Curators Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Celebrating Clean Air Day

Artist and writer Selva Ozelli marks Clean Air Day with a roundup of international art shows she has curated and participated in during this year of pandemic, spurred on by urgent connections between our environmental and health crises.

2,380 words: estimated reading time = 9.5 minutes + 2 mins video

It has been an unprecedented year, with 13% more large, uncontrolled wildfires around the world compared to last year — spelling dire consequences for carbon dioxide levels, health and biodiversity, as well as the economy. And human actions in burning down ‘Magical Forests’ — as depicted by my childhood friend artist Mehmet Kuran — are mostly to blame, according to a newly released report, Fires, forests and the future.

wildfires and clean air - showing art by Selva Ozelli — “Wildfires in the Age of Corona”, Oil 40 x 30 cm, Canvas Paper
Artist: Selva Ozelli © 2020

The year began with Australia’s record-shattering bushfires, burning down a forest the size of England. According to The Guardian, “On New Year’s Day in Canberra the air quality reading was the worst on the planet: 26 times levels considered hazardous to human health.”

In April, nearly 20% of the forested area of northern Thailand burned, and wildfires overtook Indonesia and Ukraine’s Chernobyl region, causing dangerous levels of air pollution. By June wildfires lit up the Arctic Circle, with Siberia registering the most extreme recorded temperatures, resulting in the severest Arctic melting. By August a government researcher told Reuters that Brazil’s Amazon wildfires were the worst in the past ten years. The West Coast of the U.S. slipped into an epic wildfire season, which is still ongoing. These wildfires raging across the world smashed last year’s records for CO₂ emissions, according to scientists at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, and aggravated respiratory ailments amid the ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic — the most devastating plague to ravage humankind this century.

This unparalleled year brought out the artist and curator in me for the first time in my life. The unprecedented global Covid-19 lockdown allowed me to allocate my time to expressing my thoughts and feelings about climate change and Covid-19 via paintings, in addition to my series of articles on digital technology adoption, solar energy and tax policies in jurisdictions with the greatest carbon emissions.

International art for global challenges

I took my first step as a curator with an art brochure for fellow ClimateCultures artist Rana Balkis’s Infinite Possibilities series. We are now entering what is known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but still fuelled by coal and fossil fuels — with adverse environmental effects. In this era, not only are we able to transmit our ideas and our art digitally around the world, but also the pollution from energising these digital technologies — as well as diseases affected by pollution. This triggered an urge in Rana to find a new way, through her art, to raise awareness of climate change and environmental consciousness. In Infinite Possibilities — with two paintings selected in the United Nations’ Covid-19 Artwork open brief — working in the style of collage, she intends her oil paintings to expand our curiosity and imagination so we better connect, understand and adapt to our technologically changing world by expanding our perception in the context of our stagnant values, behaviour and norms.

Since our atelier, led by Teymur Rzayev, is a space for many talented climate change artists and interesting artwork, next I curated Atelier Teymur Rzayev’s First Digital Climate Change Art Show, with five paintings that were acknowledged in six international art contests. As I reported for the ClimateCultures Quarantine Connection series, I initially planned our group show to take place at the Balat Culture Center in Istanbul. However, due to Covid-19 social distancing rules, it was cancelled at the last moment. Therefore, I had to quickly switch to launching a digital art show with the assistance of Cem Ustuner, the owner of Pinelo Art Gallery, so it could reach global viewers. Our group show was registered as UN Environment, Ocean and Desertification Days digital events and it received a favourable art review; it got ample international press and was published by the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change, Hong Kong.

Clean Air

The good reception of this show encouraged me to continue curating ten, and participating in seven, climate change and Covid-19 themed art shows: four group, and three solo. These were published by the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change Hong Kong, Climate Museum UK and over 160 museums, culture ministries and NGOs in over 40 countries around the world. I am pleased to share these art shows here today, to commemorate UK’s largest air pollution campaign: National Clean Air Day, which was launched in 2017. While this is normally celebrated on the third Thursday in June, due to Covid-19 this year Clean Air Day is celebrated digitally on 8th October in the UK.

Encouraged by the increasing interest of the international community in clean air, and emphasising the need to make further efforts to improve air quality, including reducing air pollution to protect human health, the UN General Assembly decided to designate 7th September as the International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies, which was celebrated digitally for the first time this year around the globe with the highest level of participation from the UN — and Turkey’s Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, where Professor Mehmet Emin Birpınar, Deputy Minister, explained that “the coronavirus pandemic has shown the importance of clean air all over the world.”

But the largest ever global Climate Ambition Alliance — launched in 2019 and representing 452 cities (including London and New York City), 22 regions in 120 countries, 1,101 businesses, 45 of the biggest investors, and 549 universities — is the ‘Race To Zero’ campaign. It rallies leadership and support from businesses, cities, regions, investors for a healthy, resilient, zero-carbon recovery ahead of COP26, where governments must strengthen their contributions to the Paris Agreement, achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the latest.

As part of the Race to Zero campaign, run in coordination with the UN and the City of New York, ex-Mayor of NYC Mike Bloomberg kicked off Climate Week in NYC on 21st September by announcing that Bloomberg Philanthropies and Sierra Club successfully retired 60% of U.S. coal-fired power plants — 318 out of 530 plants — via the Beyond Coal campaign. A day later, injecting new momentum into global climate action, President Xi told the UN General Assembly that China, the world’s biggest polluter of greenhouse gases, pledged to go carbon neutral by 2060 — only a week after the EU committed to increasing its emission-reduction target from 40 to 55 percent by 2030. On 27th September, the last day of Climate Week in NYC, the world’s first shipment of blue ammonia was transported from Saudi Arabia, which has the World’s second-largest oil reserves, to Japan — the World’s sixth largest CO₂ emitter — where it will be used in power stations to produce electricity without carbon emissions.

“Desolate Tree”, Oil, 90 x 90cm, Canvas
Artist: Fatma Kadir © 2020

With world leaders taking important steps towards decarbonisation, I curated a group show Clean Air for Blue Skies and my solo digital art show Breathe Life with the theme of air pollution. These two art shows contain six paintings that were acknowledged in five international art contests of forest fires, lonely trees, gardens and portraits of artists who were economically impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic with their shows being cancelled.

My solo art show Breathe Life includes portraits of composer and singer Niall Horan (Heartbreak Weather – Human’s Inertia in the Face of Wildfires) and ClimateCultures artist Renan Kaleli (Pollution), who is working towards preparing an art show Climate Change to Corona, with five paintings selected in the UN’s Covid-19 Artwork open brief. These artists turned to launching digital concerts and digital art shows this year, so I have also included a portrait of Professor Erdal Arikan (Pollution 2), the creator of 5G technology.

Urbanisation & Biodiversity

Serife Akkan explored the theme of urbanization and its impact on the environment and CO₂ levels in her solo art show One Door One Hundred Trees. Serife wanted to bring attention to and set alarm bells about the destruction humans are making of their environment — particularly since she witnessed firsthand the rapid urbanisation in Istanbul during her lifetime and its impact on air quality.

One of the concerns associated with predictions of CO₂-induced global warming is the claim that the number of birds and their habitat areas will decline. Conserving and restoring the ecological connectivity and integrity of ecosystems that support natural cycles are essential for the survival and well-being of migratory birds. Artist Fatma Kadir explored the theme of biodiversity in her two solo art shows Bird Watching 1 & 2, with sixteen paintings that were acknowledged in three international art contests to commemorate biodiversity in birds that are important plant pollinators and seed dispersers.

This July, less sea ice covered the Arctic Ocean than in any other July since scientists began keeping track of it with satellites in 1979. This marks another step toward the devastating and planet-reshaping inevitability of an ice-free summer for the Arctic Ocean. Artist Semine Hazar explored the theme of Arctic melting in her solo art show Sea Watcher. The inspiration was her trip to the Antarctic in 2017 where she witnessed the ice melting and, with a great sound, crashing into the sea. This brought tears to her eyes. Semine’s late husband was a captain. Captains determine their sea routes based on the silent light signals of lighthouses. With her sea and lighthouse themed paintings, Semine wants to draw attention to the importance of oceans to our world and our ecology as the largest carbon sink, and the need for us to guard them. She wants the silent signals from the lighthouses to be visible to all of us, not only captains of our world.

Covid-19

The current high levels of air pollution around the world have contributed to increased rates of chronic respiratory disease and impaired lung function in people of all ages, making air pollution a major and increasing threat to public health according to a study published in the journal Climate and Atmospheric Science. Many of the diseases that are caused by long-term exposure to air pollution are the same diseases that increase the risk of severe illness and death in patients with Covid-19.

In my two solo art shows Art in the Time of Corona 1 & 2, with sixteen paintings that were acknowledged in five international art contests, I explored whether climate change caused by CO₂ might be one reason for such a terrible global Covid-19 pandemic which spread around the world like a tsunami alongside heightened CO2, penetrating deep into our respiratory and circulatory systems, damaging our lungs to the point where we become highly vulnerable to the coronavirus.

“Corona Corona”, Oil, 30 x 30 cm, Canvas
Artist: Selva Ozelli © 2020

The unprecedented pandemic has put an enormous burden on health systems and professionals worldwide. So far, more than 27.9 million people around the world have been diagnosed with the coronavirus and more than 1,000,000 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University. Some 18.8 million people have recovered. The pandemic unveiled the challenges and the risks health workers face globally including healthcare-associated infections, violence, stigma, psychological and emotional disturbances, illness and even death. These frontline workers are physically exhausted and emotionally strained from the harrowing experience of serving on the Covid response with respiratory as well as neurological manifestations.

To commemorate their sacrifice I have included portraits of Covid-19 frontline professionals, including Dr Esma Akin, Chief of Nuclear Medicine at George Washington Hospital in Washington DC, USA; Dr Kalbiye Yalaz — the teacher of Dr Akin — who established the first pediatric neurology department in Hacettepe Hospital; Lale Baymur Vanli, a Pediatric Neuropsychologist who is the first psychologist to be hired into the first pediatric neurology department in Hacettepe Hospital and daughter of late Professor Feriha Baymur, who established the first Psychology department at Hacettepe Hospital and University.

Finally, climate change artists Fatma Kadir from her Bird Watching series, Resul Rzayev from his Mountain Air series, and I from my Art in the Time of Corona series donated artwork to the Portakal Cicegi Project, which will be on sale until 15th October 2020 to raise funds for the orphans of Covid-19 frontline health care professionals.

Find out more

Selva’s articles have been published by the world’s first Climate Change museum, The Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change in Hong Kong, as well as over 100 other publications around the world. She contributed Tsunami / Chasing the Quarantine Blues Away for Day 22 of our Quarantine Connection series, and in September 2020 art.earth published her piece, Acknowledging the true cost of climate change.

You can find out more about Clean Air Day in the UK and the International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies campaigns, where the UN has described air quality as a two-fold problem, with both health and climate impacts. WWF published its report Fires, forests and the future: a crisis raging out of control? in 2020. You can read 8 things everyone should know about Australia’s wildfire disaster, published in Vox about the start of the bushfires in January 2020, with the Guardian reporting how “for months, Australians breathed air pollution up to 26 times above levels considered hazardous to human health. The long-term impact could be devastating” in Inside Australia’s climate emergency: the air we breathe. In June CNN published Temperatures in an Arctic Siberian town hit 100 degrees, a new high. In September, Reuters reported Exclusive: Brazil Amazon fires likely worst in 10 years, August data incomplete, government researcher says. This Nature Briefing from June 2020 suggests that Half the world’s population are exposed to increasing air pollution.

Artist Rana Balkis is also a ClimateCultures member. You can view Selva’s and Rana’s paintings for the UN Covid-19 art show at the Trvst website, and Selva’s brochure about Rana’s Infinite Possibilities series is published by Issuu. The international art show Atelier Teymur Rzayev’s First Digital Climate Change Art Show was featured in Coin Telegraph in May 2020, with a slideshow available in this piece from the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change, Hong Hong. The Museum also has this slideshow of the Breathe Life art show Selva curated, and you can see slideshows of the Clean Air for Blue Skies art show, as well as the ‘One Door One Hundred Trees art show she curated for Serife Akkan, the Bird Watching series from Fatma Kadir, Semine Hazar’s Sea Watcher show, and Selva’s own show, Art in the Time of Corona.

Selva Ozelli

An environmentalist working as an artist, writer, international tax attorney and public accountant, who has curated a Climate Change Art Show at Balat Culture Center, Istanbul ...
Read More

A Personal History of the Anthropocene – Three Objects #4

Curator Ruth Garde selects three Anthropocene objects: artworks that evoke a past, present and future, highlighting how Deep Time and ‘human time’ are implicated in each other, and the imbalances in our relationship with the rest of nature.

1,430 words: estimated reading time 5.5 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.

***

As a curator and writer who has had the great good fortune to work on many Wellcome Collection exhibitions, I began with the intention of choosing three objects from amongst their own collections for my ‘history of the Anthropocene’ post. However, it quickly dawned on me that, over the last few years, my increasingly insistent preoccupation and engagement with environmental questions has primarily been inspired by contemporary art. Moreover, since I feel strongly that contemporary art has the power to shine a light on and prompt reflection about such questions, it seemed like the most meaningful choice.

I have therefore chosen to share three artists’ works that have had a particularly powerful impact on me and on my professional preoccupations.

Out of Deep Time …

For the ‘Past Anthropocene’ I would like to introduce a work by Anaïs Tondeur. Anaïs is a French artist, based in Paris, who creates seductive and compelling works that combine fact and fiction in poignant, often unsettling, ways. Her piece I:55, or the girl who swallowed the remnants of a forest, traces the epic, imaginary journey of a specimen in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology collection. The specimen is a calcified bladder stone, which contained the core of a pencil.

Time - Graphite on Paper, map, pathologic specimen I.55 or the girl that swallowed the remnants of a forest. Artist: Anaïs Tondeu — Graphite on Paper, map, pathologic specimen I.55 or the girl that swallowed the remnants of a forest – Selection of 41 drawings realised on an expedition from London to the French Alps to retrace the history of I.55, specimen from St Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Collection Artist: Anaïs Tondeu © 2012 http://www.anais-tondeur.com/main/i55/

Through a series of exquisite impressionistic drawings, also rendered in pencil, Tondeur depicts the journey of this specimen, beginning with the formation of graphite in a carboniferous Alpine forest 320 million years ago, through the vein of graphite formed ca. 100 million years later, which led to the French mine from which it was extracted around 1910. From here the journey continues to the remnants of the Plombagine factory, where graphite was transformed into powder, and thence to the Conté pencil factory. The final stage of the journey is the Sennelier art supply shop in Paris, where according to documents in the shop archive, an English journalist was a customer. And here we come full circle: as Tondeur’s narrative goes, some months later his daughter swallowed a pencil.

I:55 has stayed with me ever since I first saw it. To me, it beautifully captures both the deep time of nature and the relative pinprick of human existence, whilst also tracing how we through history have sought to exploit the natural bounties offered to us by the Earth.

Through our sweet overload …

Around the same time that I encountered Anais’s work I also discovered the art of Ken and Julia Yonetani, an Australian artist duo whose work is powerfully engaged with the detrimental impact of human behaviour on our natural environment. Their sculptural work Sweet Barrier Reef alludes to the bleaching of corals, which eventually leads to coral death.

Sweet Barrier Reef (detail). Sugar, 2009. 1.4 x 8.5 x 3.7 in metres. © Image courtesy of the artists and GV Art Source: https://ruthgarde.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/sense-of-taste-a-delicious-solo-exhibition-at-gv-art/

Making their sculpture out of sugar, the Yonetanis highlight the fact that one key cause of the bleaching is the harvesting of sugar cane. However the work is more layered than that: sugar is also used metaphorically to indicate humanity’s insatiable greed for consumption and the destruction that it entails.

Into immense entropies

Finally, for my ‘Future Anthropocene’ object I have chosen a photographic series by the artist Julian Charrière, whose work I sought out last year when he exhibited at Parasol Unit in London. The Blue Fossil Entropic stories documents an artistic intervention that Charrière undertook in 2013, when he stood on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean armed with a blowtorch, attempting to melt the ice beneath his feet.

The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories I. Artist: Julien Charrière — The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories I, 2013 Artist: Julien Charrière © 2013 http://julian-charriere.net/projects/the-blue-fossil-entropic-stories

For me this absurdist intervention succeeds in summing up the future of our relationship with nature: on the one hand we are but a blip in geological time, destined to be outpowered by nature whose majesty and preeminence we can never subdue; on the other, our assaults on nature will over time cause immense and irreversible destruction that will injure ourselves as much as our habitat.

The impact of these artists’ work prompted me to write three online pieces — linked to below.

Find out more

You can see Anaïs Tondeur’s I:55, or the girl who swallowed the remnants of a forest (2012) and other works at her website – and Ruth’s 2014 article on Anaïs’ work for Apollo Magazine, Lost in Fathoms: Anaïs Tondeur:

‘Anaïs Tondeur is an artist who delights in expeditions. Whether tracing the wildlife burgeoning in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant (Chernobyl’s Herbarium, 2011), or following the migration of a graphite pencil from its geological origins to its unlikely terminus in the bladder of a 17-year-old girl (I.55, 2013), her journeys conjure intriguing narratives that are in turn poetic, poignant, and scientifically compelling. Her installations have delved into history, geography, and an array of scientific disciplines (physics, geology, oceanography), but at the heart of each is a captivating story that engages the most human of emotions.’

You can see Ken and Julia Yonetani’s Sweet Barrier Reef (2009) and other works at their website – and Ruth’s 2011 post, Sense of Taste: a delicious solo exhibition at GV Art, on her blog, Words. Pictures. Objects:

‘Maybe a … suitable cultural analogy would be Hansel and Gretel standing before the Gingerbread House. As in the Grimm fairytale, these works are delectably tempting to the senses – sight and touch as well as taste – but they also explore serious subtexts fraught with danger and ultimately, death. The danger explored by these works are environmental, the unhappy consequences of our endlessly insatiate consumption-lead society, so it is therefore utterly appropriate that one’s sense of taste is so aroused.’

And you can see Julian Charriere’s Blue Fossil Entropic Stories (2013) at his website – and Ruth’s 2016 article for Apollo Magazine, Smart art that will make you reconsider your smartphone:

The relationship between art and science, ‘The Two Cultures’ once lamented by Charles Percy Snow as mutually uncomprehending fields divided by an unbridgeable gap, seems more robust than ever. Artists’ residencies in scientific institutions, such as those established five years ago at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), are proliferating … That artists engage with scientific themes can be of little surprise at a time when rapidly evolving digital technologies, scientific breakthroughs and the Earth’s ecological fragilities are critical to our lives. Art can be a rich and fertile means for people to engage with such challenging subjects, harnessing emotional sensibilities where explanations on a purely intellectual level may fail.’

Ruth Garde

I am a curator, creative producer and writer with a passion for telling stories about the human condition by bringing together art, the humanities and science.
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.

Use the Contact Form to let send your ideas, or if you're a Member contribute your objects as a post.

Festival of the Dark – Dark February

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!

Monkey
Photographer: Jennifer Leach © 2017

Vision

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.

Festival of the Dark
Photographer: Jennifer Leach © 2017

The Night Breathes Us In

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.

Find out more

Festival of the Dark at Outrider Anthems.

Jennifer Leach

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

Spaces for Joy and Grief

Writer Laura 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.

Wayra, puma in the Bolivian jungle.
Photographer: Laura Coleman © 2017

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.

ONCA, Brighton.
Photographer: Debbie Bragg © 2017

Spaces for looking into the change

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.

‘Do You Speak Seagull?’ – Private View of an exhibition at ONCA, November 2016
Photographer: Laura Coleman © 2016

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.

Find out more

Find more about ONCA at www.onca.org.uk

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

Laura Coleman

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