“Personal transformation is the nucleus of any social change,” and other responses to climate change
During the summer semester of 2019, MFA students at CIIS enrolled in a course called Art Making: Global Influences and Perspectives, taught by Pireeni Sundaralingam. During the course, students read, discussed, sketched ideas, and created original works inspired by the ways that artists and writers around the world are addressing climate change.
One of the examples of ways artists are addressing this issue is the “Dear Climate” project by Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer and Marina Zurkow:
“Dear Climate” responds to the psychic dimensions of climate change and global “weirding.” It is a training program for the spirit and the imagination, using a tone, aesthetic, and vocabulary that’s the opposite of the prevailing ones: instead of crisis and catastrophe, “Dear Climate” animates the familiar and ordinary; instead of desperation and heroism, it fosters playfulness and friendliness. Dear Climate is after a conceptual nudge rather than a paradigm shift.
“Dear Climate”’s training tools come in the form of posters, podcasts, a website, and installations. Its media are images and texts — both written and spoken — and sound. Its venues are home screens and walls, streets, and galleries. Its form is open-ended: more to come.
Underneath the training program lie three “movements of mind”: Meeting Climate Change, Befriending Climate Change, and Becoming Climate Change. When you make acquaintance with something, you invite it into your mental world. Then it’s only a matter of time before you get to know it better. The imagination gets seriously involved now, the conversation deepens, the plot thickens. Being hospitable — truly hospitable — involves opening oneself to the unknown, and the gifts of the guest can change the host profoundly. Becoming follows. Becoming disturbs the existing set-up, crosses “clear” boundaries, confuses convenient categories. Becoming is about mixing, spilling, leaking, seeping, suffusing, pervading. It’s about sleeping around, telling strange tales, making nonsense: it’s about weathering the weather, claiming the climate, taking the temperature of our times.
Students were asked to analyze and gauge the strengths of using literary or visual art forms to engage with climate change. Which forms are more likely to induce a change in people’s behavior?
Dear Climate,
We really blew it. We’re sorry.
We had other ideas and forgot about finitude.
— Intro of the “Dear Climate” Apology Letter
One of the students in the course responded with:
“[“Dear Climate”] spoke to me about the accessibility of change, beginning and focused on the personal. The initial letter of apology, a promise to do better, opens to vulnerability where change can happen. The further description reads like it came from the text of my spiritual formation training where the heart is the place of hospitality, welcoming the unknown, befriending it, being changed by it.
The two phrases that stood out for me [from the course examples] are “inner weather” or “inner climate” and “respecting what gives life.” These words showed up in at least two of the articles. As I have been working on a series of paintings, these words mirror some of my learnings in the art making process. The images I have began as emotional renderings, yet they reveal shifting landscapes. Today I invited a friend in to view my current work, one is a climate change image, the more realistic image of the series, and her first response was it looked like an emotional landscape, or “inner scape.” Our “inner climate” is mirrored in the environmental climate we are experiencing or vice versa.
Even as an image might portray a dark time or experience, there is/was something in that time or experience that gave me life. It also needs to be present.
The letter, “Dear Climate,” begins with an admission of getting it wrong, of needing to change our ways, to make things new, to try to do better. The authors create an accessible approach to personal behavior change. Personal transformation is the nucleus of any social change. If a critical mass of individuals change to positively effect climate change, the social, corporate or global change would happen. But because no one can change another individual, it is up to them. There also needs to be work on social and corporate levels to effect change. But I will always find myself working in the arena of personal transformation and leaving the corporate work to others.
A common aspect was the simple, accessible approach, meaning [these examples] all spoke on the level of everyday life, approaches that could be done by each of us: to go back to our elders, to open ourselves to befriending climate change, to building aerosolar structures no matter the size, and to GO OUTSIDE and encounter nature. None of them took a catastrophic or grandiose approach that might put someone over the edge after reading it.”
To read more about artists addressing climate change, feel free to check out “Art in the Anthropocene,” the collection of essays and projects where “Dear Climate” appears: http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Davis-Turpin_2015_Art-in-the-Anthropocene.pdf
For more information on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing at CIIS, please see https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/mfa-programs
