landfall

A speculative adaptation to climate change

"The shack is always conditional.......The disposition of things is an economy in time.......Like any etymological construction, each shack is a 3D modification of belief" – Lisa Robertson – The office for soft architecture

It is my experience that the contemporary art world mirrors a ‘throw away’ economy because of its fascination with the new, the easily consumable and the spectacle. Like the manner in which our throw away economy is altering our climate and devastating our ecosystem, so to is this cultural practice creating an unsuitable artistic climate of over production, burnout, repetition and ambivalence. Can tools such as recycling and values such as care and dedication, like in relation to anthropogenic climate chance, perhaps help restructure this economy of art along more sustainable lines?

I’m applying for an O&O subsidy in order to conduct three research experiments that connect art, climate chance and conflict within the construction of site-specific shacks and shelters. The experiments will be situated in a predicated speculative near future for the Netherlands in which extreme rainfall, soaring summer temperatures and more frequent storm winds come to define the Dutch climate. These climate changes will in turn, put pressure on the way we live, the crops we grow and the way we relate to each other leading to serious potential conflicts. For the experiments I will, in collaboration with researchers from the Erasmus University and Deltares Delft, select three specific locations that each embodies a potential site of conflict when this climate chance happens. Over the course of six months I will uses these locations as test sites to construct a series of experimental structures and shelters which aim to adapt to this new climate in a way which would mitigate conflict. The duration of these new structures may be from minutes to months but what they will have in common is the improvisation and recycling strategies through which they will be made. With these structures I intend to further develop my understanding of recycling within artistic practice, I see recycling as a strategy to structure a practice which actively sits counter a to a throw away economy often seen within contemporary art.

This project is supported by the O&O funding from the CBK Rotterdam