Abisko Online: Arctic, Art and Climate organised by Umeå Academy of Fine Arts and EKA Tallinn

Monday, May 11, 2020 3:00 PM 15:00
Friday, May 15, 2020 5:00 PM 17:00

Google Calendar ICS

Period of teaching: May 11-15, 2020, online on the Zoom platform
Organised by: Umeå Academy of Fine Arts and Estonia Academy of Arts, Tallinn (EKA)
ECTS: 3 credits
Teacher(s): Christoph Draeger (CH/SE), Laura Kuusk (Est), Keith Larson (USA/SE)

Deadline for application: Friday May 8, 2020
How to apply: Please apply with a short motivation and a portfolio, or link to a website.
Send applications by email to: christoph.draeger@umu.se

Introduction
This online course substitutes for the Kuno Express course Arctic, Art and Climate planned in Abisko in late March that was unfortunately canceled due to the corona crisis.The Abisko Scientific Research Station recently informed us that they will not accept any groups of students this year at all, and we cannot be sure if we get a next chance in 2021. So we adapted the course for an online workshop starting Monday, May 11. We will meet every day that week from 15-17h on Zoom for lectures, Q&A and discussions. Students who wish to contribute a short presentation of their work and their own artistic research, or of a related topic, are warmly invited to do so!

Course description:
Until one or two months ago, the news warned us almost daily anew of environmental threats related to climate change. But when the corona virus health crisis started to hit the entire world, the topic almost went off the table, replaced by ever rising death rates and infection numbers. However, climate change did not stop, it received at best a small, welcome break that will have some immediate positive effects, but that might be more than canceled by future actions to start up the globalised economy again. Many environmental protection policies have been scrapped in the light of the corona crisis which almost certainly will have long-lasting catastrophic effects on our climate.

The thawing of the permafrost and the connected release of an enormous amount of greenhouse gases will further increase global warming in feedback loops that may trigger other tipping points. This global warming will result in the collapse of ecosystems, the disappearance of the rainforests, mass extinction of species, the melting of the icecaps and Greenland, the warming of the oceans and the ensuing seawater rise that threatens most of the world’s megacities and coastal populations. The global rise of the earth’s temperature by just a couple of degrees threatens us with desertification, mass migration, the possible collapse of the jet stream, mass migration…the list can be continued. We are realising that this is not a scenario in the far future but that the intensification of weather-related catastrophes like brushfires, hurricanes, floods and heatwaves has already begun to impact us for real.

There is a certain risk that we get numb or immunised by the sheer weight of the never-ending bad news. For many, there is a general feeling that it only happens elsewhere - California, the Caribbean, Australia, or Indonesia - or in a future that doesn’t concern us personally. Like Marcel Duchamp had written on his epitaph: D’ailleurs, ce sont toujours les autres qui meurent : Btw, it’s always the others who die. But in summer 2017, large regions of the Swedish forest were on fire and mass migration of future climate refugees is certain to fuel the support for populist and nationalists politics in the welfare state. Right wing demagogues will use warnings that our way of life is threatened by immigrants to try abolishing our Western democracies.

The curators of last year’s Moderna Museet survey, With The Future Behind Us, stated: It might be symptomatic of an era characterised by enormous increases in population and alarming reports on climate change that many artists are also describing our civilisation as having reached a critical threshold. Not only did we cause the extinction of many species of flora and fauna and damaged the ecological systems of the planet irreversibly, but our way of life is also undermining the conditions necessary for our own survival. Political developments across the world combined with the growing reality of catastrophic climate change, also require us to confront the power structures and political priorities that have determined where we stand today.

In this Kuno course, ARcTic, Art and Climate, we are posing the question, what can artists do to get involved in this most urgent discussion of our time? How can we engage in a global discourse that becomes more and more omnipresent? How can we disseminate information through artistic means, and how can artistic research interact with scientific research?

The aim of this online course is to expand our perception of these pressing issues by working across practices like Land Art, Activist Art, Environmental Art, Propaganda etc in a trans-media approach. The collaborative project focuses on the experience and perception of climate change by artists as an active relationship that transforms physical conditions and phenomenological situations into political or poetic artistic action.

The Climate Impact Research Centre in Abisko has conducted research about the possible impacts of climate change for more than twenty years, and its coordinator and researcher, evolutionary biologist, and ecologist Keith Larson, is a co-teacher on this course. Mr. Larson has extensive experience in collaborations with artists, notably with Bigert&Bergström, and Olav Westphalen. Laura Kuusk is a prominent Estonian multi-media artist, and artistic researcher. She is associate professor at Estonian Academy of Fine Arts.

We plan to hold series of online lectures and seminars about art and the arctic in times of climate change, to inspire students to find a way of researching and producing their own practice within this most urgent topic. Students are invited to actively join the seminars, do short presentations about their work or a related topic, and be engaged in group discussions.

This online course has been created en lieu of Arctic, Art and Climate course in Abisko, which had to be cancelled due to the corona virus health crisis. It is a follow-up of the last two years’ collaboration between the Master’s programme at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts and the Climate Impact Research Centre in Abisko. The aim of the course is to catalyse, continue, and deepen the critical dialogue of art students with climate change.

Schedule:

Monday, May 11, 15h-17h

Introduction by Christoph Draeger

Keynote speech and lecture by Keith Larson

Followed by Q&A and discussion

Tuesday, May 12, 15-17h

Artist presentation and lecture by Laura Kuusk

Followed by Q&A and discussion

Wednesday, May 13, 15-17h

Artist presentation and lecture by Christoph Draeger

Followed by Q&A and discussion

Thursday, May 14, 15-17h