Institute for Contemporary Art of
Ljubljana - where he stated that “Slovenia is famous for its water,
with its Teton-like mountains, lakes and streams and Adriatic beach”.
So our Mladi Levi Festival workshop concentrated on the elemental
force of water, so beautifully celebrated in the fountains of Ljubljana.
To read more about Aksioma and Reverend Billy visit the
webpage of Institute for Contemporary Art of Ljubljana:
http://aksioma.org/reverend_billy/
On that Friday we walked with bags of water up to the country’s
parliament, and washed the front door of the elected building, as
police looked on. Another thing happened: the mysterious quality
of this life-giving liquid created an experience that we are still now
trying and failing to explain; the fascinating expressive power of this
thing that we ourselves are made of. When we speak of ourselves, we
don’t self-identify as water. We call what we do “culture” or “politics”,
but – I propose – let the water speak. Let the water do the talking.
206
The message is unmistakable. “Earthalujah! Ljubljana!”…
The event did not provide concrete solutions for challenging the
profits-over-people-logic, but it did start the discussion and put the
issue on the public agenda. It had great media impact and raised quite
a polemical issue.
We have explored and addressed various subjects of climate change
in relation to the economy and social and political crises through
performances, but also through conferences such as “Still Ready to
Change?”. We have confronted artists and theoreticians, and combined
lectures or monthly talks in Stara Elektrarna about ecology in the
context of wider societal changes.
Besides raising awareness of issues of recycling or
behavioural patterns in various projects, we have, for
example, tackled the issue of global warming by Beton LTD
performance, with a tender critical utopia of how you can
adopt a polar bear and wash out the guilt of contributing to
consumerism.
The performance “So Far Away” has been largely accepted by young
audiences, which, not without reason, seem to be the most concerned.
We also commissioned the lecture performance “Double Game”, by
Slovene performer Katarina Stegnar, on the basis of the NEF document
“The Great Transition”. In the piece she addressed her personal
duality towards the issue and the document. We worked with schools,
especially in Maribor during the European Cultural Capital year, where
kids took over a part of the city in a kind of “City to be”. The scales or
WHO OWNS THE WATER?
207
impacts of projects varied greatly, sometimes going far deeper than we
had hoped, and other times further away.
One of the very first projects touched me in particular,
because of its simplicity. It was the photo exhibition
“Migranti” (Migrants), by Slovene artist Tanja Lažeti, who
went into a market and took photos of the fruits and
vegetables that everyone could buy in their neighbourhood.
One of the questions asked, quoting Irena Štaudohar’s text from the
Mladi Levi 2012 catalogue, was: “Do we ever ask ourselves where
exactly that healthy red apple came from when we bite into it with
great gusto?”
Similarly, as with real-life migrants, fruits and vegetables end up
in various files as index cards with their photographs, names, and
countries of birth. The exhibition “Migranti” likewise presents a
thorough catalogue-like inventory of various fruits, stating their
name, country of origin, and picture of their shadow and essence.
Every entry represents an image which narrates its own story of two
different worlds – the world of prosperity and the world of poverty,
the world of satisfaction and the world of hunger, the world it comes
from and the world it travels to.
We showed these photos one by one, next to their dark copy. To me
it was a constant reminder that the way we live, the way we eat, the
way we create, and our lifestyle can make someone else’s life very
dark and miserable. We have apples growing in the centre of the city,
behind the National Drama and we go to the supermarket to buy
(eco!) apples from Chile and garlic from China? It’s simply ridiculous.
208
Things have also been changing slowly but gradually. Let us say we
would all agree that a change or transformation in the way society
is organised is necessary and evident. I see artists, media and local
community consensually agreeing that something should be done, but
nobody knows exactly what or how. How do we go ‘beyond recycling’?
We now have an extremely efficient recycling system in Ljubljana;
we have changed our actions towards a greener attitude. We have
helped to engage local neighbourhoods in community gardening, we
still go to work on bicycles, we do not put heating on in our theatre
lobby (not intentionally, but for lack of money)… Even though we
realise our actions are far from enough, the more important question
of how to transform in a more collective and systematic way remains
unanswered.
Our overall aim may never be reached, but it is important to
keep trying and hold this small, caring and engaged artistic and
environmental community alive and vibrant. As Milton H. Ericson, one
of the most influential hypnotherapists of the past century, would
say, “our sub-conscience is much more positive than our conscience”,
so let us go forth with this positive thought and believe that by
continuing to raise our collective awareness, we may also improve
ourselves and society. Otherwise, the hammer option1 still remains
available.
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it”.
Bertolt Brecht
1
WHO OWNS THE WATER?
209
LOOKING
BACK
ON
IMAGINE
2020
By Christopher Crimes,
from Domaine d’O (Montpellier, France)
It all started perhaps with my involvement in Theorem
at the beginning of this century, a most enlightening
and enriching experience. That network made me
aware of just what high challenges the European arts
and cultural communities had to face in the push
to welcome more countries into an already highly
diversified Europe. It was obvious that economic and
social considerations were going to be at the heart of
the big change. So just how could – or should – we
position our institutions in order to allow as many new
commissions as possible to be made and above all to
be produced and toured? We were all highly convinced
and involved with the major challenge of sharing our
project with our colleagues, our team and above all
audiences. Festivals succeeded where institutions
had more difficulty in presenting Eastern-European
theatrical creativity.
Networking within Theorem was a most enthralling
adventure with great debates carrying highly differing
points of view on creativity, aesthetics, logistics,
economics, society... After completion of the Theorem
objectives and the transfer of responsibility and
organisation to our Latvian partners in Riga, many of us
felt that this productive networking experience should
be continued. What better follow-up could there be
than a European network who, through partnerships
with existing structures, would consider the question
of climate change and its devastating effects on the
212
planet which nourishes the ever increasing human
race? A network which also deals with the question of
how we can become aware of each person’s individual
responsibility for the rapidly diminishing resources
and increasingly high pollution?
Through two different venues, my personal experience
proved to be an incredible source of inspiration,
although much doubt and professional questioning
had also to be challenged.
As projects were emerging one of the first challenges
was to ensure that the whole team under my
responsibility became aware of the issues and
assumed their complete involvement in the project.
It is one thing to engage in a comfortable venue with
colleagues of similar thought and coming to some sort
of consensus; it is something completely different
when you are questioned in fine detail by your team
both on the pertinence and feasibility of the projects
with an audience not yet convinced that climate
change is an issue at all. We were definitely a forwardlooking group and each member had her/his own real
difficulties in putting the project forward.
Here in France it became rapidly obvious that there
were fewer artists and venues having pertinent
thoughts on the issues than in the UK, Germany or
Belgium for instance. The new building I was to open
213
in Angers was situated in a city that prided itself on
being environmentally friendly and the Mayor made a
strong point that certain aspects of the building were
to reduce CO² emissions. So we imagined a project
that could immediately communicate these thoughts
to as wide an audience as possible.
We managed to unite hundreds of eager spectators in
a weekend of debates, performances and exchanges
that really put the new theatre on the map for research
organisations, universities and schools. At the same
time the ‘traditional’artists in residence tended to coldshoulder the event, even criticising the very thought
that art could have a role to play in climate change.
My problem about just how to associate both audience
and decision makers in a sustainable manner was
firmly anchored in the way the team reacted to these
events. Misunderstanding was probably the major
factor but also perhaps lack of long and painstaking
dialogues with all to persuade them to adhere to our
convictions. We organised many family events and
major exhibitions which treated different aspects of
the human impact on the planet. “Of All the People
in all the World” by British team Stan’s Cafe using
grains of rice to represent the world’s population or
the french NGO Robin des Bois “Sea Monsters”, which
was made up uniquely of jettison, collected from
beaches around the French coasts. Audience interest
214
was highly encouraging even though the Mayor and
his team did not consider these events worthy of ‘their’
new Theatre!
When I left Angers for a new venue in Montpellier we
enrolled the Domaine d’O in the context of IMAGINE
2020. Owned and managed by the county council,
this magnificent park in the heart of the city was an
ideal setting to address climate change, biodiversity
and art. Among the memorable activities that we
presented were the first and only “Tipping Point” in
the French language, organised with the support of
Peter Gingold. We had an amazing number of very
generous contributions from research scientists and
the response and reaction from artists was most
encouraging.
“Tipping Point” worked to organise a panMediterranean event exploring the cultural context
of climate change and focusing on ‘water’: a theme
of urgent consequence to the Mediterranean basin.
We addressed the theme of water with regard to its
impact on climate change from an environmental,
social and economic perspective. The great interest
created among the university and research institute
leaders encouraged us to open the Domaine d’O to
regular and diversified debates and meetings.
Many artists accepted our invitation to residencies
215
that were inspirational, for life in the park itself and its
biodiversity was highly conducive to new work. Even
more satisfying in our view, was the welcome that
research labs gave to artists in search of confirmation
or contradiction of their creative intuitions.
Another fine event was the very first Summer Lab
for IMAGINE 2020. We had a really great response
from all our partners, especially scientific teams from
around Europe. The theme of ‘forests’ was explored
through all dimensions and the many workshops and
discoveries that we shared made a lasting impact on
the way we look at our woodland environment.
The major and final achievement during my time in
office, was having a 600-seat theatre built, integrating
all aspects of environmental protection. The initial
concept included future recycling of the building,
considerations about ‘grey’ pollution from the building
process, all wooden material used for building and
the overall concept of an ‘eco-friendly’ theatre with
low energy consumption, thanks to 100% LED lighting
or solar-powered hot water system. Thus everything
was perfectly planned and built and the construction
process took only seven months from start to finish.
Dialogue with production teams was an essential part
of programming the new theatre, because negotiating
the lighting plan from ‘classical’ tungsten ambience
to LED equivalent engages aesthetics and needs very
216
forward-looking approaches to which many theatre and
dance companies are not yet accustomed. It remains
the only 600-seat theatre in France to maintain a new
everyday approach to production and presentation of
the performing arts with the environment at its core.
This involvement with IMAGINE 2020 was a most
invigorating experience because I was able to converse
with many people from different spheres, that in
the course of my career I would never have had the
occasion to meet.
At present, I share my happy retirement in the south
of France with the running of Nature Addicts Fund a private foundation that encourages new work from
visual and performing artists inspired by Nature and
the Environment. At present we are preparing for the
COP21 International conference in Paris.
Overcoming doubt and convincing the sceptics
continues to be my credo!
IMAGINE 2020 (2.0) will surely open new roads for
research and involvement of audiences, both young
and old, in the transition process. I wish long life to the
many colleagues who pursue the project. I am pleased
to have modestly contributed to this fine network.
217
INTRODUCING
CLIMATE
CHANGE
TO
ARTS
IN
CROATIA
By Zvonimir Dobrović,
from Domino (Zagreb, Croatia)
Domino is the biggest independent art organisation in Croatia,
producing numerous festivals, commissioning works in the field of
contemporary dance and theatre as well as visual arts. We have always
been interested in cross-sectoral work in all our endeavours. IMAGINE
2020 as a network seemed like an excellent platform to continue
working in this way, with a specific content and topics in mind.
Before joining the network, our organisation Domino had already
addressed environmental issues and realised collaborations with
other associations and organisations that dealt with this topic.
However the participation of Domino in the frame of IMAGINE
2020 has opened many more possibilities for collaboration with
similar organisations at the international level, but also enabled
us to spread that knowledge in Croatia and the broader region.
IMAGINE 2020 has found in Domino a partner that stands for the
same ideas of environmental protection and sustainability as well
as a shared value of contemporary artistic practices and research
that goes with it.
With the projects that are realised through the
framework of IMAGINE 2020 between 2010 and 2015
Domino has made a constant effort to introduce the
notion of climate change into the public discourse in
Croatia. Previously these topics and questions weren’t
frequently addressed within the artistic community in
Croatia and its region.
That made our challenge even more demanding, because although
a few organisations were dealing with the environmental issues,
220
not one of them explored this area through art as a medium, nor
as a medium that could connect science and activism. Keeping that
in mind we also tried not only to focus on Zagreb as the capital,
but to expand our activities to other cities all over Croatia. We
tried to reach different audiences in the areas where the topics of
sustainability were relatively unknown to the public.
Our Perforations Festival, which is the biggest festival of live and
performance art in Croatia, created a platform for promoting and
reflecting on the ideas embedded in the concept of IMAGINE 2020.
The Festival seemed like a perfect match for reaching out to other
local artistic, activist and scientific communities in Croatia, outside
of Zagreb, as the festival takes place in three other cities as well:
Rijeka, Split and Dubrovnik.
Our diverse programme offers a wide range of performances from
the most established local artists to very young and emerging artists.
The programme is mostly made of commissions and collaborations
which the Festival initiates. The aim of the Festival is to give to
our artists, and consequently to the audiences, the opportunity to
explore and experiment with different artistic forms, ideas and
concepts. From the local authors we should mention some of the
Croatian artists who are regular guests of the Festival, and whose
work was part of the IMAGINE 2020 network: Damir Bartol Indoš
and Tanja Vrvilo, dance collective BADco, Montažstroj. Among
many international guests we would like to mention: Heather
Cassils, Igor Josifov, Nikola Uzunovski, Graeme Miller, Ana Catarina
Vieira, Matthew Day and performing collectives such as Maska and
VestAndPage.
221
We discussed the issues of climate change and
sustainability within the frame of our Festival most
specifically through two performative events: “Night of
performances” and “Invasive dinner”.
“Night of performances” became one of the major events at the
Festival with the simple concept of inviting up to 8 artists and
commissioning their new work for a site specific event. The works
could be anywhere from several minutes to several hours long. This
is an absolute audience favourite within the Festival. One of the
artists whom we have regularly supported was Željko Zorica, who
used to create huge elaborate events dealing with issues from food
production and consumption to environmental idealism.
“Invasive dinner
if you cannot beat the enemy, eat the enemy”.
It is a creative attempt to put two seemingly
very different topics together: gastronomy and
environmental protection. It is an entertaining,
creative and educational event during which the
spectators enjoy the culinary specialities prepared
exclusively from ingredients that are recognised as
invasive species. So, while learning what invasive
species are and how we can possibly prevent their
spreading in our ecosystem, the audience also enjoys a
very tasty dinner.
During the Festival we tend to organise workshops, seminars,
222
conferences, and other educational programmes which address and
discuss a certain issue. We have tried being as creative as possible
about these workshops and have developed a few interesting ones
in cooperation with different artists. Maybe the best example is
the workshop “Ecological origami” taught by Japanese artist Ayako
Miyake. This workshop was aimed at young children between ages
5 – 10 who made origami in the shape of different endangered
species, and through that process the kids became familiar with
some endangered plants and animals, while they talked about the
ways in which they can contribute to the saving of these species.
By participating in the network IMAGINE 2020
Domino was able to better collaborate with numerous
NGOs dealing with environmental issues including
Green Action Croatia which is the biggest and most
famous association of that kind in Croatia.
Together with the “Union of cyclists” we organised several lectures
and exhibitions with the aim of encouraging citizens to change
lifestyle habits and raise awareness of the harmful effects that
traffic has on the environment.
In the last five years as a member of IMAGINE 2020 Domino has
presented numerous works that have focused on environmental
protection. Domino’s collaborations realised through the IMAGINE
2020 network represent an enormous step in the discussion of the
issues of climate change, sustainability and the ecosystems of the
future in Croatia and the Balkans, and this is the pathway we plan to
continue in the future.
223
IMAGINE
THE
POLITICAL
By Guy Gypens,
from Kaaitheater (Brussels, Belgium)
The question is no longer whether there
has to be change. The question is whether
this change will come about as a result of
‘decline’ or ‘design’, of ‘frivolous neglect’
or ‘collective political responsibility’.
end of the Cold War. Blom says that
Europe did not throw itself en masse
In his book “The Vertigo Years: Change into the Great War because of omniand Culture in the West, 1900-1914”, present nationalist and thus pro-war
the German historian Philipp Blom sentiments, but rather because of a
points out a striking parallel between sense of inevitability, of fatalism, that
the years preceding WWI and the ensued from a lack of solid foundapresent day. Both these periods are tions and a serious uncertainty about
the future. Whereas
characterised
by
exceptionally rap- So the catastrophe of 1914 until that time past
id changes in soci- was due much more to a and future had been
ety. At the start of lack of imagination or, ac- linked by tradition,
the 20th century cording to Hannah Arendt, religion and authorit was the driving a lack of the capacity to ity, modernity made
power of moderni- think, or again, as Robert a breach between
ty that initiated the Musil put it, a lack of aware- the ‘no longer’ and
the ‘not yet’. So
dizzying
changes ness of possibilities.
the catastrophe of
and bowled over
old values. Nowadays we feel above 1914 was due much more to a lack
all the consequences of a capitalism of imagination or, according to Hanthat is bursting at its seams after the nah Arendt, a lack of the capacity to
I. A SENSE OF POSSIBILITY
226
think, or again, as Robert Musil put fell and the triumphal march of free
it, a lack of awareness of possibilities. and unregulated capitalism was really
This ‘awareness of other possibilities’ able to begin. The concepts of social
is now our most precious commodity. engineering and solidarity were increasingly associatThere is little point
in idealising an im- We know damn well that ed with dangerous
aginary past simply the prolongation of our utopian ideas and
all-controlling
out of a fear of the present individualistic lives an
future. It is plainly in the pursuit of endless state. Yet, in a not
dangerous to revive growth will saddle future so distant past,
old values only in generations with an insolu- this modern nation
order to escape the ble problem. We know that state had been an
complexity of the business as usual is no lon- attempt to give a
present.
ger an option. And yet we new form to human
cohabitation
and
still carry on.
to base it on more
II. INDIVIDUALISM WAS A MISTAKE rational foundations than previously.
We called this pursuit of such a nation
The eighties. Thatcher and Reagan. state the civilisation project. Power
When neoliberalism was born. The and politics were inseparably linked
Cold War was still raging and, in re- in this endeavour. After 1989 it beaction against the communist utopia came increasingly clear that power
of social engineering we were shown was gradually evaporating upwards
a society where the state was the into a sort of extraterrestrial no man’s
great enemy and the free individual land of global economic players. In
was the measure of all things. De- its turn, politics leaked down into the
regulation was the order of the day. level below, that of individual ‘life polThatcher declared that “There is no itics’. ‘Power’ created a place for italternative”. In 1989 the Berlin Wall self that was ‘independent’ of politics.
227
Politics established itself at the level blindness to the consequences of our
of the individual life, but without the individual actions also led to the historical termination
power to have any
effect. In the middle Fundamental questions can- of the generational
contract. The longstood the half-emp- not be ignored.
term shaping of soty house of the nation state. Thatcher Can people not be anything cieties had always
prompted
and Reagan were more than solitary actors in been
by the concern for
happy to watch it the utopia of avarice?
and anxiety about
happening. States
became less politi- Is there any other possible future generations.
cally run and more balance between market, This anxiety is still
today,
managed. Manage- government and civil soci- expressed
but it is no longer
ment also implies ety?
apparent in our acsocial engineering,
but without the ideals that go with it. tions. We know damn well that the
In the decades following 1989, the prolongation of our present individindividual allowed himself to be se- ualistic lives in the pursuit of endless
duced by a desire for ‘ever more, fast- growth will saddle future generations
er and cheaper’. There was little sign with an insoluble problem. We know
of the ‘rational egotism’ as proposed that business as usual is no longer an
by such neoliberal ideologues as Ayn option. And yet we still carry on. The
Rand. The individual seemed not to question is no longer whether there
care that the ecological limits of this has to be change. The question is
desire had been exceeded. The only whether this change will come about
true limits to all these desires was de- as a result of ‘decline’ or ‘design’, of
termined by ‘the market’, that free, ‘frivolous neglect’ or ‘collective politideregulated market, guided sup- cal responsibility’.
posedly by an ‘invisible hand’. The We have to see the renewed ques-
228
tion of whether social engineering is other ideals without at the same time
possible, chiefly in the light of both lapsing into Marxist or other twentian ecological crisis that is becoming eth-century utopian alternatives? Are
more and more visible and tangible by there any other possible social engithe day and of the excrescences of the neering practices? The answer to the
‘casino capitalism’ that came to light last question is in any case ‘yes’!
in the 2008 credit crisis. The serious- We see increasing numbers of
ness of these crises and the political such alternative practices appearauthorities’ inability to react to them ing around us. It’s all about ‘citizens
adequately is leading to the growth in action’ taking control, not as inof more and more centres of resist- dividuals but as communities. Such
simple questions as
ance that no longer
accept that the free Can the neoliberal utopia ‘what things do we
market denies us the of the ‘ego’ be replaced still want to do topossibility of ques- by other ideals without at gether?’ and ‘acting
tioning the imbal- the same time lapsing into together: how did
ances it has brought Marxist or other twenti- we use to do that?’
about. Fundamental eth-century utopian alter- have led to inspiring
actual practices. Toquestions cannot be natives?
gether, these pracignored. Can people not be anything Are there any other possi- tices do not form
unambiguous
more than solitary ble social engineering prac- an
whole, though they
actors in the utopia tices?
do operate within
of avarice? Is there
any other possible The answer to the last ques- a collective sphere.
This sphere is in the
balance
between tion is in any case ‘yes’!
first place one that
market, government
and civil society? Can the neoliber- involves ‘re-politicising’, discovering
al utopia of the ‘ego’ be replaced by the plenitude of alternatives.
229
dent for the cultural sector to seek our
right to existence in a ‘false economic
Eighty years ago the economist John equation’? Is it not much more our
Maynard Keynes warned of the lack task to show how essential it is to corof long-term values in our ‘blind eco- rect the equation itself? This comes
nomic equations’. It is self-evident down to fundamental criticism of the
that we have not heeded his advice. system and thus to adopting a politiThe notion of ‘short’ in ‘short-term cal position.
profit’ can nowadays be expressed IMAGINE 2020 has been, amongst
other things, an atin nanoseconds. A
thing only exists IMAGINE 2020 has been, tempt to motivate
if it has proven its amongst other things, an the cultural world to
immediate contri- attempt to motivate the take such a political
bution to econom- cultural world to take such stand, to rediscover
ic growth. Culture a political stand, to redis- art as a source for
too is breathlessly cover art as a source for re- resistance, discontidoing its best to sistance, discontinuity and nuity and awareness
achieve the same. awareness of other possibil- of other possibilities.
But would it be pru- ities.
III. A POLITICAL POSITION
Brussels, February 15, 2015.
230
LET’S
TAKE
ON
TOO
MUCH!
By Amelie Deuflhard, Uta Lambertz and Gregor Zoch,
from Kampnagel (Hamburg, Germany)
“Art and climate change – do they work together?” This was a question
we repeatedly came across during our five-year network cooperation
in IMAGINE 2020 – Art and Climate Change. Along with it the question
about the purpose of art in general arises – its role in society and its
scope of influence on non-art subjects such as science, economy and
politics.
Thus IMAGINE 2020 can be understood as a self-experiment: aside from
the specific question of how climate
change can be confronted with the
means and methods of art, the network cooperation always required
debating the partners’ own position
as art-production-venues placed in a
transforming society.
The goals of IMAGINE 2020 were ambitious from the beginning: for
accomplishing the necessary changes that are essential to stabilising the
climate on a long-term basis, projects were to be developed and presented
to the public that work on warning viewers and encouraging them to take
action; that bring together participants and audiences from different
areas of society; that give hope and motivation to rethink production,
consumption and cohabitation in the city in terms of sustainability; that
start with themselves and set a good example – projects that cause change.
Is that too much for art to handle? The answer can only be: Yes. Because
art is not economy, politics or science and it can never be coextensive
with them. It is an immoderate expression of hubris if art claims to be
able to change the world. And it’s precisely because of that – and this is
234
our thesis – that society needs art, institutions of artistic research and
projects like IMAGINE 2020.
Why? Because the purpose of art and
its institutions is to display contingencies and to irritate ingrained cultures.
Because it can show the world that
everything could be completely different: better, fairer and maybe more
beautiful. And because it can demonstrate to its viewers over and over
again that if they take the world as it
is, they bear the blame themselves.
Simply put: because it is art’s purpose
to take on too much. For itself and for
society.
In this sense Kampnagel has never understood itself just as an ‘art-temple’,
but always also as a space for discourse and utopia, as a productive
laboratory for ideas, as a think-tank and as a place for controversy.
Kampnagel is Germany’s biggest production venue for liberal performing
arts, with five halls, seven rehearsal stages, a foyer, a sound studio and
a restaurant. The dimension of the premises alone enables a variety
of different artistic approaches and formats: we work on new formats
that seek to explore contemporary forms of public life, communication,
interaction, participation and knowledge exchange. The venue is open to
society and its surroundings.
235
Kampnagel defines itself as an ecosystem of diversity, where artists and
visitors are confronted with unfamiliar
cultural contexts offering the people
of Hamburg possibilities of discussing sociopolitical questions with congresses, festivals and topic series.
Due to its cross-sectional working method, Kampnagel has a very
heterogeneous audience – in terms of culture and age – which leads
people to become curious about approaches, discourse and styles they
did not know of, by simple confrontation. The range of topics Kampnagel
is working on ranges from questions of gender, to the future of labour, to
ecological questions.
To exploit the potential of such a differentiated programme, Kampnagel
works with different cooperation partners and takes part in various
national and international networks that provide ideas and resources for
shaping topics and formats and are able to promote their dissemination.
In this context, Kampnagel has been a part of IMAGINE 2020 since 2010.
For Kampnagel, the network partnership IMAGINE 2020 – Art and Climate
Change is unique not only because EU-funding enabled a lot of challenging
projects: the topical focus “The Limits of Growth” of the Sommerfestival
2012 is just one example.
In 1962 ‘Club of Rome’ presented the
extensive study “Limits of Growth”,
showing irrefutably that every growth
236
reaches its limits, that unlimited
growth in a world of limited resources
is a figment of imagination, that eventually the tipping-point is reached and
without substantial setbacks there is
no coming back.
For four decades these certainties were present without anything happening. According to expert opinion, the tipping-point has long been exceeded, yet still everybody is talking about the dogma of growth. Starting with
this extensive study, various performances as well as a lecture programme
were invited to Kampnagel to examine the insatiable thirst for growth.
The event “Fully grown. A Marathon with 11 Perspectives on Growth”
presented different theoretical and artistic positions that dealt with the
end of the idea of unlimited growth. Academics and artists were invited to
talk, sing or dance about the necessity of social change. Political scientist
Ulrich Brand talked about new models of social wealth; artist Armin
Chodzinski presented a lecture performance about different definitions of
growth; Austrian artist Julius Deutschbauer founded a political neo-party –
sitting in a fridge and wearing underpants; German singer Peter Licht sang
songs about the end of capitalism; the performance group LIGNA offered
an audio tour along the tracks of the old Kampnagel crane factory; Bos
Temple-Morris designed an audio-drama about a hamster who doesn’t
stop growing; economist Niko Paech talked about the end of our system
which had defined itself in terms of an economy of growth and presented
new strategies of living, producing and consuming which neither harm
our ecosystem nor waste resources; performer Davis Freeman involved
the audience in a pseudo-religious worship and motivated them to make
237
promises for a more sustainable way of living; Sibylle Peters developed a
performance about the role of money in our contemporary society; author
Kathrin Röggla presented pictures of industrial places like coal mines
and atomic power plants which mean a fundamental risk for people and
animals – not only in the direct neighbourhood; Andrew Simms, fellow
of the New Economics Foundation, spoke about the difference between
‘well-being’ and ‘wealth’ and the necessity of a great transition.
“Fully grown. A Marathon with 11
Perspectives on Growth” is a perfect
example of how art takes on too much:
artists, scientists, activists and an
interested public are brought together
for one day, claiming together that
change is possible and can be thought
about in an alternative way.
And even if no immediate change occurs in society, the experience of
the involved actors and recipients is real: they were introduced to new
perspectives, different from their own. And this is where the potential of
art lies: to open up spaces for thinking that point beyond themselves.
IMAGINE 2020 is also unique because such experiments in development,
implementation and reception always happened beyond the venues and
in the network it was the partners’ mutual obligation to continually work
on the topic of ‘Art and Climate Change’: producing together, touring and
sharing their knowledge and expertise in regular network meetings. In
this sense IMAGINE 2020 was and is the mutual invitation for the partners
to dare the new: Let’s take on too much!
238
RISING
TO
THE
CHALLENGE
OF
IMPOTENCE
By Christian Mousseau-Fernandez,
from Le Quai (Angers, France)
To engage in the IMAGINE 2020 network meant first of all that Le Quai
would have to face some gaps head on: gaps between well-meaning
discourse on ecology and non-environmentally friendly practices;
between the willingness to participate in changing attitudes and the
lack of resources deployed. It meant also accepting the need to change
our own professional practices and public activities because of the
consequences they have on the environment, as well as their immediate
effects on the economy and social well-being. It was necessary to change
the paradigm and be the engine behind a new dynamic that would
meet the challenge of powerlessness in the face of the global problem of
climate change.
What role can artists play in this project of civic awareness? Is art
political enough so that artists take on this issue? Can the act of
resistance which is artistic creation join the commitment against
climate change? How can we translate this social responsibility without
falling into simplification, to an idea which reduces everything to
ecological catastrophe? How can we bring people away from their daily
responsibilities, to raise awareness of a global issue that transcends us
all and requires a planetary response?
It is all these questions that we have tried to answer with the artists
we have met at Le Quai during these five years, among them the
project of company Les Colporteurs. This company has accompanied
its show “Le bal des intouchables” (“The ball of the untouchables” in
English) with a “research project and the creation of a durable plan for
sustainable cultural development”. The action aimed at questioning
how people related to the inhabiting of public spaces with a new model,
‘the big top’ – which supports sustainable travelling – would lead to
242
a new relationship with time, more respectful of quality of life and
would promote collaboration and dialogue with people over a period
of time. The purpose of the show also evoked the issue of exclusion
and living with ‘the other’, or how artistic expression can overcome
these differences without erasing them... This research has led to ecoconceptions of the big top (‘chapiteau’) and campment elements.
Hosted by the Scenography Department of the National School of
Architecture of Nantes, this work enabled the company to confront
the realities (including financial) that it was unable to assume alone,
when potential partners had withdrawn. This global project, designed
to better take into account environmental elements in the construction
of an artistic project, was supported by Le Quai because it allowed us to
highlight our entire chain of public and private responsibilities. It was
an opportunity to support a company that had the will to translate its
values of respect for the environment into actions, even though fully
aware that the action of transporting a ‘chapiteau’ in itself generates
a lot of CO2 emissions. This was a collaborative project which also
contributed to raising awareness among many young and not so young
people, with a research seminar open to public participation, debating
the question: “A sustainable and nomadic artistic presence: a utopia?”.
Through IMAGINE 2020, we wanted to be able to address even more
complex issues than, for example, the emission of greenhouse gases.
Such was the case with Les Colporteurs, since we were able to question
the boundaries between freedom of artistic creation on the one hand
and environmental constraints on the other.
Another approach was the involvement of our building and employees
in a desired virtuous process, with the objective of giving ourselves a
243
better knowledge of the effects of climate change on our planet. After a
long period of diagnosis, awareness building and realisation of microprojects, we were able to act simultaneously in several directions. For
example:
- We optimised our information and communication materials,
maximising digital approaches, limiting the printing of
seasonal programmes and distribution and promoting paper
recycling.
- We implemented an environmental rider with all artists’
contracts, stipulating that hotels were all eco-labelled and
catering used organic produce.
- We established a corporate travel plan for employees, and
strongly encouraged artists to use rail services.
- We changed our entire use of paper products, purchasing ecolabelled recycling paper from an Institution of Service and Aid
for Work which employs disabled people.
- We decreased our energy consumption by 15% and the
equivalent of 50% of the electricity consumed by the building is
now generated by renewable energy through a specific contract
with the French energy provider (EDF). And we installed three
beehives on the roof.
These different activities have allowed us to review all job descriptions
for employees in order to adapt these new sustainable practices into
their functions and missions. It is in acting in a global way and at a local
level that we were able to converge innovative artistic projects and new
initiatives to combat climate change.
244
These four years have helped to highlight several commitments that
must be prior to any action. First we must be aware of the rhetoric
around the fight against climate change, because it is not a selfexplanatory issue. We must be the engine and therefore be proactive
in relationships with artists to support them to integrate the issue
of climate change into their creative processes. We must ensure the
sustainability of the initiatives undertaken in our organisation so that
the expected outcome can be real and that we can measure the necessary
adaptations. Finally, it comes to finding the levers of ownership of the
issues by audience / viewer, employees / agents of change and regulating
bodies / accountable to citizens.
It is thanks to the simultaneity of these actions that we were able to
participate in changing citizen behaviour and thus reduce the feeling of
powerlessness before climate change that sometimes afflicts us.
245
THE
LONG
BEAN
By Zane Kreicberga,
from New Theatre Institute of Latvia (Riga, Latvia)
When we joined the IMAGINE 2020 network, we did not know much about
climate change or how to talk to our audiences about it. It was right in the middle
of the economic crisis which hit Latvian society quite heavily. Funding for culture
was reduced by 40-70% and we started to learn new survival skills. We decided to
share our office with the New Media Centre RIXC, which led to our collaborative
project “The Long Bean”, one of our first activities in the framework of IMAGINE
2020. It was a social art campaign with the aim of creating an impressive city
environment installation consisting of potted plants and vegetables that people
grow on their windowsills, balconies or backyards. Each pot, with a home-grown
plant provided by the city’s inhabitants, became an important element in this
common piece of art – the more pots, the larger the installation! “I’m staring
at it as an altarpiece…”, whispered a lady into her phone. Indeed, grand shelves
with pots, whose rich leafage was made by home grown vegetables and plants,
resembled iconostasis that night.
“The Long Bean”, one of our first activities in
the framework of IMAGINE 2020. It was a social art campaign with the aim of creating an
impressive city environment installation consisting of potted plants and vegetables that
people grow on their windowsills, balconies
or backyards.
The same year we produced and presented a light installation-performance “I’d
really like to come back home”, by artist Anna Rispoli from Brussels and the
inhabitants of Riga Technical University student home. For 15 minutes students
would switch lights on and off in their homes according to a musical score, thus
creating moving light patterns and signalling to the outside world that they were
back home. During the two week long preparation process Anna Rispoli met
248
almost every architecture student living in the hostel and discussed not only
the particular preparation for the ‘show’, but also issues such as sustainable
architecture, sustainable art and ways of living. The light installation-performance
of one house happened to be one of the most original and environmentally
friendly events during Riga’s “Festival of Light”.
A light installation-performance “I’d really
like to come back home”, by artist Anna
Rispoli from Brussels and the inhabitants of
Riga Technical University student home. For
15 minutes students would switch lights on
and off in their homes according to a musical
score, thus creating moving light patterns and
signalling to the outside world that they were
back home.
Looking back at our first IMAGINE 2020 initiatives, I see that all the crucial
aspects of our work were already present. Collaboration. Interdisciplinarity.
Artistic quality. Social engagement. Imagination.
I believe that through Symposiums such as “Change the Climate: Alternative
Scenarios in Art, Ecology and Economics” (2012), “I, Consumer. Shopping, the
Climate and Us” (2014), “Festival of Ideas ‘Art and Economics’” (2013) and
other similar events, we are establishing new links in our society - locally and
internationally - that are important for building a better common future. It is
necessary to encourage interdisciplinary platforms of discussion and exchange
of knowledge and experience that will attract different professional and interest
groups of society. Artists should talk to scientists, environmentalists, economists,
anthropologists... and feed their artistic practice with their knowledge and
THE LONG BEAN
249
insight. Artists could be mediators of knowledge and ideas, making them more
understandable and emotionally engaging for wider audiences. And vice versa –
artistic visions, questions and ways of looking at things can inspire experts from
different fields.
Artists could be mediators of knowledge and
ideas, making them more understandable and
emotionally engaging for wider audiences.
And vice versa.
I cannot forget the amazing atmosphere of “Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge
and Non-knowledge” in Riga that gathered 60 experts from a variety of
different fields including, for instance, medicine, anthropology, arts, law and
ecology, among others, and shared with audiences their knowledge in “90
talks on Repaired, Enhanced and Dead Body”. The smart and engaging ‘expert
installation’ by German curator Hannah Hurtzig, imitating familiar places of
knowledge exchange - such as the archive or library reading room - combining
them with communication situations - for example markets, stock exchanges
and counselling services - created the situation and feeling of true ‘AGORA’.
There is a lot of hidden potential in cross-sectoral communication and
collaboration. We should listen more to each other and get to know more about
each other to be able to think out of our ‘professional’, ‘sectoral’, ‘social’ and
other ‘boxes’, and build the critical mass of society by demanding and performing
for a sustainable future.
I like to quote artist and activist John Jordan from the Laboratory of Insurrectionary
Imagination, who has said that art today should no longer deal with aesthetic
questions, but care about the survival of our planet. Of course we cannot expect
250
all artists to engage in social, political or environmental issues, but we can hope
that theatre will, to a greater extent, become a platform for engaging discussion
on questions relevant to our society.
We can hope that theatre will, to a greater extent, become a platform for engaging discussion on questions relevant to our society.
In Latvia this has been the case for the last few years. Just to mention a few
examples: we co-produced a performance-walk “Mārupīte” with Dirty Deal Teatro,
which brought spectators to the site of a serious ecological disaster caused by an
accident in chemical storage (2012, director Valters Sīlis). The story intertwined
personal memories, political and public discourse and similar global cases
such as the Bophal ecological catastrophe and “The Yes Men” action. As part of
the “Imagine the Great Transition” programme, we produced the performance
“Testing Transition” (2013, director Kārlis Krūmiņš), reflecting on the experience
that 5 artists gained during their simulation of financial apocalypse in the Latvian
countryside. They went there without money, credit cards or food, hoping to
exchange their artistic skills for food and necessities. They returned home with
a strong belief in reciprocity as one of the basic human qualities, which became
the overtone of their performance.
Being part of IMAGINE 2020 has greatly helped the New Theatre Institute of
Latvia in gaining the knowledge and encouragement to put forward the issues of
climate change, alternative thinking in economics and individual and collective
responsibility in the core of our work.
THE LONG BEAN
251
The Long Bean is a popular mythological image in Latvian folklore - equal to the world tree
connecting earth with heaven.
The Long Bean is a popular mythological image in Latvian folklore - equal to the
world tree connecting earth with heaven and supporting the transition of the
protagonist to the other world and back with an acquired treasure. I wish that
we as a society could grow the ‘Long Bean of the Great Transition’ and be there
already.
252
IN SEARCH
OF A
GREEN
THEATRE
OR JUST
GREENWASHING?
By Ellen Walraven,
from Rotterdamse Schouwburg (Rotterdam, Netherlands)
The opening performance of the Rotterdam Schouwburg this
season was an overwhelming production, “Van den Vos”, by the
Belgian company FC Bergman. It was a visual rollercoaster: pine
trees swinging in the air, a pool full of fish. All as real as you can
get. It was a huge success with our audiences. It was not with
our technicians. Their discontent was not about the long days of
building up the set, but about the responsibility of our theatre,
hosting a production with a striking number of real trees and
animals being wasted for one evening only. They questioned: “How
sincere is the Rotterdam Schouwburg in its pursuit for a green
theatre? What is the value of this? What are valid arguments for this
amount of waste?” These questions are in fact political ones.
Then there is Rien, a lighting technician who recently retired. He also
took care of general maintenance. He was a child of his times and had
the mentality of a survivor. As a child he experienced the Dutch famine
of 1944, known as “the Hongerwinter” (‘Hunger winter’). A famine that
took place in the German-occupied part of Holland, especially in the
densely populated western provinces above the great rivers, during the
winter of 1944–1945, near the end of World War II.
He knew what things cost and had a clear idea of what they were worth. He felt
that something was profoundly wrong with the way people lived nowadays,
caring mostly about material self-interest. So, within his possibilities, and
relating to the ethics of his craftsmanship, he put signposts on the front of
the doors of our theatre spaces, explaining to the audience what amount of
collective goods, such as energy, were being spent on the performance. Just
like his colleagues in the first example, he asked a political question: “Is the
electricity spent worth it? Or: Will it bring us closer to a better world?”
256
Unregulated capitalism in the eighties and nineties, large budget cuts in
the arts in the following decade; all these matters forced themselves upon
our business and our artists. It put the focus on the quality of our own
individual conditions and on the position of the arts. Different questions
had to be answered, for instance on the legitimacy of the arts themselves.
The reigning neoliberal ideology intervened with our practice, redirecting
the debate towards the necessity of cultural entrepreneurship and
stakeholders outside the arts. In the meantime the globalisation brought
‘glocalisation’ as well. This time the debate focused on questions about
our national, regional and local identity. Finally: the Internet and social
media changed our notion of reality and we found ourselves in a vortex
full of questions on identity and what reality means.
Fortunately IMAGINE 2020 provided a backbone and kept ‘the planet’
on our agenda and gave us our monthly wake-up call telling us we
cannot go on living like this. The frequent network meetings were
important to meet, get to know more about engaged artists and allow
our in-depth knowledge to grow. But to be frank, at certain moments,
the performances, workshops, seminars etc... of the network felt like
incidents. And, in the worst moments, a means of greenwashing our
own organisation.
How could that happen? Why do performances not add up?
Why do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different,
more sustainable, society?
We understood quickly that we had to go beyond thinking in performances,
projects, proposals, initiatives, etc. A clear engaging context in which
political questions can be asked over again and again was needed urgently.
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We became convinced that we had to make very explicit what we were
already doing, as well as show our plans for the future. It required a
strategy that was more effective and robust, generating local and a global
impact via collective actions with very different sorts of partners. We
absolutely believe this was the only way to overcome this difficulty, in
order to reach a much more fundamental responsibility for a sustainable
future.
So we combined our DNA (Riens’ sobriety and knowing the price of
things) and the values of IMAGINE 2020 and initiated a major project to
reach a zero carbon footprint: “The 7 Square Endeavour”. Our target is to
reduce our emissions by 40% by 2020, moving to Carbon Neutrality in
2030. We cannot realise this scale-up plan on our own, since we are at our
limits of what can be done in a conventional way. To break through the
symbolic ‘green glass ceiling’, new methods/ applications/ inventions
are needed, as well as new partners: locally and internationally. At this
moment we are breaking new ground, and there is a lot of interest in our
work.
In short, we’ve taken the square where our theatre is located as the
energetic centre. Everybody living and working on this ‘Schouwburgplein’
(inhabitants, micro and macro retailers, cultural institutions) is entitled
to become a partner. Furthermore we have built up a close liaison with
companies such as Eneco, Dura Vermeer, Imtech, Arcadis and the
City of Rotterdam for the technological development. We have moved
beyond power generation and energy storage to grey water, heat recovery
by waste and sewage water, waste-to-energy, green roofs and other new
technologies.
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The square is a testing ground where the arts, technique and economy
meet, and above all: people. All partners must work closely together.
We have to get to know each other; show trust, guts and commitment.
Real solidarity can also act against our own specific interests, so it will
be a bumpy road to arrive at our destination, but connectivity is surely
the key to a more radical responsibility for our planet.
In due course, artists and scientists together will be producing poignant
images and finding ways to enlighten the square, to add the WOW factor
to our (most of the time invisible) enterprise. This is why we created
a global partnership: “the 7 Square Endeavour”. We take part in the
Big Urban Clients programme of Arcadis (a company specialised in
connecting high-tech solutions in the fields of transport, environment,
water facilities, urban planning and architecture) and then relate to six
other squares, probably in São Paulo, New York, Amsterdam, London,
Doha and Shanghai.
By doing this we keep up with our city’s ambition to position
Rotterdam as an important player on sustainability, being an
urbanised delta under sea level.
By setting up “the 7 Square Endeavour” we are doing two things.
In a very hands-on way we are heading for 100% carbon-free theatre,
and in the meantime we are constructing a political/moral context
for our programmes in pursuit of a sustainable ecological future. We
realise that our venue, the practices and the sets of arrangements
attached to it are in fact a cradle of values.
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From this viewpoint we might be able to reframe our status as an institute
financed by public money. Our subsidiary status is not the result of a
failing business model, but a gateway to keep the arts with their vibrant
ideas and illuminating images connected to the systems of politics and
economy. Subsidising the arts is a way of investing in game changers.
IMAGINE 2020 taught us that institutions such as our theatre are in
fact the arteries of democracy and cannot play their role without a clear
opinion or ideology. We have to play a much more enhanced role in our
cities: as a provider of the opportunity to have an ethically informed public
conversation. By doing this we are sure to reach a more ecologically and
socially sustainable society.
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ON HAPPINESS
AND THE
IMPORTANCE
OF DIVERGING
WAYS
OF SEEING
By Luís Firmo,
from Transforma (Torres Vedras, Portugal)
It is easy.
It should be easy.
If only people came together
and walked the path of transition.
In his short film,
“The Trail of a Tail”,
Portuguese director Gonçalo Tocha shows
how things could be different,
in a visual poem.
And it should be so easy.
The film is almost the same length as John Cage’s “4’33’’” (1952). Cage’s essence of
music is present in the atmosphere, when Gonçalo presents the sound of water in
contrast to that of the industrial city in movement, which comes later. “The Trail of
a Tail” was one of the works of art commissioned by Transforma, in the context of
IMAGINE 2020 and co-produced by NEF (New Economics Foundation). It won first
prize in the international Action4Climate award.
Life,
in all its hope
for the future and ecosystem destruction,
coexists here.
From the world where “In Goods We Trust”,
264
and a false belief,
consumers imagine they can buy happiness.
Gonçalo takes the viewer into a journey
of the past;
a hopeful present,
experienced in the midst of destruction;
and the future yet to be built.
There is a voice.
It guides us through the restlessness of being alive.
In an almost prophetic rhythm,
it says to us,
viewers, and graffiti artist MAISMENOS,
“Words were losing sense.
Among shouts and whispers,
you decided to write (…)
Did you believe it then?
That words still have the power
to transform people?”
Words are still powerful.
It is up to us
to create the narrative that will nurture
a constructive and affective imagination
which will create a vision
for a sustainable future.
But there is still a lot to be done...
“All interest sectors involved in achieving sustainable urban development have
genuine but differing ‘visions’ of the future. … these ‘ideals’ and the debates about
them, remain within their discrete worlds and are rarely acknowledged or understood
outside their expert communities.”
K. Williams, 2010, International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development
265
This is just one aspect of the complex problem surrounding climate change that has
yet to be solved.
The quote was evoked by Nancy Duxbury (from the Centre for Social Studies, University
of Coimbra, Portugal) in the second Summer Lab organised within the context of
IMAGINE 2020 – Art and Climate Change network, in 2012. The first took place in
Montpellier, organised by the Domaine d’O partner. In this second one we brought
discussion and critical thought to the central region of Portugal, the city of Torres
Vedras – considered a decentralised area, because it is not one of the two largest
cities of the country: Lisbon as capital, and Oporto, the so-called ‘capital of the north’.
The Summer Labs represent one of the most fulfilling activities of IMAGINE 2020.
Summer Labs
represent the creation
of a protected context.
Different perspectives
and areas of knowledge
come together.
Share,
with wisdom, care and attention,
what each other knows.
This happened within the organisation of each Summer Lab as well as in the diverse
ways each partner organised its own Summer Lab.
The case of Transforma.
We created
an intense choreography of thought
from the most diverse areas of knowledge,
allowing
the possibility
of taking the debate
out of ‘inside their discrete worlds’
266
and
confronting ideals
and ideas
with participants challenged to think
‘outside their expert communities’.
That is also part of the essence of what IMAGINE 2020 is.
From where we stand in Transforma, our proposal relates to the urgency felt to
implement change so that a sustainable future has a chance of becoming a real
possibility and not merely a utopia; and so that climate change and all natural life can
change towards a non-catastrophic, apocalyptic, direction. This means hearing the
scientists, economists, entrepreneurs, and the population in general, but situating
artists at the confluence of all these worlds.
All these voices
we should hear,
consubstantiate something
which already exists in art creation:
the daily practice
of a diverging view
on what is around us
and what is part of us.
We and nature
we are one
and
we have already done enough damage
to nature.
After all,
this is the reason why
geologists affirm
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“we are in a new geological era:
the anthropocentric era”.
This
diverging view
must be founded on daily and real questions
and only then can this
alternative way of seeing
establish a bridge
between utopia and the constraints of reality.
It is an important tool
at the service of the reinvention of society.
Natural to their essence,
artists have the potential
of adding a diverging way of seeing,
concerning the themes they are dealing with.
Art and climate change
are just one of them.
It is
a way of seeing
and understanding the other(s)
which creates meaning,
comprehensibility,
to the knowledge produced by science.
Brought together,
they search for alternative solutions
to these problems
and,
in this togetherness,
searching
may be one of the most prolific motors
of the reinvention of society.
268
It is sometimes not evident that artists work upon the theme of climate change. Even
some artists engaged by Transforma to participate in previous Summer Labs did not
necessarily come away with a project which dealt directly with the subject they had
been living and breathing in those initiatives. However sometimes, even if the theme
is not treated in an evident and literal way, there is also a social, ethical, ecological
concern inherent to artists who are engaged in the reality of life that is present at a
more underground level and not immediately perceived. That is the case of artists
who bring critical thought concerning the way we live to their work, that should not
be underestimated.
Of course,
at a time of urgent action,
we may expect to see
in our initiatives,
in the artistic creation,
a clear reflection of that concern.
It is not just by accident
or
reaction to the economic crisis
that there has been an emergence of ‘artivists’.
Jacques Rancière defends
“the mass manifestations
are becoming
more moments of artistic intervention
and expression of creative imagination”.
Even with this in mind though, there were two projects (keeping in mind that other
projects also corresponded positively to this premise) which dealt with the subject
of sustainability, and the fact that nature is a part of us and not an externality. These
were artistic objects which, in a subjective way, related to the “The Great Transition”
report, by NEF – New Economics Foundation. This is the case with Gonçalo Tocha’s
film (already mentioned above), “The Trail of a Tail”; as well as the case of writer and
performer Rui Catalão, a gifted storyteller who created and presented the lectureperformance “People versus Power”.
269
In his very personal way,
working inspired by the NEF report,
Catalão leaves
the audience
with some questions to consider.
One example is
a critical view on the role of imagination.
Talking about an impossible task,
climbing a mountain,
our imagination
may trick us into believing:
the imagined impossibility becomes a fact.
That catastrophism
paralyse
any chance of positive action.
Rui Catalão says:
“Our imagination
is removing ourselves from nature,
when we are part of it.”
So,
as with imagination,
there are always
at least
two sides to each story...
During recent years, Transforma has organised a series of activities and implemented
a change in behaviour in the use of resources not solely bound to actions related to
the IMAGINE 2020 network. This is an organisation which promotes the development
and transformation of society through the arts and creativity, bringing together
organisations and citizens of various communities, and aiming towards the production
of knowledge. It disseminates and facilitates content creation processes, research
and documentation, operating in artistic, educational and different socio-cultural
contexts.
270
Our participation in the IMAGINE 2020 network was part of the frame in which we
developed actions addressing concern about the future of our planet and our life on
it, but inspired by this subject and the network, we went further in the activities we
produced. In 2013 for example, we organised the “Transformations In Society” cycle,
consisting of diverse actions and activities, including a creative laboratory. In this
cycle, the collective hello!earth developed and presented “Re-everything”, a series
of performances applied to the actions and thoughts of how to transform society and
what society we are aiming for.
One of the hello!earth interventions consisted on the
“Elections for the local ministry of happiness”.
In their own words:
“an intervention and initiative
to catalyse dialogue
on values,
active citizenship
and forms of governance”.
The event took place in Torres Vedras and they were conscious of the importance
of context to influence the result. “Depending on the local response and context, it
can turn into an alternative political platform, a community-driven initiative, a school
project or other and it can also be designed as a participatory art-piece with a duration
of around 1 to 3 hours.”
This was a first edition,
but
in the future,
also
as Gonçalo Tocha and Rui Catalão say
in their works of art,
the ‘we’,
the togetherness,
the caring about the other,
is the catalyst for change.
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Here is where happiness resides;
not bought
as another dormant consumerism act.
This is related to what really matters,
which is also present in the project hello!earth.
“We are still intrigued by investigating cities and environments from within, aside,
above, below. We still enjoy having questions as answers and still have strange animals
included in our performances. We are still surprised by daily routines and continue to
be attracted to the invisible and its complex simplicity. We love to talk to people that
we meet in the street, in shops and in books. It is exciting to be alive!”
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A POETIC
EXPERIENCE
OF THE WORLD
by Jean Lambert-wild
(testimony collected by Claudia Galhós)
CHAPTER I
A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THEATRE
THE DISCOVERY OF THEATRE
AS THE HOUSE OF MAGIC
I don’t speak about revelation, that would imply a kind of
religious mystique which I don’t have. For me revelation
means discovery, in the sense that with theatre I discovered
a place I was searching for, even without knowing that I
was searching for it. I grew up in a tropical climate, on
the French island of Réunion (located in the Indian Ocean,
east of Madagascar). I am Creole. My childhood was nourished
by heroic figures, discoverers and explorers. I wanted to
be a marine captain and when I arrived in France, in the
metropolis, when I was 17, I was completely lost. I felt as if
I was living in a world without magic, a world that created a
sense of religion but not of magic.
I believe in magic in my environment. The magic of
communication that can exist between certain elements,
independently from being between trees, rocks, man... When I
arrived in the metropolis I had the impression of being in
a desperate world, empty of that magic which is so important
for a poet. So I searched for a 'Terra Incognita' and became
aware that I could reinvent the fantastic world about which
I dreamt repeatedly on the stage.
Until that moment, the idea I had of theatre was too
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reductive a conception. I thought of the theatre as an
expression of the bourgeoisie. When I saw the play "Three
Sisters" by Chekhov directed by Matthias Langhoff, I
understood it could be more than I had imagined. It has many
more possibilities of being reinvented... in the fables, in
History, in the social, in the amorous... I was a boy without
any theatrical experience, but this has allowed me to create
another thing. I didn’t become a marine. I dedicated myself
to theatre, which is what I do, as a kind of navigator.
What interests me is to create expeditions and search for
adventures.
There, in the theatre, I am a poet. I have that happy vanity
to think that I have a work of art to create. It started when
I was 17 years old. I named this first creation, which will
accompany all my life, “Hypogeum”. This work is a corpus of
things. I call it a fable, made up of different elements. It has
three ‘Epics’: one has already been written, called “Splendeur
et Lassitude du Capitaine Marion Déperrier Épopée en deux
Époques et une Rupture” (1999) [in English: “Splendour and
Lassitude of Captain Marion Déperrier - Epic in two Epochs and
one Rupture”]. There is a second one, “La patrie des taupes” [in
English, “Land of the moles”], which is being written now. They
are inspired by family figures from my childhood. Because all
those people who were around me seemed to have a fantastic and
mythical quality in their character.
[In 1990, Jean Lambert-wild started the
construction of his “Hypogeum”, a complex work
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IMAGINE 2020 - ART AND CLIMATE CHANGE — OPEN DIALOGUES
that he wrote and directed on stage, consisting
of three ‘Confessions’, three ‘Melopoeia’, three
‘Epics’, two ‘Exclusions’, a ‘Dithyramb’ and
326 ‘Calentures’. “Hypogeum” is being done
throughout his life and some of the artwork
will only be revealed after his death.]
I would say all the pieces of “Hypogeum” have a logic
related to the organisation of my memory, in an environment
where I talk with phantoms. In ‘Melopoeia’, there is a first,
particularly important one for me called “Mue, Un discours de
Sereburã, accompagné d’un rêve de Waëhipo Junior et des mythes
de la communauté Xavante d’Etênhiritipa” (2005) [In English
“Mue, a speech by Sereburã, accompanied by a deram of Waëhipo
Junior and myths of the Shavante community Etênhiritipa”]. I
went to work and live for a long time with the wise indigenous
people of the Pimentel Barbosa reserve in Matogrosso, Brazil.
We were hosted by the community of wise men and it was a real
communion achieved through dreams. It lasted for a number
of years and at the end, we did a show that was mute. Text
was avoided. It was an organisation between my text and the
dreams and fables of the indigenous shaman of the community
of Pimentel Barbosa. They gave me a name. I am called Waëhipo,
I think it means boar but it is mainly the name of the warrior
who adopted me and I became kind of part of the family, so I
was called Waëhipo Junior. Because it is a warrior tribe, I am
now Rotiwà Oporè, which means ‘the chief of war from the other
side of the sea’. That is why one part of what I am creating is
a phantasmatic autobiography. My life is constructed in that
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piece without constraint. The second one is “La Mort d’Adam”
(2010) [In English “Death of Adam”], which retakes a very
strange but founding fragment of my childhood.
There will be a third ‘Melopoeia’ which is very particular, on
which I have been working for ten years. The first is called
“Tête perdue au fond de l’Océan” [In English “Lost head at
the bottom of the Ocean”] and the second one “Le Jardin des
éponges” [In English “The Garden of Sponges”]. They relate
to something that has always been haunting me, submarines
and the idea of going into the abyss. Mentally, the abyss
represents a great depth. “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under
the Sea” by Jules Verne is fundamental in the memory of my
childhood. So, “Le Jardin...” has the desire to create a piece
with the wives of men who work in submarines. It is about
all which rises to the surface of human feeling, the fear of
absence, the loss of sailors. And I hope to make “Tête perdue
au fond de l’Océan” as a theatrical concert inside a French
nuclear attack submarine.
ALL IS POSSIBLE
All is possible. Until now, everybody has been saying that I
will not be able to create this piece on the submarine. But
I also heard that it would be impossible to live for some
time with the Brazilian indigenous community... was possible.
Everything is possible, it just needs commitment, it needs to
be built and turned into reality. The third part of my life
theatrical project is ‘Confession’, which is more intimate.
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The first one is already written, it is called “Grande Lessive
de Printemps” [In English “Spring Great Washing”]. It speaks
mainly of my relation with disability. I used to suffer
from speech aphasia. There was a moment of absence in my
adolescence because of that, but it resulted in something
different being constructed in me in relation to language
and also in the way of conceptualising the world and my
environment. In this context I created “Grande Lessive de
Printemps” and “Crise de nerfs - Parlez-moi d’amour” [In
English “Nerve crisis - Tell me about love”], which we continue
to present.
The core of “Hypogeum” is that we can pick it up whenever
we want. Alongside that there are two ‘Exclusions’. They are
written, but kept secret and won’t be revealed until the day I
die. There is a great circle that connects everything, called
‘Dithyramb’. It makes three threes, three threes, three threes,
two points...
[this is the moment when Jean is designing
geometric circle figures on a piece of paper
while speaking...]
The great circle is the ‘Dithyramb’, which is a sort of great
picaresque mural, where there is a mix of many things, in a
way similar to what Frankétienne does in his great frescoes.
A sort of great verbal delirium. And next to it there is the
‘Calenture’. This is a French word which means ‘the delirium
which affects certain seamen, because of lack of water,
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nourishment, fatigue, lack of vitamins...’ They get caught in
a nervous delirium, they feel the need to sing, dance and an
impressive desire to throw themselves into the sea. They tie
their hands to the ship to prevent themselves from doing
so. For example, there is a possibility that Ulysses had an
attack of calenture when he heard the mermaids. It’s a disease
that has not existed for some time now, but it was very well
known in the past.
Most of the performances I do - and ‘performance’ is a term I
don’t like - are to show that theatre is a space for mutation
which has the possibility of influencing and metamorphosing
all the spaces around it. It is the only space for possible
mutation with the capacity to include all media. It is a
magic medium which can take all and any kind of media and
organise it the way it desires or needs to. I have in the
piece a very singular clown that makes up ‘Calenture’. When
a person is in that state astounding things may happen.
For example I did a ‘Calenture’ about microgravity and
another one at the bottom of a pool... I did 40 of them, and we
produced them regularly and sometimes it was very amusing.
It can become a kind of experience of a strange clown to
whom strange stories happen. It’s great fun. So, “Hypogeum”
regroups all that I have been describing. And ‘Calenture’ as a
part of “Hypogeum” is located in what we call the ‘Ecmnésie’.
This is a moment related to memory, «a hallucinatory
evocation of past events, with forgetfulness of recent
events», where there are other shows that allow me to develop
the conception of theatre I believe in. Through “Hypogeum”
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I can go back and forth in the chronological order of the
works I created. It may seem complex but I would say it
has an ecological organisation. If you get into it, you see
there is a bigger part, and there are particles... It is always
strange, it is not finished, it started as I said when I was 17
years old. Now things start to merge...
CHAPTER II
THEATRE IS WHERE MEMORY COMES TO LIFE
WE WILL TALK TO THE TREES
One work of art creates a territory, and goes forward to
another. It is an idiom and it is an imaginary place with
stations, moments of perdition. Sometimes we have to accept
being lost. I am passionate about science and we live in a
tremendous era where we are always discovering something.
What? We discover what we already know by wisdom, but we have
a tendency to forget: we are in permanent interconnection.
There are visible interconnections, and there is ‘the world of
the invisible’. But this world of the invisible is as pertinent
as the visible one. It is simply the principle of a ‘radio’.
Consider the human being as a radio: we capture different
everyday frequencies, for example the frequency of sound, of
the voice. I say, I am a radio. Sometimes I am a deranged radio,
other times an amplified radio. I understand and receive other
frequencies.
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I am interested in the chimera of saying to myself that
one day I will be able to talk to a tree. I am interested in
the life of bees. I am interested in things such as the fact
that our bodies produce radiation. There are also scientific
concepts that completely change our metaphysical power.
We know that we regenerate perpetually. I am in permanent
transformation. And the work of art that I decided to create
is a resistance of the memory to that transformation. Let’s
take as an example the fact that we have cells. In these cells
we have a micro-bacteria called mitochondria, and it is this
bacteria that allows for the synthesis of energy and makes
each of us a living being. This symbiosis that happens at a
given moment and starts from the cell of a bacteria is genial.
Mitochondria is memory space. With some amusement, I would
say that I make theatre for the mitochondria. I try to
remind the spectator of the mitochondria, which is invisible,
through all the magic games that theatre offers. Magic of
the verb, magic of signs, magic of memory. For me theatre is
not a place of the present, it is a place of memory. Everybody
says that in live performing arts we exist in the moment. I
am not in the immediate. I think that does not even exist.
It is a futility, a foolishness. Every day the present is a
reorganisation of memory between a past, an action, and an
already conceived future. It is this connection, this friction
which is interesting. It is in this friction that we find the
need for poetry because this poetry is the spermaceti which
exists in whales. «Spermaceti is a wax most often found in
the head cavities of whales.» One theory for the spermaceti
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organ’s biological function is that it allows the whales to
go to great depths. If they did not have this oily substance
their brain would explode [Note: in science it is called
‘buoyancy’, an upward force exerted by a fluid that opposes the
weight of an immersed object or, in this case, animal]. Poetry
can be related to this idea in the sense that it is a way of
conserving the world. It is not necessary to forbid anything.
A POEM WRITTEN ON MARS
In the field of nonsense or proving the impossible can happen,
there is the real possibility of writing a poem on Mars. It’s
very simple. How can you send a poem to Mars? It is just taking
the opportunity of using the programme NASA offer each time
they send a new robot to Mars. There is this childhood joy of
believing that every day the world is a conquest. A conquest
of the spirit, not through arms. For a long time I have been
passionate about spacial conquest. I would say it’s the armed
arms of our solitude. A probe in space sends us a perspective
of ourselves. It allows us to better perceive our situation,
our solitude, our isolation, precisely in our own environment.
It also allows us to report this solitude we created and be a
medium of communication about that isolation. I wrote a huge
poem called “Space Out Space”. It is not possible to be read.
I repeat the question. How can one send a poem to Mars? You
just need to have two robots, spirit and opportunity. NASA did
a small children’s programme for people in general to become
more interested in the conquest of Space. This was called
285
“Write your name on Mars”. They facilitated a programme which
allowed anyone to write a name and a surname. This is the first
‘Exclusion’ of “Hypogeum” and the poem will be revealed after
my death. How much did this cost? Nothing.
I am not a defeatist. Even if the situation is terrible,
and it is, we have solutions. If we make an effort we are
able to achieve something as equally important as the
Italian Renaissance. We have the money for that, we have the
knowledge and the means of communication to make it come
true. What we need is effort and commitment. And if we strive,
the result may be unimaginable. We can talk and see each
other, be in communication, and save travel money, save time.
We exchange with a simple object - the Internet - which was on
the level of the unimaginable just some years ago. I have the
advantage, because of the fact that I was born on an island,
of not being trapped or surrendered to a dogma. My conception
of the poetic organisation of the world is an incredibly
unbelievable joy of the constant discovery and rediscovery of
the world. I can make art pieces where I put bees on stage, and
with just bees I show at what point empathy is created.
THE ASHES OF MEMORY RETRIEVED
Oradour-sur-Glane is a town destroyed in World War II,
near Limoges (the city where the Dramatic Centre is located)
where almost all the inhabitants were killed, and the
village was burned, everything was completely devastated.
It is an impressive place, for what it still is - the image
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of destruction is preserved - and for the memory of what it
represents, what was shattered and killed. It is terrifying.
And this is a village that people can visit. It is a very
important place of pilgrimage, and I am attached to it.
I visited the village with Richard Jeriaski, director of
Oradour Memorial Centre. He told me: “We must find something
to create here together.” I thought about it and found what
it was. Who are the living beings, still present, who saw, who
testified to what happened and have memory of it? The trees.
And there are linden trees which are said to bring good
luck and which are also important because they were needed
for the beekeepers, because they attract bees. My idea is to
make those trees talk. How? I have the idea of recording the
memories of what was found there. Letters, various documents...
they will be recorded by professional actors. I am going to
put a small device in the trees, a simple sensor that will
register the presence of a passer-by. Someone who arrives at
the memorial, downloads an ‘app’, and depending on the tree
he/she gets close to, it calls to the person and it will say
something to him/her. And it is the voice of the tree that the
person will listen to.
It is a game of clues. Something that will be strange but there
is an intention behind it, and people are going to end up doing
something in reaction to it. They are going to sit down close
to the trees to hear them talk. I am going to do what we call
a fuzzy limit; there won’t be a range of capture in a perfect
circle around the trees. There will be irregular distances
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around the tree within which it is possible to hear what they
are saying. People have to be inside the zone that activates
the voice of the tree. On different sides of the tree there is a
more restrictive space or a further range of capture. This is
also a theatrical conception, of how to understand the reasons
behind poetic conception to create empathy.
I do this as an idiot. It’s simply activating connections with
childhood. It relates to the innocent times of our lives when
we imagined the natural elements talking to us. At the same
time it is also a fair tribute. These trees were in this city,
if we cut them down we find inside the traces of massacre.
Why? Because the massacre affected the tree. The fact that
the city was burned, freed a large amount of black carbon,
and the deposit of this has been forcibly inscribed all over
the place. Scientifically we can prove it. It’s also one thing
that is important for people to be aware of. Through this
artistic piece, just saying “this tree saw it”, creates a change
- even if only mentally, but I think also affectively - in the
relationship I and other people have with that place. There
is something related to memory that is activated.
THE EDUCATION OF THE BEEKEEPER
I don’t know if the term ecology is convenient for me. I would
say that it is important for me to rethink our connection
to the world. Let’s suppose ecology implies, as an inverse
effect, the same solution as liberalism: on one extreme there
is liberalism, on the other we have an ecological life. For me
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this doesn’t create any interesting effect. It doesn’t create
any solution. It means I understand lots about ‘decrease’, and
the discourse of de-growth, but things are not just black and
white. Progress also has advantages in science, in knowledge.
It is important not to forget all that. The real question is
how to think of our organisation, our environment. It is to
say how to change our metaphysic of the world. For that, for
me, the medium is poetic. It’s to get to name things, to name our
environment and when we name things, they don’t disappear.
People don’t name their environment anymore. For example:
I am now director of the Union National Theatre and of
the Limoges Academy of Dramatic Art of Limousin. I have
16 wonderful students. I tell them, “in school you face
the world”. It’s formidable. They inhabit a place in the
municipality of Saint-Priest-Taurion, a wonderful house with
a huge park. I ask them: “Are you able to name all the trees
in this park?” They are not. We start by doing that. They have
to know them. I say, “they are your life companions, they are
your first public”. Then there is a small hill, it’s just around
200 metres high. They never go to the top of it. Again, I tell
them, “If you go up there you can see what is not seen from
the bottom, there is a small sanctuary, and deer go there
to eat, and you can observe all this.” This is important. We
do beekeeping education, including honey collection, which
becomes the Union’s honey. It’s perfect.
[The first decision and action Jean Lambertwild took when he assumed the position of
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director of the Limoges Academy of Dramatic
Art attached to the Union National Theatre,
in January 2015, was to install hives so that
beekeeping and making honey was part of the
school programme]
This has shown me the experience of an actor. If he wants to
say words, he needs to understand the utility of them, and
that words are here to name things. This is what is genial.
We have biodiversity in our thought, the wisdom of this
biodiversity is the wisdom of the world that surrounds us. If
we don’t name, if we continue to feed these personalities that
live in the virtual world of television and forget what is
in front of us... If this continues, we will disappear. But the
world won’t disappear. This is absolutely certain.
For me we clearly have a delay between philosophies, poetry
of the world, and all the traces of everything that has
been changing in the world. This change has been happening
at such a pace, that we haven’t yet built the utensils, the
helpful tools, which will allow us to organise this world
while still respecting what the world is. There is always this
moment of chaos and then understanding.
I hallucinate when in the morning I see, in the Arab world,
ten million people marching, burning religious churches,
appealing for the death of Frenchmen. Why? Because there
was a small drawing where Muhammad was crying? They
wrote: “All is forgiven.” That drawing, in my opinion, is not
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even a caricature, but a letter of love. Considering this,
effectively we have a problem. And the problem is always
exactly the same: we are not capable of understanding and
relating to our environment. We are in a bellicose and
competitive atmosphere. Today we need to change that logic.
For me the logic has to be different from discussing what we
fight for, because otherwise it is just changing one malady
for another. We need to go back to the very simple identities
which build our humanity. Let’s hear the poets.
WHAT IS THE BEST ECOLOGY?
There is nothing really new under the sun. The only thing
is that this education of the world creates an education
of the spirit which changes our behaviour, and that may
create urgency. So what is the best ecology we can have? It
is to educate our children. The more we transmit knowledge,
the more attention there is towards our environment. I have
immediate evidence of this from one of my children which
made me laugh.
He went to visit a friend and his mother didn’t like books
and said that books have no use. And he asked: “Why?” He comes
to me and tells me this, surprised, “You know papa, she says
the books have no use. I swear to you, that shocked me. It was
as if she said a washing machine doesn’t have any use.” It
is interesting. He associates the context of his life in the
world, and his own life, with a book. So, for him, a book, in his
conception, is as important as a washing machine. Why not? It
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is just that, for him, the book became a habit. It is a question
of transmission.
CHAPTER III
WE ARE ALL STONES
A POEM IS NOT MADE TO BE READ
Our brain hasn’t evolved in the same way as our tools. If we
make a connection between this and theatre, the latter is a
wonderful laboratory to experiment these ideas in depth.
We can explore, try to refine our dialectic, to confront all
our memory, to experiment and see what our possibilities are
in all media, and the possibilities each media has. Related
to this, we can also build transmission in the context of an
idea of a public service which is education. And this doesn’t
stop at the age of 18. It needs to continue. This place, the
theatre, is fabulous for this. A world of truly amazing,
possible permissibility. As a poet, I fundamentally chose this
art because it is the one which is clearly not constrained by
this epoch. Cinema is constrained by an era. In the worst of
the worst I prefer to amuse myself with stones. Going back to
“Hypogeum”, the second ‘Exclusion’ is a poem written on stones,
which are scattered, as in a mystery game, to be discovered at
any moment.
We can make a useless poem. A poem is not made to be read.
It is written to identify itself in a cosmogony. There is a
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cosmogony which takes into account this state of space, but
which also has to take into consideration the fact that I
myself am also a stone. If I imagine too much, at the end if
I go very high in my imagination, I will fall to the ground
just because there is gravity. So the stone is a wonderful
reminder of what we are, with the advantage the stone has
over us: it exists always in the present.
We are the fruit of the tree in which we grow. I am the son
of my father and my mother. This is not idiotic. When I say
this I am saying something enormous; that I am the son
of this. Effectively I think the strangeness which I am,
almost Freudian, is connected to this. I belong to the French
nobility of the country, emigrated to escape from the ‘diktat’
of conventions, with my father who was a farmer but who takes
me into the adventure of the discovery of a world, with an
education of “Paideia”, the idea of the education of a young
Greek, the idea of Sparta, the idea of resistance... Ideas
completely out of fashion, in part connected to military
strategy, understanding of the world, science, what we call
the humanities. I was a disciplined student, so my brain is
connected to all of this, including the warmth of the island
where I grew up.
THEATRE:
A COOPERATIVE OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION
The idea I always have of the experience of my past, as a
child, is of someone who stored everything. The result of
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that is that I did a mutation. I am the product of an amiable
hazard. This means that within a moment of my mutation I
am already the fruit of a mutation that occurred before,
so I am simultaneously distant and close to that world.
Distant because it doesn’t belong to me. It is completely
foreign to me. And close because every day I am in this
love relationship with a wish to know myself. I assume this
completely. My childhood is more than the fruit of generations
and generations and generations which succeed one another,
it is the result of a transmission of something which may
seem eccentric and picaresque at first glance, but is very
important. And in that there is also this conception of saying
we are all limited by our competences and skills. The system
of cooperation is the best solution. If you observe carefully,
I have never signed a show alone, I refuse the definition of
stage director. I am not that. I am something else, whatever you
wish. I prefer the term of the person that incriminates others
in a project, as I did with Michel Onfray and Carolyn Carlson,
also with Lorenzo Malaguerra, Jean-Luc Therminarias, François
Royet, Juha Marshalo, Catherine Lefeuvre, Stéphane Blanquet.
[In 2009, Jean Lambert-wild started a
theatrical collaboration with Michel Onfray,
inspired by texts of the French philosopher.
The first was “Le Recours aux forêts” (“The
Recourse of Forests” in English) with the
collaboration of Jean-Luc Therminarias,
Carolyn Carlson and Francis Royet, at the
Comédie de Caen - National Dramatic Centre
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of Normandy in the 2009 Festival Boreal; the
second one was “La Sagesse des abeilles” (“The
Wisdom of Bees, Democritus first lesson”), with
Jean-Luc Therminarias, Lorenzo Malaguerra
and François Royet, at the Comédie de Caen National Dramatic Centre of Normandy, in 2012.
He is now preparing a third theatrical piece
with Michel Onfray]
I think that in a complex world, the only way to solve
complexity is through cooperation. Theatre is a social
laboratory. We are here to try to create objects which are
not necessarily constructed every day in relation to social
stratification, which means a hierarchy led by a director. The
cooperative model creates its own works of art. I don’t believe
in the collective. I don’t believe in the terms performance
or emergence - these are words that say something about
the logic of the market. I believe in artists submerged by
something that surpasses them, or young artists who are
immersed and that are expected to break out... Emergent is
a word that everybody uses and repeats to dismiss from
the responsibility we have to transmit and inform. The
single opportunity we have is still this fundamental love
the French people have for liberty translated into small
spaces which are National Dramatic Centres. They are small
but finally the open spaces which allow us the possibility,
in respect to the republican framework, to organise an
experience of the world, a poetic experience of the world.
This is not much, but it is essential, that in this permanent
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exchange, it is a laboratory of together trying repeatedly to
start again from the beginning to express ourselves and from
the belief of the cooperation and transmission and knowledge.
Intellectuals, poets, the university, we have a huge
responsibility with semantics. This means we have to be
attentive to the use we give words nowadays, which in my
opinion destroy reality. The concept of ‘emerging artist’ for
example, is an absolute horror. Emerging from what? If we
reflect on it, it is humiliating. Me, being rebellious by nature,
in the 90s people said I was a young emerging artist. And
it also creates segregation. If there are those who emerge,
then there are those who decline. It’s horrendous. Here,
good ecology starts immediately by being responsible and
putting order and sense into words, into naming. I know from
experience what it means to loose words, I tell you how much
more important and essential this is and how conscious I am
of the relevance of this. We have the responsibility, here, at
this place, of transmission. It is very easy to create shows
without words. The symbolic image creates magic, it works,
but are we able to associate and create meaning and magic
through the use of the power of the verb?
I am the one that does all the scenography for the shows.
For me this is a challenge, it means to create these visually,
very complex systems, but the body and the word are always
present. The body is present even in its phantom. The word is
always there with its generous expression. Today people need
to reconcile with the verb, not in a religious sense, but in
terms of reconciliation with our humanity.
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THE RE-EVALUATION OF UTOPIA
Firstly, I find it interesting to bring exogenous forces into
theatre every day. The philosopher should work for theatre,
the poet should work for theatre, everybody should, at a
given moment, experience something of theatre. The connection
and bonding is possible. This way you create a space of
dialogue and community with different methods. Imagine for
example the force of Michel Onfray associated with Carolyn
Carson and myself at the service of that force. It allows for
an alliance which implies ‘friendship’. And friendship is very
important. It opens up space for disagreements, to close your
eyes. I know to close my eyes because there is a gift which
is offered by friendship, the possible reconciliation of a
tomorrow.
I personally believe in a possible reconciliation with that
tomorrow. I don’t live as an apocalyptic. I refuse to live
like that and I begin to not tolerate apocalyptics, people
that repeat every minute that we are getting closer to the
end of the world. Of course this is a difficult world, but
if I remember well what my grandfather told me, he lived
in harder times than ours. So if we keep the proportions of
different times in perspective, we need to put things in their
particular contexts; this is the first thing.
The second is: we should have a utopia every day, but in the
sense of creating the entropy of a utopia. This means that
the entropy is really saying that the path is open. I don’t
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want to live in a condition which has always said this will
be this, and that will be that. I am too wild for that. I get
troubled by everything that is turned into dogma. Everything
is an occasion for poetry. Attention, we have to say and
understand this: everything is possibility of poetry. If we
contemplate everything this way, we have a relation to the
world which evolves in its totality. And I try to think in
a totality because the totality doesn’t belong to me. I am
a singularity inside a totality. Thinking a totality is to
preserve your singularity with the desire to possess the
totality.
The subject of the totality is simply a cartography of the
possible which is accessible from an existence, from an
experience of being. This is why I believe in this incredible
opportunity which is having a life, being alive, appearing
and disappearing infinite times in the course of a life. I
am conscious that I regenerate myself from cell to cell and
astoundingly there is a space of coherence which allows me
to have memory of all this, which allows me to talk about it,
which is interesting and passionate. On the other hand there
is always something to be discovered. Another important thing
is to understand how to obtain a supplement of oneself which
disappeared in the course of a century.
THEATRE IS THE ART OF DISAPPEARANCE
It is possible that the act of transmission creates its own
loss. The principle of communication is: each time we transmit
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something, we lose information. The obligation of each human
being is always to search for that unknown loss. That is
probably the best way of falling in love. Because it’s in the
process of searching for that unknown loss - not for oneself
but for the successive generations who lost something that was
transmitted to them - that we get to re-composition and attain
the experience of growing old. I find that interesting and
fundamental. It is an amorous concept of the world and the
human being, creating a strong form of loyalty and fidelity.
Today the most interesting forms to experiment with are
those of cooperation, which necessarily escape the unity of
dogmas because they create an obligation of conversation.
Conversation is much more difficult than democracy.
Conversation, debate and the exchange of ideas are much more
complex than democracy. We may have a democracy in which
nobody speaks to each other but everybody votes.
Talking in a dialectic model is taking the time for an
exchange. We are all there to search for that loss. What I
search for is without a doubt different from what another
person searches for, but because we search together, in
our exchange of words and conversations, each of us adds
something to the other which will allow him, in new ways,
to re-orientate and foresee futures of who he/she is in the
world. In this sense, I am absolutely in agreement with Pier
Paolo Pasolini who translated this wonderfully into the
feeling of delight. He is happy, of a desperate happiness. It
is more difficult to be happy than to be unhappy. To be happy
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there is a need to exercise the curiosity of what is around us
every day and what is around us which is part of what is on us.
It is complex. For me, what I love in theatre is the fact that
theatre is the space for this conversation of individuals. It
is usually a strange conversation but always enriching. It is
a community which comes to sit down and listen to someone who
was nominated to speak, and who carries and transmits a word
that is not his/hers. He/she is the transmitter of something.
Words we can debate, and when there is the applause at the end,
it is not for the actor, but the public itself.
Considering I am part of that audience, we applaud what we
have found of ourselves in what was said to us. When we don’t
find anything, we cannot applaud. We praise the recovery of
what we are in what has been given to us. It is because of
this that the clapping of hands is important. And because of
this there is nothing more touching for an actor than being
applauded. He knows from that sound that he was able to
disappear enough on the stage in order for something more
important than him to emerge and be manifested. This art
of disappearance is so singular to the theatre and is in my
opinion an essential function in rethinking an ecology of the
future in a modern way, already beginning with words.
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IMAGINE
2020:
PERSONAL
AND
ARTISTIC
VIEWS
IMAGINE 2020 is a relational platform which brings together
thinkers, artists and activists from different areas of knowledge,
to share information about Climate Change, with art at its heart.
Each person’s engagement had completely different configurations
and contexts. The Summer Labs – four, which happened in France,
Portugal, Croatia, and the UK – are one of many emblematic
activities of the network. In a concentrated frame of time,
organised by different partners of IMAGINE 2020, a group of
people coming from diverse backgrounds and geographies,
engaged in the thinking and acting, inspired by issues related to
different possible approaches to Climate Change. Here, eight of
those specialists, who participated in at least one Summer Lab
(most of them were involved in other ways with IMAGINE 2020)
share some of their thoughts about some questions. For example:
How do they relate to the subject of Climate Change? What do
they see as the potential role of art to raise awareness about this
issue? How do they value their relation with the network?... They
are Artúr van Balen, Driss Ezzine de Blas, Guillaume Gatteau,
Stijn Demeulenaere, Laurence Mellinger, Sónia Baptista, Richard
Houguez and Neil Callaghan, in random order.
What is your personal and artistic relation to the
subject of climate change?
Artúr van Balen: I first got
Guillaume Gatteau: Of course I had heard
about climate change from newspapers, TV, etc,
but my real and deep understanding of it started
when I had to create a play on the topic. Then, I
had to read, understand, watch and think about
everything concerned with and affected by these
simple words 'climate change'. I discovered a kind
of parallel world where people fight for the climate
and are engaged to make something change. I
used to say that I was looking for a new way of
becoming involved in political thought after years
of disenchantment. I think I’ve found it!
Sónia Baptista: I am someone that invariably
uses animalistic representations, inspirations and
excuses to create my performance and poetic
work. You might think of me as someone who took
Deleuze and Guatarri’s becoming-animal as her own
and rolls with it smoothly and creatively. Notions
of identity, nature, or rather the conflict between
what is nature-made and what is man-made also
permeate my work. I have a natural empathy with
what concerns nature and I fear for its demise. The
world is becoming something else that is more and
more unkind to many of its living inhabitants. As I
wrote in one of my last pieces ("In the fall the fox")
"there is fear in waterfalls".
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involved in thinking about climate
change in 2008/2009 when I did an
exchange with the Glasgow School
of Art. There I learned to gather all
my food from supermarket bins. I
went gathering to several Glasgow
supermarket dumps three evenings
a week and shared the food with
my fellow friends who were also
into dumpster diving. This practice
of gathering food made me realize
the kind of crazy wasteful society
we live in on a very physical level:
globalised food production that
ends up uneaten in the bin. Through
my dumpster dive, my friends and I
also became involved in campaigns
against climate change and airport
expansion. This was my entry point
into thinking seriously about climate
change. In 2009 I cycled from Berlin
to Copenhagen on a tall bike to the
Copenhagen Climate Conference.
Since then I have been involved
in a variety of creative activism
campaigns around different issues
within climate change.
Laurence Mellinger: I am an environmental artist. Since 2000, I’ve produced art work
to make people aware of the responsibility wich humans have towards their environment. I try
to show unity in life, links between human and the earth and the fragility of the ecosystem. For
me, the problem stems from the nature/culture rupture in our society. I question our ways of
using materials, producing, constructing and living in the world in our emergent society. From
this research a theme reoccurs: quality of life and its environment. The media varies according
to inspiration and context. The idea is to create awareness and be involved in the change before
it’s too late. I use different processes: photography, video, installation and collective projects
(with youths, people in jail or in a psychiatric environment) between artistic, ecological and
social fields. Climate change is one of my research topics... In 2000 in Sweden, I started a work
based on ice and produced an experimental work of photography and sculpture.
Between 2006 and 2009, I developed a collective work with inhabitants of my city called "Le
Chantier Enchanté", meaning "The Enchanted Work Site". It was a collective work made with
natural materials, ecological and collective pedagogy. In 2012, I started a series of pictures with the
sea over my city, by superimposing painting on photography. I called them "Architectural Fictions".
As a collective action, I have been involved in the "Clipperton Project" for 6 months. This project
organises research and education programmes, expeditions and exhibitions all around the world,
all with one ultimate objective: using exploration to energise and empower active citizens.
Now I am involved in "More To Come" (MOTOCO: motoco.openparc.org/), a project built
by the city of Mulhouse and a collective team from Switzerland, Germany and France. It has
received a prize from the IBA Basel label. Imagined together by users and communities, the
District DMC (a former industrial textile site) in Mulhouse was transformed into a European
laboratory for social innovation and creative action from its pit (MOTOCO). The bottom-up
process allows for a rich heritage to be re-conquered, a testimony living on the industrial history
of Rhenish. By going beyond national borders within the framework of IBA Basel, the project
has opened up new possibilities of development for the DMC site. "MOTOCO" and the project
Swiss IBA generated an impressive dynamic and fertile partnership. I am also working with
Bearboz on a book about the controversal
closure of the oldest nuclear power plant
Driss Ezzine de Blas: Science.
in France, wich is near where I live.
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Richard Houguez: In the same
Neil Callaghan: Personally I have followed
groggy way that the alarm clock rips
my body from sleep and lets me know
it’s time for work, industrial time also
uproots forests from their seasons, or is
it seasons from their companions? It’s
in this grogginess I feel my relation to
the subject - that lucid clarity of dreams
where you’ve solved it all, if only you
could remember how. I started making
work about climate change when I
realised it had articulated a subject
within me. An unethical consumer.
A highly privileged being. Politically
alienated, full of many complex impulses
and confused ideas of reproduction and
no idea how to tell the time.
I’ve been working with Liberate Tate,
a collaboration of artists and activists
creating a sustained visibility around oil
sponsorships of the arts, with a focus on
BP sponsorship of Tate Galleries. They
create highly effective, fight-specific
performances, to borrow Isola’s term.
I’ve been very influenced by working
with groups such as Platform and
insurrectionist-arts collective Lab of ii.
arguments on climate change since I was a student,
perhaps even as early as a child when the ozone
layer and CFCs were big issues. After studying at
Dartington College of Arts, I founded Propeller
Performance (www.propellerperformance.org)
with 4 friends. We were a company who made
performances, gave lectures and ran workshops.
We always said that our work explored "Art,
Ecology, perception and orientation". Certainly we
were engaging with issues of climate change, but
our work came from a place of feeling like there is
a lot of statistical information and scientific data
available - we all know that we should recycle more
and fly less - but what other possible responses
could there be to climate change? Since then I
have worked with people who engage explicitly
and less explicitly with climate change. I have
also trained in Body Weather for many years and
organised several Body/Landscape workshops
with Frank van den Ven in remote parts of the UK.
This has certainly informed my relationship with
environment and landscape. I have always had an
interest in the outdoors and wrote my BA and MA
thesis on ecologies, perceptions and 'becomings',
and for the MA I was very influenced by Felix
Guattari’s "The Three Ecologies".
Stijn Demeulenaere: Personal: climate change is an important and interesting topic.
Both from a scientific point of view (how does a weather system work, how is it influenced
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by our behaviour, what are the evolutions on a geological scale…), and a social-scientific
point of view (how is our perception of the climate change question formed, how has that
changed in the last decades, how are the power balances trying to influence this image and
framing of the question, how does the economic field co-opt this message, etc).
Artistic: one of my previous works - "SmallTalk" - discusses the perception of climate
change. But, while this topic still remains important to me on a personal level, it no longer
plays a role in my current artistic endeavours. I am now focusing on other questions, mainly
inspired by my sociological background.
What is your relation with IMAGINE 2020?
Richard Houguez: I was invited by
Laurence Mellinger: I was invited by
Mark Godber and Sam Trotman from
Artsadmin to attend the first Summer
Lab in Montpellier in 2011. I was sent
with an ambiguous role – that of a 'Young
Explorer' - to observe and partially
document the experience and dynamics
of the lab, and to report back to Artsadmin
and the wider network partners as the lab
format developed year after year. I think I
am the only person who have been to all
four labs. For the 2014 UK Summer Lab,
I was part of the production team, and
responsible for documenting the sessions.
Christopher Crimes, director of Domaine
d’O in Montpellier, where the "Tipping
Point" Summer Lab had taken place. In
August 2011, Domaine d’O welcomed
the first summer school, inspiring artists’
sensitivity towards environmental and social
stakes, so as to instigate awareness among
citizens. Christopher Crimes discovered my
work in 2003, in Mulhouse, and showed it at
La Filature, a national theatre in Mulhouse.
This work, a live installation called "e"
showed, simultaneously, the power and
fragility of nature.
Guillaume Gatteau: Le Quai (Angers, France) asked us for a theatre play last year: we
did it, and then went to summer camp last spring in Petersfield. We should have performed
once more this Autumn, but Le Quai had some problems and preferred not to. We were
disappointed. We certainly won’t have another opportunity in IMAGINE 2020.
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Driss Ezzine de Blas: Participation in the Montpellier encounter.
Stijn Demeulenaere: I was
Neil Callaghan: Along with Simone Kenyon,
happy to be invited to take part in
the 2014 Summer Lab of IMAGINE
2020, of which I had not heard of
before. I sympathise with the idea
and effort of the program. Crossdisciplinary and international
collaboration between institutes
and artists, on a specific topic, is an
intriguing approach. On top of that, I
strongly believe artists shouldn’t shy
away from relevant societal questions.
(For more about this go to the answer
to the next question). However, my
own relationship with IMAGINE
2020 is, up until now, limited to my
presence at the 2014 Summer Lab.
I was invited to the IMAGINE 2020 Summer
Lab held in the UK, and organised by Artsadmin,
at the Sustainability Centre in Petersfield.
Sónia Baptista: I hope to be able to
develop an artistic project with the support
of Transforma and re-unite with my fellow
Summer Lab participants soon and share
experiences, knowledge and queries.
Artúr van Balen: I participated in
C.R.A.S.H. Course, a two week workshop
around art, activism and permaculture organised
by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
and funded by Artsadmin in 2009. This was my
initial relation with IMAGINE 2020.
In what way do you think artists may contribute to
changing awareness and behaviour regarding a positive
attitude to ecological concerns towards climate change?
Artúr van Balen: I pass on this question as I think it is a very open question, but also
implies that art can create maximum awareness or change an individual’s attitude. At the
moment I am also trying to rethink my own practice and come up with something new for
me. I think it’s important that in the face of man-made catastrophic climate change, in the
so-called Anthropocene, where 'man' itself changes the composition of the earth and human
technology has the ability to destroy life on earth, be it fast with the use of nuclear bombs
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or slowly through the release of carbon emissions, we not only need to create awareness but
practice M.A.S. (mutual aid society). We need to share skills and knowledge, and help build
and sustain cooperatives, communities and create shared economies. How to do this in an
artistic satisfying way, that is the question.
Neil Callaghan: It is hard to draw the line between work that
draws awareness towards ecological concerns and awareness about
climate change. I think artists might not necessarily contribute
to this through the content of their work, but through what the
work does. For ecologists, a healthy ecology is a diverse one, and
I think it is the same for our cultural ecology. We need a variety
of different responses and there is not just a correct one. We need
work that processes data and represents it in comprehensible
ways. We need work that focuses our attention. We need work
that can show us what it means to be together. We need work that
ignores all of this and shows us how to remain positive.
Sónia Baptista: Perhaps to personalise matters,
keep it simple and close to one’s own experience. Big
numbers and big events often de-sensitise or petrify
people, and the result is inaction and/or denial. Be
honest, show doubt, show hope, show your personal
research on the matter, and intertwine ecological
concern with artistic concern. Reference scientists
but keep the philosophers at hand. Create events
deriving from personal experience, performance
lectures, and installations where the sometimes grim
facts and truths are also poetically expressed. Do
things of beauty and share, show things of ugliness,
and share, with hope and positive action.
Guillaume
Gatteau: It’s quite
hard to answer. Artists
are citizens, so they
behave as citizens first.
I don’t think it has
to be a subject for all
artists to create work
about this issue. But
as soon as we look at
the world as human
beings, everything will
follow... Am I clear?
Driss Ezzine de Blas: Artists
have an emotional way of dealing
with complexity. Scientific
rationality is sometimes not
enough to find solutions, new
hypotheses and to communicate
with the rest of society. Other ways
to deal with complexity are key to
being successful in research and in
communicate objectives.
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Laurence Mellinger: I think there are
Stijn Demeulenaere: Personally,
different levels at which to contribute. Artists
can contribute by empowering the subject of
climate change more strongly! Artists could
create awareness and concern through pictures,
stories and reports showing the public the
consequences of climate change on human
beings, not only human beings living on far
away islands but also here, near us. Artists could
work with scientists to communicate about
new discoveries. Artists could work with people
to experiment with new models of society, by
using collaborative and participatory economy
to produce and create. We all need to work
together to solve the problem. People have
to learn to work together. I think in France,
institutions could promote a more ecologically
engaged contemporary art to make awareness
more efficient.
I find this question rather problematic.
First of all, the wording of the question
is ambiguous and could, albeit
maliciously, be interpreted in different
ways. Above all, I believe artists don’t
have to tackle social questions if their
artistic endeavours take them on
a different path or are focusing on
different subjects. Artists shouldn’t do
anything, except make good art. So it
is up to every artist to decide for him
or herself what the topics, questions
and stances should be. This being said,
even though I haven’t taken any activist
stances in my own work up until now,
I appreciate artists who do it. The only
condition being, and this is paramount,
that the art is good.
Activist art should challenge, question,
displace, attack and perhaps even subvert our own preconceptions and assumptions about
the topics addressed. Even, just a blistering indictment of/for a cause could be a good
work. You have to make people think, and make them question themselves, others and
the world. You have to have a reason to use art to advocate your stances, and it is my belief
that art needs to question.
As said, art doesn’t have to do anything. This is my personal preference, what I find interesting,
and I believe this is where art can be of use in the climate change debate. If you just want to
be an activist and advocate a position, there are perhaps better options than making art about
it. Go into politics for example, become a scientist, debate, be a journalist. I believe if art just
tells the stories that all these domains tell very well, then you’re just recapping what somebody
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else said, and perhaps they’ve said it even better. I believe some of the artistic approaches I’ve
encountered in this field are rather simplistic and naïve, and lack a critical questioning of the
topic and their own stance towards that topic (examples that centre on ‘becoming one with
nature’, or the romantic sublimation of nature…). To me, this results very often in mostly
boring and superficial art. I can’t believe this is very beneficial or even relevant for the cause.
Last but not least: art is not pedagogical (or at least, not that directly). There’s nothing wrong
with preaching to the already converted, but it won’t start or help a good discussion or new
viewpoints. I believe activist art should aim higher.
In what way did you participate in the IMAGINE 2020
programme? Describe your involvement, and what you
feel came of it.
Stijn Demeulenaere: I participated
in the 2014 Summer Lab. I met some great
people there, stayed at a nice location, and
overall had a good time. However, I did leave
with the feeling of not really having done
any substantial work, not really discussed
anything, and not really having made
anything.
In retrospect, I have the feeling that the
structure of the lab was perhaps a bit too
ambitious. I completely agree with, and
support, the organisers opting for practice-led research, however, it felt like the time
for any real research was lacking. Because it
was only a week and the days were packed
with different workshops morning to night,
it felt like there was absolutely no time to dig
deeper, to really discuss things and think of
how we could thoroughly question our own
viewpoints and the topics at hand in art. I felt
like we were hopping from one thing to the
next, hesitatingly remaining, and shallowly
agreeing with each other. I know from the
‘after hours’ and off the record discussions I
had with other participants of the Summer
Lab that this was not due to the participants
themselves, but that there were structural
limitations to the setup of the week. There
was simply too little time to really get into
the things and questions. I found some of
the workshops very intriguing (most notably
the listening and discussion led by Anja
Kanngieser), but even there things ended just
when it started to become interesting.
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Guillaume Gatteau: I already
Laurence Mellinger: I was invited as
answered, no??!!
an environmental artist. During the Summer
Lab I exchanged as much as possible with
other scientists, artists, economists, lawyers,
etc. I shared my views on the subject as
much as possible and exchanged ideas which
could be concretely developed. I realized
that the perception of the subject of climate
change is so varied amongst different people,
that we need to develop interdisciplinary
projects. I got involved at this time in the
Clipperton Project. I was not chosen to sail
in the end, but helped the project in France. I
questioned human choices for construction
materials that human use to build, and our
responsibility regarding these choices. During
the Summer Lab we visited the Domaine d’O,
and I suggested to Christopher Crimes that
4000 wooden chairs could be recycled from
the outside theatre into a sculpture for the
Domaine d’O. By this recycling act, I gave the
exotic wood a second life, keeping the CO2 in
it for longer. The Summer Lab was an extra-large open mind place of exchange between
different disciplines and learning about new
research. It consolidated my choices as an
environmental artist and questioned my
practice.
Artúr van Balen: I led two
workshops in the Summer Lab.
See descriptions at
http://summerlab2014.eu/.
Sónia Baptista: I was invited
by the Portuguese partner of
IMAGINE 2020, Transforma, to
participate in the 2014 Summer Lab.
Neil Callaghan: Simone
Kenyon and I facilitated the
IMAGINE 2020 Summer Lab
organized by Artsadmin. It was
our job to make possible the
programme that Artsadmin had
curated. For us, it was a huge
privilege to spend the week with
such a great group of people made
up of artists and activists. We made
new connections and are still in
touch with some of the people
we met, leading to interesting
conversations and further thinking
about my place in the world, my
politics, my responsibility and how
I play a part in affecting change.
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Suggest proposals for future action or initiatives on the
subject of arts and climate change.
Stijn Demeulenaere: Make the Summer Lab longer, and less packed. The practiceled research is a good approach, but it is one that needs time and also a group differentiated
enough. Some counter opinions should be included. One should aim for a true debate:
different opinions are necessary to really make progress through discussion and work.
In general, I’d refer back to my answer 3: art needs to question in depth, and make people
think about their own viewpoint, perhaps from a different angle. It should not just tell
easy (and luckily by now widely accepted) stories about the topic. Even though they have
their place in an artistic approach to this topic, I believe the true power of art should be to
make people think, not by just advocating a point of view, but by making people think, and
questioning themselves, the people around them,
and the world. And of course: show, don’t tell. Also,
Neil Callaghan: It always feels
it is important to have good and factual data and
like there could be more time. Not
just one week, but longer engagement work with these. Talk to scientists, politicians,
economists, and yes, also the people opposing your
over time. Not just being busy
own stance and use that in your art.
with new encounters and sparking
It is also important that any activist art should
thoughts and ideas, but about
at least be aware of the key facts as understood
following them through. (Perhaps
this did happen through other strands by institutions and actors with an undisputed
reputation. Otherwise the critical stance of the
of the IMAGINE 2020 programme?)
work is too easily dismissed.
I think it would be interesting to
take a long boat trip with a diverse
group of individuals: a boat trip to
Guillaume Gatteau: I don’t know... In France,
America, Africa, Australia, Brazil and
theatre life is organised within a 30 or 40-year-old
China. To have time in which there is
system, wich does not include consciousness of
plenty of unscheduled time for deep
climate change (waste of energy, exhortation to tour
conversations and to allow various
more than to work with local audiences, etc.). We
responses to emerge.
should think about this...
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Laurence Mellinger: Develop exchange groups between inhabitants and artists in
each city to create street furniture and gardens adapted to the emergent society: made
with recycled, industrial materials from the area, built in “Fablab” nearby, developing a
new relationship with gardens (solar energy to spray water or lighten, playgrounds using
alternative energy)... Because public space belongs to everyone, it is the place to experiment
with how to live together with different dreams or cultures. This change can start in the
street. Make collective artistic actions at the
seaside to draw attention to the rise of the sea
level. Maybe during summer festivals.
Sónia Baptista: (Refer to answer 3.)
Can you give an example of an artist that is doing
influential work on this subject?
Sónia Baptista: I’ll have to get back to you
Artúr van Balen: John Jordan
on that, but in her unique way I think Yoko
Ono references nature as a true descendent of
the haiku tradition, and expresses reverence
and respect to the natural world, especially
in her writings. To write about the beauty
and amazement of nature is already starting a
thoughtful flow.
and Isa Fremeaux and their Laboratory
of Insurrectionary Imagination.
Their workshops on art, activism and
permaculture have influenced me a lot.
The Public Lab and their community
oriented civil science approach. This
is a network of individuals and not of
artists. In their words: “Public Lab is a
community where you can learn how
to investigate environmental concerns.
Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we
seek to change how people see the world
in environmental, social, and political
terms.”
Stijn Demeulenaere: Check the
performances by Davis Freeman, “Random
Scream”. They’re great.
Driss Ezzine de Blas: Not really. I am
ashamed, as they probably are...
Guillaume Gatteau: No, sorry!
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Laurence Mellinger: Naziha Mestaoui has great work about links between people and
nature in a participatory way. She uses contemporary media to create new kinds of ‘Transe’
inspired by ancestral culture. She recreates a universal experience which can influence
people’s awareness. It can help protect the old forest by the link she creates with native
people. I like the work of photographer
Spencer Tunik. He takes pictures with
Neil Callaghan: For me, a few that come
people naked in nature, for example a
to mind: Platform (www.platformlondon.
naked crowd on Aletsch, the biggest
org) are doing interesting work explicitly
glacier in the Alps. He relocates human
related to oil and climate change and Future
beings in an original posture looking at
Farmers (www.futurefarmers.com). Then
their own future. He draws the attention
there are other artists whose work for me
of the public by bringing together the
relates with this issue but they would not
vulnerability of the glaciers threatened
necessarily describe their work in this way:
by the reheating of the climate, and the
Gisuppe Penone, Basia Irland, Jeremy Deller,
fragility of the naked human body in the
Min Tanaka and Milos Sejn. There are also
face of the elements. He is engaged with
very interesting writers: Rebecca Solnit, Lucy
this issue and a poet of the landscape at the Lippard, Suzi Gablik, Naomi Klein, John
same time.
Berger, and Ruth Little (dramaturg).
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BIOGRAPHIES
INTRODUCTION
Claudia Galhós was born in Lisbon in 1972. She has been writing about dance and
performance art since 1994. She is a published author in Portugal and abroad in the
area of fiction, culture in general, dance and performance. She currently writes about
the performing arts for the weekly Portuguese national newspaper Expresso, and is
a columnist for the “Festival Bytes” (Blog of the European Festivals Association, EFA
– http://www.festivalbytes.eu/). She was editor of the weekly TV programme about
performing arts, for Portuguese public TV (2003-2005); editor of the weekly cultural
magazine AGORA, also for Portuguese public TV (2012-2014); and has written and
given seminars about performing arts (specialising in dance) for several publications in
Portugal and abroad.
Theresa von Wuthenau (DE)
Theresa von Wuthenau is a Paris-based freelance curator and project manager in the
performing and visual arts. Over the last five years, she has focused her work on arts
and climate change and sustainability. She was among the founding members of the
European networks Thin Ice and IMAGINE 2020 – Art & Climate Change, which she
has coordinated for over six years. Among other projects she has also worked with the
British organisation Cape Farewell, and is an artistic consultant to the French Nature
Addicts! Fund.
CURATED VIEWS
ARTSADMIN
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (UK)
Infamous for fermenting mass disobedience on bicycles during the Copenhagen climate
Summit, touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in post-capitalist
culture, throwing snowballs at bankers, launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a
coal fired power station, covering the Tate gallery in molasses and falling in love with
utopias, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Lab of ii) is not an institution or
a group, not a network or an NGO, but an affinity of friends who recognise the beauty
of collective creative disobedience. We treat insurrection as an art and art as a means
of preparing for the coming insurrection. Creation and resistance are the entwined DNA
strands of our practice. We see art and activism as inseparable from everyday life. Our
experiments aim not to make art but to shape reality, not to show our world to you but
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to change it together. We champion artists who escape the prisons of the art world,
who stop playing the fool in corporate palaces and apply their creativity directly to the
engineering of social movements. We befriend activists who value the imagination,
listen to dreams and play with the political as they would stanzas of a poem. At the
heart of our experiments lie new ways of relating to each other and organising ourselves:
working without hierarchy, taking direct action, practising self-management and living
ecologically, we refuse to wait for the end of capitalism, but attempt to live in spite of it.
| www.labofii.net
Isa Fremeaux (UK) and John Jordan (UK) (Co-Founders)
Together they co-founded art activist collective The Laboratory of Insurrectionary
Imagination, and co-authored/directed the film book “Pfard dur Utopia” (nautilus, 2013)
They are in the process of setting up a new school for art activism and Permaculture with
the new land-based collective La r.O.n.c.e (Resist, Organise, Nourish, Create, Exist) in
Southern Brittany, France.
John Jordan is an art activist. He founded the direct action groups Reclaim the Streets
and the Clown Army, worked as a cinematographer for Naomi Klein’s The Take, co-edited
the book We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism (Verso 2004)
and lectures in theatre and fine art.
Isa Fremeaux was a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College-University,
London, before deserting the academy to set up a new self-managed education project
in France. Her action research explores popular education, storytelling and creative
forms of resistance.
BUNKER
Henrietta L. Moore (UK)
Professor Henrietta L. Moore is a distinguished anthropologist and cultural theorist and
has held the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge
since 2008. Her work has developed a distinctive approach to the comparative analysis
of gender and sexuality, and to the intersections between culture and globalisation. A
founding Trustee of The SHM Foundation and Chair and Co-founder of SHM Productions,
she has been actively involved in the application of social science insights to the arts,
business, and public policy for twenty years. Appointed fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
in 2000 and Trustee of the Barbican Arts Centre in 2011, she has an on-going interest in
the role of the arts in promoting cultural and social innovation. Professor Moore regularly
participates in public and academic debates and has written and presented on subjects
ranging from virtual worlds and new technologies, to self-imagining, democratic political
decision-making and contemporary art.
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IMAGINE 2020 - ART AND CLIMATE CHANGE — BIOGRAPHIES
Renata Salecl (SI)
Renata Salecl (born in 1962) is a Slovene philosopher, sociologist and legal theorist. She
is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University
of Ljubljana, and holds a professorship at Birkbeck College, University of London. She
has been a visiting professor at London School of Economics, lecturing on the topic of
emotions and law. Every year she lectures for a couple of weeks at Benjamin N. Cardozo
School of Law (New York), on Psychoanalysis and Law. She has also been teaching a
course in neuroscience and law. In 2012 she was also employed as visiting professor
at King’s College London. Her books have been translated into ten languages. Salecl is
associated with the critical legal studies movement. She was Centennial Professor at the
department of law at the London School of Economics (LSE) and is now visiting professor
at the LSE’s BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and
Society, as well as visiting professor at the School of Law at Birkbeck College in London.
She has been fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin (1997/8), visiting
professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, visiting humanities professor at George
Washington University in Washington, DC, and visiting professor at Duke University. She
also writes columns in various European newspapers, including “Delo” (Ljubljana) and
“La Vanguardia” (Barcelona). In 2010, she was awarded the title of “Slovenian woman
scientist of the year”.
DOMAINE D’O
Chus Martinez (ES)
Born in Spain, Chus Martínez has a background in philosophy and art history. She is
currently Head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in
Basel, Switzerland. Before she was Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and
dOCUMENTA (13) Head of Department and Member of Core Agent Group. Previously
she was Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona (2008–11), Director of the Frankfurter
Kunstverein (2005–08), and Artistic Director of Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2002–05). For the
51st Biennale di Venezia (2005), Martínez curated the National Pavilion of Cyprus, and in
2008 she served as a Curatorial Advisor for the Carnegie International and in 2010 for the
29th Bienal de São Paulo. During her tenure as Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein
she curated solo exhibitions of Wilhelm Sasnal, among others; and a series of group
exhibitions including “Pensée Sauvage” and “The Great Game To Come”. She was also
founder of the Deutsche Börse Residency Programme for international artists, art writers,
and curators. While at MACBA Martínez curated the Thomas Bayrle retrospective, an
Otolith Group monographic show, and an exhibition devoted to television, “Are you
ready for TV?” In 2008, Martínez was curator of the Deimantas Narkevicius retrospective
exhibition, “The Unanimous Life”, at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, which
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travelled to major European museums. Martínez lectures and writes regularly including
numerous catalogue texts and critical essays, and is a regular contributor to Artforum,
among other international art journals.
KAAITHEATER
Jeroen Peeters (BE)
Jeroen Peeters (Brussels) is active as a writer, dramaturge, performer and curator.
Trained in art history and philosophy, he publishes on dance and performance in various
specialised media, including Contact Quarterly, corpus, Dance Theatre Journal, Etcetera,
Maska, Mouvement and TM. Together with Myriam Van Imschoot and Kristien Van
den Brande, Peeters directs Sarma. As a dramaturge, artistic collaborator or performer,
Peeters has contributed to performances and research projects of a.o. Eleanor Bauer,
Paul Deschanel Movement Research Group, deufert + plischke, Sabina Holzer, Anne
Juren, Thomas Lehmen, Vera Mantero, Martin Nachbar, Meg Stuart and Superamas.
KAMPNAGEL
Adrienne Goehler (DE)
Adrienne Goehler is a publicist and curator based in Berlin. 1989-2001, President
of the Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für bildende Künste) Hamburg; 2001-2002,
Senator for Science, Research and Culture of the State of Berlin; 2002-2006, Curator of
the Cultural Capital Funds Berlin. She is the author of Verflüssigungen (Liquifications)
– Wege und Umwege vom Sozialstaat zur Kulturgesellschaft, Campus, Frankfurt Main
2006 and € 1000 für jeden: Freiheit. Gleichheit. Grundeinkommen (with Götz Werner),
Econ Verlag, Berlin 2010. Since 2010 she is Artistic Director of the touring exhibition
examples to follow! expeditions in aesthetics and sustainability in Lima, Puebla, Sao
Paolo, Beijing, Addis Ababa, Mumbai, et al. Further exhibitions: wall on wall, WestsideGallery, photographs by Kai Wiedenhöfer, Berlin, 2013; radius – research based art, part
I & II, 2008 | 2011 and Art Goes Heiligendamm, an art intervention on the occasion of
the G8 summit, Rostock, 2007.
LE QUAI
Cyril Dion (FR)
Cyril Dion is a writer, director, French poet and activist. Actor by training, he was an actor
before joining the Hommes de Parole Foundation as project coordinator and editorial
director. In 2007, with Pierre Rabhi, he founded the NGO Hummingbirds, which he
directed until 2013, before becoming their spokesman. Editorial adviser at Actes Sud
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Collection “Domaine du Possible” created by him, he is the co-founder and editor-inchief of Kaizen magazine, co-produced with Hummingbirds, a film by Coline Serreau,
“Local Solutions to a Global Disaster”. He is preparing a new film, TOMORROW, of
which he is author and co-director with Mélanie Laurent. In 2014 he published his first
collection of poems “Sitting on the wire” in the Round Table editions.
LIFT - LONDON INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF THEATRE
Amy Sharrocks (UK)
Amy Sharrocks is a live artist, sculptor and film-maker who invites people to come on
journeys in which their own experience, communication and expression are a vital part.
For 10 years she has been investigating people and our relationship to water. She also
makes a lot of work about falling, looking at our daily trips and stumbles, questioning
our need to be up.
Jon Davis (UK)
Jon Davis has worked as Producer at LIFT since September 2011. Prior to this
appointment, Jon worked as a Project Facilitator for The Reader Organisation and as
an independent producer for Il Pixel Rosso. At LIFT Jon is responsible for year round
research and development and producing festival presentations and new commissions.
He has delivered a wide range of projects including large scale, site specific performances,
multi-disciplinary projects and theatrical productions in conventional theatres. Jon has
worked extensively with artists from the Middle East and North Africa, including Ahmed
Al Attar (Egypt), Lucien Bourjeily (Lebanon), Company O (Morocco), and has travelled
throughout the region meeting with artists, cultural organisations and attending arts
festivals.
Stephen Emmott (UK)
Stephen Emmott is Head of Computational Science, Microsoft Corporation. A
neuroscientist by training, he now leads a multi-disciplinary research laboratory which
spans stem cell biology, immunology, molecular programming, biogeochemistry and
Earth System science. His Laboratory’s work has been published in Science, Nature,
Nature Medicine, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Climate Change and over 100 leading
domain specific scientific journals. Stephen is Visiting Professor of Computational
Science at the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor of Biological Computation,
University College London. He is author of the best-selling book “10 Billion”.
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ROTTERDAMSE SCHOUWBURG
Tobias Kokkelmans (NL)
Tobias Kokkelmans (1980) graduated at the University of Amsterdam in theatre science,
musicology and dramaturgey. He has worked for, a.o., The Flanders Festival in Brussels/
Ghent (B) and the Ro Theater (NL). Currently, he works as a dramaturgee for the festival
Operadagen Rotterdam and the actors’ collective Wunderbaum.
TRANSFORMA
Gil Penha-Lopes (PT)
Gil Penha-Lopes holds a PhD in Functional Ecology and is currently working on a PostDoc on “Integral Adaptation Solutions when facing Climate Change”. His research focus
is on bottom-up initiatives and processes such as social movements (Transition and
Permaculture) and Eco-villages, and on the analysis of the implementation success of
participatory, inspirational and conflict solving tools for decision-making.
Vera Mantero (PT)
Vera Mantero worked as a dancer in the Gulbenkian Ballet from 1984-89. Since 1991 she
has been showing her choreographic work in theatres and festivals around Europe, Brazil,
USA, Canada and Singapore. She participates regularly in international improvisation
projects, teaches workshops on composition and improvisation and collaborates in
music projects as a singer. She represented Portugal at the 26th Bienal of São Paulo in
2004, together with the sculptor Rui Chafes, with the co-creation “Eating your heart
out”. In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious Gulbenkian Art Prize for her career as a
performer and choreographer.
INSIDE VIEWS
ARTSADMIN + LIFT
DARTER (UK)
Chloe Cooper and Phoebe Davies are British artists who work independently and in a
collaborative process with Louisa Martin as DARTER.
Chloe Cooper (UK)
Chloe Cooper is a British artist who uses performative tours, lectures and instructional
videos to propose something quite improbable to a group of people, to be worked
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through together. This something quite improbable normally splashes about in the
rocky waters of human relationships, such as the desire to subvert conventional thought
around regionalism and progress by travelling in time or seeking to understand why
someone left a challenging programme of practice-sharing by inspecting a plaster cast
of their foot.
Phoebe Davies (UK)
Phoebe Davies is a British artist and producer, her practice is defined by its location
and context, investigating and exploring how people perceive their social framework.
She generates work through instruction, discussion and live interaction, be it creating
wrestling performances in shopping centres to feminist nail bars or public installations
on byroads connecting local farm villages. Her work is often ephemeral and chanced
upon, existing primarily in pedestrian spaces as well as in galleries and institutions.
Michael Pinsky (UK)
Michael Pinsky is a British artist whose international projects have created innovative and
challenging works in galleries and public spaces. He has undertaken many residencies
that explore issues which shape and influence the use of our public realm. Taking the
combined roles of artist, urban planner, activist, researcher, and resident, he begins
residencies and commissions without a specified agenda, working with local people and
resources, allowing the physical, social and political environment to define his working
methodology.
Artsadmin and LIFT (UK)
Judith Knight is Co-Director of Artsadmin, Beki Bateson is Executive Director of the
London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). Both Artsadmin and LIFT are members of
the IMAGINE 2020 Network, and co-commissioned Plunge.
Beki Bateson (UK)
Beki Bateson is Executive Director of London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT).
Previously CEO at Greenbelt Arts Festival for nine years, she was also Projects Coordinator for the human rights charity Amos Trust of which she was also Chair (20072012). Beki has led trips to the Middle East, Nicaragua and South Africa and made films
promoting charitable work including HIV and microcredit initiatives. Beki was co-founder
of Vaux, a collective of artists and city-lovers, and has lived in London for twenty years.
Judith Knight (UK)
Judith Knight is the co-director and founder of Artsadmin. She worked in theatres in Hull,
Glasgow and London before setting up Artsadmin in 1979. Over the years Judith has
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produced numerous projects by different artists, nationally and internationally, many of
which have been site-specific pieces in locations all over the world. She is on the boards
of the arts and environment organisation Tipping Point and theatre company Jericho.
She was awarded an MBE in 2007, and in 2009 was made Officier des Arts et des Lettres
by the French Government.
BUNKER
Nevenka Koprivšek (SI)
Nevenla Koprivšek was trained at Ecole Jacques Lecoq. She began her professional career
as an actress, then theatre director. She was artistic director of Glej theatre and in 1997
established BUNKER. Since then she has acted as the company’s director, as well as
artsitic director of MLADI LEVI international festival. Bunker is also in charge of STARA
ELEKTRARNA, an old power plant converted into a performing arts centre. Nevenka has
been involved and co-founded many international networks and exchange projects. She
occasionally is writes, researches, lectures and advises on different issues of programming
and cultural policy. She is also a certified practitioner and trainer of the Feldenkrais method
of awareness of movement. In 2003, the City of Ljubljana gave Nevenka Koprivšek a major
municipal award for special achievements in culture and in 2011she was honoured by the
Government of France as a Chevalier d’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
DOMAINE D’O
Christopher Crimes (UK/FR)
Christopher Crimes first taught languages and arts in Southampton. Over the last 40
years he has developed expertise in challenging new projects throughout France. Initially
assistant director of a multimedia centre serving schools and teachers throughout
France he moved on to the performing arts in 1982 and joined the management team
of Oscar Niemeyer’s Maison de la Culture in le Havre. In 1993 he opened “la Filature”
one of the major venues for performing arts in the east of France, home to all the major
international talents: Merce Cunnigham, Denis Marleau, Trisha Brown, Bob Wilson
but also Alvis Hermanis, Christophe Marthaler to name just some of the 900 artists
supported or produced over the 13 years of production and programming. Moving on to
the Quai in Angers – a new arts centre with accent on sustainable development and also
a founder member of the Thin Ice network. In Montpellier he developped an ambitious
project involving arts, science and audience involvement around the major questions of
present day society and notably climate change which was concluded by the opening of
an exciting new 600 seat theatre, designed on sustainable principles and with limited
energy needs At present Christopher is General Manager of NA!Fund.
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DOMINO
Zvonimir Dobrović (HR)
Zvonimir Dobrović was born in 1978 in Zagreb. He is developing the Domino’s artistic
programs (over 100 events per year), implementing the strategic plan, building institutional
marketing for the organization and securing the budget for a steady growth of the
organization and also is responsible for cross-sector cooperation between the organization
and a wide pool of stakeholders (NGO, arts, politics, media). Founder, producer and curator
of two festivals: Queer Zagreb (since 2003) and Perforations – week of live art (2009).
Perforations Festival is presented in Croatia annually in Zagreb, Rijeka and Dubrovnik and
commissions up to 20 new works per year.In 2012 started an annual Queer New York
International Arts Festival.Invited as curator for different festivals and events – Limit festival
Belgrade, Balkan focus Onassis Cultural Center Athens 2014, Contrefugue Le Quartz Brest
2012, etc. Executive Producer of IETM Zagreb 2012 meeting (450 participants / conference
– Informal European Theater Meeting).Founded Balkan Performing Arts Network with the
goal to promote and support local and regional artists internationally 2012.Started the
first comprehensive international research and development year round artist residency
program in Croatia 2013. Editor of a performing arts magazine Balcan Can Contemporary,
published 3 times a year in English in Slovenia by Maska.
KAAITHEATER
Guy Gypens (BE)
Guy Gypens is currently the artistic director of the Kaaitheater arts centre in Brussels.
After obtaining a master’s degree in economic science and an MBA in marketing &
human resource management he became the administrator at the Beursschouwburg in
Brussels from 1987 to 1991. From 1991 until 2007 he was Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
and her dance company Rosas’ general manager. Simultaneously, he worked for some
years as theatre company tg STAN’s and contemporary music ensemble Ictus’ manager.
From 1996 to 2000 he also directed the Springdance Festival in Utrecht.
KAMPNAGEL
Amelie Deuflhard (DE)
Amelie Deuflhard was born in 1959 in Stuttgart. She is married and a mother of
four children. After studying Romance, History and Cultural Science she worked as a
research assistant at the University of Tübingen and at the Museum für Technik und
Arbeit (Museum of Technology and Work) in Mannheim. From 1996 onwards, Amelie
Deuflhard was a producer of theatre- dance- and music-projects in Berlin. Between
325
2000 and 2007 she directed the Sophiensaele in Berlin and developed it into one of the
most important independent production venues in Germany and beyond. In 2003 she
was head of the association “Zwischen Palast Nutzung” (Temporary Palace Use) that
created and organised an artistic programme for the Palast der Republik (Palace of the
Republic, Berlin). In 2004/05 she was one of the artistic directors of the “Volkspalast”
(People’s Palace), a kind of festival project at the demolished Palace of the Republic.
This project produced an international discussion about the use of the palace square
that has been lingering until today. Since 2007 Amelie Deuflhard has been Artistic
Director of Kampnagel Hamburg, the biggest independent stage and production venue
for Performing Arts in Germany. Amelie Deuflhard is (Co-) Editor of several publications,
eg. “VOLKSPALAST – Zwischen Aktivismus und Kunst” (2005), “Spielräume produzieren
– Sophienseale” (2006) and “Parcitypate: Art and Urban Space” (2009). In March 2010
Amelie Deuflhard received the Caroline-Neuber award from the city of Leipzig, for being
a “founder of theatre in the best sense of the word”. In November 2013 she received the
insignia of the Chevaliers des Arts et lettres from the French ministerial of culture for her
engagement in cultural dialogue between France and Germany.
Uta Lambertz (DE)
Uta Lambertz was born in Unna/ Germany in 1983. In 2003 she started her studies at
Ruhr-Universität Bochum where she completed her degree in theatre & media studies
in 2007. During her studies she did internships at Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen and
Schauspiel Essen and worked as musician and freelance dramatic advisor for several
scenic projects. From 2008 she worked as an event manager and project leader for
Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen, where she later pursued her postgraduate studies
in Communication & Cultural Management. In 2010 she completed her master’s degree
under Prof. Karen van den Berg and Prof. Dirk Baecker. Since 2010 she has been working
at Kampnagel – Centre for Finer Arts in Hamburg. As a curator she is primarily responsible
for cross-genre-formats and strategic partnerships. Since 2010 she has also worked as
a guest lecturer for University of Hamburg, Theater Academy Hamburg, University of
Witten/Herdecke and Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen.
Gregor Zoch (DE)
Gregor Zoch was born in 1988 in Peine/ Germany. In 2009 he started his studies at Hafen
City University in Hamburg where he completed his bachelor degree in cultural studies
and urbanism in 2013 under Rolf Lindner. During his studies he organised different
projects dealing with arts in public spaces. After a first internship at Kampnagel –
Centre for Finer Arts in Hamburg he worked as personal assistant to the artistic director
Amelie Deuflhard (from 2013 - 2015). Since 2015 he has been working as a curator for
performance and theatre as a member of the artistic team at Kampnagel.
326
LE QUAI
Christian Mousseau Fernandez (FR)
Academic background: Sociology Master’s applied to local development; Bachelor and
Master’s in design and implementation of cultural projects. Professional Experience:
Director of the theatre Le Quai d’Angers (2009-2014); Director of Cultural Affairs and
theatre Saumur (2003-2009); Director of Cultural Affairs of the 1997 Douchy Mines
(2003); Member of the steering committee of the research programme of the value and
usefulness of culture, since 2011.
NTIL - NEW THEATRE INSTITUTE OF LATVIA
Zane Kreicberga (LV)
Zane Kreicberga has been trained as theatre director at the Latvian Academy of Culture
where she is currently lecturing theory and practice of contemporary theatre and theatre
management. She is one of the founders and curators of the New Theatre Institute of
Latvia (NTIL) and the International Festival of Contemporary Theatre “Homo Novus”.
At NTIL Zane currently is developing activities in the framework of European project
“IMAGINE 2020: Art and Climate Change”, which concerns artistic response on topical
ecological, economical and political issues. Her interests of research include acting
techniques, the role of theatre in social and political context.
ROTTERDAMSE SCHOUWBURG
Ellen Walraven (NL)
Ellen Walraven is currently, and since 2013, Artistic and General Director of Rotterdamse
Schouwburg ( City Theatre of Rotterdam, the Netherlands). She was dramaturge of
Toneelgroep Amsterdam (2010); General and Artistic Director of Amsterdam Cultural
Political Centre, De Balie, and Artistic Director of Informal European Theater Meeting
in Utrecht (2004-2005). Among the various responsabilities she assumed in arts (in
supervisory board, in advise, programmaking and in publications), Ellen Walraven has
worked as dramaturge for different groups and was a member of theatre collectives.
TRANSFORMA
Luís Firmo (PT)
Torres Vedras, Portugal. Cultural and Arts Manager and Curator, holds a Product Design
Degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon (FBA-UL) and a Sculpture
Graduation from AR.CO, Lisbon. Post-Graduated in Arts Management at National
327
Institute of Administration (INA) / Foundation CCB-FLAD, Lisbon, in Curatorial Studies
at FBA-UL / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and in International Cultural Relations at
the Faculty of Humanities, Catholic University, Lisbon. Has developed diverse activity
as creator, as trainer, as manager and as a curator and programmer of contemporary
arts. Develops a continuous activity in the cultural sector, collaborating with various
organizations, national and international, evaluating and/or facilitating the creation
and implementation of projects of different nature (arts, design, architecture), and
preferably features that integrate research into new forms of dialogue and intervention
in the public space. Founder Member, Chairman and Director of Transforma.
OPEN DIALOGUES
Jean Lambert-wild (FR)
Author, actor, set designer and theatre director, Jean Lambert-wild was born in 1972
in Reunion island. In 1990, he started the writing and the theatrical creation of his
“Hypogeum”. In 1997, he became associate artist at the Théâtre Granit- scène National
of Belfort and founded the cooperative 326. From 2007 to 2014 he headed the Comédie
de Caen - National Dramatic Center of Normandy; then, in 2015, the Theater of UnionNational Dramatic Center of Limousin and Academy of Dramatic Art of Limousin. His
writing plays a major role in his artistic work, which combines tradition and innovation.
The theatre he defends is in essence a multi-art “medium”, the place where codes from
all artistic disciplines express themselves and create meaning. For each of his projects,
he constitutes a phalanx of collaborators and place in the centre of his creations a
network of different artistic, technic, scientific or academic skills in order to explore new
perspectives for theatrical art and stage writing.
ARTISTS SUMMER LABS
Artúr van Balen (DE)
Artúr van Balen is a Dutch-Hungarian conceptual artist, researcher and activist. Having
studied philosophy, fine arts and ceramic design van Baleńs individual and collective work
has been internationally exhibited at Victoria and Alberts Museum (Disobedient Objects
Exhibition 2014, London), the Media Impact Festival for activist art (Moscow 2011 and
2013) and at the food art exhibition Eating by Design (Designmuseum Eindhoven 2012,
Netherlands), amongst other notable venues. His sculptures—ranging from 10 meter
high inflatables used at protests to delicate porcelain designs—reveal a fascination with
the ephemeral and the state of transformation. This transformation can take many forms
both physically through inflatables and biological processes as well as socially through
328
activism and engaging in social change. However, at the heart of everything van Balen
does there is a touch of irony and play at work.
Driss Ezzine de Blas (FR)
Driss Ezzine-de-Blas is PhD in economy. His research activities also integrates ecology
and sociology research methods. He is Principal Investigator at CIRAD (www.cirad.fr)
where he leads various research projects on multi-criteria evaluation of development
and conservation policies, including issues of equity and human development.
Guillaume Gatteau (FR)
Born in 1970, Guillaume Gatteau soon fell in love with theatre and words, learnt some
philosophy and acting, and has continued until today as a regissor. He is happy in his own
life but angry with some people that make the world crazy.
Stijn Demeulenaere (BE)
Stijn Demeulenaere is a sound-artist, a radio maker and searching musician. He holds
degrees in sociology, cultural studies and studied radio at the RITS school of arts. Stijn
was the curator and producer of the free form radio show ‘Radio Eliot’ on Radio Scorpio.
He worked as an editor for Jan Fabre and worked as a journalist for the Belgian public
radio stations Klara and Radio 1 and for the independent radio station Radio K Centrale
in Bologna, Italy. He was a founding member of the improvisation collective Karen Eliot.
In 2009 he started out as a sound artist, showing his first installation “SmallTalk” at the
Burning Ice festival at Kaaitheater in Brussels. Stijn is attracted to sound because of its
directness, it’s malleability, and it’s mystery. In sound he tries to unravel social structures,
personal history and the unconscious imagination of people. He is currently working
around the themes of the ruin of listening and the personal experiences of sound. Lately,
Stijn has been increasingly involved with dance. He created the soundtracks for the dance
pieces “As It Fell” by Marisa Cabal and Stav Yeini, and “Vartaloiden Kaupunki” by Veli
Lehtovaara. Other collaborations included directors and video artists Ychaï Gassenbauer,
Pierre van Heddegem and Visual Kitchen. His work was shown or played in Belgium,
the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Portugal and the UK. In 2014-15, Stijn is artist in
residence at Overtoon, (Brussels, BE) and associated artist with the Pianofabriek Arts
Lab (Brussels, BE). Stijn lives and works in Brussels (BE).
Laurence Mellinger (FR)
I was born in Metz in 1972. I am a professional visual artist since 1999. I currently live
and work in Mulhouse, east of France. Environnemental artist and designer, my research
is centered around what binds Men to nature. To the question “ how to live in harmony
with the world? “ I answer by various projects or works between artistic, ecological and
329
social fields : household objects, outdoor design, spaces, gardens, pictorial expression,
installations, photographs, supervision of consultation project and collective creation
with inhabitants for the transformation of their place of life. From this research a theme
recurs : quality of live and its environment. The Media varies according inspiration and
context, each activities rewarding the others. Since 1992, while following my studies,
I teach drawing and achieved murals painting on order. Graduated from a Design art
School and from Paris National School of Fine Arts, I have been affiliated at «the house
of the artists» since 1999.
http://laurence.mellinger.free.fr
Sónia Baptista (PT)
Sónia Baptista was born in Lisbon in 1973. She completed the Contemporary Performers
Course at Fórum Dança in 2000. Her training was complemented in numerous dance,
music, theatre and video workshops. She obtained, with distinction, the degree of Master
Researcher in Choreography and Performance from the University of Roehampton,
London, U.K. In her work she explores and experiments with the languages of Dance,
Music, Literature, Performance and Video. As performer and co-creator she collaborated
with various artists and companyies, amongst them, Laurent Goldring, Patrícia Portela,
Aldara Bizarro, Vera Mantero, Thomas Lehmann, Sílvia Real, Teatro Cão Solteiro and
AADK. In 2001 she received the Ribeiro da Fonte Award for best newcomer in the Dance
Field, from the Portuguese Ministry of Culture, for “Haikus” (her first piece), a series of
short solos that were officially premiered at the Danças na Cidade Festival in 2002. In
2015 she premieres her new piece, “A Falha de onde a Luz”, at the Festival Cumplicidades
in Lisbon, and writes a dramaturgic piece, “Peremptório Erro sem Dano”, about the work
of the artist Pedro Tudela, premiering at END, in Coimbra (Portugal).
Neil Callaghan (UK)
Neil was born in Portsmouth, England and studied Theatre at Dartington College of Arts.
He has been making performances since 2002 with various constellations of people.
He works alone, in collaboration numerous others and for many dance and theatre
companies including: Featherstonehaughs, Requardt&Rosenberg,Kazuko Hoki, Nicola
Conibere, Dan Canham, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods a.o. Along with other graduates
from Dartington he was a co-founder of propeller performance, a company to set up to
explore art, ecology, perception and orientation. He is interested in curating and creating
contexts for things to happen. He is involved in an on-going collaboration with Simone
Kenyon, with whom he has undertaken numerous projects, including facilitating the
Imagine 2020 Summer Lab organised by Artsadmin.
330
Richard Houguez (UK)
Richard Houguez is researching modes of hairdressing which engage in private and
public symbols and wider social contexts of hair, with performances and collaborations.
Richard is currently organising salons at Common House in Bethnal Green, around new
forms of social cooperation, and the politics of the building’s users as a starting point.
Other ongoing activities includes sustained pressure performances with Liberate Tate on
oil sponsorship issues and working with Artsadmin’s Imagine 2020 team to produce the
Imagine 2020, 2014 Summer Lab.
331
The IMAGINE 2020 - Art and Climate Change network members are:
Artsadmin | Toynbee Studios 28, Commercial Street, London E1 6AB, United Kingdom
T: +44 (0) 20 7247 5102 | F: +44 (0) 20 7247 5103 | www.artsadmin.co.uk
Bunker Productions | Slomškova 7, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija
T/F: +386 1 231 4492 | M: +386 31 326 099 | www.bunker.si
Domaine d’O | 178 Rue de la Carriérasse, 34090 Montpellier, France
T: +33 (0)4 67673100 | www.domaine-do-34.eu | Domaine d’O left the network in 2013
Domino | Ožujska 9, 1000 Zagreb, Croatia
T: +385 1 3820019 | www.thisisadominoproject.org
Kaaitheater | Akenkaai 2, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
T: +32 (0)2 201 58 58 | F: +32 (0)2 201 59 65 | www.kaaitheater.be
Kampnagel | Kampnagel Internationale Kulturfabrik GmbH Jarrestrasse 20, 22303
Hamburg, Germany | T: +49 40 270 949 89 | F: +49 40 270 949 11 | www.kampnagel.de
Le Quai | 17 rue de la Tannerie, BP 30114 49101 Angers, France cedex 02
T: +33 (0)2 44 01 22 22 | F: +33 (0)2 44 01 22 11 | www.lequai-angers.eu
LIFT | Institute of Contemporary Art, The Mall, SW1Y 5AH, United Kingdom
T: +44 (0) 20 7093 6340 | F: +44 (0) 20 7093 1304 | www.liftfestival.com
New Theatre Institute of Latvia | Miera iela 39-2, LV 1001 Riga, Latvia
T/F: +371 6 7228477 | www.theatre.lv
Rotterdamse Schouwburg | Schouwburgplein 25, 3012CL Rotterdam, The Netherlands
T: +31 10 404 41 11 | F: +31 10 413 24 04 | www.rotterdamseschouwburg.nl
Transforma | Largo de Sto António, 24-26, 2560-632 Torres Vedras, Portugal
T: +351 261 336 320 / 261 101 944 | www.transforma.org.pt
IMAGINE 2020 is funded with support from the European
Union. This publication reflects the views only of the author,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use
which may be made of the information contained therein.
About the Publisher
ARTINSITE _ ArtinSite is an editorial project made by Transforma that produces magazines,
books and catalogues based on eclectic approaches about contemporary culture.
TRANSFORMA.
Largo de Sto António, 24-26, 2560-632 Torres Vedras, Portugal
T: +351 261 336 320 / 261 101 944
[email protected] | www.transforma.org.pt

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