Yearly Archives: 2012

Do you wish to breathe life into an unused open space within your Glasgow neighbourhood?

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Jamie Clements in collaboration with Christian Cherene, ‘Site 001′, 2012, multimedia, Photo by Pavel Douseck

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

Ever thought of using an unused open space in Glasgow for a:

  • green gym/ play/ outdoor exercise
  • pop up sculpture
  • exhibition space
  • outdoor education
  • arts project
  • event space
  • urban beach
  • pop up park
  • growing space
  • or any innovative idea

Glasgow City Council now invites applications for the Community Support for Stalled Spaces fund.

Funding is available from a minimum of £1,000 to a maximum of £2,500.

Closing Date for applications: 27th of August.

Proposals should follow the guidelines/criteria as laid out in the following link which also contains inspiring examples and a first point of contact for anyone who wishes to apply for funding:

www.glasgow.gov.uk/stalledspaces

Proposals must take place within the Glasgow City Council Boundary.  Development & Regeneration Officers can assist community groups to complete their applications.  Hard copies of application forms are available on request.

Last year the initiative assisted 42 projects resulting in over 15 hectares of land being brought back into temporary use (the equivalent of 22 international football pitches) and supporting groups to attract match funding totalling approx £500,000

Stalled Spaces
Planning Service – Development Plan
Development & Regeneration Services
Email: stalledspaces@glasgow.gov.uk
0141 287 8618

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

2nd. Uranium Film Festival Rio de Janeiro – June 28th to July 14th, 2012

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

The Uranium Film Festival of Rio de Janeiro is a global event with satellite festivals in other cities and countries. The Uranium Film Festival is a project of the Yellow Archives.

The goal of this Film Festival is to inform global societies about the nuclear fuel chain, the dangers of radioactivity, and the environmental and health risks of uranium exploration, mining, processing and also about nuclear waste. The festival stimulates the production of independent documentaries, movies and animated films about nuclear issues.

The Yellow Archives, the presenting organization of the Uranium Film Festival, is a cultural and educational organization and it is the first-ever film library in Brazil and Latin America dedicated to films about the whole nuclear fuel chain and radioactivity. The Yellow Archives hopes to increase public information about the nuclear power, about nuclear waste, uranium mining and radioactivity in general. Schools, universities, non-profit institutions will have access to the Yellow Archives. The films shall be used only for non-profit, educational and research purposes.

For more information about the Festival, the Films and schedules, please visit http://www.uraniofestival.org

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Conference “Cultural Dimensions of Climate Change and the Environment in North America”

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

The Conference will take place at the  Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen, Germany (June 28-29 , 2012)

Climate change is an inherently global problem. However, climate change impacts as well as mitigation efforts are always perceived and dealt with locally and in a culture-specific way. Global warming interacts in multiple ways with North American ecological and social systems. On the one hand, the U.S. and Canada belong to the world’s largest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases. On the other hand, the Arctic north of the continent as well as the Deep South is already heavily affected by a changing climate. Despite the US’s and recently also Canada’s rejection of international binding climate targets, on the local and regional level, some of the world’s most ambitious climate initiatives can be found in North America.

Striking about the symbolic representation of climate change in the USA is a relatively huge cultural variety. While in Europe climate change deniers are largely marginalized and without influence on mainstream politics, American views on climate change and the environment become increasingly polarized according to political beliefs. And whereas the U.S. hosts some of the world’s leading climate science institutions, religious explanations of why global warming is or is not happening, repeatedly have found supporters in media and politics, too.

How can these contradictions be explained? The participants will deal with these questions in the course of the conference that focuses on the human dimensions and cultural representations of climate change and the environment in North America.

You can read the program here.

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Negotiating Routes: Ecologies of the Byways III February – June 2012

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

Negotiating Routes: Ecologies of the Byways is a project inviting reflection by artists on the anxieties embodied by the rank infrastructural development across India and its uncomfortable coexistence with local ecologies.

Now in its third year, the project has invited artists, collectives and other professionals to develop projects that are site-specific and have an inter-disciplinary approach. Mapping various sites across the country, artists and communities have come together to discuss the regeneration of the environments they inhabit. The project encourages the archiving of local knowledge and mythologies, flora, fauna, home remedies, stories and folklore as integral to the specific artist’s intervention.

This years ongoing projects are:

NR 9: Akshay Rathore and Flora Boillot (Aulinjaa Village, Madhya Pradesh)

Abstract Reality: A Visual Perspective on the Organic Movement in Madhya Pradesh http://aulinjaamp.blogspot.in/

NR 10: Priya Ravish Mehra (Najibabad, District Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh)

Making the Invisible Visible: The Darning Tradition of India

http://rafoogari.wordpress.com/

NR 11: Uma Ray (Domahani, District Jamshedpur, Jharkhand)

Where the River Meets its People

http://wheretherivermeetsitspeople.blogspot.in/

 For more information about the event and the ongoing projects , please click here.

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Eden and the overburden

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This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes: 

The partnership between the Eden Project and Rio Tinto has been billed as supporting education projects about sustainability and research into post-mining regeneration. This was a working partnership, not merely a “social license to operate” – the creating of a benevolent public image for corporations such as BP, Shell, Rio Tinto, through their association with cultural institutions, and now the Olympics.

One of the education projects of this partnership is a pop-up children’s book, Earthly Treasure, full of pictures of dazzling jewels and brightly coloured pages showing how modern life can only exist through minerals that must be mined.

There’s a page showing a huge open pit mine, a sombre, near-monochrome dug-out bowl. You can slide trucks to take away the “surface layer” and “pull down the tab and blast away the top layer of earth, called the overburden”.

The “overburden”. The infinitely complex soil that makes life possible is merely a weight, a waste to remove to get to the riches below. The phrasing harks back to Francis Bacon who wrote in his Novum Organum in 1620 that miners were the new class of man who would interrogate and alter nature. Nature could be “forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded”.

But now, the soil holds no more secrets. It’s only the burdensome surface layer.

This normalizing of open cast mining and mountain top removal is given to children as if a game, one more gem to absorb in their education. Many reasons may lie behind using that phrasing, but the license it condones is not merely cultural benevolence.

h/t: Robert Newman in the Guardian

 

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

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory