• We need culture to shift behaviour, because everything is culture but the mentality is that art is an adornment and not actually a tactic. I think art is a tactic.
I first met Annette while I was chair of the Sectoral Climate Arts Leadership for the Emergency (scale-lesaut.ca/about-scale/) or SCALE in 2022 and have since then gotten to know her as an artist here in Ottawa on the traditional unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.
Annette’s multi-disciplinary work emphasizes social-critical art culture with political themes at its centre, addressing both local and meta-national conditions.
Overall her work raises issues within a civil society to challenge the “isms” and all their inhumane expressions.
Art climatism anyone?
Annette defines herself as a builder of capacity of the arts and culture sector to respond in the climate emergency and she is well placed to do this as Organizational Development and Network Lead of SCALE, so we talked about SCALE and the challenges of mobilising an arts sector that already has many challenges to face and yet the climate emergency is unique…
I mentioned that co-founders and mission circle members of SCALE have also been featured on this podcast, including judi pearl (e59 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) ), david maggs (e30 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) and e166 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) ), kendra fanconi (e36 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) and e87 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) ), tanya kalmanovitch (e53 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) ), ian garrett (e54 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) ), kimberlye skye richards (e76 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) and e171 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) ), Sanita Fejzić (e155 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) et é154 (balado-conscient.simplecast.c...) ), anthony garoufalis-auger (e93 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) et é56 (balado-conscient.simplecast.c...) ), tracey friesen (e85 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) ), viviane gosselin (e84 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) ), robin sokoloski (e61 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) ) and anjali appadurai (e23 (conscient-podcast.simplecast....) ). A cohort of art and climate activist.
I appreciated Annette response to all of my question but in particular about the role of art in previous periods of crisis:
• In any time when there's a cultural upheaval there has been the power of art, not only to illustrate the situation that we're in, but also to imagine a place where people could go. Dada did that after the first World War : dismantling the beast that brought this devastation and then coming in with a sense of imagination and joy to move forward and show people around them that there are other ways of being. … Look at Afrofuturism or indigenous futurism: there's a real beautiful way of imagining futures that are not utopian. They're looking at how the world could come out of the mess that we're in. … There's real power in that.
Annette recommended the following books and podcasts:
• Playing for Time (www.triarchypress.net/playing...) by Lucy Neal
• Raw Materials (www.sfmoma.org/raw-material-a...) podcast by San Francisco Moma
• Dark Matter Labs (darkmatterlabs.org/) and their pilot on Universal Nutrition
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END NOTES FOR ALL EPISODES
Here is a link for more information on season 5 (drive.google.com/file/d/1YlY2...) .
Please note that, in parallel with the production of the conscient podcast and it's francophone counterpart, balado conscient (balado-conscient.simplecast.com/) , I publish a Substack newsletter called ‘a calm presence' which are 'short, practical essays about collapse a...