Context:
Cape Farewell was founded in 2001 by the photographer David Buckland, following a collaboration with climate modellers at the Hadley Centre for Climate Science. At that time, models were showing the scale and urgency required to tackle climate change, yet overall public awareness was low. Buckland established Cape Farewell in order to promote exchanges between creative practitioners and scientists. The aim was to create new, high-quality artworks that would reach a range of audiences and spark discussions about climate change as a cultural problem, caused by industrialised ways of life.
Transformative creative practice:
Over the last twenty years, Cape Farewell has organised a wide range of activities. One strand of work has involved bringing creative practitioners and scientists into dialogue. Often that has happened through a series of unique expeditions, which have taken scientists artists, writers and musicians to the High Arctic, the Andes in Peru, and the Scottish Islands – places where environmental changes are increasingly visible. These compelling field investigations were intended to provide creative practitioners with embodied experiences of climate breakdown, to which they responded by creating new works for public audiences.
In addition, Cape Farwell has also created compelling climate-focussed artworks and showcased these to large-scale international audiences. An extensive programme of exhibitions, such as Carbon 12, Carbon 13 and Carbon 14 in Paris (France) Texas (USA) and Toronto (Canada) have invited audiences to think about climate change as a cultural concern. Cape Farwell’s many commissions have enabled the production of new works of performance and experience focused on the changing relationship between human societies and earth systems – from poetry to installations based on global micro-climates.
Connections to eco-social sustainability:
Over their long history, Cape Farewell has investigated the relationships between human societies and their environments from many different perspectives. Climate change remains a pressing challenge for us all and takes a central position in Cape Farewell’s work. However, the team has also explored other sustainability challenges, such as the environmental impacts of farming and food production, the health of rivers, global air pollution, the life of islands, and the changing Arctic.
Cape Farewell’s home for artist residencies, The Watershed in Dorset, has knitted the organisation into a local landscape with its own concerns, in addition to outward-facing expeditions.
Our Life is Here – The Marshall Islands expedition.
In August 2023 twenty artists and scientists voyage to the Atolls of the Marshall Islands whose average height above sea level is less that 2m. Their 3000 year old culture is under serious threat from the climate crises and in particular, sea level rise. The expedition narrates their plight focussing on climate justice and the counties of the global south who are unfairly picking up the tab of western excess.
The core of the project is a sea expedition with visual and written artists who will experience the Marshall Islands and the impact of climate change on the region, produce content for media outlets, and eventually produce artwork inspired by their experiences. The goal is to have at least half of the artists come from the Pacific Islands and to bring on board Marshall Islands-based scientists and anthropologists, as well as filmmakers, film editors, and social media figures. Parallel to the main expedition, a team of 10 Marshallese youth will sail off, eventually linking up with the expedition team.
On learning and evaluation:
Cape Farewell has worked with researchers to try to understand how the experiences of environmental artworks may influence visiting audiences. The Pollution Pods artwork was part of the collaborative and inter-disciplinary Climart project, which included researchers at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Commissioned in 2017 and touring since then, the micro-climates of global cities are simulated inside a series of interconnected glass domes – including their polluted air.
Using a questionnaire to survey visitors after their immersion in the pods, researchers found increases in individuals’ intention to act after physically experiencing the scents of air around the world. This was accompanied by a piece of qualitive research in partnership with the Climate Psychology Alliance, including a published DreamTime workshop which included the artist, Michael Pinsky.
Learn more:
Visit Cape Farewell’s website to learn more about their 20+ year history of working on culture and climate.
Project credits:
Cape Farewell is supported by the National Lottery Community Fund and the Arts Council England.
]]>Open Urban Forest planted at ssesi.space is a six-month research project exploring how the human and the more-than-human work with and around each other. These explorations are situated in the specific context of a nature-reclaimed communal garden located on the steep hills of the Svratka river in the city of Brno, Czech Republic. The research seeks to pave the path for meaningful communication and cohabitation of various agents that occupy and utilise this garden space. The Open Urban Forest research strategy is to approach the site and its actors through the prism of four expert teams with Michal’s additional guidance as he has been visiting the site regularly for the past eight years.
The experts involved in this inter-species conversation are:
AVA collective: sonic enthusiasts, explorers and flâneurs who re-search and re-shape the environmental sounds, combining live sonic feeds as well as field recordings with an open palette of post-club tendencies.
d’Epog: a post-dramatic theatre company whose performative interventions explore given space across extended time scales often elevating the invisible features and dynamics of the given context.
Ing.arch. MArch Jan Kristek, Ph.D and his architectural class: Jan is leading a studio at Faculty of Architecture, Brno University of Technology that explores various shapes of architecture as well as the ways architecture shapes the social and urban fabric of given space. He is currently serving as a dean as well.
Associate Professor, Ing. Radek Pokorny, Ph.D: head of the department of Forest Planting and Nourishing of Mendel University in Brno. He is an ardent advocate of both sustainable and pragmatic approaches to forestry.
MArts Michal Mitro: (main project author): his role in the project is to guide and facilitate the guests as well as process and curate their findings
The experts in the team are asked to use their distinct knowledge, tools, and skills to elaborate on the aspects of the Open Urban Forest space. The research is thus structured loosely and allows a lot of space for subjective preferences, focus and attention to detail. The team agreed to openly acknowledge their active and transformative role in the environment rather than positioning themselves as “objective observers”.
The bourgeoning garden forest is shaped by a multitude of human-initiated contexts such as traffic infrastructure extension, drought, and municipal urban planning. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly feral. Throughout the project duration, guests experts from fields of architecture, forestry, visual arts, field recording, and performance art will visit the forest and conduct their research. These guests are invited to observe, analyse, abstract, and speculate on meanings and datasets that the forest conveys to them, or to which they happen to incline. Equipped with unique tools, knowledges, and viewpoints we hope to jointly shape an inter-subjective representation of the forest that would reflect its stacked and multifocal nature. We hope that, by doing so, we can set an inviting and supportive base for the interspecies dialogue and reinforce dynamics that would make the space open, urban, and forest.
]]>Creative practices offer unique ways of engagement to connect communities with their local sea – yet, these practices are often only enacted once and bound by the artist’s or designer’s spatial and temporal reach. The Baltic Sea Lab adapts and adopts such creative practices with the aim of extending their reach beyond their clearly authored initial framing. Can a creative practice seed a range of similar engagements, all adapted to their specific locality and community context?
In November 2020 – April 2021, the Baltic Sea Lab occupied a large abandoned retail space of the A Bloc shopping centre in Otaniemi (Espoo, FIN). The space hosted a multi-sensory seaweed structure named Hidaka Ohmu, originally designed by Julia Lohmann and the Department of Seaweed for the World Economic Forum in 2020. The sculpture made of Japanese kelp facilitates conversations and alliances by bringing the sea, its materiality, texture, and scents into a human-made environment. Fellow artists and researchers, including the Open Forest collective, were working inside and around the Ohmu for a period of six months and invited other interested creatures for one-to-one dialogues.
After moving out from the A Bloc space, the Hidaka Ohmu sculpture traveled to a new venue, the Glasshouse Helsinki, where it was exhibited in June – August 2021.
The Baltic Sea Lab project followed with two co-creative engagement events, delving deep into the concept of ocean literacy to better understand the needs of the local sea. Partnering with local Finnish institutions like the John Nurmisen Foundation, the Hanaholmen, and the Tvärminne Zoological Station, the Lab invited conversations with artists and designers about various ways of engaging communities with local sea and surrounding environment.
The panel discussion ‘Baltic Sea Lab: How creative practices can support sea health’ held at the Tvärminne station invited six panelists: author of the ECOtarot deck and Arizona State University professor Adriene Jenik; founders of the Ocean Confessional initiative Sam Shamsher and Pete Fung; author of the Selkie Skin project Gary Markle; researcher and artists Iryna Zamuruieva from Flood Risk Scotland, and the Baltic Sea Lab’s very own Julia Lohmann to reflect on contemporary themes and issues in ocean literacy.
The goal of the panel was to identify ocean literacy topics that need to be addressed from a scientific point of view and, alongside it, to understand how creative practices create engagements with relevant individuals and communities. The insightful conversations prompted reflections on the challenges of scaling and reproducing artistic practices and on the nature of an effective engagement.
We observed three interwoven and recurring topics that became the backbone through which we understand how creative practices engage a community with ocean literacy: Knowledge (awareness of ecological and cultural issues), Care (empathy, emotional and embodied connection), and Action (active participation, agency).
A Moment with the Sea event followed with a less structured form of reflection, inviting individuals and communities to spend a moment thinking about and with the Baltic sea. In celebration of Itämeripäivä – Baltic Sea Day – the event called for messages of love, concern, gratitude, confession, and/or fear for the sea to be sent and written with chalk onto rocks along the Baltic shoreline.
The lead project author Julia Lohmann presented the Baltic Sea Lab project and related themes in ocean literacy at the New European Bauhaus Dialogues – Arctic Design Week event (March 2021) and later at the Bauhaus of the Seas conference, as part of the New European Bauhaus initiative – Roundtable ‘Transformative Economies: Ecosocial Wellbeing and the Politics of Participation’ (May 2021). In June 2021, the Baltic Sea Lab ExP team contributed some of their seaweed artifacts, including the beautiful KombuKamui dress, to the Archive of Vibrant Matter, as part of the Porto Design Biennale in Portugal. Another seaweed artifact, the large sculpture named Kombu Ahtola, was shown at the exhibition The World As We Don’t Know It, organised at the Droog Design space, Netherlands. The exhibition curated by Renny Ramakers features 20 international artists presenting their visions on the climate crisis.
In September 2021, Baltic Sea Lab authors unveiled the Seaweed Shrine – a collective sculpture documenting ongoing practice-based research and exploration into algae and seaweeds conducted together with students and staff at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. The Shrine co-authors connect their expertise in design, marine biology and chemistry to engage audiences with themes in ocean literacy, material development and the agency of seaweed. Exhibited as part of the Helsinki Design Week, the Shrine aims to alter foster people’s capacities to care for their surroundings while attending to more-than-human values and interests.
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