Transition Culture

2 Apr 2015

Isabelle Frémeaux, John Jordan and the rise of the insurrectionary imagination.

Isabelle Frémeaux (IF) and John Jordan (JJ) are the co-founders of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.  It’s a collective which , according to Isabelle, “aims at opening spaces, real or virtual, and bringing artists and activists together to work on and co-create more creative forms of resistance and civil disobedience”.  Both have a long history in campaigns and movements, as well as the arts.  I started by asking them to give us an overview of the kind of work they are involved in.

IF: The work we do has several dimensions. We do a lot of experiments. We like to call what we do experimental projects or pieces. We like the idea of experimenting collectively and accepting that sometimes things might fail, and that by embracing that capacity for failure we can be more creative. I’m by training an academic and a trainer, so I tend to be more into the training dimension of what we do.

We do quite a lot of workshops and trainings, from a day to 2 weeks with artists and activists to really see the synergies between arts and activism and often permaculture, and to see how when these three domains merge, we can create synergies for more creative, more efficient, more productive, more resilient projects that we aim to be projects that are geared towards forms of resistance and civil disobedience.

JJ: What we don’t do is ‘political art’. We’re quite critical of the notion of political art, which for us is art which is about political issues. Occasionally we make films and books but we call those “holidays in representation”. The majority of our work is not making films and books, it’s actually making these experiments which are really critiquing representation; the idea that most artists will make a performance about climate change or a sculptural installation about the loss of biodiversity or a film about climate justice.

What we are very clear about is that actually what we like to do, and what we think is vitally important, is to bring artists and activists together not to show the world but to transform it directly. Not to make images of politics, but to make politics artistic. The reason we work with these two worlds is we think that artists have a lot of creativity, a lot of capacity to think outside the box, a lot of capacity to transform things into poetics, yet often have big egos and not much social engagement.

We think activists – and of course these are generalisations – often have a lot of social critique, capacity to work collectively, but often a failure of imagination. Often the same rituals, the same kinds of demonstrations, the same kinds of tools for transforming society. By bringing these two worlds together, we think we can actually create something different.

We are always embedded in social movements. We spent 5 years as organisers within the Climate Camp and at the same time as organising the camp we were also organising workshops and actions that brought artists and activists together. For example one project was the creation of a thing called the Great Rebel Raft Regatta where we buried a whole load of boats in a forest a week before the Climate Camp happened in Kingsnorth.

The Climate Camp was a self-managed camp developed to create education and alternatives to the climate catastrophe, but it also always had an action at the end of it. This camp at Kingsnorth was actually to stop the building of a new coal fired power station that was taking place next to a power station that already existed. The project that we did, the Great Rebel Raft Regatta basically brought people together into affinity groups. We buried boats a week beforehand in the forest and with the boat was a bottle of rum. We also gave them a treasure map.

We sent people off in their affinity groups to find the buried boat with the treasure map. They would dig up the boat, sleep in the forest overnight, then at 7 o’clock run out of the forest, take their boat onto the river and go and find and block the power station. We got about 150 people, and one boat managed to block a third of the power station and shut a third of it down. For us, it’s really using forms of action that are effective in terms of having an effect on the real world, but also are fun and adventurous. The whole aesthetic of the treasure map and the bottle of rum and the people dressed up as pirates brings a playful element to activism which we think is absolutely fundamental.

You use this term ‘insurrectionary imagination’. Could you just say a little bit more about what you mean by that?

IF: The imagination has the potential and is a fundamental ingredient for insurrection. We wanted to reclaim the offensive and the defiance that is often lacking in art. By calling it a ‘laboratory’ would call on the idea of imagination without having what we feel can be quite a bland understanding and bland connotation of the word ‘imagination’ which is very often seen as something lovely and creative and child-like by actually reclaiming the existence of the defiance of what we wanted to do. This is why we put the word ‘insurrectionary’ in the name of our collective.

JJ: Here’s how we describe it on our website:

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Lab of ii) merges art and life, creativity and resistance, proposition and opposition. Infamous for touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in postcapitalist culture, throwing snowballs at bankers, turning hundreds of abandoned bikes into machines of disobedience and launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station; we treat insurrection as an art and art as a means of preparing for the coming insurrection. The Lab of ii is now in the process of setting up an international utopian art/life school on a Permaculture farm in Brittany.

We don’t actually believe in the separation between artists and activists, and we don’t actually believe in those two terms. We think the notion of art as a separate action in everyday life is a very recent phenomenon within the Western tradition. In most cultures there isn’t a separation of art and everyday life.

We think that activism, this idea that activists have this monopoly on social change, is exactly the same as art having a monopoly on creativity. Actually everyone can and has the capacity and does change the world in some way, all the time. So in a way it’s a kind of dialectical relationship, because we wanted to get rid of both those notions.  For us, creating an insurrection or some kind of revolutionary change (which we think is absolutely necessary), we have to provide the alternatives to capitalism and the climate catastrophe and resist the problems that are happening that we can’t divide.

We see the DNA of social transformation as being two strands. Being the creation of alternatives such as Transition Towns etc, and a resistance, a resistance against the fossil fuel industries, the banks that fund them and so on. One without the other is absolutely pointless, because if we don’t resist then we forget who the enemy is and there’s a massive danger that our projects become simply experiments in laboratories for new forms of green capitalism. If we don’t create the alternatives, then of course we simply have a culture of resistance and a culture that’s simply saying ‘no’ all the time and that isn’t sustainable in terms of mental health and personal sustainability because people just burn out.

Historically we see the division of these two movements being absolutely a problem, and I think the 1970s is a classic example. For us in all our projects, we try to make models of alternative forms of living. So we haven’t flown on a plane for 10 years, despite the fact that we have this international art world career, where most of the people in that world spend their life on aeroplanes. We live ecologically, we live in a yurt in a community where we set up an organic farm, where we put the land into production. For us that’s not necessarily political but that’s what we do normally anyway, and resistance work is always done without hierarchy. We teach consensus at the beginning of all our projects and we try and use permaculture principles to make them happen.

As one example, and this is relevant because our latest project is geared towards the COP 21 in Paris, the UN Climate Summit which is aiming to find a universal agreement on CO2 emissions and adaptation and so on in December this year. In 2009, we were invited by 2 museums to do projects around COP15 in Denmark, in Copenhagen. We were invited by the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen.

We had already spent some time in Copenhagen. We published a book on alternatives called Paths Through Utopias, unfortunately only available in French, Korean and German. And we spent some time in Christiania in Copenhagen, a self-managed community in Copenhagen. We noticed then, during that time, that there were thousands of abandoned bikes all over Copenhagen. So we thought: there’s the material. There’s a permaculture principle, “create no waste”.  We thought let’s see what we can do with the waste of Copenhagen with these abandoned bikes. Let’s transform them into tools of civil disobedience.

Traditionally, civil disobedience in the Gandhian, Thoreau tradition is through the body and we thought what can we do with the body and a bicycle? We proposed this to the two museums, they both agreed. In the project we worked with the Climate Camp as the movement we were working with and the idea was that we would produce prototypes in the Arnolfini Gallery where we would put 50 people together in an open free workshop, we would teach them the basics of permaculture principles and so on, and we would then go – ok, what can we do with these bikes, and design a prototype that we’d then take to Copenhagen to then scale up.

Then we had an interesting moment when both museums said “you can’t do any welding in the museum”. So we thought ok, fine, we’ll get a container outside and we can put an image in it and it’ll be a more public space anyway, so the problem was the solution. Then they had a phone call from the Copenhagen curator and she said “we’ve got a container, but there’s just one little thing. We just talked to the Police in Denmark, and there are certain rules about what is a bicycle.

A bicycle can’t have more than three wheels, it can’t be more than 3 metres long etc etc. If your objects are outside of those rules then you have to write to the police, you have to show them the design and it will take 3 weeks before they come back to you and say you’ve got the right to go on the road. So we said “well that’s very interesting, but we’re doing civil disobedience. We don’t really care whether the bikes are legal or not”. At which point there was this pause, and she was like “so you’re really going to do it…”

We’ve had this experience in the art world a lot. Basically, a lot of the art world pretends to do politics. They have these very radical texts and radical propositions. Maybe she imagined we were going to build these objects and stay in the museum, but for us that’s not the point. The point is actually to take action. Unfortunately the museum then pulled out, but we did find an ex-squat in Copenhagen which is a sort of art and cultural centre called the Candy Factory and produced a project there. About 200 people ended up being involved and took part in the demonstration against the corporate domination of the UN climate talks.

In a way this is a good example of how we think a lot of so-called political art at the moment, which is very trendy. There are endless biennials, museum exhibitions, theatre festivals which use the word ‘political’, ‘radical’, ‘socially engaged’ and so on. Actually, as far as we’re concerned, a lot of it is what we’d call “pictures of politics”.

You recently wrote that “the Left is very scared of using desire and the body and capitalism and the Right are brilliant at it”.  Can you talk us through what the implications of that are, and for Transition as well?

IF: There is a tendency amongst the Left, and of course these are massive generalisations. A tendency to feel that the problem is what people don’t know and that therefore if we can produce more facts or figures or information or reports and that people know what’s going on; if we can show the maths, if we can have better pictures of the number of species that are going extinct or the number of people that are being affected, the figures of unemployment etc, then people will react. There’s this idea that there is a large number of people who do not act because they don’t know.

Whereas we believe that very often the problem is actually what people do know, that they cling on to things and values that have been the structure of their life for a long time, and that what generally makes people move is not rational thinking but much more often desires and fantasies of what could be.

There’s a beautiful quote by an American author called Stephen Duncan that puts it very beautifully, about “the dreams of what could be”. The dreams of what could be are much more located in the emotions, in the body, rather than in the left brain. It’s really important to combine them. It’s not a question of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and saying “stop all reports, stop all research, stop all science”. But to not overly rely on them.

The numbers should be there as backup, to be used as crutches, but what is going to motivate most of us is to be able to experience emotionally and bodily a life that is more just, that is more healthy, that is more relaxed, that is more enjoyable. That’s not something that is purely rational. That is one of the knots that is very complicated to untie, the great lie of neo-liberalism and capitalism which is that more stuff necessarily means a better life. We know that it’s untrue, and yet this is something that is difficult to untie. We will manage to untie that by talking and calling upon people’s values.

At the same time, one of the notions that can be of new learning for projects like Transition Towns is that these emotions are the positive emotions of what could be, but also the negative emotions of what we know is wrong with what is going on. Actually, it is a matter of finding the balance and finding how one can feed the other and not overcome the other. Sometimes there can be a tendency to want to deny and obscure the anger and frustration at the injustice and the destruction.

Actually these emotions need to be acknowledged, and need to be used as fuel for resistance, while the emotions of what could be can be used as a tool to move forward to the alternative. It’s the combination of these two emotions that can make the social movements irresistible and indestructible, and very often the movements are indestructible when they’re only calling upon one of those. So it comes back to this DNA of the yes and the no, but I think it’s very true in the kind of emotions that we call upon in ourselves and in other people.

Permaculture is a big part of your work. Could you say a bit about that? Why is permaculture important to what you do?

IF: It offers a very inspiring and stable framework; a very stable value framework. To be able to work in the way we want, we thought that the three main pillars of permaculture are a very efficient way of making people understand that actually it’s not so complicated. Because the principles are a really good road map for working towards the system, and designs that are productive and resilient and respectful. Personally we feel very touched by the idea that you take nature as your teacher and the more you do that, the less you see nature as this external thing outside of you.

More and more you take it as a tool so that you can reintegrate yourself in nature which we’ve been taught to see as this thing…the fact that we very often talk about the environment is telling. It’s this thing that surrounds us, that obviously we’re not part of. Permaculture is an excellent tool to be able to reintegrate oneself into what is actually our only consistent. So we try to use the principles as frameworks for our experiments, and generally the spirit of permaculture is our inspiration.

JJ: And we have this 10 day training called ‘Think like a Forest’ which we have done 4 or 5 times over the past years. It’s actually very inspired – it’s a training in art, activism and permaculture and it really looks at what does art bring to activism, what does activism bring to art, what does art bring to permaculture, what does permaculture bring to art and activism and so forth, to look at it as a system of three worlds. That training was actually very inspired by a training by Starhawk, who’s an anarcho-feminist witch, very involved in the peace movement in the 80s and the alt to globalisation movement, who has a course called the Earth Activist Training Course which we both attended and was very much a big inspiration for us many, many years ago.

We modelled our course on that in a sense where there’s a permaculture element, but instead of having the witchcraft element, we replaced witchcraft with art. Her thing is earth-based spirituality, activism and permaculture, ours is art, activism and permaculture. And in a sense, art is magic. It’s a form of magic. We think that’s one of its powers, that actually things become true when enough people believe in them. Art is very good at weaving the magic that we need in these moments. 

[This is an edited version of a longer conversation.  You can hear our discussion in full in the podcast below:

John and Isabelle are just two of over 60 artists who have written sections for Lucy Neal’s forthcoming book ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered” (see cover, right).  The book is published at the end of this month.  TransitionNetwork.org readers can get £5 off Playing for Time.  Simply enter this discount code at oberonbooks.com – ONPFT2015.  Valid until 31 Dec 2015.

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1 Apr 2015

New Transition Network office is a load of rubbish

Transition Network is moving offices!  Since the organisation’s inception in 2007, it has been housed at 43 Fore Street in Totnes, in a building once described in the Sunday Telegraph as a “rickety set of rooms”.  The decision to find new premises was taken 3 years ago, but after a fruitless search for new premises, a different solution was suggested.  A small building plot, close to the office, was purchased, and we can announce today that our newly-built office will be our home from the end of this month.

In keeping with our ethics, the new office is entirely built using recycled materials.  It took staff a year to collect enough stuff to build it.  As TN’s Office Manager Jo Coish put it:

“The Board decided on an approach where we used recycled stuff, so anything non-compostable was fine.  Old bottles, plates, traffic cones, old shopping baskets, pallets.  Our builders were up for the challenge.  Oddly, people in the town were more than happy to donate.  One guy turned up with a full skip”. 

The new office is the talk of the town.  It certainly stands out from the traditional Elizabethan architecture for which the town centre is known.  But how is it to work in? TN’s Ben Brangwyn:

“It’s a bit of a squeeze to get us all in, but I like the toilet seat windows.  I’m less convinced though that the stairs, made from old Jeffrey Archer novels, will prove too durable, but it’s all the kind of thing you get if you sign up to Transition”. 

The plans managed to bypass conventional planning controls by being proposed as an art installation rather than as an office building.  This is one of the stories told in Lucy Neal’s excellent new book on Transition and the Arts, ‘Playing for Time‘.  “I think these offices will prove to become iconic”, she said at her recent book launch, “as a living, breathing example of Art inspiring Transition, and Transition inspiring Art.  I also managed to empty all the crap out of my garage”. 

Many people in Transition had already got wind of the project, and it has already inspired several similar efforts.  Transition Black Isle are reportedly close to completing the UK’s first seaweed and superglue office, and Transition Norwich are putting the finishing touches to their REconomy Centre built using a highly innovative system using prefabricated panels made from old ‘Last of the Summer Wine‘ video box sets.

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31 Mar 2015

Book Review: ‘How to Save Town Centres’ by Julian Dobson.

Book review: How to save our town centres: a radical agenda for the future of high streets by Julian Dobson.  Policy Press (available here). 

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.  Indeed, I wish I had written it.  It is, in effect, the Transition Guide to Reclaiming Local Economies.  It is quite brilliant.  My already well-thumbed copy is full of underlinings, exclamation marks, asterisks.  They pick out nuggets like:

• “real hope involves getting your hands dirty”
• “… people want to support the towns they live in; they just need to feel their efforts will be welcomed and worthwhile”
• “We need to turn leaky buckets into magnets: tools that attract and retain money rather than letting it flow out”

‘How to save our town centres’ is an unfailingly positive book.  It takes on the challenges, the problems, the issues staring town centres up and down the country in the face, but is always thinking about what we might do about them, presenting the shift we need as “the transition from ‘me town’ to ‘we town'”.  It is bold and ambitious in its solutions, yet it all makes sense. 

When I give talks these days, I talk about how those building resilient local economies are the cutting edge of the economy.  Rather than being somehow on the margins, they are the vanguard, the pioneers of where we are inevitably headed.  Dobson puts it a bit better than that:

“In the context of the ‘old economy’ of concentrated ownership, standardised products and places that look increasingly alike, these new producers and consumers may be swimming against the tide.  But against all the odds, they are making headway.  It’s time to raise a glass to the new economy, because it’s the best hope for our high streets”. 

He looks at the challenge from a number of different angles.  He sets about demolishing the myth that what he calls “the flatulent promise of retail-led development” is the only way to bring town centres back to life.  Looking at the Liverpool One shopping complex he writes “projects like Liverpool One don’t create wealth so much as concentrate it”, adding “the story of retail-led regeneration is one of concentration , polarisation and anonymisation”, adding:

“The notion that every town and city can prosper in competition with neighbours pursuing the self-same strategy of debt-fuelled development and the accumulation of bigger and brighter retail space defies credulity; there will always be losers, and some will lose spectacularly”. 

He challenges the way in which town centres are developed, land ownership, and how most development serves distant investors and imagination-bereft and economically extractive developers rather than local people and what they need from a place. 

[Here is a recent talk by Julian…]

 

He doesn’t pull his punches:

“…the only positive future that governments, retail and real estate experts and financial gurus appear able to envisage for our towns is one where the wheels of the gravy train are re-greased and the whole shambolic jalopy is set in motion once again, with the same predictable consequences”.  

Among the tools he recommends that would make a difference is a “much more radical extension of the right to reclaim land”, which would kick in if a site or property is left unused for over a year, as well as a ‘Right to Try’, whereby communities could use empty buildings to try out new uses for them. At the heart of his solutions is the idea that owning property requires a mindset of stewardship, of responsibilities as well as rights.  As he puts it, “People who are trying to make a quick buck tend to be poor stewards”.  We all know how that feels in the places we live.

But all is not lost – the future, as they say, is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.  Across the UK, in the face of appalling development, as he puts it, “local identity is flickering back to life”.  Indeed, rather than being something exceptional, working co-operatively to solve problems is our natural state.  As he puts it “far from being a utopian fantasy, cooperative attitudes simply need to be stirred from their slumber”.  And they are indeed stirring, through a dazzling diversity of campaigns, movements, projects and social enterprises.   

Having mentioned the wonderful Coin Street Community Builders in London, among others (and no doubt Atmos Totnes had he heard of it in time), he writes:

“There is ample evidence that ordinary people, with determination and support, can affect lasting change and create value both for people who need somewhere to live and for the wider residential and business community”.

So what’s the alternative?  “The challenge” he writes, “is to create places that work, where people are productive and feel at home, where human beings can flourish as citizens and not just consumers”, places he later refers to as “places of possibility”, a term I had been searching for for some time now.  How might we start doing this?  He identifies what for him are the key tools needed: “thinking in terms of risk, resilience and restoration”. 

For Dobson, like Transition, rethinking local economies and how they work is an enormous opportunity.  “If we want to assess the real state of our economy”, he writes, “we need to pay less attention to GDP figures that show whether or not we are in or out of a recession, and focus more on our ability to generate wealth intelligently; value it accurately, share it fairly and recycle it effectively”. 

Dobson’s starting place is very much on the same page as Transition.  Here are two passages that could have come straight out of a Transition publication:

“The resilience we need to build locally shares the same DNA as the resilience required to address global problems such as poverty and climate change”.

“We need an alternative to the Hobson’s choice of unaccountable and unresponsive global institutions and vulnerable, undercapitalised local ones – both of which have proven unsustainable when disaster strikes”.

Transition appears regularly in these pages: the Bristol Pound, the Brixton Pound, the NoToCosta campaign in Totnes and Transition Town Totnes’s Economic Blueprint, which he describes as being “not about backwoods isolationism or making do with second-best; it seeks to maximise public benefit by redirecting money that is already being spent”. 

‘How to Save our Town Centres’ is a call, like Transition’s REconomy Project and many other great initiatives popping up everywhere, to step up and create the new economy.  It is rare to find a book about urban regeneration and local economies that you can’t put down, but this is one.  And he even names a chapter after a song by The Clash (“Lost in the Supermarket”, thankfully not “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”). 

It’s brilliant.  I recommend it hugely.  Buy copies for everyone on your local council.  Buy it for everyone in your Transition group who are trying to figure out how best to impact the local economy for the better.  It contains the passion, the ideas, the approach that we will need if we are to bring our High Streets back to life. 

His closing paragraph is one that sums up his approach, and which I couldn’t agree with more:

“The best future for our town centres is not merely as places to buy, but as places to be; places where we can live and act as citizens rather than as consumers.  Then they can be places where we rediscover local identity and community, where we can be more fully alive and more fully ourselves.  As many a shopkeeper has said, why settle for less?”. 

 You can order the book direct from the publisher here.

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23 Mar 2015

Ackroyd & Harvey on "the creative response to climate change"

Heather Ackroyd (HA) and Dan Harvey (DH) work together as Ackroyd and Harvey.  Sculpture, photography, architecture, ecology and biology are some of the disciplines that intersect in their work, revealing an intrinsic bias towards process and event. For over 25 years their work has been exhibited in contemporary art galleries, museums and public spaces worldwide.  They are also one of the contributors to Lucy Neal’s book ‘Playing for Time’, and active members of Transition Dorking.  I started by asking them what, for them, is “art”?

HA: In a way now it’s become a way of life. As a way for people to get a handle on what we do we say we’re artists, but sometimes it will be the question “do you paint?” Or depending on who you’re having the conversation with, people by and large now say “what kind of art do you do?” Usually at this point, we bring out some postcards that we have lurking in our bags because working with visual media as we do, it just seems easier to say “ok, this is an example of what we do”. That then allows people to go “oh, right, ok”. Then they start to ask questions.

DA: Because our work doesn’t naturally fall into a category; it’s not painting, it’s not sculpture as such, it has its own life energy. So it’s quite difficult to explain what we do, but it is in very much a visual language.

HA: Well you’ve managed to explain it to me after about 24 years!

In your section for Lucy Neal’s book ‘Playing for Time’ you write about “energising the creative response to climate change”. What does that creative response to climate change look like, and why do we need one?

HA: I don’t think there is one singular way that we respond to it. Going back to the point that Dan and I first met back in 1990, the medium of our work was actually chlorophyll, working with seedling grass, using seedling grass grown in a clay base, growing vertically over an existing architectural structure. That was our point of connection. We were talking about processes of growth, processes of change, processes of transformation. In a way, whenever you are dealing with processes of growth, you have to also embrace the inevitability of decay or of degradation as well. So we’ve always been interested in these pivotal points.

Around 1988 I was really very keenly aware of all the conversations around the greenhouse effect. Following on from the very pivotal speech from James E Hansen about saying “Houston, we have a problem”, and we’re pretty sure that what’s gone wrong is we’re unleashing far too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and this is causing this phenomenon called the greenhouse effect. This really caught my imagination, but I think it was a number of years before Dan and I started to actually…

Put it this way: we would never actually say “this is climate change”. That doesn’t sit comfortably with us at all. We don’t like that bald categorisation of what we do.

DH: I think as artists, you work with things that interest you and intrigue you, and sometimes maybe things that you don’t understand as well. With one of the materials, working with the seedling grass the way we do and talking about chlorophyll and photosynthesis, in some ways it is the photosynthesis that has changed the climate, having created a climate that we can actually survive in. So it’s quite interesting, the way that works, starting to move into looking at the environment that we exist within.

Can you tell us a bit about some of your work, some of your projects?

HA: One aspect, just to pick up on what Dan was saying about the chlorophyll is that we make these very complex biochemical photographs working with chlorophyll as a light sensitive pigment so we can make these incredibly complex images that grown on the vertical we’ll often make the space into the dark room. The images are taken by ourselves, that we’ll project onto a wall of growing grass. And then within about 8-10 days, we have an incredibly detailed and very exquisite positive image.

DA: The only space that these species receive are from a projected negative onto them, so where the light falls it produces the chlorophyll and goes dark green, where there’s less light is goes less green. Where there’s no light, they grow but they stay yellow.

HA: These are pieces of work that we’ve been doing for about 24 years now. Specifically a project that we initiated in 2007 which we called ‘Beuys’ Acorns’. There is a very famous artist who died in 1986, Joseph Beuys, a German artist. He had incredible worldwide fame and he became very articulate and very passionate about ecology, about the environment, about nature. He actually was one of the founder members of the German Green Party. He got out of politics when he realised how toxic it was on some levels, but he could bring his fame and he could bring a lot of leverage to subjects.

If you look at the way that Germany is now in terms of renewable energy, in terms of how it manages energy, how it’s managing the whole debate around climate change, it really is far in advance of where we are, where we seem to be at times almost Medieval wanting to go into fracking.

He did an amazing piece of work called ‘Seven Thousand Oaks’. He didn’t complete the project before he died, planting seven thousand trees. We collected acorns from a number of the trees and we’ve been growing them, we have about 200 surviving saplings. For the last few years, we’ve exhibited them in some high profile galleries and venues.

We’ve also done some high profile events, for example the Nobel Laureate Symposium and we’re trying at the moment to get a major project in Paris happening to coincide with COP 21 which is based around tree planting, but it’s also about planting ideas, very multi-disciplinary, visions for now, visions for the future, which will place ecological and social biodiversity into a framework which is mutually beneficial, and will allow evolution that isn’t going to put us into boiling water.

DH: We got involved with a project ‘Cape Farewell’ in 2003 that was taking artists, musicians, writers and scientists on a very small sailing schooner into the High Arctic, and experiencing, seeing the changes that were taking place there. We were lucky enough to be involved over a number of years – the last trip was in 2007. But in that time actually really physically seeing the glaciers retreating, but also having scientists on hand, oceanographers and people to speak with, I think that stimulated a number of pieces of work.

HA: The ‘Ice Lens‘.

DH: There was a big lens that we carved out of a section of glacial ice. The idea was to get it to focus the sunlight to melt or burn things. Unfortunately, the warmest it got at that time was -27 and the ice just kept on glazing over and frosting and cracking, so we never really got it to focus the light, but it acted as a sort of sun catcher anyway.

There was another piece we did, ‘Stranded’ where we managed to access the skeleton of a stranded whale that was washed up in Skegness through the Natural History Museum. We fenced it on the beach, took the bones out and crystallised the whole piece, the idea was talking with oceanographers about changes in the chemical balance within the oceans that are directly affecting corals but also the plankton that the whales live on. So it was a piece that speaks directly with that. ‘The Polar Bear Diamond’ was another.

HA: We sometimes say that there’s an orchestration of responses that we have. It has very much grown out of our body of work. It’s very embedded in the way that we think about natural processes of growth and inorganic processes of growth such as crystals. Some of the earlier work we’re doing in some ways was drawing some really important science that’s been done in this country to show how critically important it is to plant more trees, have green roofs, have more parks in our urban and city spaces to counteract the effects of the heat island effect and warming temperatures and flooding and storms. We’re trying to get to the point where we’re trying to physically engage with people I suppose in more of an aesthetic than an activist role.

RH: And what’s your sense of the role that the Arts can play in Transition? Why does Transition need the Arts and then as an extension from that, why does the Arts need Transition?

HA: We all need art in our lives, whether it’s in the broader sense: music, writing, paintings, sculptures, beautiful aesthetic designs. Creativity should be almost welded into our beings, and whether or not one is an engineer or a physicist; the people I often find the most exciting are from very different disciplines. Lawyers have such an embedded creative approach which is also quite critical, and when I say critical I mean there’s a criticality there which is good, and communication skills are really important.

It’s about trying to use imagination, use vision, use wit, use insight, use, I don’t know, use inner dreams to navigate our way through these various crises that we find ourselves in. Art has been both a guardian and a guide and an absolute independent presence that has shaped and inspired going back to cave paintings really.

Yes, Transition is about getting ourselves off this fossil fuel dependence which is heavily promoted by businesses and corporations who we know historically have done some pretty rotten stuff to stop it advancing as we should do, but it’s also all about how we teach, how we share knowledge, what’s important in our world, what we deserve, what we should be protecting, what we should be embracing and celebrating as well.

[Here is the unedited podcast of our conversation].

Ackroyd & Harvey are just two of over 60 artists who have written sections for Lucy Neal’s forthcoming book ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered“ (see cover, right).  The book is published at the end of this month.  TransitionNetwork.org readers can get £5 off Playing for Time.  Simply enter this discount code at oberonbooks.com – ONPFT2015.  Valid until 31 Dec 2015.

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22 Mar 2015

Seeing Transition take flight: a day in Luxembourg

I had never been to Luxembourg before.  Having recently visited France and Belgium to meet Transition groups, I had just about got used to the fact that in one (I can’t remember which) people kiss on one cheek, and in the other they kiss on two cheeks, and I always get it wrong, either over-kissing or leaving people feeling short-changed.  My confusion was multiplied substantially therefore to find that in Luxembourg people kiss three times!  I kept life simpler by just shaking peoples’ hands.  Once I had got used to the fact that the capital city and the country as a whole have the same name, it turned out to be a friendly and charming place. 

Compared to its neighbours, Germany, France and Belgium, Transition in Luxembourg is in its infancy.  Its genesis can be traced back to 2010, and the founding, by Katy Fox, of Centre for Ecological Learning Luxembourg (CELL).  CELL was initially founded as a vehicle to bring permaculture and eco-village thinking to Luxembourg.  Katy, who was moving home after living in Scotland for many years, was also inspired by subsistence agriculture she spent time studying in Romania.  In 2010 she also discovered Transition and liked the “inclusive, do-it-where-you-are, integrated, Head/Heart/Hands thing”. 

So CELL was formed in 2010 as a structure that could put on trainings and events and generally raise the profile of these various initiatives as well as supporting the emergence of citizen-led, self-organising action groups with either thematic or geographical focus.  It had its formal launch in January 2011.  By 2012 the first community garden in Luxembourg city’s first Transition initiative was underway, and SEED, a group dedicated to saving seeds, had formed.  In April the first Transition group emerged, Transition Minett, which embarked on, among other things, urban gardening projects, food co-ops, an energy co-op and a DIY skillshare festival. 

In 2013, Transition West began, a rural initiative with a rather nice logo (regular readers will know that I am a bit of a ‘collector’ of good Transition group logos – sadly I can’t find this one online…).  They started doing interesting things with aquaponics among other things.  Transition West and the CELL headquarters are located in Beckerich, which has been pioneering energy autonomy projects (gas biomethanisation cooperatives with farmers, retrofitting houses, green energy and solar cooperatives, clusters for innovative businesses) since the mid-1990s.

In 2014, TERRA, a great CSA market garden, of which more later, got started.  Two more Transition initiatives formed in the north of Luxembourg, largely with a focus on food projects Transition Bonnevoie also formed.  Something is stirring. 

I spent one very full day there supporting the work of the Luxembourg Transition Network, who have recently been funded by the Ministry of the Environment to have a fulltime national co-ordinator in order to help accelerate Transition.  My first activity of the day was to run a four-hour workshop at Henri Tudor Centre, for architects planners and engineers.  Titled “The post-carbon city: the concept of ‘transition towns'”, the aim was to bring them up to speed on Transition and how it might relate to their disciplines.   

About thirty people came, from across that professional spectrum, and it was a very entertaining morning.  We played the ‘Web of Resilience’ game with string, we did a self-taught ‘milling’ exercise with the Transition Ingredients cards, we discussed Transition, the leaky bucket and how resilience differs from sustainability.  Very enjoyable, and hopefully useful for them too.

Then after lunch we headed off to TERRA, Luxembourg’s first Community Supported Agriculture project.  Situated on a plateau looking across to Luxembourg city, the garden was started last year by three passionate permaculturists/Transitioner/food growers, Marko, Pit and Sophie. 

Their 1.5 hectare site already contained a number of mature fruit trees.  To this they have added two polytunnels, a water tower, and many no-dig beds for outdooor crops.  As a CSA they already have 150 members who receive a monthly box.  They reckon that 200 would be the maximum their site could support. 

When I arrived, a large group of Transitioners and others were already there, and in a beautiful barn in which they sort and store their produce, we gathered for tea and a discussion of some questions that were, for them, especially pressing.  After a while, as the sun broke through outside, we headed out to see the field in which the CSA is based. 

Very impressive it was too, although clearly not the time of year to really see it at its finest.  They offer two different sizes of vegetable box, the ‘Pierre Rabhi’ (Rabhi is a well-known French advocate of small scale farming) and the larger ‘Vandana Shiva’ (for 3-4 people per week).  Most entertaining.  Thankfully the ‘Rob Hopkins mixed nut assortment’ has yet to see the light of day. 

From here we whizzed back into town for the evening’s talk.  This was hosted at l’Athénée de Luxembourg, a secondary school, in their largest hall.  By the time the talk began, the hall was packed, standing room only, 350-400 people (I was told that generally in Luxembourg getting 50 people to a conference is an achievement, and 100 is exceptional, so this was quite something). 

The evening began with Norry, one of the co-ordinators of Luxembourg Transition Network, setting the scene, and then Katy Fox giving an overview of the arrival of Transition and its unfolding in Luxembourg.  I then spoke for about 40 minutes, with Nicolas and Antoine, my excellent translators, doing their very best to keep up.  We had a great Q&A session, and it all seemed to go down very well. Here are a few photos: 

By the time I’d finished, the potluck supper brought by many people had largely been devoured, but I managed to get enough, and a beer, and had many good conversations with lots of different people.  Very enjoyable and entertaining.  Eventually I headed off into the night for a short night’s sleep which included an odd dream about sharks nibbling my toes, before getting up early for the Eurostar home. 

My thanks to Katy, Norry and the other organisers, to Carole Reckinger and Joanne Theisen for letting me use their photos here, and to all the great people I met.  And wishing the guys at TERRA an abundant harvest in 2015.  

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