Arts & Ecology

Youth voyagers tell their tales

I’ve just come out of Cape Farewell’s Youth Expedition Conference which took place at the RSA today and was organised by Creative Partnerships.   12 students were selected to board Noorderlicht, the vessel bound for Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic which became the crew’s temporary home between 14 – 23 September 2007.

Embarking from London, the chosen 15-16 year olds came from schools across the UK, Germany and Canada with the objective to explore climate change and see the very real effects for themselves.  During their trip they responded to the issues from a scientific and artistic point of view, but perhaps paramount to this was the invaluable experience of sharing perspectives from their own cultures and feeding back their discoveries to a much wider audience via online broadcasts. 

To assist with the communication and legacy of the project on dry land each school had a ground team who brought the project alive to those who weren’t on the trip – fuelled with pride and purposefulness these students made contact with the media and got the whole school on board in a philosophical sense.

I was totally blown away by the fascinating stories, observations and accounts from such a talented, articulate and positive group of young people.  There was a privileged insight into the perspective from the Inuit community courtesy of Doriana and her teacher who call the Arctic their home.  While Western eyes look at the Polar bear with wonder and spectacle, the Inuit community find their increasingly everyday presence alarming - Polar Bears are solitary animals but have been forced to come into villages to scavenge for food when the ice breaks up and doesn’t return when it should do. 

After lunch Josef and Jethro played an acoustic and enchanting rendition of a score that they had written on the boat and we had the opportunity to see Franzi’s innovative short film which ingenuously told the tale of plankton from a fluorescent narrative!

I urge you to look at the site and read these amazing accounts; it was an inspiring and incredibly optimistic day.  Creative Partnerships are now working on a tool kit which will be distributed to schools next year to ensure the outcomes and experiences reach a much wider audience.

Latest news from Ahmedabad

It is the now the second day of the workshop that Pal (Performing Arts Lab) are running in partnership with us and the CEE (Centre of Environmental Education) at the Fourth International Conference on Environmental Education in Ahmedabad.

This is a huge event - 1500 delegates and us, right bang in the middle of it. To our knowledge it's a world wide first to have the arts and design properly represented at one of these things.

Our workshop – Art, design and ecology - the role of artists and designers in creative education for sustainable development – is outside under a big orange awning with a floor made of packed and dried cow dung. In our group we've attracted a growing crowd. Everyone is curious. We have people from Russia, Egypt, Hong Kong, Bosnia, the States, Latvia, Ghana, Australia, the South Pacific, of course India and the U.K. I've met others from Taiwan, Vietnam, Borneo, and all over.

It was quite sticky yesterday trying to get people to participate, but today we really got energy and dialogue in spades. Some truly amazing projects: designers talking about work in the Andaman Islands, people making beautiful things and textiles out of recycled stuff, working with and training the poor in doing so, artists using dance with reference to drought in Africa, you name it.

In tomorrow’s session we lodge our recommendations for action and involvement on behalf of the international cultural sector as part of the Conference response. No one has much patience for anything other than for the doing: working across disciplines and focusing on the poor with their light footprint and their totally unfair vulnerability.

I know a conference can sound dull - but this one is on a beautiful campus with monkeys, peacocks in the trees, very tame chipmunks, the noisiest of birds, apparently snakes, and of course dear old mozzies. So we do feel part of the planet. We invited a group of local schoolchildren to join our workshop – they gave a stunning presentation and said 'don't expect the animals to save the planet, it's down to us'.

Michaela Crimmin

The Bat House Competition

Last night at the RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects) the prizes were awarded to the winning entrants of the Bat House Competition and you can see the winning entries on display at the RIBA until the 24th of November. This competition to design a bat house was initiated by Turner Prize winning artist, Jeremy Deller, who had been inspired by bat enthusiasts in Texas who had ‘excavated caves and built towers on their land to encourage bat settlement’. The competition had three entry categories: professional architects; students and the general public; and school children. The entries across the categories ranged from architecturally and aesthetically excellent designs, to those that took bat species requirements into careful consideration to completely fantastical creations – a bat rollercoaster was even included in one of the school children’s entries.

It was inspiring that the overall winners, Jorgen Tandberg and Yo Murata came from the student category; both of whom are fourth year students at the Architectural Association. Kevin Peberdy from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust said in the opening speech that it is easy to superimpose human needs in a scaled down form when designing a building for bats. Part of the aesthetic and functional strength of Tandberg’s and Murata’s innovative and intricate design resulted from the fact that it is totally incomparable in any shape or form to a human building and was conceived completely with bats in mind. Their design will be built later next year at the WWT London Wetland Centre in Barnes, in South West London.

One of the aims of the competition was to raise awareness of decreasing biodiversity and Jeremy Deller said in his speech that he hoped that the legacy of the competition amongst architects would be an increased consideration of bat needs and habitats when designing buildings for humans, especially as old buildings continually get torn down to be replaced by new ones which are not so accommodating to bats. 

For more information about the Bat House Project please visit the website: www.bathouseproject.org and if you are planning to go to Manchester in the next couple of months why don’t you drop by CUBE where RIBA’s sister exhibition is showing until 26th of January.

Fiona Parry.

Sound as a Pound?

Last weekend, I biked down Regent’s Canal and emerged on Mare Street to then disappear for two hours in the continually breeding galleries of Vyner Street.  For Arts & Ecology, there were rich pickings at Wilkinson gallery where David Batchelor’s exhibition Unplugged (remix) was showing.

The ground floor space yielded a series of rather brutal totemic structures, collectively titled Parapillars, onto which were attached plastic findings like fly swatters, toilet brushes and combs from the pound shops of London's East End and Scotland.  It was quite a startling sight though there was a system to it – the objects attached to each structure were selected according to colour and categorised further by object type.  The work gave off a magnetic energy, exposing an artificially coloured rainbow of similarly worthless yet essential items.

For me it triggered a memory of a previous experience in Sri Lanka.  I spent a short period of time in the southern area of Kalutara six months after the Tsunami hit and like many others assisted with the clean up of the beaches.  What seemed like an infinite amount of possessions washed up on the beach day after day; flip flops; toys; plant pots and among other things, thousands of toothbrushes.  All plastic, all cheaply produced but at an extreme cost to the environment. 

Batchelor’s pound shop pickings, almost all derived from a never ending production line in China.  Dispersed across the world these goods arrive in our towns and cities and are sold at super low prices aimed at low income households.  It would be interesting to see the real cost behind a baby blue ladies comb from China. 

The show has now finished at Wilkinson but is accompanied by a catalogue published by Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh where the work was first shown earlier this year.

See also Milton Keynes Gallery’s current exhibition; Pascale Marthine Tayou: Plastik Diagnostik.  For his first solo exhibition in the UK Marthine Tayou presents a series of works at the gallery and off site installation, Plastic Bags at the MK Dons Football Stadium which, faithful to his practice draws on the detritus and throwaway ephemera discovered on the streets.

India

Tomorrow morning I fly to India - expending carbon emissions in the context of today's UN warnings of catastrophe - so I know I need to make the trip valuable. As I write, the radio has the voice of an MP saying we had better get our act together since the UN report says the world is warming faster than was previously thought.

The reason for going to India is that PAL (Performing Arts Lab) in partnership with RSA Arts & Ecology and the CEE (Centre for Environment Education) is running a workshop at a big UNESCO / Government of India three day conference in Ahmedabad. The theme of climate change runs throughout all the sessions. With British Council support, we have brought together artists, designers and educationalists to propose a collective long term initiative to bring about positive change. Have a look at the CEE site through the link above to see the scope of the conference including the names of people participating. Before this, I am accompanying MA students from the Royal College of Art to meet artists in Delhi and in Mumbai - it will be interesting to hear their ideas for addressing the raft of challenges. I will let you know. Meanwhile if you have expereience of the relationship between art, climate change and education, we would be very interested.

While I am away, and actually from now on, other members of the arts team will be contributing news, comments and questions.

Comments comments!

As I prepare for a trip to India - more on this shortly - I am greatly cheered by the first responses to the blog. One came through from Bill Stott welcoming this more human form of communication and also advocating the irreverent, sometimes cynical accessibility of the cartoon as a way of exploring socio-economic and cultural issues. Yes!

Richard, I agree with you too - we need the Romantic tradition to continue amongst a plurality of perspectives and means of addressing what seem sometimes to be pretty intractable challenges. My concerns come when the balance tips into this at the expense of artists' engagement with the political, economic, social and behavioural. There is so much value too in artists challenging and subverting as the means of exploration. We are launching a new series - Arts & Ecology Exchanges - in the New Year and then the new Arts & Ecology Online which will centre on public conversation.

I am more than happy for this blog to be used as a place for comments like these so that we are responding to interests and concerns, rather than plotting on our own. If anyone would also like to be on our database, please let me know.

Of interest if you don't know, YASMIN hosts a significant amount of discourse on climate change and art.

Off Climate Change - onto the Fourth Plinth

Wednesday saw the installation of the beautiful, complex, extraordinary - and very brave - work of Thomas Schütte for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. I urge you to go and see it. This is the fifth in a series which began as an RSA project with three works commisioned from Mark Wallinger, Bill Woodrow and Rachel Whiteread. We continue to be represented on the Greater London Authority's commissioning group.

The Mayor of London said that whilst London is renowned as the finance capital of the world, the main reason why visitors come here is our art - our culture - our heritage. And it is of course right that this includes art conceived in another country, indeed by one of the world's most interesting artists. I leave the office on Friday evening very proud to have played even a very small part.

Back to climate change next week!

Climate Change: Science, Art and Human Rights

Last night I went to the first in a series of talks organised by Arts Catalyst, the British Library and the Open University on Climate Change & Human Rights. The President of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, Greenland – Aqqualuk Lynge – made some very simple, very direct pleas. Work with us as equal partners. Develop mutual respect and compassion. Exercise moderation for the sake of our people today and your people tomorrow. He talked of ethics and human rights, of responsibilities to the earth and each other, in the context of science – of reaching for courageous alternatives. You could say the usual stuff and shrug – but coming from a highly intelligent and articulate man whose world is increasingly polluted and destabilised, it made for thoroughly uncomfortably listening.

Can Lynge’s appeal to the science community stretch to the arts as well? The chair, Dr Michael Bravo of the Scott Polar Research Group, University of Cambridge, rather wearily said he was tired of artists expressing the romantic in this context and yearned for something more critical. Someone from the audience said the arts can open the debate. Surely we can go further than that?

Tomorrow (Wednesday 7 November) at SOAS there is a day long symposium on how artists, technologists and scientists can lead African responses to climate change. Melting the Ice – African Perspectives on Climate Change – will be chaired by the publisher and playwright Margaret Busby OBE. Speakers include artists Yinka Shonibare MBE, Baaba Maal and Romuald Hazoume. Email nr20@soas.ac.uk for a place.

Welcome to the Arts & Ecology Blog

A big welcome to this first post for the RSA's Arts & Ecology project. It's a regular chance to talk about what's happening on the project, and on the broader issues that it is addressing. Far more importantly, as our team here has far more questions than answers, we hope to provoke your responses and ideas to inform this next more ambitious, more participatory stage of Arts & Ecology.

If you don’t know what has been achieved previously, there is information on the site. So this is essentially an introduction to ‘what next’ on the project.

The RSA has long been at the cutting edge of combating climate change, first offering a prize for reducing industrial smoke emissions in the year 1770. More recently a massive tree planting scheme. And now the Arts team sits next to another major project at the RSA, CarbonLimited, developing new ways to encourage individual citizens to play a role in reducing the carbon emissions which increase global warming. We want to match their practical and exploratory initiatives with completely different, complementary perspectives, those of artists and the cultural sector.

We started Arts & Ecology in partnership with Arts Council England in 2005. Two huge words coming together inevitably create potential for the largest ever Pandora’s Box and I frequently feel that the lid is perilously close to bursting open.

So we at once try the difficult art of focus, yet remain open and alert to the complexity, scope, inter-relatedness and the sheer enormity of the issues. What I have seen markedly change in these two years is the sheer amount of interest from both within and outside the sector in what artists and the cultural sector have to say and bring to the debate. We now have on average two thousand visits a month to the website, daily contacts – artists coming through London, non-arts organisations wanting to involve artists in their activities, people wanting to know how they can source more information and be engaged.

Well before us there were and always will be extraordinary arts projects addressing climate change. Of course artists raising questions, posing new ideas, exploring behaviours, commenting, revealing. And organisations,Cape Farewell, Platform, a number of academics and university courses, the website Yasmin to name but a few.

We have Peter Gingold’s Tipping Point and Al Tickell’s Julie’s Bicycle. All operating in different ways but all working for positive change. Further national and international examples are described in the book we published at the end of last year, Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook and even this is inevitably well short of comprehensive.

What we want to do at the RSA with ACE is to profile many of these activities and to extend the discourse. Building and adding to previous debate, Arts & Ecology Exchanges will provide a platform for artists alongside politicians and others who are influencing our future.

A new series – one event a month for five months beginning in the New Year – is currently being planned so let us know if you are interested but not already on the mailing list and we will be sure to send you information as soon as we have dates and speakers confirmed. The headings for this series are huge including conflict and migration; population increase, consumption and waste; diminishing biodiversity and the threats to the eco system.

A bigger project is the development which is currently taking place of the new Arts & Ecology Online. This blog is a precursor and we’d WELCOME your suggestions as to what you would like included on the site as we prepare the briefs and specifications.

What would you like to see and what services?

Anything from the briefest note would be incredibly helpful. Our vision for it is that it will profile interesting projects, of course; have plenty of means for conversations across the world between artists and between the cultural sector and people in other disciplines; have regular thinking pieces from a wide range of contributors; information on environmental issues and organisations. That it will be a hub, a place to make connections and add ideas.

The third related and new venture for us is Arts & Ecology International. Three artists are preparing to travel to Afghanistan and to India; a project is underway in Brazil and we will be developing new partnerships in China, India and the U.S. in 2008. Working internationally in another way, we are commissioning short animations which will be shown on Arts & Ecology Online and beyond – and a project in virtual space on Second Life.

But to end this first blog with art. On a recent Saturday morning I experienced one of the great rewards for working with artists. I got up before dawn to go to Gunpowder Park to see the latest work by Argentinian artist Tomas Saraceno. He talked at our No Way Back? Conference at the LSE last December, and then again at the symposium we ran as part of the 2007 Sharjah Biennial. This time time there was little talking.

Trained as an architect, Saraceno’s work poses the idea of floating cities. At the invitation of Arts Catalyst he brought a giant inflatable to the early morning autumn mists of Essex. It lay there, a huge circle of sheeting on the ground, held down by sandbags.

A small group of lucky, lucky people were there in the dew. Slowly we helped the giant fill with air and grow as the sun came up and saw it brought to life, the colours of the foil which forms part of the material spectacularly colourful as the sun reflected off it.

This is why I work with artists – this is a serious, magical, unique, positive experience. This is invigoration for the Green movement, for the Climate Change lobby, for the scientists pouring over statistics and charts. Thanks to Saraceno and to Arts Catalyst we who were there will remember this morning for the rest of our lives.