How Do We Begin A Meaningful Conversation About Art’s Place Within the Climate Crisis?

British people infamously love talking about the weather, but what happens when UK temperatures start to regularly exceed 40 degrees? Will the conversation shift when climate-related mortality becomes a commonplace form of death? How will we begin to truly acknowledge the impact of the climate crisis?

Human-made climate change has an interconnected impact across our social, economic, and cultural lives. It shapes communities on a local and global level and determines everything from the food we eat to the age we can expect to live. Its effects are insidious and unavoidable.

In recent years, positive news on the fight against the climate crisis has become increasingly hard to come by. In 2019 the Oxford Dictionary declared climate emergency as the word of the year. Following a huge increase in usage British newspaper The Guardian started using “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” instead of “climate change” to better articulate the urgency and immediacy of the situation. Promises are broken as quickly as they are made; over a third of the world’s largest companies are committed to Net Zero targets, yet nearly all (93%) are set to fail if they don’t at least double the pace of emissions reduction by 2030.

Curbing carbon emissions is often presented as a Sisyphean task, but the consequences of failure will be catastrophic. What began with the degradation of biodiversity, rising sea levels and the gradual disappearance of coral atolls is now a global problem witnessed in a myriad of catastrophic ways. In 2022, a record-breaking heat wave swept across Europe, intense weather disturbances occurred across North and South America, major floodings took place in Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, Haiti and beyond, and Wildfires engulfed massive swathes of Australia, North America and Europe. This list is by no means exhaustive, as severe weather warnings become a commonplace occurrence.

Such a topic is emotional and often evokes deep defence mechanisms and eco-anxieties. For this reason, my curatorial approach in dealing with the climate crisis at the Sainsbury Centre aims to initiate a frank and honest conversation, one that dares audiences not to turn away, but to confront their personal hopes and fears and our collective concerns for an uncertain future.

Over the past years, the relationship between art, ecologies, and the environment has become more and more vital as artists across the globe use their work to raise awareness and initiate change. The work of John Gerrard, whose art practice examines energy production, consumption, and environmental degradation issues has never felt so topical. In 2022, the artist created a timely NFT work on the global impact of burning 100 million barrels of oil per day and dedicated 25% of the artist proceeds to atmospheric C02 removal. The rest of the proceeds will be donated to regenerative farming organisations across the globe to help farmers adapt to a more sustainable form of farming, an approach that moves beyond petro-agriculture and the use of nitrogen fertilisers.

Another striking example is The Edible Hut project (2011–2014).

Located in Detroit’s Osborn neighbourhood, the space – which features an edible roof and oculus ceiling made from a reconfigured Detroit garage – is a collaboration between residents, organisations, artists, and schools. The Edible Hut is a place for people to organise creative activities: spoken-word and hip-hop performances; the growing of healthy food and enjoying the art of cooking; plant education and exploration, cultivation and transformation of artistic energy; and support a neighbourhood sense of community belonging, ecological awareness, and sustainability.

The cross-over between art, the environment, and ecologies is not new. The 1960s saw artists commonly utilising and embracing recycled everyday objects and waste as materials of art. Artists such as David Medalla, Nancy Holt, Agnes Denes ,and Joseph Beuys used the environment as both a resource and modern cabinet of curiosities. Much like an artwork, such materials possess the tremendous power to excite the imagination, raise public awareness of environmental degradation and galvanise the public in an urgent attempt to encourage humanity to live more sustainably with the planet.

Sediment Spirit is one of the Sainsbury Centre’s developing exhibitions dedicated to addressing the climate crisis. Its title is a neologism I propose to offer as a new framework with which to engage with such a complicated and destructive issue, arguably the biggest threat to humanity that we have ever faced.

Sediment (From the middle French sédiment and from the Latin sedimentum) is a solid material from the Earth that moves and flows through different locations. It is composed of varying sizes and shapes of minerals, rocks, pebbles, remains of plants and animals, debris of branches, massive boulders, and it can be smaller than a grain of sand. Sediment moves through the process of erosion (the removal and transportation of rock or soil from one point to another). It is of vital importance as it enriches the soil with nutrients. The science of Geology informs us that habitats rich in sediment are also often rich in biodiversity and life.

Spirit (From the Latin word anima and spiritus denoting the undying part of humans and animals which inhabits a body that gives it life) is the non-physical or dematerialised quality of an artwork to evoke an intellectual or emotional response. This concept is connected to what American academic Donna Haraway defines as Sym-poiesis or “making with”: the idea that nothing is self-organising or can nurture life alone. In her essay Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble in the book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Harray states: “Sympoiesis is a world proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated historical systems. It is a word for worlding.”

Haraway argues that earthlings are implicated in the earth’s ecological assemblage, ranging from, cells, organisms, fungi, bacteria’s, and other microscopic beings. The cycle of life that we cannot see beyond our human eyes. This idea offers us a relational understanding of the complex systems of symbiogenesis, an evolutionary theory that promotes cooperation between species in order to increase overall survival and interconnectedness of life in polytemporal, polyphonic, and polyspatial unfoldings.

Sediment Spirit pertains to contemporary art’s multiform and transformative processes to translate the complex science of climate change (data, graphs, maps, archives, and narratives) into the relatable language of our shared humanity. It connects us back to the corporeal, poetic, social, and visceral experience of humanity, so that we may engage with human-made climate change on an intimate level. Doing this expands our capacity to re-imagine our surroundings and how we exist within them in more sustainable ways, to provoke new ways of living. The exhibition aims to stimulate new discoveries of attunement, resonances, and interconnections and simultaneously invoke and summon the life force of art in creating a new language in this age of rapid geopolitical, ecological, and technological change.

The curatorial proposition of Sediment Spirit is an understanding of anthropogenic climate change as a transformation that happens simultaneously inside of our bodies as well as our external environment – it is something intimate, immediate, interconnected, hyperlinked, and altogether quite abstract to grasp. As the 2006 Al Gore documentary posited, the impacts of human-made climate change is an Inconvenient Truth.

It is a change that not only redefines our understanding of humanity as the new terrifying monsters of the Anthropocene, but also implicates the very essence of how we personally and collectively exist in society. It works in and outside of our bodies to manifest new methods of forming our future stories, songs, language, art, politics, economics, and our dreams of societal metamorphosis in the face of an ever-transforming world.

Sediment Spirit opens in autumn 2023

John Kenneth Paranada Curator of Art and Climate Change Sainsbury Centre

John Kenneth Paranada is a Filipino born, UK-based Curator, Researcher, and Writer. He is the first Curator of Art and Climate Change at the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia. His interdisciplinary practice focuses on experimental futures, hybrid forms, and practices, with a focus on climate change, sustainability, historical entanglements, the Anthropocene, social sculpture, new media technologies, and platforming climate narratives.