Art-making for political ecology: practice, poetics and activism through enchantment

ABSTRACT

Our world’s climate is changing. The ramifications of the current ecological age and the possibility of habitation in – if not strictly post-apocalyptic – very different living conditions than the present, has spurned a pressing need to address our place in a more-than–human frame. A disjuncture between the urgency for concrete action on climate change and the actions of a political class unconvinced and/or slow to move has catalysed the need for action and collaboration across disciplines. The article draws on several creative projects as a springboard for environmental discourse. Notably, it discusses British artist Kate Pattison’s work on glaciers, Eve Mosher’s High Water Line project, and a work involving a local urban river system. Environmental communication transmitted through artmaking may speak to the problem of inaction in a way that employs soft persuasion and affective poetics. This article intimates artmaking can be a type of activism through enchantment, which has the potential to awaken personal and communities’ interests, and thereby encourage them to consider a more eco-centrically holistic future.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• affective poetics
• artmaking
• arts-based communication
• climate change
• environment
• more-than-human
• soft persuasion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Process driven here refers to art whose strength of impact rests on the way an artwork is produced, with the emphasis being on the process of production rather than the final aesthetic output. It is fundamentally a type of performance art but outward facing rather than the more traditional performance art of the 70s which had a significant focus on the body. More recently, performance has been understood as a way of engaging directly with social reality, the specifics of space and the politics of identity (Tate Modern n.d).

2. It included more than one hundred artists writers and philosophers explored political ecologies ‘beyond the official sphere of professional politics, and explores public assemblies too often left out of a narrowly-defined discourse: laboratories, assembly lines, supermarkets, trade rooms, courts of law, bureaucratic institutions, churches, and natural resources such as rivers and climates.(ZKM n.d.)’ He also curated several other exhibitions including, Iconoclash (2002) reset Modernity in (2016), as well as Critical Zones. Observations for Earthly Politics (2020). This kind of curatorship has been labelled Thought Exhibition (European Commission n.d.)

3. Spelling of these names often vary due to variances in orthography and pronunciation. As there is no consensus on a singular correct spelling author has included both common variations.

4. Lt. James Cook was a navigator and cartographer in the British Royal Navy, famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean. He is the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Island (where he would be eventually killed), and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. He also contestably claimed Australia as being Terra Nullius, meaning that it was uninhabited and functionally robbing the inhabitants, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of the recompense afforded to ‘conquered’ nations. Sovereignty, however, was never ceded and this is still an pressing issue in modern day Australia.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Selina Springett

Selina Springett is a Sydney-based early career researcher and award-winning artist.