As part of the Trailer Trash Project,  Sam will be working with the Nomad Lab - children and their parent from the Valle Del Oro Neighborhood Association in Newhall (Santa Clarita) CA.  The Lab offers all kinds of  art workshops in graphic design, print making, music, acting, etc.  It is run under the direction of Evelyn Serrano who also teaches a class on art and activism at CalArts. Sam recently met with the class. Here are his notes: [ed.]

-by Sam Breen, October 17, 2010

I met with Evelyn’s class, and we are starting to make a plan.  Our first date with theNomads and their parents is in Newhall on Nov 6 . There should be about 30-40 students there, ranging in age 6-14. Evelyn wants me to bring the trailer, so I will need to install a work-floor in the Spartan  by then! Nomad workshops in photography and creative writing are already under way. Teachers are exploring the idea of what home means to them. So they’ve begun thinking about this theme (which is great ’cause that’s my theme, too!) I’ll give the kids a small presentation of the project and take them

What makes a house a home?

on a tour of the Spartan. Then the photography kids will take pictures. Some will start writing, some of the Arts and Activism students from CalArts will lead theater games (with the idea of home in mind). Some of the Nomad kids will be commissioned to talk about what they’d want in the trailer if it was their home (they could draw, write etc.) We could have a projector in there, so I might put up some ideas for my wish list – things like solar panels, a grey water system, compost. I’ll also be asking them about ways to use the trailer as a performance space – even before it’s finished.

On Oct 20, well’ll have another meeting of the Arts and Activism Class.  Stay tuned.  [Sam will have got to install a temporary floor in the Spartan in the next three weeks. That also means floor insulation, a belly pan, and tanks for storing clean and water. -ed.]

This post is part of a series documenting Sam Breen’a Spartan Restoration Project. Please see his first post here and check out the archive here. The CSPA is helping Sam by serving in an advisory role, offering modest support and featuring Sam’s Progress by syndicating his feed from http://spartantrailerrestoration.wordpress.com as part of our CSPA Supports Program.

Call for Papers

The conference committee invites proposals for papers addressing the relationship between the cultural and environmental aspects of sustainability.

Potential topics and questions might include:

• performance ecologies
• green design for performance
• theatre and eco-activism
• How can the arts widen our perception of nature and our ability to experience, reflect and adapt to the environment?
• What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in terms of our consideration of the environment?
• How are cultural values expressed in rituals and public events creating a human ecology?

Proposals should include:

• a 250-word abstract
• presenter’s name & affiliation
• mailing & email addresses

Please forward proposals to:

Ina Agastra, Executive Assistant to the Dean
Faculty of Fine Arts, York University
4700 Keele St. Toronto ON Canada M3J 1P3
ffadeanasst@yorku.ca

Submission deadline: September 1, 2010

Artists working with interventions, activism and other participatory practices are invited to apply for participation in NEW LIFE CANCUN.

This experimental hospitality initiative intends to promote and facilitate participation during the UN Climate Change summit (COP 16) in Cancún, Mexico at the end of 2010 (Nov. 29th – Dec. 10th).

In continuation of Wooloo’s NEW LIFE COPENHAGEN festival – in which we secured housing for more than 3.000 activists during the Copenhagen summit – NEW LIFE CANCUN is aiming to connect visiting activists and NGO employees with local families in the area of Cancún.An area infamous for its vulnerability to climate disasters (mainly hurricanes), as well as for the high-CO2 emissions associated with its tourism sector.

Utilizing this meeting of hosts and guests in Cancun as our exhibition platform, artists and activists are invited to explore its social architecture and suggest work proposals of an awareness, educational and/or practical-action nature designed around the topic: “NEW WAYS OF LIVING TOGETHER”.

The deadline for work proposals is JULY 1st, 2010.

Please direct all research questions to contact@wooloo.org

Proposals must include a detailed budget. As fundraising efforts are still ongoing, we do not yet know the size of our final production budget. However, it wont be large – so please be aware that your project must be able to be realized in a low-budget manner!

NEW LIFE CANCUN is a collaboration between Wooloo.org and the Mexican climate change collective Carbonding

Image credit: Stephanie Claverie

via WOOLOO.ORG – NEW LIFE CANCÚN.

An Excerpt from Daniel Boese’s article in ARTFORUM on Wooloo’s “New Life Coppenhagen”.

“We work in the medium of hospitality,” Rosengaard says. The “New Life” project created the possibility for strangers to share their homes and experiences, to thus collaborate under the broad goal of addressing climate change in a global conference and treaty. All participants created the work together, unlike public art projects in which artists serve as teachers for a lay public. Individual acts of hospitality create hope in the face of planetary ecological crisis; strangers can agree and cooperate. But our heads of state did not follow suit; they failed to usher in an age of global cooperation at the summit. “New Life” walked the line between art and activism in a new way, updating tactics pioneered by Beuys, Gran Fury, and the Russian Constructivists: Times have changed, and the problems have only become more urgent.

WOOLOO.ORG.

Still from Coalition of the Willing: Back to the 60s by World Leaders

The film is appearing online at coalitionofthewilling.org.uk. Rayner’s collaborator is the film maker Simon Robson aka Knife Party, who has pulled in a glorious range of film makers and animators to bring Rayner’s script – on how activists can come together to combat climate change.

The first clips went up at the start of this week. More will be appearing in waves in the coming weeks.

it’s a really exciting way of bringing creative people together on a project like this. The medium is wonderful. I’m not entirely sure I’m convinced of the message – though I would like to be. The Coalition of the Willing’s theme is that that the net allows “swarm politics” to flourish, giving activists a unique chance to mobilise against global warming.

While the net does have that effect, there are two other effects which seem to be just as strong:

1) It gives exactly the same power to those who think the very opposite of what you do – witness the swarm  of warming scepticism online.

2) Though it creates lots of networks there is no real incentive for those networks to link up. They are often reproducing exactly the same message, deploying the same tactics, in isolation from each other. At the same time as it pulls people together it also keeps them in separate silos.

Knife Party, Tim Rayner

FILMMAKERS: Adam Gault & Stefanie Augustine, Bran Dougherty-Johnson, Cassiano Prado, Mario Sader & Ralph Pinel, Clapham Road Studios, Dave Baum, Decoy, Dom Del Torto, Dylan White & Andy Hague, Echolab, Foreign Office, Andreas Gebhardt, James Wignall,BBWD (Loyalkaspar), Sehsucht – Directed by Mate Steinforth, Mighty Nice, Parasol Island, Thiago Maia, World Leaders, Yum Yum London

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

*HQ – Performance Activism Headquarters

Gallery Pouslen

Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel

Artiste de Garde

The Colonel and The Yes Men

Day 1

Just spoke with someone from Shell: formerly working for their sustainability program, quit so they can look at themselves in the mirror (minimal progress, 30-33 people killed annually, stupid, selfish choices re: developing countries.) Asked not to be identified

Day 2

Fabian, one of the Climate Pirates who brought 5 ships to Copenhagen, saw his colleagues surrounded by the melee of violent police on the way to the World Culture Center where we are working. He perceives that the police are deliberately sustaining the high tension of the situation by making arrests and quick releases.

Day 3

I like an orderly society as much as anyone but not at the cost I’m experiencing here. I spoke to eyewitnesses (people known to me), who watched Danish plain clothesmen infiltrate the protestors and become provocative until the police charged, at which time the police encircled the phony agitators to bring them back into the folds of their own, while going on to beat up the rest of the crowd.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/16/protests-in-copenhagen-de_n_393784.html

‘…Louder than Bombs’: Art, Action & Activism

Live Art Development Agency and Stanley Picker Gallery
call for artists: 4 December deadline
event: February – March 2010

Over the course of seven weeks in February – March 2010, the Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University, will host a series of week-long residencies entitled ‘…Louder than Bombs’: Art, Action & Activism.

Co-curated with Live Art Development Agency, ‘…Louder than Bombs’: Art, Action & Activism will focus on challenging social, political, global issues addressed by seven invited artist/activists, working in a series of weekly occupancies of the space.

The issues addressed by the programme of activities will include a range of political, ecological, social and personal causes, as to be defined by the seven participating individuals and groups.

The programme will provide each participating artist/group with the space, resources and supportive environment for their work to be developed over an intensive five-day period. During their week-long residency each participant will be required to deliver at least one participatory workshop and a public event.

One of the seven invited projects will be developed to engage directly with a local primary school, in order to pilot the introduction of performative practice into the classroom.

‘…Louder than Bombs’: Art, Action & Activism has been developed as part of the research project, ‘The Art of Intervention: The Intersections of Public and Private Memory’ between Kingston University, London and Kyoto Seika University, Japan.

For information on how to make a proposal, email: picker@kingston.ac.uk .

www.thisisliveart.co.uk

See the Video at:

Video: Countdown to Copenhagen at Bristol’s Arnolfini gallery | Environment | guardian.co.uk .

When I interviewed Damien Hirst for the NYT a couple of years ago about For The Love Of God, he was disappointingly evasive about discussing the obvious link between diamonds and the current lethal exploitation of Africa that was contained in his work. He did stress that they had deliberately sourced the £14m worth diamonds from ethical sources. I remember suggesting that with a work of this scale – which bought up a significant part of the world’s diamond supply – he must have also inflated the price of blood diamonds but he wasn’t interested in going down that route. In that Hirsty kind of way he affected a kind of Wow… I never really thought of that response, I should have pushed it harder and didn’t, and the discussion never made it into the short piece that was finally published.

At times it benefits art to remain evasive. To dictate what the audience should find in a piece short-changes us. And of course, at the time Jay Jopling was looking for a multi-million dollar price for the work, and any whiff of activism might have jeopardised the sale of a piece in which Hirst and Jopling had invested massive amounts of their own money.

But in this case, by leaving it vague, Hirst let the impression hang that he didn’t care a fig about the issue of diamonds being directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Angola, Cote D’Ivoire, Liberia and the DRC within the couple of decades.

Ironically, this leaves the field open to LaChapelle to reduce the meaning of the work to a symbol of how the west has raped Africa. In his photograph, Hirst’s skull lies at the feet a child soldier.  It’s an example of how, at times, art’s professional reticence about talking too much about the issues that surround the work leave it looking timorous, self-interested and carelessly aloof.

Detail from The Rape of Africa by David LaChapelle, 2009.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

“I thought one could fuse the political ideal of social change with art”

Emma Ridgway, curator of The RSA Arts & Ecology Centre, interviews Gustav Metzger

Born in 1926 to Polish-Jewish parents in Nuremberg, Gustav Metzger is an artist known for his radical approach. His work responds directly to political, economic and ecological issues. Creating manifestos and events in the UK since the early 1960s, he developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and Art Strike movements, which addressed destructive drives both in capitalism and the art industry. He still makes challenging work and his ideas continue to be influential.

With his Flailing Trees one of the centrepieces of the Manchester International Festival, Gustav Metzger’s reputation as a major figure in radical art continues to grow. Emma Ridgway talks to the artist about his long career in art and activism.

via RSA Arts & Ecology – Interview | Gustav Metzger.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Fancy yourself an eco-inspired photographer? Then send in your best shots to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as your good Earth Day deed. The now-hopefully-less-deadbeat-since-Obama’s-president agency’s looking for inspirational photos for its EPA Earth Day Photo project.
 

All you have to do is upload your photo onto one of those 3 Flickr groups — people and the environment, the beauty of nature, and wildlife — by April 30. The winner gets whatever fame comes from being featured on the EPA Earth Day site — and the happy knowledge that the photograph could inspire eco-activism in others.

via Enter the EPA’s Earth Day photo contest | green LA girl.