Hot topic

The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) at the end of this year will attempt the Herculean task of trying to create a political framework for reducing the world’s greenhouse emissions. As we inch towards that goal, with politicians reluctant to stick their necks out too far, something else has become obvious. To move into the new ecological age, we need more than new laws and targets. We need a new kind of citizenship, one in which we’re no longer passive in the face of global threats such as climate change. Political change of the scale needed now is inseparable from cultural change. While the arts are only one part of the broader culture, they have always had a role in creating the narrative of how we interact with our natural world.
Where we’re at
The Royal Society of Arts’ (RSA) Arts and Ecology Centre, in partnership with Arts Council England, was born in 2005 to explore how we could actively focus the energies of artists on these problems – but also to draw attention to the great work that many artists were already doing. David Buckland’s ‘Cape Farewell’ project launched in 2001, to link artists of all disciplines to climate science, and to harness their celebrity to draw attention to the issues. Tipping Point started organising a series of conferences to bring artists and scientists together and to galvanise the wider arts world (see p5). Julie’s Bicycle has taken a brilliantly hands-on approach to reducing the environmental footprint of the music industry (see p6). My background is in the visual arts, and this was a rich source of new insights, inspiration and activity. Art can sense where the tensions in society lie, and has increasingly become interested in how it can engage people in new relationships – relationships between spaces, between people, between people and their environment. Relationship is at the heart of the notion of ecology.
We embarked on a series of commissions and partnerships with artists. When the artists Heather and Ivan Morison created a public shelter, ‘The Black Cloud’, in Bristol in July, it was the product of an earlier Bristol residency that Situations ran, initiated by the RSA. Not cocooned in a gallery, The Black Cloud was built in an act of collective barn-raising by the people of Bristol. In the weeks following its creation, the structure has hosted events, meetings and performances, bringing people together, very literally, under the black cloud that we collectively face and hope to emerge from. If art has the power to create a special space for new thought that is free of the usual noise and conventions, then the Morisons’ work is that idea made concrete (wood, actually).

Collaborative change
Radical Nature, an exhibition drawing together 40 years of investigation into art and ecology by artists and architects, was hosted at the Barbican Art Gallery this summer and autumn. Curated by Francesco Manacorda – an alumnus of RSA Arts and Ecology – the exhibition was initially criticised for being housed inside a gallery space away from the ecologies it discussed. Within days of its opening, Manacorda was able to answer those critics when the Dalston Mill opened. In 1982 artist Agnes Denes created an artwork ‘Wheatfield, A Confrontation’, by planting a disused space in Manhattan with wheat. A version, ‘Radical Nature’, was recreated in Dalston. The French-based architectural collective EXYZT created a windmill and community kitchen alongside the wheat field. Denes’s work wasn’t just making a dramatic ecological statement. It was playing an active part in changing local people’s relationship to the place and to each other as they visited the Mill to bake bread, share recipes, and attend meetings, events, music and theatre. You could see that enjoying doing something collectively unlocked a local energy in people in a way that few other projects could. If the new citizenship is to be based on individual and collective resourcefulness rather than passivity – and our own resourcefulness is key here – this was art acting as a blueprint. As Madeline Bunting noted in The Guardian, “it’s evidence of an art that is penetrating some of the least hospitable places, very far from galleries, to open up conversations in unexpected ways around our relationship with land, food and each other”.
Call to action
In the past two decades, art has been thought of as a tool of regeneration, whether it be urban regeneration or art for health. As both these projects hint, it can also be a powerful catalyst for a potentially more profound type of regeneration. Art is not going to combat climate change by didacticism or preaching, but it can help us to start the process by which we rethink our most fundamental relationships. Instead of being passive, waiting for governments to act, the arts can be the prompt and facilitator of active engagement. It’s exciting to see the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre emerge from a period of exploration into one of genuine action. Peterborough, a particularly forward-thinking administration, is setting itself the goal of transforming itself into a flagship of sustainability. Enthused by some of the ideas of connected citizenship, it has invited us to play a substantial role in that transition, understanding how art can not only help people re-envision a place and articulate their thoughts, but how it works to transform people’s fundamental relationships within it. Again, this is more than using art for conventional urban regeneration – this is about unpicking the concept of sustainability and asking what it really means in the context of a future British city. The Peterborough project is in its infancy, and developments can be followed on the Centre’s website.
And COP15? This is the moment to begin to build a new coalition of cultural organisations working internationally to advance the potential of arts as we face the huge issues of the future. This future can be as ominous or as positive as we determine.