Yearly Archives: 2015

Till It’s Gone | Istanbul Museum of Modern Art

MELD

This post comes from MELD

Featuring artists from various periods and geographies, TILL IT’S GONE explores artistic positions and approaches to the ecological issues and to the world we live in.

Arjen de Leeuw, Act, 2012, HD Video, 2’55’’ © Arjen de Leeuw, Courtesy of the Artist.

Istanbul Modern welcomes 2016 with an exhibition praising nature and focusing on environmental awareness. The exhibition reflects artists’ relationship with nature and interpretations of the concept of sustainability. Featuring artists from various periods and geographies, TILL IT’S GONE explores artistic positions and approaches to the ecological issues and to the world we live in.

Markus Hoffmann, Level Up, 2013. HD Video, 7’50’’, Dead Sea, Israel. © Markus Hoffmann, Courtesy of the Artist.
Su Rynard, Bear, 2004 – 2006, Video SD, 9’30’’ © Susan C Rynard, Courtesy of the Artist.

Scheduled to open on January 13, the exhibition’s preliminary program features Yoko Ono’s large-scale installation “Ex It”, described as “life as a continuation” by the artist.

Curators: Çelenk Bafra, Paolo Colombo

Istanbul Museum of Modern Art logo

The post, Till It’s Gone | Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, appeared first on MELD.
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meld is an ongoing interactive global art platform and collaborative catalyst to commission, produce and present ground-breaking and evocative works of art embedded in the issues and consequences of climate change. meld invites exceptional artists and innovative thinkers dedicated to the moving image and committed to fostering awareness and education to join us in our campaign for social change. Through a collaborative dialogue, we hope to provoke new perceptions, broaden awareness and education and find creative solutions concerning climate change, its consequences and its solutions.

meld was formed by a devoted group of individuals guided by a passionate belief in the power of art to convey personal experience and cultivate social progress. meld is inspired by the idea that when art melds into the public realm, it has the power to reach people beyond the traditional limitations of class, age, race and education and encourage public action.

Go to MELD

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Sustainability in Production Alliance needs you

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

So what is the Sustainabilty in Production Alliance (SiPA)?

SiPANetworkBack in September 2015 Fiona MacLennan spoke to Andy Purves and Craig Bennet, the founders of the Sustainability in Production Alliance to find out more about the alliance. Both Craig and Andy are members of the Association of Lighting Designers and have worked for many years in the live production industry. They have become concerned at the direction the industry is moving in and the lack of sustainable thinking. Their concerns encompassed financial, environmental, and social sustainability and between them they decided it was time to do something about it.

At PLASA 2014 a panel assembled by the Association of Lighting Designers debated sustainability. It was recognised that each facet of the industry working disparately could not effect the necessary culture change. This ultimately led to the creation of Sustainability in Production Alliance (SiPA). The alliance is formed of representatives from all sectors of the industry.

The SiPA network

“We will only move forward as an industry if we communicate and work together to change our culture”.

A large number of those at the event expressed an interest in being involved and during 2014/15 a group of those interested professionals got together and agreed on a set of goals covering Social, Environmental and Economic sustainability.

The goals cover an initial 10 year period from 2015 to 2025 and are intended to form a framework to stimulate individual, collaborative and industry-wide action.

  • The pillars of sustainability – social, environmental, and economic each support three SiPA goals, facilitated by a group of goal guardians.
  • Goal guardians work with a team of goal allies (you) to ensure communication and collaboration will reach all sectors of the supply chain.
  • Each goal group will collect information, form agreements, and embed outcomes into daily practice.
  • Practice is the key here; SiPA is practical. The SiPA initiative removes the cultural boundaries to sustainability that are naturally present within the industry. Understanding the needs and actions of others will create a combined force to tackle some of our biggest issues.
  • The goal groups will work transparently and present progress on an annual basis.

The press launch of SiPA – The Sustainability in Production Alliance took place on 8th September 2015, at the Unicorn Theatre and this was followed up by the successful launch of the initiative at PLASA 2015 in London, Creative Carbon Scotland is keen to promote their message in Scotland and will be presenting a seminar on the Goals at:

PLASA Focus Glasgow

Igniting Sustainable Culture Change in the Live Production Industry

Thursday 21 January 2016 14:00-14:45 pm (Alsh Room)

You can help

SiPA would like to hear from anyone interested in becoming involved. They are recruiting goal guardians. To find out more check out the SiPa website where you can find information on what’s involved and how to contact the Alliance

NOTE: SiPA is 100% unfunded but has been supported in-kind by:

  • Entertaining Sustainability – for sharing of their web space and forums
  • PLASA – for provision of space and a show stand at the PLASA trade show
  • The Association of Lighting Designers – for initiating the debate
  • The Theatres Trust – for provision of meeting space
  • White Light Ltd – for support and provision of materials

SiPA is a voluntary group. The group will use social media to spread their message to manufacturers, product designers, hire, sales and events companies, designers, stage managers, technicians and engineers, production managers, producers, architects and theatre consultants, students, educators, directors, choreographers, venue managers… the live production industry

The post Sustainability in Production Alliance needs you appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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Liu Bolin Reminds Us Of The Destruction Brought By Coal And Deforestation

MELD

This post comes from MELD

“I put my thinking of the whole of society and my view of the entire world into my artworks,”

Liu Bolin produces sculptures, installations, paintings, and photographs in which he critiques global societies. Though he has traveled to cities like New York and Paris for his work, he focuses principally on his native China, characterized by rampant development and consumerism. Among his best-known projects is his “Hiding in the City” series (begun 2005). Eschewing Photoshop, Liu stands in front of iconic cultural, historical, and commercial sites, camouflages himself to blend (almost) seamlessly into his surroundings, and photographs himself. The resulting images show him dissolved into shelves of junk food or the Great Wall—a Taoist vision of oneness with the world, and a warning of contemporary society’s consumptive power.

A consequence of China’s rapid economic development through industrialisation, urbanisation, and excessive consumption, is the severe deterioration of ecology and the highly polluted urban living environment. Mountains have been deforested, if not split or leveled for urban constructions; rivers have been dried if not contaminated by industrial wastes; and landscapes have been transformed beyond recognition. In particular, for urban dwellers, outdoor air pollution has recently been identified as the fourth-leading factor for premature death in China . To compensate for the destruction of nature, urban planners started designing green zones and parks amid concrete jungles made up of urban high-rises to bring a small piece of nature back to human living. Hiding in the City No. 94 – In the Woods speaks to the belated human awareness of the importance of trees, nature, and clean air, in which Liu Bolin “disappears” into a small forest in an urban park.

In 2010 Liu Bolin created the optical illusion of thousands of people who disappear (die) every year because of China’s massive coal consumption. Devoid of regulation, China’s coal mines experience regular explosions, cave-ins, and other fatal disasters. “Coal Pile is a conceptual commentary on the consequences of not only the dependence on coal, a limited resource, but the dangers that come for families who work with and use coal, ironically, to survive,” explains the artist.

The post, Liu Bolin Reminds Us Of The Destruction Brought By Coal And Deforestation, appeared first on MELD.
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meld is an ongoing interactive global art platform and collaborative catalyst to commission, produce and present ground-breaking and evocative works of art embedded in the issues and consequences of climate change. meld invites exceptional artists and innovative thinkers dedicated to the moving image and committed to fostering awareness and education to join us in our campaign for social change. Through a collaborative dialogue, we hope to provoke new perceptions, broaden awareness and education and find creative solutions concerning climate change, its consequences and its solutions.

meld was formed by a devoted group of individuals guided by a passionate belief in the power of art to convey personal experience and cultivate social progress. meld is inspired by the idea that when art melds into the public realm, it has the power to reach people beyond the traditional limitations of class, age, race and education and encourage public action.

Go to MELD

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Free Energy & Carbon Audit for SMEs

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

In collaboration with the Carbon Trust, The University of Edinburgh & University of Strathclyde

The Energy and Carbon Audit programme is provided free to selected small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Glasgow and Edinburgh areas by a partnership between the Carbon Trust, University of Strathclyde and University of Edinburgh.

It will help you to understand and reduce energy and other costs in your business, providing a clear assessment of your organisation’s carbon footprint and a practical action plan to make savings and take positive steps towards environmental sustainability.

Postgraduate students from the respective universities are trained by the Carbon Trust to complete an audit at an SME site, as part of their studies towards a Masters degree in engineering, carbon management or other related discipline. They will be selected to work with your business, backed by the support and experience of the Carbon Trust. This is highly valuable practical experience, carried out to professional standards, benefitting the students’ development and helping to produce a much-needed future generation of skilled technical specialists in business sustainability.

The link below gives a clear summary of how the programme works for the prospective businesses and what you need to do to participate:  http://www.carbontrust.com/media/560352/free-energy-and-carbon-audit-for-smes-glasgow-edinburgh.pdf

To confirm interest in participating in this free programme please send an email with your contact details and brief description of your business to: paul.wedgwood@carbontrust.com.

The post Free Energy & Carbon Audit for SMEs appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

Climate Research Project- Something a little different than a submission call…

Open Calls

To whom it may concern,

This is something a little different than a submission call, we are seeking help with a research project.

We (Joa&P) and the Llano del Rio Collective are collaborating on a project charting concrete and abstract ecological relations that people operate within to address, bolster and alter (through creative work) their relationships to a changing world. The project will use the metaphors of geology to add to a conversation about what it is to live, create, and challenge our changing world. We aim to locate these tectonics and humors, and identify the characters of forces working to sustain and reshape our ecological world.

In a country like France, where radioactive clouds stop at the border and where we aren’t afraid to build a cancer research center on the former site of a nitrogen fertilizer factory that has been condemned by the EU’s industrial safety agency, we should count less on “natural” crises than on social ones. It is usually up to the social movements to interrupt the normal course of the disaster.
-The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

When it is necessary to change an automobile tire, open an abscess or plow a vineyard, it is easy to imagine a quite limited operation. The elements on which the action is brought to bear are not completely isolated from the rest of the world, but it is possible to act on them as if they were: One can complete the operation without once needing to consider the whole, of which the tire, the abscess or the vineyard is nevertheless an integral part.
– Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share

Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships- co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all. Historical specificity and contingent mutability all the way down, into nature and culture, into naturecultures. There is no contingent mutability rule all the way down, into nature and culture, into natureculture. There is no foundation; there are only elephants supporting elephants all the way down.
-Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto

Life is built on relations. Climate change dramatically alters the terms of these relations. Action and creativity alter these relationships to end harmful patterns and facilitate the emergence of more healthy ecological relations; between people, between individuals and natural systems, and between humans and the economies they exist within.

The Project

We are interested in sighting these emerging creative practices and actions.

Toward this effort we are hoping to survey the land to create a guide to the humors working today. Whether you’re creating projects that change the perception or alter our dependence on oil, reframe our relationship to extractive technology and the abstraction of resources, re-network the material and emotional routes against and beyond oil-time, or explore the metaphors of energy itself, we’d love to hear from you.

The Climate Change/Change the Climate guide will be a practical and projective resource for individuals looking for ways to plug-in to a biological struggle.

Please send us simply:

1. the name of your project
2. The location where your work functions.
3. website or online reference to the project
4. A simple description (one paragraph tops please!) of what you are doing.

All submissions will be considered for inclusion in this guide.<

Deadline and mailing
Please mail it to us by February 1st, 2016
Mail to editors(at)joaap.org

Warmest Regards, In Cahoots…

(ps. As Climate Games says, “We are nature defending itself)

(pps. we’ve also really been digging Jason W. Moore, Frans Fanon, Amaia Pérez Orozco, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Montse Galseran for the ideas we’ve been thinking through on this… and many more.)

Ashden Directory receives the 2015 Nick Reeves AWEinspiring Award

Ashden Directory

We are honoured to announce that the Ashden Directory, Ashdenizen and Landings Stages have been awarded the 2015 Nick Reeves AWEinspiring Award for Arts, Water and the Environment.

The award is presented by the Arts and Environment Network of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) in association with the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW).

The award celebrates projects that have contributed innovatively to CIWEM’s vision of ‘putting creativity at the heart of environmental policy and action.’

Each year, on the Directory and Ashdenizen, we looked forward to announcing the AWEinspiring winner, never expecting to be on the other side of the story. We have long appreciated the work of the late Nick Reeves, and the Arts and Environment strand of CIWEM, which has shown the way for other organisations to acknowledge and incorporate the arts in their thinking and in their work.

In making the award, CIWEM found that ‘the vision, intention and execution of the Directory has been far-reaching, and represents an impressively deep treatment of ecology in theatre and the performing arts over many years’.

We are very proud to be included in the company of past winners and would like to thank also the many artists and writers whose pioneering work has provided the inspiration for the Ashden Directory, Ashdenizen and Landing Stages.

warm regards

Wallace Heim, Robert Butler, Kellie Gutman and Eleanor Margolies

Landing Stages. Selections from the Ashden Directory 2000 – 2014, available as pdf on www.ashdendirectory.org.uk

There are hard copies of Landing Stages available. Please contactashdentrust@sfct.org.uk if you are interested in receiving a copy.

The Ashden Directory of Environment and Performance,www.ashdendirectory.org.uk

Ashdenizen, ashdenizen.blogspot.co.uk

 

For more information on the award:

CIWEM www.ciwem.org/competition-and-awards/the-nick-reeves-award.aspx

CCANW www.ccanw.co.uk/

Art, EcoJustice, and Education: Call for Proposals

Open Calls

The Art-Eco Project is pleased to announce a call for proposals for a peer-reviewed, edited book project on art and EcoJustice. The collection of articles from various authors will enlighten different ways of studying, supporting, and sharing the themes of socio-ecological issues through artistic practice.

The principal aim of EcoJustice thinking is to understand the essential interdependence among humans and with the more than human world. It is crucial to acknowledge the fact that we are mutually responsible to and dependent on others. Any assumption that we are superior to or outside this interdependence will cause damage.

EcoJustice work (teaching, scholarship and art) thus works along three interrelated strands of analysis: 1) The first involves an understanding that the present problems of ecological and social violence are rooted in the deep cultural assumptions underlying modernity. Our taken-for-granted value-hierarchized worldview, including anthropocentrism, linear thinking, individualism, science based rationalism and instrumentalism, has to be challenged in order to change the course of action towards regarding all life as equally valuable. 2) The second strand is focused on identifying those patterns of belief and behavior that lead to mutual care and the protection of more sustainable ways of life both within modern societies and traditional indigenous communities. We name this process revitalizing the commons. 3) The third strand argues for imagination as an important means of engaging the forms of responsibility needed to generate healthy communities. As Wendell Berry has written, “for humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it” (2012, p. 15). We must, that is, imagine that it is possible to live ethically on this earth and what that could look like.

This book will be organized to explore how artistic practice intersects with and informs this EcoJustice framework. We recognize that this is an interdisciplinary field with many diverse entry points. Scholars draw from a range of philosophical and social theoretical view points—post structuralism, phenomenology, post-humanism, feminist theory, queer theory, new materialism, for example—as well as artistic practices—culture jamming, environmental art, improvisation, participatory art, community dance, documentary theatre, just to name a few. And we ask questions about what the intersection of these theories and practices could mean for education.

We thus invite essays that explore intersections among art practice and the EcoJustice framework. Essays could focus on (but are not limited to) the following:

  • empathy, compassion and art
  • performing identities and differences (race, gender, sexuality, ability, etc.)
  • imagination and transformation
  • time and space-based art
  • indigenous or place-based knowledge and understanding
  • immaterial art and consumerism
  • environmental art as activism
  • street art and the property of place

Specific Guidelines: Proposals should be approximately 500 words and include a brief abstract of 100 words. Include a brief bibliography. Priority will be given to those works that make clear their connection to the EcoJustice framework.

Deadline for proposals is Feb 29th 2016.

Please send your proposal (in file format .doc or .pdf) to raisa.foster@artecoproject.com.

The book is edited by Raisa Foster, Ph.D. (research director, Art-Eco Project), Jussi Mäkelä (researcher, Art-Eco Project) and Rebecca Martusewicz, Ed.D. (Eastern Michigan University).

AEJE_call for proposals (pdf)