Amy Lipton of ecoartspace has been selected as one of the five curators for DC Creates’ 5×5 project. She has in turn selected five artists (Brandon Ballengée, Chrysanne Stathacosto, Habitat For Artists, Natalie Jeremijenko, Tattfoo Tan) develop work for sites across Washington. The project runs from 5 March to 27 April and ecoartscotland will post more on this project in due course. Richard Hollinshead of Grit and Pearl based in NE England has also been selected.
Amy Lipton’s 5×5 Project
January 23, 2012Opportunity: Wetlands in Taiwan
January 22, 2012Artists from all countries are invited to send a proposal for a site-specific outdoor sculpture installation to be created during a 26-day artist in residency (April 11 – May 7, 2012) in Cheng Long, a small rural village near the southwestern coast of Taiwan in Kouhu Township,Yunlin County.
Cheng Long village view
This art project is an expansion of the 2010 and 2011 Cheng Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Projects, going into the Village as well as the Wetlands. The selected artists will work with elementary school children and community residents to create large-scale sculpture installations focused on the theme of “What’s for Dinner?”
Rumen Dmitrov, Flying Boats, 2010
The artworks should reflect on environmental issues surrounding food production and emphasize organic aquaculture. Artworks will be in village public spaces, on abandoned buildings, and in the wetlands nature preserve, and artists will use recycled materials and natural materials to create their artworks that will stay on exhibition through 2013.
Residency in Taiwan: April 8 – May 7, 2012
Selected Artists Receive: NT50,000 (US$1,662), round trip economy airfare, accommodations and meals for 26 days in Taiwan, local transportation, volunteer help to find materials and make the artworks.
Send the following by email to Curator, Jane Ingram Allen, allenrebeccajanei@gmail.com
- Description of your proposed sculpture installation giving estimated size and materials (1 page .doc or .pdf ).
- Sketch of your proposed work as a .jpg or .pdf file (less1 MG )
- Images and image list (title, date made, dimensions, materials/media, and where located) of 6 previous outdoor sculpture installations (6 .jpg files each less than 1MG in size)
- CV (.doc or .pdf file)
- Contact information: Name, Present Address, Nationality, Email address and Website (.doc or .pdf file)
Deadline: 8 February 2012.
For more info: http://artproject4wetland.wordpress.com
Roy Staab, Invasive Species, 2010
A PEOPLE’S PRELIMINARY HEARING ON MONSANTO
January 20, 2012
'listening to zea maize' from mid west radical culture corridor website
ANDANDAND made the following announcement through the dOCUMENTA (13) newsletter (who, it should be noted, added “dOCUMENTA (13) is not responsible for the views or factual claims expressed by the artists and artworks it presents.”.
“Our focus is on Monsanto’s role in transforming and damaging the ecologies, economies, and social relations of this region. Proceedings will unfold in several stages, and as the deliberation process builds, it will add to the accumulating record of harms perpetrated by this corporation against human and non-human bodies, food, biological processes, weeds, neighborhoods, farmers, alternative forms of knowledge, and finally the environment from which all these entities emerge.
Through this project, we challenge rigid categories of legal protection, and seek an ethics that protects life itself from coercion. We invoke the form of a trial to produce a comprehensive public understanding of harms, and to determine responsibility for those harms. Existing judiciary frameworks are inadequate to the scale and nature of the ongoing damages perpetrated by Monsanto, which, under current law, is granted the rights of a legitimate “person,” while human non-citizens and non-human agents in our biosphere are not recognized. Existing law produces exclusive notions of legitimacy and harm that ignore and damage entities that do not favor a reductive calculus of profit.
Our proposition is to consider all living things as potential plaintiffs in an accounting of Monsanto’s crimes. We submit to public review impacts that are experienced materially and culturally, in the past, the present and extending into our shared future. By expanding notions of legal standing and of legitimate harm, we assert our interdependence. The urgent question is: what will it take to safeguard the interlocked nature of the world against criminally reckless corporate priority?”
The first hearing will take place at:
Time: Saturday, January 28, 2012, 11 am
City: Carbondale IL; Chicago IL; Iowa City IA; others TBA
Country: USA
Location: 37° 43′ 35.11″ N, 89° 13′ 12.97″ W
Address: Lesar Law Building Courtroom, Carbondale
Midwest Radical Culture Corridor has undertaken a number of drifts with the likes of Temporary Services and Brian Holmes. Their Call to Farms project and publication is inspirational.
Food Forward
January 19, 2012
John O'Shea, Black Market Pudding, 2012 Photo: courtesy the artist
- Michael Burton & Michiko Nitta, Republic of Salivation, 2011 Photo: courtesy the artist
Stroom den Haag‘s new exhibition…
‘Food Forward’ presents scenarios for the future of our food based on the work of artists and designers. The starting point is the video ‘The Hunt’ by Christian Jankowski (DE) that humorously puts the estrangement between city dwellers and food on edge. John O’Shea (UK) pushes the limits of the law in his attempts to achieve a more humane meat production and meat consumption scheme. Michiko Nitta and Michael Burton (UK) will present two scenarios from their larger study of life after agriculture: the symbiosis between humans and algae and a functional food regime. Arne Hendriks (NL) finally explores the possibilities and consequences of shrinking men to 50 centimeters. Uncomfortable? Alienating? The scenarios start from existing scientific research and new food trends and deserve our attention, because our food future is uncertain.
DRIFT Call for proposals
January 18, 2012DRIFT is the title of the fourth art in nature project of Rerun Productions Foundation. The Waterloopbos, the former Hydraulic Laboratory in Marknesse, the Netherlands, will host this contemporary spatial art project from May till December 2012. The project invites artists to send proposals which respond to the theme and to focus their idea on the special location of the exhibition, a curious combination of an industrial heritage site and forest.
Theme
DRIFT refers to our passion for change, transformation from old to new, from sea to land, from industry to nature, from basic to digital and back again. Drift cannot be directed, it is a primal force. It pushes us in a direction, it brings us something new.
DRIFT invites us to reflect on the impact of transformation; the impact of human interventions in nature, the disappearance of the old world and its replacement by a new one, and the possibilities that arise from that.
Location
The site where DRIFT will be located is an expression in a nutshell of a metamorphosis. The Waterloopbos (Marknesse, The Netherlands) is situated on a ”polder” (land conquered on the sea in the 1930s). It has been a hydraulic laboratory until 2001, where engineers experimented with scale models of harbours and estuaries to solve specific problems with currents, waves and mud flows. Nowadays the half overgrown, partly restored industrial ruins lie scattered in the forest.
Proposals
Artists are invited to send a concrete proposal for a spatial installation that can survive the conditions on site for at least 7 months (a public forest, the influences of nature). The choice of material is free, if harmless to nature.
Work period: 8 to 18 May 2012
Dismantling of the exhibition: after mid-December 2012
Proposals should contain:
- A project outline and project description (including use of materials and workplan)
- CV and documentation of previous work by the artist
Proposals can be sent only digitally in PDF format (up to 10 A4) to: proposalskunstbroedplaats@gmail.com
Deadline: February 25, 2012
The results of the selection by an expert jury will be announced 1 March.
Thanks to Jan van Boeckel for highlighting this.
Paul Kingsnorth speaks at RANE
January 17, 2012RANE, in collaboration with University College Falmouth’s Department of Writing, are pleased to welcome back author, poet and novelist, Paul Kingsnorth – one of the UK’s most original, and controversial writers on the environment:
Thursday 15th March 2012 @ 5.30pm, Woodlane Lecture Theatre, Woodlane Campus, University College Falmouth
Paul’s first book, One No, Many Yeses (2003), explored the rise of the global resistance movement. In 2008, his polemic travelogue Real England: The Battle against the Bland was described in the Independent as “a watershed study, a crucially important book”. In 2009, Paul co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, a global network that aims “to bring together writers and artists, thinkers and doers, to assault the established citadels of literature and thought, and to begin to redraw the maps by which we navigate the places and times in which we find ourselves”. Paul is also a former editor of the Ecologist magazine and a frequent contributor to national newspapers.
Please note: This event is free and open to all, but those wishing to attend need to register online by following this link: Lecture Registration
More information about this and other events in the RANE lecture series please visit www.rane-research.org
Access to Tools
January 12, 2012
The Library at MoMA in New York had an exhibition on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog over most of last year. They have a comprehensive online resource. Brett Bloom and Bonnie Fortune’s Let’s Re-make also contains a wealth of documentation on radical and counter cultural living.
Peat: subject of Wellcome Science Writing Prize
January 12, 2012
Peat is fundamentally interesting and important. This short article captures just a few of the reasons.
IHOPE
January 11, 2012
Image from NASA's online history of Apollo 11
The Journal of Ecology and Society frequently has interesting papers, and the current issue includes “Toward an Integrated History to Guide the Future”.
Abstract:
Many contemporary societal challenges manifest themselves in the domain of human–environment interactions. There is a growing recognition that responses to these challenges formulated within current disciplinary boundaries, in isolation from their wider contexts, cannot adequately address them. Here, we outline the need for an integrated, transdisciplinary synthesis that allows for a holistic approach, and, above all, a much longer time perspective. We outline both the need for and the fundamental characteristics of what we call “integrated history.” This approach promises to yield new understandings of the relationship between the past, present, and possible futures of our integrated human–environment system. We recommend a unique new focus of our historical efforts on the future, rather than the past, concentrated on learning about future possibilities from history. A growing worldwide community of transdisciplinary scholars is forming around building this Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE). Building integrated models of past human societies and their interactions with their environments yields new insights into those interactions and can help to create a more sustainable and desirable future. The activity has become a major focus within the global change community.
Key words: agency; anthropocene; backcasting; causality; contingency; holistic approach; integrated history; long-term perspective; resilience; social and ecological systems
Toward an Integrated History to Guide the Future
The Home and The World
January 10, 2012Arts and Ecology Conference 2012 – The Home and The World takes place at Dartington Hall in Devon 19-21 June 2012.
Deadline for presentation proposals 4.00pm February 24th.
This summit explores existential questions such as: what does it mean to be at home in the world? what does home mean to us? how can we be more aware of our ‘inhabited place’ in the world? It’s been more than fifteen years since Gablik suggested that art can re-enchant our connection to the world – how have we responded?
