"Political change is inseparable from cultural change"

In the run up to COP15 in Copenhagen, Michaela Crimmin, Head of Arts at the RSA and Director of the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre reflects on what we've learned in the four years of our history - and discusses where we need to go from here.

 The United Nations Climate Change Conference - COP 15 – looms at the end of this year, attempting the Herculean task of trying to create a political framework for reducing the world’s greenhouse emissions.

As we inch towards that goal, with politicians ever-reluctant to stick their necks out too far, something else has become obvious. To move into the new ecological age, we need more than new laws and targets. We need to foster a new kind of citizenship, one in which we’re no longer passive in the face of global threats like climate change. Political change of the scale needed now is inseparable from cultural change. While the arts are only one part of the broader culture, they have always had a role in creating the narrative of how we interact with our natural world.

The RSA Arts and Ecology Centre in partnership with Arts Council England was born in 2005 to explore the ways we could actively focus the energies of artists on these problems – but also draw attention to the great work that many artists were already doing on these lines. We weren’t alone. David Buckland’s Cape Farewell project had launched in 2001 to link artists of all disciplines to climate science, and to harness their celebrity to draw attention to the issues. From the performance arts, Tipping Point had started organising a series of conferences to bring artists and scientists together and galvanise the wider arts world. We were soon to be joined by fellow travellers like Julie’s Bicycle, who’ve taken a brilliantly hands-on approach to reversing the environmental footprint of the music industry.

My background was in the visual arts and it was obvious that this was a rich source of new insights, inspiration and activity. Previously at the RSA I’d been involved as part of the team which had successfully launched the Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square. Sensing where the tensions in society lie, art has increasingly become interested in how it can engage people in new relationships – relationships between spaces, between people, between people and their environment. And relationship is at the heart of the notion of ecology.

In our early years we embarked on a series of commissions and partnerships with artists working along those lines – which over the years have borne extraordinary fruit. It’s worth mentioning a couple of this year’s highpoints. When the artists Heather and Ivan Morison created a public shelter The Black Cloud in Bristol in July, this was the product of an earlier Bristol residency that Situations ran, initiated by us and generously funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation. Not cocooned in a gallery, The Black Cloud – was built in an act of collective barn raising by the people of Bristol. In the weeks following its creation, the structure, partly based on a traditional Amazonian Yanomamo shelter, has hosted events, meetings and performances, bringing people together, very literally, under the Black Cloud that we collectively face and hope to emerge from.

If art has the unique power to create a special space for new thought that’s free of the usual noise and conventions, the Morison’s work is that idea made concrete (wood, actually).

London this summer and autumn has hosted Radical Nature, a Barbican Art Gallery exhibition drawing together 40 years of investigation into art and ecology by artists and architects. Curated by Francesco Manacorda – himself a former alumni of RSA Arts & Ecology – it was initially criticised for being housed inside a gallery space away from the ecologies it discussed. Within days of its opening, Manacorda was able to answer those critcs when the Dalston Mill opened – again a project supported by RSA Arts & Ecology.

In 1982 artist Agnes Denes created a pioneering artwork Wheatfield, A Confrontation, by planting a disused space on Manhattan with wheat. For Radical Nature, a version was recreated in Dalston. The French-based architectural collective EXYZT created a windmill and community kitchen alongside the wheatfield. Now Denes’ work wasn’t just making a dramatic ecological statement, it was playing an active part in changing local people’s relationship to the place and to each other as they visited the Mill to join in baking bread, sharing recipes and attending the meetings and events, the music and theatre, that were organised in this new, temporary space. You could see from the way people enjoyed doing something collectively how it unlocked a local energy in a way that few other projects can. If the new citizenship is to be based on individual and collective resourcefulness rather than passivity – and our own resourcefulness is key here - this was art acting as a blueprint.

As Madeline Bunting noted in The Guardian, “it's evidence of an art that is penetrating some of the least hospitable places, very far from galleries, to open up conversations in unexpected ways around our relationship with land, food and each other.”

In the last two decades, art has been conceived of as a tool of regeneration, whether it be urban regeneration or art for health. As both these projects hint, it can also be a powerful catalyst for a potentially more profound type of regeneration. Art is not going to combat climate change by didacticism or preaching, but it can help us to start the process by which we rethink our most fundamental relationships. Instead of being passive, waiting for governments to act, the arts can be the prompt and facilitator of active engagement.

It’s exciting to see the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre emerge from a period of exploration into one of genuine action. In Peterborough, a particularly forward-thinking administration, working with Arts Council East, is setting itself the goal of transforming itself into a flagship of sustainability. Enthused by some of the ideas of connected citizenship coming from the RSA, they’ve invited the organisation, and in particular the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre, to play a substantial role in that transition, understanding how art can not only help people re-envision a place and articulate their thoughts, but how it works to transform people’s fundamental relationships within it. Again, this is more than using art for conventional urban regeneration – this is about unpicking the concept of sustainability and asking what it really means in the context of a future British city.

The Peterborough project is in its infancy; if you want to see how it develops visit our website www.rsaartsandecology.org.uk. That site is another example of how we’re forging transformative relationships across the globe.

And COP15? This has been the moment to begin to build a new coalition of cultural organisations working internationally in order to advance the potential of arts in this huge agenda that is the future. A future that can be as ominous or as positive as we determine.

This article orginally appeared in Arts Professional

Photo: EXYZT, The Dalston Mill, 2009, Commissioned by Barbican Art Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009, photo Brice Pelleschi