Tending Waste, Cultivating Life
I am thrilled to let you know that Sunlight Liberation Network is having a second edition, ‘Tending Waste, Cultivating life’. A collaboration with Arts Catalyst in Sheffield, we are delighted to have been funded by Culture of Solidarity, European Cultural Foundation. This edition continues to draw on peer learning and creative experimentation, bringing artists together with art workers, local community groups and cultural organisations in ways that weave solidarity and agency. The aim of Sunlight has always been to support art workers and their communities to practice ways of being that develops different relationships with ourselves, each other, and the land, and at the same time composting existing rituals and practices that harm. The project originated with a commitment to my communities in response to Covid-19, and this is the lens through which it continues to wayfind today.
Our second edition, ‘Tending Waste, Cultivating life’ invites artists, designers, carers and agitators to reimagine and repurpose creative practices and spaces to confront a multifaceted challenge of our era, waste. I have written about the physical and sociocultural roles that waste and disposability play in the art world as part of my Artangel residency (Making Home a Proposition for Waste Management in the Arts). As more people are forced to live relations filled with shifting uncertainty—from destructive weather events, nose-diving real-term wages and insecure work, sky-rocketing costs and rents, and endless genocide and world-ending destruction, we ask, how does dealing with our waste teach us about cultivating life? With an emphasis on grassroots climate justice, each artist commission explores work from the context of unevenly shattering environments. In doing so, they practise placing their life in enhancement of community as opposed to infrastructures of consumption and capital. Maya Chowdhry will work with social enterprise and literacy training cafe Roshni’s Kitchen to create an artistic and useful intervention to deal with the organisation’s food waste. Angela YT Chan collaborates with Bóxī Wú to grow a community to think about the role ‘tiny tech’ could play in arts practice. Digital tools, data and networked cultures increasingly inform the work of artists, educators and community workers while their social, political and material harms are never made visible or accounted for. In comparison, ‘Tiny tech’ infrastructures are low-tech and self-hosted technologies that challenge the scale, centralisation and extractivism of contemporary digital technologies. Whether this is a solar-powered server for a hobby run from your bedroom or participatory data projects that enable communities to engage with local ecological issues, sharing learning with others or creating pockets of joy and liveability, tiny tech infrastructures arise out of localised ecological or neighbourly needs and are not meant to be scaled. Manual Labours (Sophie Hope & Jenny Richards) will spend a day with staff at Arts Catalyst to explore interdependent infrastructures of care, maintenance and workers’ rights connected to the toilet break. Through walking, talking and tracing sewage pipes the group will discuss refuge, respite, and burnout, exploring what we need to make our work spaces operate differently. Our visual note taker flematu sessay (Public Tactics) will attend all the workshops and design 3 posters to share our findings publicly. The posters will be freely available online and will accompany an online event at Arts Catalyst on 19th February.
You can read more about this edition on Arts Catalyst’s website here.
The World is a Mill
This autumn I launched a wild and beautiful new project The World is a Mill. A slow project happening over a number of years, it is a collaboration with the inimitable Luiza Prado de O. Martins, and has been carefully nurtured by the wonderful, Lucy Lopez.
I really vibed with Lucy’s framing of this programme, which is called ‘Rehearsals For A World We Could Live In’. Examining the lifespan of the common bean, from seed to commodity, we will be hosting bean banquets, running community cooking sessions, and bringing people together in learning networks to collect and map recipes. Our lived experience has taught us that the enduring mass movement of people, cultures, species, and kin is what has ensured the survival of many things. Through necessity, seeds have been carried along migration routes and recipes have become carrier bags for worlds of knowledge. The idea is that we will bring people together to explore the idea of recipes as carrier bags, amplifying migrant and migrating knowledge that has and continues to create conditions of regeneration. Thinking about recipes and beans in this manner, is a way to think about the deeper challenges in a climate adaptation future, such as climate migration and balancing local connections and global co-dependencies. Is food sovereignty freedom or further precarity? Can feeding ourselves be an act of inclusion, when no other place is home?
We held our first bean banquet back in November at Fearon Hall Community Centre partnered with Radar and Primary, Nottingham. Some photos of the fantastic evening here. And there is a project description at the end of the web page here. You can also read more about our project and the other commissions on Radar’s website.
The title of the project comes from this heart wrenching song by Brazilian singer and songwriter Cartola. Driven by the wind or water, a mill transforms the energy around them, concentrating it to create the nourishment needed to survive. At the same time, the mill of life, nation states, governments, and police, can grind you to dust. Unstable political situations, restricted border crossings, dehumanisation, surveillance, and escalating violence are more severely impacting migrant art and cultural workers. This is an unsustainable way to live, and without support many are struggling to find a foothold in this world.
Underneath our collaboration, Lucy, Luiza and I have committed to redistributing a portion of our time and energy to work with rather than against the mill. We are creating a solidarity fund for migrant art and cultural workers. This solidarity fund is a small action which we hope will grow, but which we also understand is an imperfect action; it is not an answer, but a commitment, to help us move through these times. Could this be the environmental education we don’t currently have, but one that is urgently needed. More about this art for mutual aid project soon. x
Stepping Through the Portal
Finally, this year I have dedicated as much time as possible to community dialogue, working groups, and research about the role art and life-long learning plays as we unevenly move through climate breakdown. This has taken shape as a process of serious relationship building, learning and unlearning through conflict together, understanding how to work generously with others to negotiate what collapse asks of each of us, and asking how to navigate the many denials we collectively and individually face.
I have created governmental documents for two art organisations in the form of a Code of Care and Environmental Policy. I have workshopped about alternative economies as part of Sara Horowitz’s Mutualism project and learnt about alternative configurations of art in a working group, New Rhythms. I have begun to process this work in three new essays exploring the u-bend, portal and doorway, which I see as figurative ways to spaces beyond the existing ethical framework. You can find one of the essays in the upcoming ‘Decentring Ethics: AI Art as Method’ book as part of the DATA BROWSER series, Open Humanities Press.
For 2025, my aim is to grow Sunlight into a sustainable organisational network. One that supports art workers and their communities in deeper ways to create the meaningful change we once believed unimaginable in our artistic environments. I need help. Please reach out if you would like to chat more.
To everyone I have seen this year, I send love. To those I haven’t, I hope to see you soon.
Until next year.
Dani