Facing the Climate Swedish and international cartoonists take an amusing and alarming look at the climate
© The Swedish Institute and participating artists ISBN 978-91-86995-73-7 Cover illustration “World Sea” by Love Antell English translation by Stephen Croall Graphic Design by Igor Isaksson/Mu AB Paper: 150 g Arctic Volume Printed by Exakta Print AB, Malmö, Sweden, 2016
Facing the Climate Swedish and international cartoonists take an amusing and alarming look at the climate
Foreword
We all recognise the images: a polar bear pacing anxiously on its shrinking ice floe in the Arctic; a Haitian child standing alone in the remains of the family home after the earthquake; neighbours fleeing over each other’s rooftops to escape rapidly rising floodwaters in the Balkans. The threats to our climate come in many shapes and forms. Without doubt, ending climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. “We are the first generation that can end poverty – and the last generation to tackle climate change before it is too late.” The words of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon may sound ominous, but to me they also speak of optimism – of belief in a future that is sustainable in the long term, for both people and planet. The year 2015 was one of hope. It was the year that world leaders gathered for a UN summit in New York to lay down new Global Development Goals. The summit was successful, and the plan they adopted is Agenda 2030. Heads of state and government from across the globe have now agreed to join together in leading the world towards a fairer
and more sustainable future. Last year also brought the UN climate summit in Paris, which sought to establish a just and wide-ranging international climate agreement. Again, under the influence of great expectations from the citizens of the world, the parties managed to agree. There is now a plan in place for r educing climate emissions in all corners of the world. Sweden has long pressed for ambitious development goals and bold action on the climate and we are of course inspired by both Agenda 2030 and the new climate agreement. The Swedish Institute (SI) focuses its activities on areas where Sweden and Swedish skills, experiences and values are relevant and sought-after. In 2010, to help illustrate Sweden’s deep commitment to our environment and the climate, SI launched the exhibition Facing the Climate, in cooperation with Swedish embassies and local partners. Since then, the exhibition has been seen by more than 280,000 visitors across the world. In it, five Swedish cartoonists and a range of international colleagues provide their interpretations of the climate crisis, with the aid of humour and satire. The result makes us
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smile, but also reflect on the many worrying trends of today. This project has shown the advantage of using culture – and humour – as a means of approaching difficult and contentious issues. Through the exhibition and the workshops, and the talks that have accompanied it, we are proud to have contributed to important discussions about sustainable development and the survival of our planet. With this publication, SI wishes to share the rich array of images that the exhibition has generated and make them more widely accessible. At the same time we hope that the book – like the exhibition – will provoke further thoughts and reflection about one of the truly crucial issues of our time. Annika Rembe Director-General, Swedish Institute
“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.�
Introduction “Every cloud has a silver lining”, as the saying goes. The United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 (COP 15) ended in disappointment. Hopes of achieving an international agreement that would follow on from the Kyoto Agreement were dashed. But an exhibition staged in connection with the meeting proved a success. An exhibition featuring cartoonists from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, organised by the Museum of Danish Cartoon Art – ‘The Black Diamond’ – spawned a project that has since gone on tour and steadily grown, like a grain of sand in a clam. By now, 115 cartoonists from five continents have taken part in Facing the Climate and the exhibition has been seen by an estimated 280,000 people. Everywhere it goes it has been accompanied by talks, debates and workshops that have attracted both established and aspiring cartoonists. Facing the Climate has thereby acted as a catalyst for discussions about the climate issue and freedom of expression.
persevering. Another reason for the success of Facing the Climate is the impressive settings in which it has been shown, whether in prestigious libraries or the reception rooms of Swedish embassies – another legacy from Copenhagen. The whole thing started when the grand old man of Swedish political cartoons, Riber Hansson, was invited by the curator of the Copenhagen exhibition to suggest suitable Swedish exhibitors. He proposed Love Antell, freshly graduated from the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design (Konstfack) in Stockholm, and Karin Sunvisson, a student at École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and also Helena Lindholm and Magnus Bard. Some years earlier, in 2007, Riber Hansson and the latter two had experienced an inspiring but disconcerting encounter with Russian-speaking colleagues in the Russian Baltic Sea city of Kaliningrad. Five well-known Russian cartoonists had taken part, and five Swedes.
The five illustrators who represented Sweden in Copenhagen were a motley crew, different in age, in artistic style and in their political thinking. Some had several decades’ experience, while others were new to the scene. I’m convinced that the success of the venture is partly due to the group’s composition. This randomly created team has proved both strong and
Helena Lindholm later wrote an account of that episode in the art and design journal Tecknaren (No. 6/2007), describing amongst other topics a round-table discussion. “Round the table we all agreed that it’s what the reader sees and not what the artist draws that is the important thing. An illustration can be interpreted in as many different ways as there
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are readers, and what each person possesses in the way of feelings and experience, opinions and convictions determines how they react to the picture they’re looking at.” Her article makes clear that the participants were hoping for a continuation of the project embracing further countries around the Baltic Sea, and possibly dealing with the environment. It never transpired, however. One reason could be that such an event would be difficult to manage. That, at least, is my own conclusion, given the number of people and institutions involved. Helena Lindholm suggests another possible explanation that has its roots in Russian policy. People who shaped public opinion in Russia had just begun using the Internet and the country’s official censors were jumpy. Elections were round the corner and it was not a time to take risks. Since then, the political climate has hardened – and not only in Russia. Facing the Climate began touring before Europe had acknowledged the global refugee crisis, before civil war broke out in Syria and before the conflict in Ukraine. The theme in Kaliningrad was how Swedes view Russians and vice versa – a more conventional subject for cartoons than the climate and the environment. Prejudices, ‘mental shortcuts’, have always been a basic ingredient in humorous drawings. To me, political illustration represents a subcategory
of the cartoon genre. The message may be serious but it must always be put across humorously. Many ‘apolitical cartoons’ can in fact be interpreted politically. Opinions differ as to when and where cartoons first appeared. Western historians frequently invoke a Roman wall inscription from the 4th century AD showing a crucified donkey. The caption below the drawing reads: “Alexamenos worships (his) God”. There were no mass media in those days, the artist couldn’t expect his drawing to go viral, but I like this example since it suggests a bottom-up form of expression. The inscription was found in a building that had been used as a school. One suspects that the target may have been a teacher. Caricature is an important element in political cartoons, and so common that the two terms are sometimes used synonymously. In The Art of Controversy – Political Cartoons and their Enduring Power, published in 2013 after the Danish Muhammad cartoons but before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, editor and journalist Victor Navasky compares the genre to parody. This is a relevant comparison. A parody may indeed be good-natured or cruel, sophisticated or unrefined, banal or intelligent. The same applies to political cartoons. In both cases it’s the perspective that is crucial. The political cartoon genre, as we know it, largely dates back to the emergence of the liberal press in Western Europe. As a rule, newspapers had an illustration on the front
cover. In those days, the early 19th century, the publishers’ intention was to give themselves greater room for manoeuvre. It was in this space that democracy took its first, faltering steps. The cartoonists’ self-image as frontline champions of freedom of expression stems from this period. Their unique skills gave them a special position in the various editorial offices. Their role could be compared to the one that court jesters are claimed to have had in the Middle Ages – to say that which may not be said. It would be wrong to assume that the political cartoons of the early 19th century were published as a means of communicating with illiterates and the ignorant. In the European cities where there was advancement, literacy was widespread and the newspapers’ target group was informed and interested in social development (perhaps more so than today!). The cartoons lent each newspaper its special profile and the cartoonists were feared by those in power. The competitive advantage of such pictures is to be found at the abstract level. We interpret images spontaneously and intuitively, more or less involuntarily, as abstractions of non-verbal communication. The newspapers of the day were concerned more with shaping opinion than with reporting news. The texts and their authors dominated but the cartoons and the cartoonists were at the forefront. The authorities feared them. Napoleon is said to have commented that the British graphic satirist James Gillray caused him more damage than any army.
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Power hunger and vanity are interrelated. (All caricaturists know that power-holders tend to collect pictures of themselves.) Charles Philipon, who drew the French king’s face as a pear, was prosecuted by the French state on six occasions, jailed for a year and fined very heavily. But he was allowed to live. Paradoxically, it has almost always been the case that in order to say that which is forbidden you must enjoy sanction – and protection – from the highest echelons of power. In recent times, it has become increasingly difficult to determine where supreme power lies. Religious and ideological leaders don’t care about national borders. A Swedish artist has had a fatwa called down on his head because of a cartoon. His life is threatened and he is guarded by Swedish police round the clock. It is hard to explain how a single drawing can prompt a death sentence. To do so, we must go way back in time. Up until the present age, a hallmark of power was the ownership of – and the means to reproduce – images. Images are accorded magical qualities in all cultures. To draw or reproduce is to appropriate or acquire. It is immodest, self-asserting. The scriptures of the western monotheistic religions, the Tanakh (Old Testament, Torah) expressly forbade the use of images. This prohibition was first lifted in Christian Europe. It may seem strange that the magical significance attributed to images has not been eliminated in today’s globalised and digitised society, but such is indeed the case.
After an initial run in Iceland, the Facing the Climate concept was tested in full in the autumn of 2010, with Swedish and local contributors, in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. There, the GRAD culture centre selected the local cartoonists and curated the exhibition. The concept is simple but if it is to work well there has to be a conscious effort at the local level. Swedish embassies that are interested in the exhibition undertake to find local cartoonists who can take part and prepare a programme activity. The Swedish Institute provides a digital toolkit with pictures, rules and templates – a design manual, perhaps – and offers guidance on the process. In many countries, cartoonists are not organised. Where this is the case, other networks need to be used. In Vietnam, where Facing the Climate was exhibited in the autumn of 2015, there is no tradition of political illustration. There, the embassy worked with a small private gallery. This is how Camilla Bjelkås from the Hanoi embassy describes events: “We made clear in our discussions with the Manzi Art Space that we wanted both men and women, both from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, illustrators with different styles. The fact that they’re all young is due to the curators’ network. But also to the fact that satirical cartoons are not usually found here. There are a couple of people who do strips for a few newspapers but they’re older and we wanted to find cartoonists who aren’t published as frequently.” Globalisation has many benefits. People are brought closer together and it becomes clear
what we as human beings have in common. Our fundamental needs have nothing to do with national borders. Nor do nature or the climate respect boundaries drawn by people. Unfortunately, the same applies to radioactive emissions. And viruses. And ethnic or religious conflict. When problems spread, national borders simply resemble invocations. The climate crisis may be deemed of secondary importance when the world is on fire. Not since the Second World War have so many people been in flight around the globe. The climate issue is sometimes considered a luxury problem, but the Swedish exhibitors reject this. Karin Sunvisson: “I’ve been forced to realise that the climate issue in particular brings people together”. Camilla Bjelkås: “An exhibition like this makes it abundantly clear both to us as organisers and to visitors that the image you have of climate change varies enormously depending on where you live. For us Scandinavians it’s often about snow, ice and warmer winters, whereas for the Vietnamese it’s almost exclusively about air pollution and rising sea levels.” Expressing oneself graphically means being over-explicit. Political cartoonists are of course responsible for what they publish, but as a rule they share this responsibility with a publisher who has a specific political agenda. At least when their work is published in a newspaper. How, then, are we to interpret the cartoons in this book? They haven’t been produced for a newspaper. They were commissioned
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by the Swedish Institute, which doesn’t have a political agenda – unless one were to argue that the Swedish form of government represents a political stance. And what is there to say about the climate? In the presence of the weather gods we are all equal and we have learnt that we are powerless. I borrowed the heading for this article, with its reference to our powerlessness, from the American 19th-century humorist Charles Dudley Warner. If the weather reflects the will of God, how can you joke about it? A net search for images associated with ‘climate change’ turns up any number of illustrations sharing the same motif: the polar bear on a melting ice floe. It’s a tiresome cliché and I’m glad this book contains only one such example. It is, on the other hand, empathic. Generally, the image portrays helplessness, but this particular bear doesn’t look like a victim. The cartoon reminds me of an observation by William Hazlitt in an essay on British humour (1819): “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they ought to be”. There is hope. The climate summit in Paris in 2015, COP 21, ended more auspiciously than the one in Copenhagen. Awareness of the climate issue is spreading. And Facing the Climate is continuing its highly successful tour. Andreas Berg Professor of Illustration, Oslo National Academy of the Arts
Getting along 10
Sergey Tunin, Russia | Aquarium 11
Stathis (Stavropoulos), Greece 12
Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro), South Africa 13
Meton Joffily, Brazil | Empty 14
Mai Thảo Ngân (Bít Tất Biết Tất), Vietnam | Moving out
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Hameed Karout, Syria 16
Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro), South Africa | Trojan Horse 17
Claudius Ceccon, Brazil | Climatic Justice 18
Karin Sunvisson, Sweden | Bad Times Ahead 19
Neama Zedan, Egypt 20
Ilja Bereznickas, Lithuania | Contemporary Park 21
Paulo Caruso, Brazil | Tractor (left), Reforest (right) 22
Victor Bogorad, Russia 23
Today’s menu 24
Claudius Ceccon, Brasilia | Ethanol or Food 25
Jiří Bosák, Czech Republic | Banana Bear
26
Agim Sulaj, Albania | Water 27
Karin Sunvisson, Sweden | Still Life 28
Ngô ĐứcTrí, Vietnam | Food Army
29
Marek Oravski, Czech Republic | Looking for air? 30
Xiao Longhua, China 31
Helena Lindholm, Sweden | Ronald Mc Do Bad 32
Youssouf Cissé, Mali 33
Volha Sazykina, Belarus | Buffet. Sandwiches, natural bread, glossy photo 34
Sifiso Yalo, South Africa | Tree of Life 35
Kazo Kanala, Slovakia | I feel myself a kind of empty 36
Bobo PerneckĂ˝, Slovakia | Ice floe 37
Karin Sunvisson, Sweden | Guilty Pleasure 38
Aleg Karpovich, Belarus | In October 39
Payoff 40
Magnus Bard, Sweden | Rethink 41
Igor Paschenko, Russia 42
Janina Wegscheiderin, Austria 43
Sergey Tunin, Russia | Autumn 44
Ricardo Sasaki, Brazil | Greed Street 45
Nicolas Mahler, Austria | Industry 46
Helena Lindholm, Sweden | China most polluted? 47
Roman Sustau, Belarus | Chernobyl 48
Helena Lindholm, Sweden | Reactor Vases 49
The bigger picture 50
Love Antell, Sweden | The Plant 51
Serhiy Ryabokon, Ukraine | Dead-end offshoot 52
Gatis Sluka, Latvia 53
Riber Hansson, Sweden | Ship Earth 54
Mykola Kapusta, Ukraine | Bogus birches 55
Linda Sp책man, China 56
Vladimir Stepanov, Russia 57
Petros Zervos, Greece 58
Magnus Bard, Sweden | Global Chemist 59
Serhiy Ryabokon, Ukraine | Scape Donkey 60
Yasser Ahmad, Syria 61
Magnus Bard, Sweden | Fashion Colour 62
Katsyaryna Martsinovich, Belarus | Landfill 63
Bruno Haberzettl, Austria | Common Values 64
Saša Rakezic alias Aleksandar Zograf, Serbia 65
Nini Sum, China | A Masterpiece 66
TheMico (Mihajlo Dimitrievski), Macedonia | Play 67
Karol Cizmazia, Slovakia | Obdurate 68
Riber Hansson, Sweden | Global Warming 69
Issam Hassan, Syria 70
Nina Had탑ic, Bosnia and Herzegovina | Bad Time for Heroes 71
Love Antell, Sweden | Mirror #1 72
Agim Sulaj, Albania 73
Ramunas Vaitkus, Lithuania | A Bike’s Seminar 74
Ree Treweek, South Africa | Migration 75
It’s time 76
Syargey Volkau, Belarus | FINITA III 77
Tan Faezal, Malaysia | Stuck 78
Fadi Fadel, Syria 79
Antanina Slabodchykava, Belarus | Life is short 80
Varlam Jmukhadze, Georgia 81
Igor Hofbauer, Croatia | Eco 2 82
Riber Hansson, Sweden | The Ark 83
Hana Al Hejizy, Libya 84
Levan Kvaratskhelia, Georgia 85
Jeffrey Guan, Austria | The Climate in Your Face 86
Mohamed Salah, Egypt | 8 Minutes 87
Participating Countries:
Facing the Climate Facing the Climate is a touring exhibition that has grown in size over the past five years. By 2016, a total of 115 cartoonists from five continents had taken part and the exhibition had been seen by an estimated 280,000 people. Wherever it has travelled, talks, debates and workshops involving established and aspiring cartoonists have been an accompanying feature.
The Swedish Institute (SI) is a public agency that promotes interest and confidence in Sweden around the world. SI seeks to establish cooperation and lasting relations with other countries through strategic communication and exchange in the fields of culture, education, science and business.
www.si.se www.sharingsweden.se
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