Sunlight Doesn't Need A Pipeline
Greetings Art Workers!
I am thrilled and energised to be able to share my latest venture with you. Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline, is a project that explores and enacts just transition in the arts. Across 2022, I’ll be collaborating with a coalition of art workers, agitators, dream weavers, makars, and caregivers, to co-create a bottom-up and open-source decarbonisation plan for art workers.
In a time of climate emergency, radically reducing carbon emissions in the arts is not simply about stopping subsidies for oil companies, swapping flying for shipping, or lowering an organisation’s carbon footprint; it also depends on cultivating a deep understanding of our roles in, and the consequences of, such transition.
What ways of living and being together must we keep, what must we expel, and what must we let go?
Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline is a training ground for flourishing communities, who can divine, give voice to and demand what just and regenerative spaces look like. Over the next twelve months we will be reaching out and reflecting in. Through listening, decoding, probing, discussing and imagining with others we will critique capitalism and practise the future together. We will be asking questions like: How can we reimagine an art worker's carbon footprint? What is the responsibility to your community in a time of climate catastrophe? How does environmental colonialism show up in our daily lives and our communities? What does it mean to be low-carbon? And how can we make a transition in the arts just?
Based at the Stanley Picker Gallery, London, we will be convening holistic community-driven carbon reporting, co-creating an Anti-Offsetting Primer and a Carbon Literacy Training Index for workers, organising a day-long ‘dawn-to-dusk’ Festival that gives more than it takes, and sending out Monthly Messages with in-world directives. Allying with individuals, communities and organisations from far and wide, and from inside and outside the sector, we will be plotting imaginative and tangible actions as part of a pathway towards a just and decolonial transition in the arts. The published plan will be launched at the end of the year and will be adaptable and modifiable for the worker's own decarbonisation journey.
Sunlight Doesn't Need a Pipeline was developed through my Stanley Picker Fellowship. The project is funded by the Stanley Picker Trust and Arts Council England. It was commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University.
If you would like to keep up to date with the SDNAP activities you can sign up to receive future Monthly Messages. Please click here.
If you would like to know more or are interested in getting involved we would love to hear from you. Please get in touch at info@sunlightdoesntneedapipeline.com.
Ancestors, Bings and The Venus of Niddrie…
In Scotland’s West Lothian, there are a series of reddish-rose coloured hills that tower out of the relatively flat ground that surrounds them. From a distance you could be forgiven for thinking they were made of red sandstone, like the rocks that can be found in central Australia. Referred to locally as bings, these unhomely crops are not natural geological formations but are actually spoil heaps from early Scottish oil production and comprise thousands of pieces of rough, pink shale. In 2021, in the UK, we used 63 million gallons of oil a day but back in the 19th century Scotland was one of the earliest places for oil production, albeit on a much smaller scale. The West Lothian refineries produced petrol and diesel fuel. As part of this process shale would have been blasted to 500 degrees before being thrown onto the heaps and the result was paraffin wax for lighting and candles. The final mines closed in the 1960s but, today, the bings are covered in verdant green foliage, with more plant species than Ben Nevis, and are remnants of this early fracking.
In 1975, as part of the Artist Placement Group (APG) project conceived by Barbara Steveni, conceptual artist John Latham was hired by Glasgow Development Agency to reimagine and find new purpose for these spoil heaps. Latham produced a ‘feasibility report’ and rather than recommending removal or reshaping, he suggested they be renamed and reconceptualised as a monument called the Venus of Niddrie.
The Niddrie Woman is a para-fictional ancestor.
A massive industrial earthwork constructed by 10,000 hands over decades.
A posthuman landscape rich with biodiversity against all odds.
A whisper connecting us to the ideas of myths and rituals long forgotten.
A prism to view extractivism’s violence that has been normalised and made invisible.
A doorway connecting life to its unintended consequences.
An exit.
Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline’s theme for the year is ancestors. It is a conduit to remind us that there are many ways of doing energy and carbon politics, governance and infrastructure. In following these lines of exclusions, enclosures, rituals and empowerment, we aim to reveal new connections, so that we may think deeply about more just ways of being with one another. Woven through our shared learning and production, with curiosity we will enliven ancestral histories and use them to think through a just transition in the arts, today. We will return to the earliest forms of physical and social organisation, rethink the culture industries’ inability to allow things the right to rest, create a deep and expanded timeline of far-right ecology, imagine a redistributed blockchain ledger of responsibility, probe decolonial degrowth and populist purity politics, and much, much, more.
If you would like to keep up to date with the SDNAP activities you can sign up to receive future Monthly Messages. Please click here.
If you would like to know more or are interested in getting involved we would love to hear from you. Please get in touch at info@sunlightdoesntneedapipeline.com.
Until next time,
Dani Admiss