Ecologies of Change

Paris, June 2015: the whole world is watching as the conference of the parties, commonly referred to as COP21, unfolds. While the parties meet, eat and negotiate, the clock is ticking. At the Place du Pantheon, twelve giant chunks of glacial ice are placed in a circle. The artist Olafur Eliasson took them from Greenland’s Nuuk Fjord and shipped them to Paris. They slowly melt in the summer sun as the world keeps turning and time is passing. People are attracted to the installation, touching the ice and tasting its water. “I hope this work of art can actually bridge the gap between the data, the scientists, the politicians and heads of state, and how normal people feel,” says Eliasson. 

And this is exactly what art can do. It provides direct access to complexity, without reducing it. It makes slow, creeping processes visible and audible. It introduces urgency and activism. It can connect the individual experience to hyperobjects like climate change, species extinction, and growing global inequality. It both provokes and attracts debate. Olafur Eliasson was heavily criticized for the carbon impact of his artwork, shipping glacial ice via air-conditioned transport all the way from Greenland to Paris, only to melt away there. Nevertheless, seven years on, “Paris” and “1.5C” have become keystones, leading to many policy initiatives. 

Art, Climate, Transition: ACT

In this transition toward a sustainable future, art and artists have many different roles, positions, commitments. Globally operating artists like Eliasson are able to bring urgency and invite a wide audience to engage in the artwork and the issues it addresses. But it is also locally, on smaller scales and in peripheral territories, that we witness the everyday contribution of artists and cultural organizations to a just transition. We operate under the name Art Climate Transition (ACT) as a network of 10 European cultural organizations, venues, NGOs and festivals. A diversity of contexts and perspectives brings us together to critically engage in a reflection of what it means to program artivists and to produce artworks that are committed to ecology and to a fairer social transition. Co-financed by the Creative Europe Programme of the EU, we have been working on the cutting edge of performance and visual arts that center on climate change and ecological issues. The previous Imagine2020 collaborative project focused on exploring the future under new ecological conditions. ACT started as a project in 2019, maintaining a focus on the arts, ecology and climate change, areas we connect to the interlinked issues of inequality, climate justice, and urban ecologies.

Living as we are in the Anthropocene era, we seek to integrate the agency and articulation of non-human and other voices. Recent uprisings and protests in our cities support our agenda to use the arts to address the networks of dependency, inequality and power that define our (in)ability to take collective action. It is not just transition, it is a just transition that is urgently needed: a transition based on our ethical awareness and ecological understanding of interaction between species, humans and their political and natural environments. This understanding of ecology is not just “the issue”, it also shapes the way we see the world and our own contribution to it. In this article we will highlight some of our work and projects to illustrate this idea of ecology. 

Connecting contexts

In September 2021, Marseille finally hosted the IUCN World Conservation Congress – the global summit on biodiversity which had been postponed several times due to COVID-19 constrictions. Participants who descended the stairs from Saint-Charles train station couldn’t miss a huge mural with birds, painted by Greek artist Fikos. The birds depicted are migratory species, which find a habitat in areas surrounding Marseille during a part of the season. The depicted birds are under threat: their habitats are shrinking, either due to climate change or human-induced developments. The mural was commissioned by ACT partner COAL, bringing the American Audubon Mural Project to Europe. But the project didn’t stop there. As a sequel, the other ACT partners are organizing a duplication of the initiative in their territories by commissioning a bird mural locally. The murals follow the same principle: a beautiful depiction of migratory birds from the region that are under threat of extinction. Ordinary birds as well as rare species are disappearing. These projects involve the engagement of local communities, including schools, a workers’ union and a retirement home, and invite local ecologists to share their knowledge. The conversations that emerge around each mural deepen understanding and a sense of responsibility. The project also connects each of these murals and each of these communities across Europe. A roodborstje (robin) has appeared on Roodborststraat in Rotterdam and a grey vulture at Goce Dolchev primary school in Skopje, North Macedonia, with more bird murals set to follow soon. 

An ecology of relations

Now let’s dig a little deeper. Because we are convinced that this contextualizing approach to ecology and arts also allows a deep connection with the issue of a just transition. Many of the artists we work with are convinced that ecological and climate justice cannot be envisaged without social justice. Without perceiving the world as an interconnected web of things and people – and being sharply aware of institutionally embedded inequalities and dependencies. As a cooperation project, we foster this approach and we invite artists to explore it and to learn from each other’s artistic trajectories in summer labs and residencies. This artistic orientation is not aiming for the global stage, but rather seeks to make an impact in the roots and rhizomes of everyday life in urban and rural communities.

To create and disseminate an ecology of relations is the core purpose of the Collection Europe project, developed within ACT. An ensemble of four artists and collectives were selected to develop artistic trajectories across European territories. The Portuguese collective Berru has created an extraordinary installation addressing the energetic issues of the ocean, which will be performed in Clermont-Ferrand and Lisbon. Their works tend to combine living and non-living structures and speculate about their potential collaborations in creating sustainable systems.

With The Apocalypse Reading Room, Ama Josephine Budge created an on-site library in response to environmental and social transformations. In this installation, the London-based artist gathers all the books we might need to change the end of the world. The installation is also activated by other artists who are invited to develop a residency program that centers on it, requiring the maintaining of a community space. It opens conversations and connections focused on loss and grief as well as resistance and strategies for solidarity.

As such, both projects invite the presence of voices of people who are not heard or understood, or are not given a stage to be listened to. For Belgian artist Sarah Vanhee, this lies at the heart of her cultural practice. As Sarah says about her project BOK – Bodies of Knowledge: “What develops is an ecology of relations, also very literally. Something happens beyond the blindness of the white middleclass to which I also belong. We wonder why the ecological movement remains so white?! Of course it’s because the topics that are at the table are completely out of reach for people from more precarious classes. But at the same time, a lot of ecological solutions already come from them! For instance, we had someone in the tent who spoke about ‘how to get by with very little money’ — and then you realize a lot of these solutions are deeply ecological, but she just doesn’t call them that.”

Embodied knowledge

So is this the end of Theatre with a capital T? The work that ACT is producing and presenting redefines the position of the theatre and art institutions. However, this does not equate to a departure from theatres and formal stages. They are used intensely as well as in innovative ways. The intricate and delicate unwritten contract between audience and performers, limited in time and space, remains of great value in exploring the new ecological condition. In post-pandemic times, the means to develop such implicit protocols have also been extended. The triangle of nature, audience and performers becomes a source of inspiration for many artists. They activate the audience as a collective body, which can be an excellent tool for raising ecological awareness. 

We see this in diverse forms: some very fragile and intimate, others resulting in mass choreographies where the audience is transformed into a swarm. Immersion, by Selina Thompson (UK), is a very intimate piece exploring the sacredness of breath by inviting an intergenerational mix of women to record their breath. These recordings become part of a soundscape, shared as a form of activism, which signals our inability to breathe freely, whether due to Covid, racism or air pollution. The Chilean choreographer Jose Vidal creates mass choreographies. Emergenz, for example, is a dance performance exploring the process by which a collective, a social body, emerges from the movement of single bodies. With swarms of birds and fish, the wind whistling through the leaves of the forest, fractal patterns that repeat and sustain themselves, Vidal offers a structure, a framework, within which the dancers play and improvise. Emergenz brings 100 performers on stage, professional dancers alongside an equal number of citizens from all walks of life. Architects, designers, teachers and bank employees rehearse with Vidal and his team. No words, just movements and invitations to interact. As a result, 100 performers act as one ecosystem. The result is mesmerizing to see – and an unforgettable experience for those who participate in the process of creating it.

An artistic compass for unknown territories 

What role can art and creation play in the vast and urgent transition toward a just and sustainable society? At ACT, we work from an ecological rather than a mechanic or a linear understanding of this question. We know that artistic work has an impact – and that this impact is organized in ways that require an ecological understanding. The merging of art and activism can be found in many of the projects we connect with and support. And they’re desperately needed in our collective attempts to find new ways to inhabit Earth together with all other lifeforms. Or to be more precise, to inhabit a Critical Zone, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour calls it, a thin shell only a few kilometers thick, where everything happens. Is it inhabitable? “Depends on your chosen science.” Will I survive down there? “Depends on your politics.’’ It is time to land, and to learn to navigate. 

This article was written on request for the Veolia Institute Review, edition 2022, themed ‘the social and economic challenges of ecological transformation’.

Ecological transformation consists of radically changing the modes of production and consumption, to put ecology at the heart of every process and every evaluation.

The objective of this Veolia Institute Review is to better understand the notion of ecological transformation throughout the world, to clarify the issues at stake and to identify the conditions for accelerating a virtuous transformation process.

find the whole magazine here: ecological transformation, Veolia Review #24, 2022

and a pdf of this specific article can be accessed here: ecologies of change