Doorstep

Wasteland Twinning

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

Glengarnock on a road trip, 2004

Wasteland and stalled spaces are important.  This new project connects wasteland in different places as well as offering some suggestions for ways to explore those on your doorstep – join in and be twinned with places in Indonesia, Australia, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Malaysia, India (interestingly there are no US or Canadian partners).

Glengarnock (all that's left) 2004

Most of the ideas suggested involve spending time with your own wasteland, making sound recordings, putting up signs, doing surveys, finding sit spots, discovering what’s edible, and then inventing your own responses. 

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

New metaphors for sustainability: "Come into my house" (DVD)

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

When we asked Hester Reeve, artist and lecturer, to suggest a metaphor for our series New metaphors for sustainability, she offered to make this DVD, “Come into my house.”

The term ‘sustainability’ is rightly used first and foremost in the contexts of both local and global policy changes. Whilst acknowledging the crucial role played by activist pressure in ensuring sustainability is on the agenda in the first place, I see its implementation chiefly as the responsibility of politicians (shame on them).

I made my metaphor in my house. The camera is out on the street and I open each door/window in turn and call out for various thinkers to “Come into my house.”

As an artist, I am more interested in restoring richness to the ‘cult’ of everyday life and in incorporating the force of poetic imagination than in reflecting/interacting with culture at large. My metaphor therefore reflects this sensibility.

I suppose the only thing someone like me at this point in the environmental direness of 2011 can do is to come back to the doorstep, where the agency of the single being starts and to call for that paradigm shift in our thinking that might finally allow us to dwell as an act of loving the world.

 

“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)

The editors are Robert Butler and Wallace Heim. The associate editor is Kellie Gutman. The editorial adviser is Patricia Morison.

Robert Butler’s most recent publication is The Alchemist Exposed (Oberon 2006). From 1995-2000 he was drama critic of the Independent on Sunday. See www.robertbutler.info

Wallace Heim has written on social practice art and the work of PLATFORM, Basia Irland and Shelley Sacks. Her doctorate in philosophy investigated nature and performance. Her previous career was as a set designer for theatre and television/film.

Kellie Gutman worked with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture for twenty years, producing video programmes and slide presentations for both the Aga Khan Foundation and the Award for Architecture.

Patricia Morison is an executive officer of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, a group of grant-making trusts of which the Ashden Trust is one.

Go to The Ashden Directory

3rd Ring Out: Rehearsing the Future By Zoe Svendsen and Simon Daw

The temperature is rising, the Earth is changing and your city is threatened. How will you respond? This is a story in which YOU decide what happens next.

Imagining a world in which nature takes revenge on industrial humanity, 3rd Ring Out takes you forward in time to an emergency planning rehearsal set on your doorstep.

Metis uses live performance, video simulation and interactive computer systems to produce work which responds to contemporary concerns. The result has the immediacy of theatre combined with the thrill of a disaster movie; a fiction rooted in fact.

Check out the Booking section to find out where 3rd Ring Out takes place and for responses to the performances …

via About.