Filmmakers Sarah Thomas and Jon Randall share a conversation about the ideas, stories and creative processes behind their film exploring Óshlið, an abandoned road in Iceland — accompanied by a slideshow of their images from this changing place.
270 words: estimated reading time 1 minute + 26 minutes audio + 3 minutes gallery + 2 minutes video
Our film represents a journey along Óshlið, an abandoned coastal road which is considered to be one of the most dangerous, and beautiful, in Iceland. Following the construction of a mountain tunnel in 2010, the road was closed and is now in the process of being rapidly reclaimed by both the mountain and the sea. The film delves into the stories of this road and its relationships with the people who maintained, travelled and died upon Óshlið. Through these voices, it reflects upon a post-human landscape and the nature of mortality.
The title embodies the topographical and compound nature of this film. Óshlið is an Icelandic word comprised of ós (river mouth) and hlið (slope). Óshlið is both the name of the road, and the place – from which it came and to which it will return.
To listen to our conversation, choose the ‘Listen in browser’ option rather than SoundCloud, so you can view the accompanying slideshow below.
A writer, documentary film-maker and traveller fascinated by our entanglements with the living world, and the nature of place. Read More
Questioning Loss? Space for creative thinking..."What do our experiences of loss - of place, objects, relationships - mean for our understanding of environmental or climate change? Share your thoughts in the Comments box below, or use the Contact Form."
Artist Julien Masson explores memory, material transience and meaning in his an intriguing response to our ClimateCultures challenge to share three objects with personal significance and illustrate the past, present and future of the emerging ‘Age of Human’.
670 words: estimated reading time 2.5 minutes
The challenge: the Anthropocene – the suggested Age of Human that our species has initiated – has a complex past, present and future, and there are many versions. What three objects evoke the unfolding of human-caused environmental and climate change for you? View other contributions at A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.
The first object I selected is an amalgam of objects that were given to me in the past. This 3D collage of disparate elements that I would compare to a melange of old memories that have merged into a sort of mnemonic chimera. The use of contrasting material such as mineral and the manmade industrial metal alludes to the clash of the natural world and the manmade activity.
The ubiquitous battery has a limited life span and in many ways symbolises the transience of our contemporary lives… the battery is a container, a vessel to convey energy to devices. In this case, a camera. When its power is spent, it is rendered useless and is disposed of in landfills or recycled. Its shape is simple and functional and I often wonder at the technical codes on these objects. Their meaning is lost to me and they might as well be some long lost cabalistic language.
The third object represents our future. My selection suggests a dystopian vision of the future, where virtual experiences replace our spirituality. What will future generation of archaeologists think of such a device in centuries to come? Out of meaning and out of network, maybe it is some sort of votive artefact? An empty shell for the virtual ghost of our times…
Find out more
You can see a short animation Julien has made, Funland: An Anthropocene amusement park, and more of his artworks at macuse.com and jfmasson.com
Each post that appears in the sequence of A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects earns its author a copy of a book that had an impact on my thinking about our topics here – whether fiction, poetry or non-fiction – and which I’ve recently rediscovered in a charity shop. (Delivery in the UK only, sadly!) For his post, Julien receives a copy of William Golding’s classic novel, The Inheritors, “a startling recreation of the lost world of the Neanderthals and a frightening vision of the beginnings of a new age.”
An artist whose works are all, in some way, related to technology and our relation with it and wishes to expand notions of what is art. Read More
Your personal Anthropocene? Space for creative thinking..."What three objects illustrate a personal timeline for the Anthropocene for you? See the original 'guidelines' at ClimateCultures' A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects, and share your objects and associations in your own post."
At its heart, the Anthropocene idea seems simple (if staggering): that as a species (but far from equally as generations, countries or communities) humankind has become such a profligate consumer, reprocessor and trasher of planetary resources that we've now left (and will continue to leave) our mark on the ecological, hydrological and geological systems that other species and generations will have to live within. In reality though, the Anthropocene is a complex and highly contested concept. ClimateCultures will explore some of the ideas, tensions and possibilities that it involves - including the ways the idea resonates with (and maybe troubles) us, personally.
Your objects could be anything, from the mundane to the mystical, 'manmade', 'natural', 'hybrid', physical or digital, real or imaginary. What matters are the emotional significance each object has for you - whether positive, negative or a troubling mix of colours along that spectrum - and the story it suggests or hints at, again for you. Whether your three 'past', 'present' and 'future' objects are identifiably connected in some way or float in apparent isolation from each other is another open question.
Writer Mark Goldthorpe joined the gathering for The Night Breathes Us In, part of Reading’s year-long Festival of the Dark, and found three simple, unexpected ways that the ‘outside’ – human, more-than-human, solar – came inside the tent.
1,600 words: estimated reading time 6.5 minutes
Saturday 25th March – almost on the Spring Equinox – was the perfect day to be in Reading for the latest instalment of its year-long Festival of the Dark. Blossoms and blue skies and a temperature to match, with a good crowd making use of Forbury Gardens just off the town centre. I’ve never discovered this Reading park before. I’m glad I’ve done so.
It was also my first Dark Mountain experience, although I’ve often explored the digital foothills at their site. Their approach to the complexities of climate change and our uncontrolled planetary experiment has intrigued me, and continues to as I feel myself circling closer into its nuances. The name of the event, The Night Breathes Us in, captures this beautifully, expanding our focus to the more-than-human and its agency over us (even while we disrupt it) but acknowledging the unavoidable centrality of our selves within our own experience.
Sadly, in my case, the night only partially inhaled; I was able to stay for the afternoon but missed out on the evening. So, this is an invitation to someone else to post a blog on the second half!
The black marquee in the middle of the gardens was an intimate space to share stories and experiences under the guidance of Dark Mountain explorers, and the three sessions I took part in there brought quiet reflections and gentle conversations.
We began with the launch of Dark Mountain’s new book, with readings from the poems and essays in Uncivilised Poetics, and music and natural sounds from the book’s companion CD. Writer and editor Nick Hunt suggested poetics as a needed counterweight to the dominant language and statistics of technical and policy narratives. Poetics – not just poems, but art as exploration and an open-ended questioning – helps engage us in a world that cannot be captured in the beguiling, make-safe terminologies of ‘management’. Nick quoted from William Stafford’s poem, A Ritual to Read Each Other: “For it is important for awake people to be awake … the darkness around us is deep.”
Everyday language can trick us into unseeing important truths, and even our attempts to see a bit wider can still fence us inside our illusions. One of the passages shared in our dark tent in the middle of a city park was from Robert Bringhurst’s essay The Persistence of Poetry and the Destruction of the World:
“When I was a youngster in school, someone asked me, ‘If a tree falls in the forest with no one there to hear it, does it make a sound or not? The question is demented. If a tree falls in the forest, all the other trees are there to hear it. But if a man cuts down the forest and he cries that he has no food, no firewood, no shade, and that his mind can get no traction, who is going to hear him?” – Robert Bringhurst
This demented quality to a lot of what we tell ourselves about ‘the world’ and ‘ourselves’ is what Dark Mountain, the Festival of the Dark and others are countering. Poetics is part of what can help us overcome this strange collective lack of traction on the depths and connectedness of the world. Bringhurst also quotes Skaay, a Haida poet from America’s north west indigenous cultures, who refers to humans as xhaaydla xitiit ghidaay: “plain, ordinary surface birds.”
“Creatures with more power – killer whales, loons, grebes, sea lions, seals – know how to dive. They pierce the surface, the xhaaydla it is called in Haida.” – Robert Bringhurst
Poetics is one way for us plain, ordinary surface birds to pierce the flatness of our worldviews.
Crossing the Bridge
Art editor and writer Charlotte du Cann guided us in Crossing the Bridge, an exploration of the traditional solar and growing cycles of the year: the solstices and equinoxes, and the seasons of fertility, growth, fruitfulness and latency that they help to parcel out. These are transitions from which we are easily distanced but never truly separated. We need to know how we are creatures in and of time: a deeper one than is surfaced in our phones or clocks. Deep time is not just in the rocks and soils. It’s built into our substance: bones, tissues and cells, and in the bacterial cohabitants inside us. Everything that makes us ‘us’. It’s inside the shallow time of our daily preoccupations, even as these try to hide it from us.
Using stones that the group had brought in pockets or memories – stones from beaches, flint soils and rivers, from ancient glacier beds or the mysterious recesses of ebay – we toured the eight solar and soilar doors of the yearly cycle. We explored the associations, memories and feelings through whatever door we found ourselves placed at on our stone clock. What do the light of summer or the dark of winter do with us, within our minds and bodies?
And we talked about the stones we’d brought to share. I found memories of the shingle of Orford Ness in Suffolk, and how on one scale – the beach itself – it reveals the seeming fragility of places and lives on the edge, constantly subject to the waves and currents eroding matter here, depositing it there. On another scale – the individual pebble – shingle reveals the persistence of matter as it’s shaped and smoothed and swept onwards. Beach and pebble contain deep time in cycles that “it is important for awake people to be awake” to. Sharing a pocketful of stones brought a beach of stories into the tent.
Holding the Fire
My afternoon inside the black tent closed with theatre maker and author Lucy Neal guiding us through Holding the Fire. She shared inspiration from three key character for her: women from history, personal experience and mythology.
Lucia of Syracuse, a Sicilian Christian of the Third Century, used a wooden headtorch to show her a path through the darkness as she took food and comfort to the poor. And Lucy demonstrated her own candle headdress to great effect.
Lucy met Hildegard Kurt at a workshop in Slovenia. Hildegard used moments of quiet reflection and exchange to reveal: how we hold knowledge and creativity inside ourselves; that this can help us recognise our active part and potential within the flux of environmental crises; a shared space can enable us to explore a different possibility.
Hestia, daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, was the ancient Greek Goddess of the Hearth. Her role emphasises the importance of the fire in domestic and public life; Homer’s hymn to her acknowledges that “Without you, mortals hold no banquet.”
With these examples in mind – of the hearth, shared space and light in the dark – we spoke in pairs, sharing stories of times and experiences of seeing and being seen differently and of awakeness.
Taken together, it was a lot of time to spend in the half-dark tent, but refreshing. And the ‘outside world’ was never absent. Early on, for about 30 minutes, a ladybird crawled over my left hand. It paused occasionally as it struggled to stretch the wings from under its red enamelled carapace, testing if they were ready. Eventually, it managed to unstick itself and take off. Later, speeding police sirens tore across our quiet voices inside, momentarily taking our minds back outside. Everyday life was proceeding all around us. Later, when I looked at the photos I’d taken inside the twilight, I saw how the automatic exposure had kept the camera’s aperture open long enough to paint the black fabric walls almost transparent, the unseen sun revealing a shadowy world beyond the veil. Three simple ways that the ‘outside’ – human, more-than-human, solar – had pierced the surface for the xhaaydla xitiit ghidaay.
Find out more
The Night Breathes Us In is part of the Festival of the Dark, a year-long festival in Reading, produced by Outrider Anthems. You can read Jennifer Leach’s blog leading up to The Night Breathes Us Inhere.
Dark Mountain Project – published Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (“Think of it as a flag raised so that we can find one another. A point of departure, rather than a party line. An invitation to a larger conversation that continues to take us down unexpected paths”) in 2009, and has produced many events and 10 volumes of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and images since then.
Nick Hunt – part of Dark Mountain’s editorial team, Nick is a writer of non-fiction and fiction (including the short story Green Bang, which was one of the commissions from TippingPoint’s Weatherfronts programme). His second book, Where the Wild Winds Are is his account of walking the invisible pathways of four of Europe’s named winds – the Helm, the Bora, the Foehn and the Mistral – to discover how they affect landscapes, peoples and cultures. You can read a series of exclusive excerpts for ClimateCultures, starting here.
Theatre maker, writer and community activist, Lucy Neal is interested in the role the arts play to nurture and provoke the changes needed to transition our society to a more ecological age. She is the author of Playing for Time: Making Art as if the World Mattered.
An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses. Read More
Artist Jennifer Leach introduces Reading’s year-long Festival of the Dark, whose purpose is to gently lead people into the darkness — a place of stillness, mystery and contemplation, and a locus of the unknowing and the unknown.
790 words: estimated reading time 3 minutes
Some months ago, I had a very graphic dream involving barbed wire, entanglement and injury. In my dream, as I was trying to ameliorate the situation and minimise pain, the message came through loud and clear, ‘Cut the wire!’. What exactly this wire is, I have since been seeking to understand. It kept presenting itself to me as a subversive notion, an act of daring sabotage.
The question has proved seminal to the progress of Reading’s Festival of the Dark. The seed for the festival was sown at the TippingPoint Doing Nothing is Not an Option conference, and the endeavour initially moved with great flow. Its purpose is to gently lead people into the darkness — a place of stillness, mystery, contemplation, locus of the unknowing and the unknown. To face and embrace the ultimate fear that is fuelling our electrically-lit lemming stampede over the cliffs of ecological destruction. Since the launch, and once the Arts Council funding came through, there has been, at best, a general indifference towards the festival; at worst, there has been a clear closing of the official ranks towards it – business, church and media. Surely not because they sense something of a challenge in its message? Grin! A message that was possibly not so apparent when they first pledged their support. The churches – with their great venue potential in a town with few suitable spaces – have been particularly disappointing (see the notable exception below). The response from one church in Reading, whose hall we wished to use for a general meeting of arts organisations: ‘As an evangelical Christian church we believe passionately that Jesus came into this world to bring light into the darkness. As this belief is the foundation on which the Church is built it would be inappropriate for us to be involved in such an event [Festival of the Dark].’ Badgers, night-scented stocks, stars and moonlight? – that naughty co-creating Devil!
It has been a painful journey for myself and the small band seeking to realise the Festival’s vision. I have been bemused, wounded, short-tempered with my family, deep-soul exhausted. And yet…
From the moment of the Festival’s inception, there has been a supportive network holding the vision and the importance of the work. I marvel at it – quite literally spread across the whole of the UK. Actively rooting for us. Travelling down to create thoughtful, thrilling events for us. Bringing their fire, love and magic. To Reading! There are visionary businesses in Reading who are supporting us, Reading Buses being the most extraordinary. There are beautiful individuals making madcap ideas reality. With humour. There is one church so far – the Catholic church of St James, with Father John – who is open to working with us, most particularly in the light of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, ‘Laudato Si’.
So much to sing about; what we need to do is change tack. A friend I have worked with and whom I greatly admire shared with me yesterday what she asks for with her work: Take me to the hungry. For me it was a conversation that has unlocked the mystery. I realized that the metaphysical cutting of the wire was not a subversive act of sabotage, but an empowering act of liberation. There is no point in trying to convert patriarchy to a more meaningful system, or to try and engender a new spirit in people who are sated, if not content. Working with those who, with us, are spiritually hungry, eager for new ways – this is the way forward. The wire that needed cutting belonged to the imprisoning fence holding us all within ‘the system’, the critical and the non-critical alike. And so I ‘cut’ the wire, crawled through the fence, and lay face down on the earth, studiously avoiding the cowpats, breathing in the fresh rich energy of the Earth and the Universe.
The personal feeling of liberation is calmly satisfying, and the way forward for the Festival – although as unknown as ever – feels right. I suspect the Festival events will be small, and different to our initial conception. Yet embracing this is now effortless. Exciting. And who knows, hundreds of Reading-ites may yet surprise us and turn out in force for our next event, The Night Breathes Us In with the wonderful Dark Mountain Project, on 25th March. It would be lovely if you joined us.
A poet, writer, performer and storyteller whose wild work, forged in the fantastical reaches of deep imagination, brings to life new stories for our strange times. Read More
WriterLaura Coleman explores the urgent need for spaces where we can engage the emotions of environmental change — to hold onto our spaces, and create new ones — and shares two spaces with deep meaning for her.
1,120 words: estimated reading time 4.5 minutes
There are two spaces in the world that I think about every day
The first is a small piece of the Bolivian jungle. I have watched it grow, flood, burn, and grow again. The creatures that live there – rescued, sheltered and cared for by Bolivian and international staff and volunteers – have, over the last ten years, threaded through me, to the point that I dream of them. There is one in particular, a puma. Her name is Wayra, and she is one of my closest friends.
The second space is a building, in Brighton, England. It has four floors, a basement and a cave (tunnel included). It has been a hairdresser’s, a Middle Eastern food store, a mod bar, an Internet café, and an empty shop. Five years ago, it became ONCA. ONCA is an arts and performance venue that I started after coming home from the jungle, having no clue what to do with the stories I found now sitting at the base of my stomach. I didn’t realise that ONCA would be radical, or important. I just wanted to find a way to tell stories like Wayra’s.
After five years, ONCA has developed a life of its own. It has become a beautiful venue, providing more support, solace and community than I could ever have imagined. That makes me proud, not proud to have had the idea but proud to have had the opportunity to watch it become what it has. Proud to be part of the community that has shaped it. Because I believe that spaces like ONCA are important. There are a few arts venues that are trying to acknowledge the urgency of the times that we live in, and attempting to provide a framework for creatively engaging with those times, and ONCA is one of them. ONCA was set up to explore and raise awareness of environmental issues through art, but since environmental change and human culture are so inextricably linked, we find ourselves exploring immigration, human health, happiness and economics, just as much as plastic pollution, flooding and species extinction.
I have thought a lot about what arts venues need to, and can, be, since starting ONCA. So much so, I am now researching a PhD on the topic. Although they are worlds apart, quite literally, it is possible to find similarities between spaces like ONCA and spaces like the refuge I go to in Bolivia. One of things that ONCA does so crucially, I think, is embedded within our mission. We do nothing in the building, or outside it, that doesn’t touch on environmental and social urgencies. One of the major barriers to environmental communication is the ease with which we, as a society, look away from things like climate change. ONCA, by its very nature, looks – or at least we try to. We try to practice what Donna Haraway so eloquently calls ‘staying with the trouble’. “It is not possible,” she says, “to stay with the trouble among us without the practice of joy. That the practices of joyful, collective and individual pleasure are essential to the arts of living on a damaged planet.”
As is, simultaneously, grief. This is something that both she, and others like Joanna Macy for example, have argued for a long time. Staying with it then, through joy and grief both. This is what we try to do, at ONCA, through such arts as play, craft, enquiry, DIY ritual, dialogue and creative action.
What I found in the refuge in Bolivia, I believe, was similar. For whatever reason, I ended up spending a lot of my twenties all day, every day, in a very small piece of the Amazon rainforest, with a puma. Making sure that she, above all else, was as happy as she could be. And she wasn’t particularly happy most of the time, if I’m honest. She was scared and confused. Due to her history, she could never be released. She would always live in a cage, and she would always have to be dependant on people like me.
Despite that, she trusted me. She trusted me and even, at times I thought, was happy to have me around. Despite the fact that her life had been irrevocably damaged, when her mother was shot, when her trees were cut down, when her jungle burned, her capacity, I believe, to feel joy, and to bring joy to other lost ones like myself, was staggering. That, in turn, gave me a clue about how necessary it is to grieve for what she, and other creatures like her – humans included – have lost, and are losing every day.
Spaces for the joy and the grief
Spaces where the joy and the grief of this is made real, is made possible, is made communal, are so urgent. I don’t think it matters what kind of space – a little camp in the jungle for lost creatures, a bricks and mortar art gallery in central Brighton, an online blog, a community centre, a sports club, a church. As the earth seems to alter more rapidly each week, this is a cry to hold onto our spaces, and to create new ones, to step through the door, over the gate, across the river, into the screen, through the glitter curtain, and look our ruins honestly in the face.
I am about to go back to Bolivia for half a year. I am balancing the impact of the air miles with my need to see Wayra again. She was three when we met, she is thirteen now and getting older by the day. Before, I thought that being in Bolivia meant leaving ONCA behind. I don’t think this is the case anymore. ONCA and the jungle are two spaces, on opposite sides of the world. Somehow they have become entangled. I am not sure what this means yet, maybe I will never be sure. Maybe I’ll spend the next six months trying to find out.
For more than 20 years, Communidad Inti Wara Yassi in Bolivia has been working for the benefit of wildlife rescued from illegal trafficking, giving disadvantaged youth a sense of purpose through involvement with wildlife care, and educating the Bolivian public to respect wildlife. Find more about CIWY at www.intiwarayassi.org
A writer and artist who cares for rescued wild animals in Bolivia and founder of ONCA, an arts charity bridging social and environmental justice with creativity. Read More
Filmmakers Sarah Thomas and Jon Randall share a conversation about the ideas, stories and creative processes behind their film exploring Óshlið, an abandoned road in Iceland — accompanied by a slideshow of their images from this changing place.
Artist 
Clash of two worlds
Voltaic throwaway
Votive artefact
Writer 
Hands and Boots
Making the stone clock
Lucia of Syracuse
Artist 
Monkey
Festival of the Dark
Wayra, puma in the Bolivian jungle.
ONCA, Brighton.
‘Do You Speak Seagull?’ – Private View of an exhibition at ONCA, November 2016