2 Degrees | festival preview

Programmed by Judith Knight and Mark Godber at Artsadmin, 2 Degrees is a full-on mini- festival of artworks and events created by over 20 "radical and politically engaged’" artists taking place between 16 - 21 June in East London. 2 Degrees is one of the events featured in Respond!

After attending a TippingPoint meeting of scientists, artists and arts administrators to discuss imaginative responses to climate change, Judith Knight co-director of Artsadmin, felt both despair and excitement. The scientists had explained that according to the best current climate models, a rise in global temperatures of 2°C above pre-industrial levels (very likely without significant worldwide cuts in CO2 emissions very soon), will start dangerous changes in the global climate systems which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to stop: past 2°C and it’s in the lap of the Gods. But the meeting also showed Knight and her colleagues at ArtsAdmin that they were far from the only ones wanting to do something about it.

It will take a global, collaborative effort in order to avoid a 2°C rise. Shortly after the TippingPoint event, Artsadmin became a founding member of the 2020 Network 2020 Network of European arts organisations "working together to encourage artists and audiences to engage with the subject of climate change". The 2020 Network, funded by the European Union, currently includes organisations in Slovenia, France, Britain and Belgium. Thin Ice is the name for a two year programme of partners’ activities, taking place in their respective countries; 2 Degrees is one of the first events of the Thin Ice programme.

The festival is also part of the RSA Arts & Ecology’s Respond! month and therefore part of a whole network of artists and organisers in the UK and abroad who are worrying creatively about these issues. With all these layers of involvement, I asked Knight whether she feels any backlash against climate change as a subject for artists – whether anyone thinks it’s merely fashionable. “There are people saying Oh not that again, but you have to ignore that because it’s just too important not to do. It’s not a subject where you can think, We’ve done that”. For Knight, the variety and growing number of artists’ responses is only beginning to reflect the urgency of the problem, as expressed in the festival’s subtitle, Art, Activism & The Global Climate Emergency. ArtsAdmin have deliberately shifted the definition of how we are affecting the earth’s climate systems from clinical "climate change" to campaigner George Monbiot’s much more alarming phrase.

A "climate emergency" requires artists’ responses because “artists have a way of communicating that is so much more imaginative and interesting that just reading this stuff in the papers”. It also requires artists and administrators to be responsible about the environmental impacts of making and showing work. The collaboration across borders that helped produce the festival, for example, raises environmental questions that Knight is keen for the sector to discuss. Over 18-19 June, the Slow Boatevent organised with the British Council will bring together in London 100 British performing arts companies, venues representatives and technicians to ask how we should continue to work internationally while minimising environmental impacts. Many artists’ livelihoods (including Knight’s jazz musician husband’s) currently depend on air travel, and it is hoped that the Slow Boat discussions will lead to some practical ideas for alternatives.

The artists in the festival are mainly locally sourced, and the events all situated in or close to Artsadmin’s Toynbee Studios, East London. However, Knight “would hate to think” that they at ArtsAdmin are “preaching at people, because we’re absolutely not the right people to do that”. Rather, she hopes that 2 Degrees will “not be a holier-than-thou thing”, but looking at the present and future in a practical, honest and imaginative way – just as the scientists at the TippingPoint event were “devastating” and “inspiring” at the same time. The Peachy Coochy event on June 19 at Toynbee studios (a regular monthly feature there, but this themed evening for the festival is running in association with TippingPoint), is typical in tone and purpose of the festival as a whole. "Coocheurs" (or presenters) must accompany 20 climate change-themed images, each projected for 20 seconds at a time, with precisely 20 seconds of live spoken text. The brevity and spontaneity of the exercise should provide some new ways of grasping sometimes tired subjects.

At Peachy Coochy nights, "randomness is discouraged but narrative linearity is not automatically esteemed", which is a good way of describing the ethos of the performances, interventions and sometimes confrontations that will form 2 Degrees. The artists have varying focuses, including food and drink, urban environments, family and guilt, with varyingly abstract approaches, but none strays too far from the urgency of the central theme. “I don’t think that artists can be so precious that they can’t engage at all with the world”, Knight explains, “nor would I sit in the camp that says you’re an artist, you have a responsibility: you have to make work about A/B/C/D…you can’t do that either.” “The activism was important” to Knight and Godber and the artists that they approached to be involved were mostly people who already “really live it – they don’t just make work about it”.

It is also purposeful that 2 Degrees is a festival not simply to attend. Whether it’s sharing an organic picnic, recreating a lost river or buying a woman, almost all of the events will ask the audience to do something, and think while they’re doing it.

Knight agrees that “artists have to have a good sense of humour” when they are getting the audience involved. Performance artist Richard DeDominici has said that “[i]f you can make a stranger laugh, then they’re much more likely to engage with the underlying meaning of the work”. From Tuesday 16th–Saturday 20th June DeDomenici will be serving genuine airline meals, delivered straight from an airport factory in a plastic tray, for £5 at his Plane Food Café, an immersive installation created out of fixtures and fittings procured from aircraft reclamation yards, complete with on-board entertainment on the wider subject of air travel. Plane Food Café responds to chef Marcus Wareing’s recent statement that British pub food is so bad that “if you want a decent bite to eat, you’d be better off getting on a plane”. If that’s true then for five days in June people within walking and cycling distance of Toynbee Studios can sample better food than their local inn without emitting the 2 tonnes of CO₂ from an average long-haul return flight.

In 2005 DeDomenici stashed himself in a suitcase left outside Helsinki Railway Station for Unattended Baggage, drawing attention to a liminal space – and how official guardians of it react to its unwanted invasion; Lossrail is an ongoing project to document buildings that will be demolished to make way for Crossrail – the planned trainline running East-West across London. As roads and rail carve out new routes and spaces across cities, many of the rivers and lakes that helped physically and culturally to shape them – giving places their names and providing food and other resources – are now concealed, submerged or gone. In artist Amy Sharrocks’ 2007 SWIM project, 50 people swam across London from Tooting Bec Lido to Hampstead Heath Ponds. The swimmers were, in Sharrocks’ words “exploring an idea of freedom” physically, putting their bodies through restricted and public waters, while also looking a cheering sight slopping through the streets of London together in swimming costumes. Sharrocks’ Walbrook project takes the natural step from swimming in urban water to becoming it. On Friday, 19th June, 2pm-5pm, a large crowd dressed in blue and loosely tied together will trace and recreate the buried Walbrook River. One of London’s oldest rivers, it has been tracked by Sharrocks and a dowser from its source in Islington to its mouth at the River Thames, through the heart of the City, indeed across the Bank of England.

At the Bank the blue walkers may well flow over one or several of the eight Postcapitalist interventions led by a number of artists under the C.R.A.S.H Culture banner (Wednesday 17^th – Saturday 20^th June). The Café of Equivalent$ due to be opened for service in the City will price a dish according to its cost in the developing world that produced it, relative to an average developing world wage. Bankers will also be able to buy bowls of soup made from real gold in order, the artists say, “to discover what it feels like to be of real value”.

For full details:

Artsadmin on Respond!
Download the full Artsadmin 2 Degrees programme [PDF 402KB]

See also:
Judith Knight interviewed about 2 Degrees

Caleb Klaces is a poet,and founder and Editor-in-chief of www.likestarlings.com, a website which pairs up established and new poets to create new poetic conversations. He is a guest blogger at the RSA Arts & Ecoloby Blog and recently interviewed Plane Stupid's Leo Murray for RSA Arts & Ecology.

Photographs: Top and bottom: C.R.A.S.H. Laboratory of the Insurrectionary Imagination. Middle: Richard DeDominici's Plane Food Cafe