
Since ACT is about making a change, we need to talk about impact. We must learn about the sorts of impact art can make, about the role and place of impact in art practices, and about how art practices themselves are impacted, for instance by Covid-19.
Therefore, as part of the Learning to Impact Work Package of the ACT project, we research the many faces of impact. We do so by interviewing artists. With The Interview Series we tap into their embodied, concrete artistic practices. We want to build an understanding of how these practices (may) evolve in the face of the current challenges. How the artists learn to ‘stay with the trouble’. How the urgency of climate change, ecology and biodiversity informs their attitude towards the social impact of their artistic work.
‘In a way, the quest for impact is central to my artistic practice. I have always focused on climate change, environmental conflicts, protection of territory and rights of nature. I see myself as a guardian of nature. My main concern is how we can live in kinship with nature and imagine artistic gestures of care with and for the environment.’
‘Yes, my background is in graphic design and that still affects the way I work. In a way I generate or re-design new services for society. I work mostly on location, in public places, such as laboratories, clinics, courts and landscapes, connecting the artistic with voices of scientists, activists, lawyers in multidisciplinary collaborations. These are all projects that humbly aim to have an impact. From each project to the next I reflect on the process: which kind of change the practice anchored and what would be the next artistic tool for impact? My trajectory over the years also shows the different impact strategies I’ve been using.’
‘In the past I have given lots of thought to this question of how you can create individual impact and how that individual can have a more global impact. It is almost impossible to change masses, but you can do a lot of micro-changes. Impact can take place in various ways: a change of mind, a changing of perspective, an inspiration for an action. In my artistic practice, I often work with small groups of people, or through long term engagements where people who participate are also invited to take action, or to imagine gestures of care together.
As far as the research goes, all my projects have a long time in the reflection and societal engagement. And really, the presentation itself is not the final goal. All the research steps leading up to the project are already doing the change. The encounters with communities, the intervention on site-specific, the multiple engagements in meetings with lawyers, activists, climatologists, scientists, communities already constitute the invisible impact of the project. So, for instance, working with someone from the law faculty from a university for a long time means that the research process, through all the dialogue that takes place, already starts to affect the educational system in that department. In my projects I aim to create multiple entanglements and ‘tentacles’, expanding in different disciplines and directions. I am more and more fascinated to work in that way.
From my own projects, but also from the activist movements and the legal work of Urgenda (NL) or Klimaatzaak (BE), Sarayaku community (EQ) amongst others, I have learned that change rarely stems from a single intervention. Change requires persistence and long-term engagement. I have learnt that the persistence of activism works.’
My work is difficult to define as an artistic practice only, because it has a lot of social and activistic dimensions embedded in it. I see a lot of potential in transdisciplinary work. As an artist you struggle when it comes to impact. When you join forces with other disciplines, your impact gets stronger as a transformative and complementary process. This way of working has grown on me.
I don’t stage my projects in a traditional art setting. Being near a river or in a courtroom will trigger a different quality of empathy with environmental crime or a relation with more than the human world. I develop site-specific projects in which I try to activate the space and the relation between the people and that location. The qualities of the space matter, the location itself already has a transformative quality.
For example, as part of the Natural Contract Lab (2021) project we aim to get the Zenne river in Brussels (BE) recognized as a legal entity. We try to see how the ‘artistic scenography’ can be used to invite politicians to these walks. It is not just about ‘how do we get inside the parliament’. It is also: ‘can we get the parliament to come to the location, to experience the river for themselves?’ I think the relationship between people and their environment is broken. We need politicians to leave their infrastructures and really experience how the river is impacted by their decisions, by climate change, by pollution, and even by ecocide.
Repair comes from the restorative justice approach. When I left the sphere of protesting, rebellion, and pressing for immediate change, I realised that there is so much restoring or healing that needs to be done. I went to the Amazon in Ecuador and Standing Rock Lakota (US) and witnessed the consequences of contaminated water caused by oil spill. There were legal cases, sure, but it was all about money, about victims being financially compensated. But money cannot bring back to life who or what has died. To me the question is how we transform the framework of punishing the perpetrator and financially compensating the victims into a form of reconciliation. Therefore we talk about repair, we raise the questions of how we can repair humanity’s relationship with the ecosystem, as a gesture of care for the planetary system.
We need to come to terms with the fact that we are all part of the conflict. Humankind has a tendency to make someone else accountable for the crime and right now the focus is on making the perpetrator feel guilty. But the truth is: we all hold many positions at the same time. We are all perpetrators because we all use natural resources. We may not be conscious about our micro-impact in the global impact, but climate change is done by all of us. But we are also victims. Sometimes we are witnesses too, and sometimes we are silent. That makes us a bit lost in how we position ourselves.
Reconciliation is about collectively exploring how we can repair our broken relationship with the environment. Moving beyond the current situation in which oil companies plant trees as a form of compensation. We need to find strategies that work on different levels of repairing. Restoring can take many forms and should not be designed by a specific judge in a courtroom. It needs to be in relation to the community that has been affected by the crime because you need to know what kind of reparation they seek for. And we need to be conscious about the risk of anthropocentrism in doing so. Restoring the relationship with nature is about reciprocal care, trying to understand natural entities as equal, to work together, not just ‘implementing’ something in the landscape.
Art can be a gesture of care, it has the ability to complement, nourish and inspire sensorial and inner political changes in society. Together we care, we share and learn from each other’s practices, by transforming and imagining artistic landscapes into new forms of engagement, participation, and impact.
Explore the upcoming works of Maria Lucia 2021
8 – 24 october 2021– RE.NATURE
11 – 21 november 2021 Terra Batida, Alkantara Festival
Personal website: http://mluciacruzcorreia.com/works
Kinstitute: https://voiceofnaturekinstitute.org/
This is the second article in The Interview Series on Impact.