ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES (MANIFESTO)
ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES (MANIFESTO) @Venice Climate camp 2022
A project by: Sale Docks and The Institute Of Radical Imagination
Program
Venice Climate Camp, Lido di Venezia: September 9, 2022, h. 14.00
Workshop/Plenary Assembly: Art For Radical Ecologies (Manifesto)
The Venice Climate Camp 2022 is an opportunity to bring together art and performing arts workers to initiate a discussion that will lead to the collective writing of a manifesto on the role of art in the struggle for climate justice and in the creation of new ecologies (which take into account the intersection of environmental and social facts). If the pandemic had already dramatically underlined the consequences of extractivist anthropization, the war in Ukraine (in addition to its immediate death toll) is a manifestation of what Andreas Malm has called 'fossil fascism', a mix of authoritarianism and fossil fuels that weakens the already insufficient measures to combat global warming. The scarcity of Russian gas has brought coal back into vogue and, in Italy, the construction of new regasifiers is on the agenda. The decision to organize the workshop at the Venice Climate Camp (promoted by Rise Up For Climate Justice and Fridays For Future) reflects our belief in the importance of freeing art from the capture of institutional circuits. We want to experience, as participants in social movements, aesthetic-political concatenations that interpret creativity as a radical character of the social and not as a commodity. The participants also share the conviction that the fight for climate justice is, necessarily, a fight against and beyond extractive capitalism, even in its green version (actually an attempt to turn the crisis into new accumulation).
The workshop will be a moment of discussion based on the practices of the invited guests, who convoke some central themes: the use of art as a method of inquiry and visualization in the climate crisis; the production of activist art forms that look at the performativity of direct action; art as a ground for radical imagination in designing new ecologies that reshape the relationship between human and non-human; art as an archive of movement practices and so on.
During Camp days, in addition to the main meeting moment, there will be a screening of films by Oliver Ressler and two workshops by Paolo Cirio and Andreco.
First participants: Sale Docks, Institute Of Radical Imagination, Caracol Olol Jackson, Rise Up For Climate Justice, Andreco, Annaclara Basilicò, Paolo Cirio, Terike Haapoja, Rosa Jijon, Francesco Martone, Teresa Masini, Oliver Ressler, Federica Timeto
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September 8, h. 21.00
Oliver Ressler: Screening
The director will attend
Everything‘s coming together while everything‘s falling apart: Venice Climate Camp
A film by Oliver Ressler, 4K, 21 Min., 2020
This film celebrates the Venice Climate Camp of September 2019. Leaving the camp on the Lido at dawn, 200 activists forced their way into the Venice Film Festival enclosure, where they occupied the red carpet for nine hours. Making full use of the international media presence, the activists laid claim to the world attention focused on the day's prize giving ceremony, turning it to the agenda of the climate movement. The Venice Film Festival as such was not the target of the blockade, but the activists took a sharply critical position on its neglect of an important opportunity to call publicly for climate justice.
The path is never the same
A film by Oliver Ressler, 4K, 27 min., 2022
This film focuses on two complex, self-organizing systems: a forest and an occupation. The Hambacher Forest near Cologne (DE) has become the scene of Europe’s longest tree-top occupation. Since 2012, about 200 people have been living in this forest to prevent its clearing by the energy company RWE, which wants to extract lignite. The film reflects on the forest as a living space and on the need to confront the climate vandalism perpetrated in the name of “economic activity”. The people here organize non-hierarchically, standing – as one activist puts it in the film – “just like the trees, next to each other, on the same level”.
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September 9, 2022, h. 10.00-12.00
Paolo Cirio: Workshop at Venice Climate Camp
Looking at the data about greenhouse emissions by individual countries and their Carbon Majors, Paolo Cirio will propose conceptual and provocative art interventions to address the Venice Climate Debt paid directly by tourists.
Starting from the introduction of ticketing and entry fees for tourists visiting Venice, the concept can be push forward with creating a new reality in which the entry fee can be proportional to the amount of greenhouse gases emissions of the tourist's country origin.
During the workshop Paolo Cirio will discuss emissions data, attribution science, carbon tax and credits, global climate agreements, and how these can be material for works of investigative and interventionist art. Furthermore, the workshop will be a chance to debate on policies on tourist tax, the controversial entrance of a city with tickets, and generally overturism globally.
The workshop will culminate with a small intervention with proposing the entrance fee directly to the tourists in Venice.
In 2021, Paolo Cirio established an utopian international Climate Tribunal to accuse the major 100 fossil fuel firms with data, graphs, and documents that he transformed in artworks.
Through creative forms of journalism and activism for public policies, Paolo Cirio investigates and intervenes into the social, economic, and cultural issues of contemporary society. His work researches the social fields impacted by technology, geopolitics, and economics in order to address human rights, inequality, justice, and democracy.
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Reharsals: September 9, h. 12-14; September 10, 10-12.
Performance: September 10 , h. 17.00
Andreco: Super Symbiont.
Collective and itinerant performing practice.
Andreco – www.andreco.org – www.climateartproject.com
An intensive workshop to create a Super-Symbiont, a collective body on the move. We will experiment performing practices in the public space; overlapping artistic, scientific, political and ecological visions we will create trans-disciplinary icons to feed new imaginaries for climate and social justice.
The goal of the workshop is to compose a choreography for the Climate parade, a mutant and dreamy, elusive and indefinable block, in which everyone can participate.
If Green Capitalism appropriates ecological definitions, chewing them and emptying them of meaning, we will constantly mutate, finding new language and practices to maintain the radicality of the contents and instances.
The Super-Symbiot is a mutant and iridescent organism able to cure as marigolds on sunburn or ferns on metal-polluted soils. The symbiote is a new Best Practice, a Climate Action to create new radical imaginaries.