Renewable Resources

Land Arts Generator Initiative events

This post comes to you from Cultura21

Arsenal-Gallery-200x300June 27- August 30, Arsenal Gallery, Central Park, New York

“Our civilization has been built on non-renewable resources and an outmoded presumption that nature is limitless. Certainly art will continue to serve many purposes; however, for artists and designers who choose to engage in what Joanna Macy terms The Great Turning, what is the role of beauty?” —Ann T. Rosenthal

This opening event kick off the summer exhibition at Arsenal Gallery (in Central Park), NYC, is also act as the book launch to their latest publication “Regenerative Infrastructures,” which features 60 submissions to the 2012 LAGI design competition for Freshkills Park as well as several essays, including “Redefining Beauty within the Context of Sustainability” by Ann Rosenthal

Formerly a symbol of immense urban waste, the Fresh Kills Landfill is being transformed into an enormous parkland destined to exemplify the values of ecological restoration and environmental sustainability. In partnership with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, the Land Art Generator Initiative held an ideas competition for a site-specific public artwork designed to operate as a source of clean energy for the city utility grid, using Freshkills Park as the design site. This volume features many of the top submissions to that open call, each with the capacity to power hundreds of homes. The Land Art Generator Initiative creates sustainable design solutions that integrate art and technology into renewable energy infrastructure around the world. Regenerative Infrastructures draws a much needed connection between the two critical issues of sustainable development—energy generation and waste management—highlighting solutions that address both problems at once, thereby creating economically beneficial hybrid utility installations.

For more information : http://landartgenerator.org/newsevents/

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

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eBook: Promoting natural materials

This post comes to you from Cultura21

This free eBook, edited by Päivi Simi and Outi Toumela, is the main publication of the long term project of the same title, taking place in Southern Finland and Estonia from 2009 to 2012.

The focus of the project lies in raising awareness and spreading knowledge on the use of healthier materials as well as on the environmental importance of using local materials.

From the back-cover:

What are natural materials? Basically, every material is originally natural. Even humans are composed of pure natural materials. We need better definitions like ecological materials, local materials, renewable resources, organic materials, and so on. We also need recyclability as well as a free flow of information. Everything we do or consume locally also affects globally. We must not forget that we have options.

Click here for the full eBook

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

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Artists digging for victory part 2

This is from an article I have in this morning’s Observer magazine:

Flicking through a history of community gardening in America, Amy Franceschini discovered that between 1941 and 1943, 20 million Americans took part in the Victory Gardens programme, an initiative created to feed the nation during wartime.

“I was thinking, when have 20 million Americans ever participated on that scale besides sports – or shopping?” says Amy, nursing a cup of green tea in her studio, an expansive floor of a former warehouse. “And San Francisco was the most successful place for Victory Gardens. They took it on massively here.”

In a local newspaper she found a photo dated 18 April 1943. There, in front of the august neo-classical pillars and dome of the San Francisco City Hall, were row upon row of vegetables. “And I thought, ‘We have to have a garden in front of city hall again.’”[…]

“What artists do is seed things. They plant ideas,” says Michaela Crimmin, head of the RSA Arts and Ecology Centre. Which maybe explains why these cheap, relatively small-scale projects like Franceschini’s can have such an influence.

Harvesting food as art is growing in the UK, too. Patrick Brill – otherwise known as the artist Bob and Roberta Smith – currently features as one of the new generation of “Altermodern” artists at Tate Britain. In 2007, he created a work called The Really Super Market in Middlesbrough. Encouraging local gardeners, schoolchildren and farmers to grow vegetables, they turned the town centre into a giant farmer’s market for a day, an event that culminated in a community cook-in.

The idea took root. This summer, in east London’s Gunpowder Park, artists Amy Plant and Ella Gibbs are running a ramshackle Energy Café, using only renewable resources to cook organic food foraged locally, or supplied from within a six-mile radius.

Turner prize-winner Jeremy Deller initiated a 10-year project in Munster, in Germany, in 2007, giving all the gardeners on a community plot a large leather-bound diary in which to record their notes – whatever they wanted to write. In exchange for their participation, Deller handed each an envelope containing seeds of the dove tree. When planted, the trees should flower for the first time at around the point the project comes to fruition, at which time Deller will collect the diaries and put them in a library. “The gardens are a vernacular art work in their own right,” says Deller. “They’re homemade and made up as they go along. The people that tend them are thinking about colour and form.”

Meanwhile, for the past nine years, the artists Heather and Ivan Morison have been working on a garden and woodland in Wales – originally a community garden plot developed as a conscious echo of Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness. (Jarman, of course, was another artist who helped change the way we think about gardens.)

The rest is here.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology