Notes on Change: Our Decarbonisation Plan is Published + First Words on the Sunlight Liberation Network!
Greetings Art Workers!
I’m over the moon to announce that the final parts of Sunlight’s 2022 Holistic Decarbonisation Plan are now online! They are: Notes on Change: The Anti-Offsetting Primer by Luiza Prado de O. Martins, “Human Beings are Spiritual Beings”: An Interview with Maxwell A. Ayamba and Our Community Inheritance by Dr Cecilia Wee. Through collaborations, commissions and community-driven research, Sunlight’s Holistic Decarbonisation Plan provides an insightful critique of sustainability in the UK art sector, focusing on how transition touches the lives of art workers worldwide in its various forms, and offering alternative perspectives and ways of doing and being that contribute to the creation of more just and regenerative modes of repair. Information and links to the final parts of the plan below.
Notes on Change: The Anti-Offsetting Primer
The Anti-Offsetting Primer by Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an anticolonial inquiry into doing art in uncertain times. The project was born out of the tension between the public-facing art&climate programming produced by UK art organisations— which call for just futures — and the sustainability policies, such as carbon-offsetting by which the art sector, by way of the UK Government and Arts Council England, is governed. Carbon offsetting is a flawed policy tool that allows polluters to compensate for carbon dioxide emissions arising from industrial and other human activity. Grounded by dialogues with collaborators operating as artists, curators, writers, activists, scholars, thinkers, and art workers, the Primer emerges, both as a critique to proposed easy solutions to harmful environmental practices in the arts, and as a meditation on change; an exercise in ‘postponing the end of the world’, as Ailton Krenak (2020) posits.
Human Beings are Spiritual Beings
Our final interview in the Anti-Offsetting Primer series features Maxwell A. Ayamba. Ayamba is an academic, activist and environmental journalist, who founded the Sheffield Environmental Movement (SEM), a charity that works to facilitate and reconnect minoritized people to the natural environment for health and well-being. In “Human Beings are Spiritual Beings”, Prado and Ayamba discuss how the colonial project continues to impact the bodies, minds and spirits of BAME communities who live in the UK. One step on the pathway towards climate justice is to make the British landscape more inclusive for everyone. In this rich conversation, Prado and Ayamba discuss Ayamba’s work towards this goal and connect over their shared endeavours to reclaim silenced knowledges relating to the natural environment. Through their individual research into the Savanna and Peacock Flowers they speak about how various herbalist knowledges used by African and Indigenous Ancestors have been oppressed, lost or refused, weaving in reflections on how historic epistemic injustices feed into power relations today.
Our Community Inheritance
When we speak about climate justice we often talk about future generations, but what do communities need in order for them to inherit and benefit from conditions that are healthy, supportive and safe? Our Community Inheritance (OCI) is a creative action research and learning project exploring more equitable circulation of wealth and resource generation. Initiated by Dr Cecilia Wee, it is made with local communities across the UK. In Autumn 2022, Wee worked with the Grenfell Health & Well-being service and Grenfell impacted communities to explore diverse definitions of wealth. Through decolonial approaches to cultural production, knowledge from community organising and liberatory understandings of economics as ‘making home’, Wee worked with the community to share their intergenerational wealth stories. This generous and rich text weaves together the project’s context and history, a case study, and a discussion of Climate Justice actions for art workers.
If you haven’t had a chance to check out the plan, you can read all the contributions here:
Sunlight Festival 2022
A huge thank you to everyone who took part in our Community Festival in October! The day-long celebration and teach-in held at Stanley Picker Gallery was a chance for all the communities, groups and individuals who took part in Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline to connect. Various projects as part of Holistic Decarbonisation Plan were presented to audiences and local communities, accompanied by various film screenings, performances and interventions. The day culminated in a community vote which saw audiences choose which parts of the Plan they would like to see actioned as part of the Stanley Picker’s Environmental Policy priorities over the next 3 years (2023-27). Read about the next steps for the gallery’s Environmental Policy, how Sunlight experimented with community programming as carbon returns, and take a look at the fabulous documentation of the day by w.i.n.c films and Ellie Laycock.
Sunlight Liberation Network 2023…
In the early months of 2023 it is painful to see that living beings all over the world are feeling and witnessing unfolding catastrophes of ecocide and genocide. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard write “Even the most purposefully ignorant must know now, at some level, that in damning the wretched of the earth, and the earth itself, they were also damning themselves (even if they would kill to avoid admitting this).” (2022: 209)
Since our Festival in October, the Sunlight coalition has been meeting with its stakeholders to reflect on the project findings and talk about what is needed for art work (and living) in uncertain times. Our project over the past few years has clearly showed that many of us are living with the difficulty to care for ourselves on individual and societal levels; failing to live in the right relationship with the world.
To understand this more deeply, and how we might support each other to take action, we are currently developing the Sunlight Liberation Network, a social and emotional support and education group for climate justice and art workers. We are seeking practices and tools to help us notice portals in our lives, gateways that can act as a conduit for a person to change their ways of being and imagine their world anew. We are interested in asking how we can support art workers to notice portals that show up in their everyday, and step through one when it presents itself?
If you would like to be part of this journey or want to know more, please feel free to get in touch.