Heritage, Art and Community Collaboration:
Artist Julien Masson shares a recent community collaboration with artists, residents and businesses, using recycled garden furniture, instruments and miscellaneous timber found locally to create public art that reflects a mix of cultures and transform public spaces. “Working on these collaborative projects often starts with initiating a conversation with local businesses and, often facilitated by their staff, we typically send out a call for material donations.
The community’s response is usually incredibly generous: local people donate wood and domestic items that would otherwise be destined for the skip or the bonfire. Our goal is always to keep these materials as local as possible, like a neighbourhood contemporary survey.”
https://climatecultures.net/challenges-of-creative-engagement/art-community-collaboration/
Finding the Tipping Points with Thrutopian Fiction:
Sustainability professor and writer Denise Baden discusses the challenges of thrutopian fiction — writing stories to entertain, raise awareness of effective climate action and inspire sustainable behaviours — and her latest thrutopian novel, The Philosopher and the Assassin.
“The goal is thrutopian — it aims to entertain and suggest some of the key leverage points that could tip us in the direction of a sustainable future.
And in my latest Substack post, Changing paths through woods and waters,
I reflect on desire lines and (a little) on my time as part of this year’s Living Waters co-operative inquiry and ways to reconnect to the wider world and our need to expand our failing Western ‘consciousness contract’…
“Walking through the landscape cocreated by my local stream, by the biodiversity it’s enabled over millennia and by present human occupants and visitors too, I came to appreciate also those paths, often faint and transitory, made by so many non-human animals. The tracks made by the horses, introduced to manage the heathland and the old farmland abandoned many decades ago, as they head down to the water to drink and enjoy the shade of the woods. Print trails left by birds scouting the muddy margins for insects. Possible signs of foxes passing through. The occasional dog tracks as a companion to boot prints. Together, they form what I imagine as a long exposure image of parallel but shared habitation over time.”
https://climateculturesandmore.substack.com/p/changing-paths-through-woods-and
