Flood Tide of Resistance

https://www.neme.org/projects/a-sea-change/flood-tide-of-resistance

Extreme weather conditions have become the global norm. Forests are burning in Brazil and Siberia, permafrost soils are thawing, polar ice and glaciers melt, drought strikes once fertile regions, plant and animal species are becoming extinct on a massive scale. Yet even as the impact of climate breakdown comes to be felt everywhere, government climate policy worldwide is woefully inadequate to the urgency of the crisis. States prefer not to act at all: when forced, they act on a symbolic level at most. On one day they declare a climate emergency; the next day they still sponsor fossil-fuelled energy, building freeways, airports and gas pipelines, enclosing territory on whatever scale the projects demand.

This cynical spectacle contributes nothing to planetary survival. What is urgently needed instead is decarbonisation of the world economy, total reorganisation of trade, food production, labour and housing, plus drastically increased taxation of climate-destructive modes of transport and forms of production that squander resources. The overall social focus must be shifted from growth and profit towards resource conservation, preservation of livelihoods, climate justice and global redistribution.

The worldwide scope and visibility of the environmental movements reflect the terrifying global scale of the threat and also the unprecedented social breadth and depth of collective determination to counteract it. Millions of people determined to prevent total planetary climate collapse – to preserve the Earth as habitat for future generations – are joining the climate justice movements and collectively taking action. This is also true of many artists, more and more of whom have shown over the last few years that they no longer regard climate breakdown merely as “subject matter” for their works.

Climate justice movements worldwide are the most serious and significant drivers of this socially necessary change. The past 25 years of UN climate negotiation have led to no reduction of global carbon emissions whatsoever. Meanwhile, extra-parliamentary and horizontally organised social movements have never relented in their pressure on states to end the fossil fuel economy outright and ensure swift transition to a carbon-neutral society. The movements’ blockade of German lignite mines played crucial part in the decision of that country’s government to phase out the use of coal (although the 2038 exit date announced is too late). Were it not for the years of implacable pressure from Indigenous American Water Protectors, US President Joe Biden would likely never have revoked Federal approval of the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

Historically, resistance has often been covertly organised by partisans or extra-parliamentary groups. Climate activism, by contrast, is coming visible on a massive scale, despite often crossing the boundaries of what is considered “legal”. The worldwide scope and visibility of the movement reflect the terrifying global scale of the threat and also the unprecedented social breadth and depth of collective determination to counteract it.

The climate justice movements confront a crisis inseparable from the racist, sexist, colonialx, and authoritarian foundations of the present-day social world. This is why the future of the movements lies in becoming intersectional, transcending what Nancy Fraser has called the “merely environmental.” “Addressing the full extent of our general crisis,” writes Fraser, the movement “must connect its ecological diagnosis to other vital concerns – including livelihood insecurity and denial of labour rights; public disinvestment from social reproduction and chronic undervaluation of care-work; ethno-racial- imperial oppression and gender and sex domination; dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of migrants; militarisation, political authoritarianism and police brutality. These concerns are intertwined with and exacerbated by climate change.”

Millions of people determined to prevent total planetary climate collapse – to preserve the Earth as habitat for future generations – are joining the climate justice movement and collectively taking action. This is also true of many artists, more and more of whom have shown over the last few years that they no longer regard climate change merely as “subject matter” for their works.

This exhibition brings together artists who produce their works in dialogue with the climate justice movements in which they consider themselves participants.

Artists: Tiago de Aragão (BR), Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio (US), Noel Douglas (UK), Francisco Huichaqueo (CL), Gilbert Kills Pretty Enemy III (US), Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner & Aka Niviâna (MH/GL), Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (FR), The Natural History Museum (US), Oliver Ressler (AT), Enar de Dios Rodríguez (ES), Theo Prodromidis (GR), Rachel Schragis (US), Seday (FR), Jonas Staal (NL), Tools for Action (HU/NL), No Grandi Navi (IT).

Seminar 1

Curator, artist, and filmmaker Oliver Ressler introduced the exhibition Flood Tide of Resistance that brought together artists who produce their works in dialogue with the climate justice movements in which they consider themselves participants. He discussed the wide range of strategies and approaches that can be observed, such as taking over responsibility for the visual appearance of movements, the creation of tactical tools, designing direct action or the creation of alliances with different groups or organisations.

Oliver Ressler produces installations, projects in public space, and films on economics, democracy, racism, climate breakdown, forms of resistance and social alternatives.

Curated by Lena Johanna Reisner and realised in a former water reservoir in Berlin in 2022, the exhibition Fossil Experience and its accompanying program addressed some of the widely divergent and in part violent realities generated by the use of fossil fuels. The notion of fossil experience pointed, on the one hand, to the experience of acceleration made possible by the widespread availability of cheap energy, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, it referred to the traumas of extraction, exposure, and displacement, which threaten to further escalate as global heating progresses. In her curatorial talk, Lena Johanna Reisner will reflect upon the aesthetic and discursive ambitions of the project, which has brought together important voices from art, poetry, and activism both locally and internationally.

Lena Johanna Reisner is an inter-dependent curator and writer based in Berlin. Her research centers around matters of ecology and natureculture, the social structures that drive climate change, ecosystem degradation, and biodiversity loss, as well as environmental and climate justice as counter-movements to these crises. Past curatorial projects include Fossil Experience at Prater Galerie, Berlin (2022); Antje Majewksi & Paweł Freisler: Apple. An Introduction. (Over and over and once again) at Galerie im Turm, Berlin (2019); Capitalo, Chthulu, and a Much Hotter Compost Pile at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin (2018); and Creatures of the Mud at Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2016).

Following an autoethnographic approach, this presentation by Sophie Goltz will reflect on how to engage with narratives of “Sustainable Development,” especially since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, through cultural production and aesthetic forms. Starting from climate activism (Berlin, 1997), across modalities of curatorial questioning (Wien/Berlin, 2007/8) and research interventions (Singapore/Manila, 2018/19), to artistic engagements with practices of shared worlding (Salzburg/Kassel, 2021/2), this movement suggests significant transformations within the discourse of contemporary art. While engaging a subjective shift in perspectives towards zones of climate survival typically associated with the ‘Global South,’ such a shift is, arguably, a delayed formation relative to both the acceleration of climate emergencies in recent years, which are currently manifest within post-industrial contexts as the militarization of the fossil fuel crisis through the Ukraine war; as well as to the historical discourse of climate activism itself.

Sophie Goltz lives and works in Salzburg and Berlin as a curator, art educator, and writer. In 2020, she was appointed director of the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts. From 2017 to 2020, she taught as an Assistant Professor in the new Museum Studies and Curatorial Practice (MA) program at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. She served as Deputy Director of Research and Academic Education at NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore). From 2013 to 2016, she was the Artistic Director of Stadtkuratorin Hamburg. From 2008 to 2017, she worked as a curator at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), where she also became the Head of Communications and Art Education until 2013. Most recently, Goltz published Culture City. Culture Scape. (co-authored with Ute Meta Bauer and Khim Ong, NUS Press, 2021) and Passages. Art in Public Space Hamburg since 1981 (forthcoming, Spector Books) reflects on her time as Artistic Director of Stadtkuratorin Hamburg.

How can forms of creative play inform the desperate need for more effective political action to stop the threat of climate change? Through a series of projects that Noel Douglas has been involved in this presentation will address this question and show how disobedient play in the urban spaces we inhabit and the art institutions that reflect on the world around us can add to the collective pressure to create a world whose climate is compatible with life for ourselves and future generations.

Noel Douglas is an artist, designer and activist whose work across a range of media and different spaces has been aligned with movements against capitalism and for social justice for over two decades. noeldouglas.net

Seminar 2

The seminar was a parallel event of the Flood Tide of Resistance project, and promoted Cyprus based initiatives that focus on the preservation of Cypriot natural ecosystems, local sustainability issues as well as the revitalisation of local environments and economies.

In the face of the growing biodiversity and climate crisis, Martin Hellicar talked about the environmental solutions BirdLife Cyprus is actively proposing for implementation. BirdLife Cyprus is a conservation organisation with a broad remit in tackling threats to nature across Cyprus. Martin presented the NGO’s work, its philosophy, and approach, and concentrated on marine issues such as the serious and relatively unacknowledged threat of fisheries by-catch caused by trawl fishing nets.

Martin A. Hellicar (1968-2024) was the director of respected bird conservation NGO BirdLife Cyprus, the local partner organisation of BirdLife International. Experience in team and project management, report writing, communications and lobbying in Nicosia & Brussels. He had sound academic background in ecology at BSc (Lancaster Uni.), MRes (York Uni.) and PhD (Uni. of Cyprus), coupled with experience in relevant field work.

Who decides what happens to the sea and the coastline? How do we engage with institutional processes which are inherently unequal? How do we link these processes with our claims and how do we bring in the question of the commons? What’s art have to do with it? This presentation aims to ponder on these questions, using the local context to highlight that the struggle around the appropriation of the marine and coastal commons is ongoing.

Maria Hadjimichael is a scholar – activist and a Senior Associate Scientist at the Cyprus Marine and Maritime Institute. She conducts research in the fields of political ecology (including urban), environmental politics and governance of the Commons. The sea and the coastline is the main focus of her research.

Photographs: Jafra Abu Zoulouf

This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.