18.10.2018 - 18.11.2018
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CLIMATE AS ARTIFACT
KLIMAAT ALS MENSENWERK
... is it an exhibition, a public program, a festival, a new collective.....?
Climate as Artifact is an exhibition program that targets at how redefining climate as a cultural artifact through artistic practice helps us to break free from conventional attitudes in order to establish new and essential perspectives. Climate as Artifact will bring together artists, designers, scientists and society to rethink our perceptions of culture and nature.
Now that people all around the world are slowly starting to rethink how people and planet are interrelated, new questions arise around the understanding of time and the perception of place. It’s not merely a technical or political challenge that we are facing. It’s a cultural one.
Our expanding cities have been named people’s largest artifact. But it was the Dutch landscape architect and emeritus professor Dirk Sijmons, who recently wondered whether by now the climate might be our biggest artifact. Defining people as nature and the climate as an artifact could just be a philosophical or linguistic exercise. It is what brought us to the question ‘Who is nature?’
Redefining these concepts through art could be an essential task though, for this requires an intensive and constructive use of people’s sensitivity and imagination. Visual narratives and artistic actions that invite the public to go outside their ‘comfort zones’ and perceive the world with a critical but open mind, could cause these valuable sparks that make a lasting impression. It helps us to bring abstract concepts or things that are seemingly beyond our control, closer to ourselves.
Climate is a hyper object. We know that it exists, but we can’t comprehend it, as the British philosopher Timothy Morton stated. Materializing ideas through art and redefining climate as an artifact, as something we make, helps to increase our sensitivity and to see connections within the natural world and between our actions and our environment.
January 2006 artists collective Satellietgroep kicked off with the question To whom belongs the sea?
To celebrate over 12 years of pioneering and prepare for an unforseen and challenging future, in January 2018 we started to rethink our perceptions of culture and nature with the question Who is nature?
During the first half of this year we tested & experimented with ongoing artistic fieldwork, involving experts and audiences, to develop new insights and pose different questions.
Convinced that the arts can create an other 'Golden Spike' by posing different questions, Satellietgroep challenged the participating artists and designers to step out of their comfort zones. We warmly invite our guests and visitors to join in this venture. Faced with current and future challenges, the time-depht of landscapes and of ourselves, we need a new visual idiom, other collaborations and multi-facetted perspectives.
Are you nature?
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