REFUGE 2016 - 2021

This is NOT a drill - Produced by Arts House (Melbourne), REFUGE is a multi-year (2016-2021) transdisciplinary project between artists, emergency management professionals, local government, Indigenous and local communities, and academics exploring the role of artists and arts organisations in climate-related disaster preparedness. Central to this work is Isabelle Stenger’s concept of the ‘cosmopolitical’, how de-centering fact-sharing with values-alignment creates more meaningful participation, and how speculative approaches activate the public imagination informing feedback loops of research, policy and creative practice in the REFUGE project. 
Every disaster is different. Every community is different. Therefore, every action in disaster preparedness, response and recovery is context specific. Each year, new questions are explored in depth as we collectively determine the imagined scenario and what we will practice together. 

Photo credit: Emma Byrnes

READY STEADY GO

Imagine the unimaginable. How prepared are you and your community in the event of a major disaster event? What if you call 000 and no one came for 48-72 hours? Ready, Steady, Go is an online practical guide and repository what ifs and what fors in case of emergency. Centred around the ‘emergency kit’, you’ll find fun and not-so-fun facts, questions, prompts, tips and hacks to imagine, prepare and plan in case of emergency.

Photo credit: Emma Byrnes

2130 SLEEPWALKING INTO EXTINCTION

Other Sights in partnership with Sydney Festival and Tribal Warrior presented the future is floating in January, 2020. Canadian and Australian artists were brought together in a two-week-long exchange residency speculating on floating futures. On 22 January 2020, artists Venessa Possum (Dharug Dharawal), Syrus Marcus Ware (Black, from Turtle Island), Claire G. Coleman (Noongar), and Jen Rae (Métis) performed experimental works exploring what it might mean to be at the end of the world.

Speaking to us from the future, Jen Rae performed 2130 Sleepwalking into Extinction, a performance lecture including the broadcasting of Evacuate to the audience as the Tribal Warrior’s Mari Nawi floated by Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s residence Kirribili House.

Photo credit: Rafaela Pandolfini

EXPERIMENTAL TIMES

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THE CENTRE FOR REWORLDING

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FUTURE PROOF SURVIVAL GUIDE

The term ‘future proof’ is a process of anticipating the future and developing methods to minimise the impacts of shocks and stresses in relation to these predicted events (Rich, 2016). It is predominantly used in the fields of architecture and urban planning, medicine, design and technology applied to infrastructure and systems. However, increasingly it has become more common in educational and environmental communications. I suspect this is because it has greater meaning and resonance than discipline specific terms such as ‘adaptation’ and ‘mitigation’. As an artist, I use the term as a conversation starter to disrupt ‘future blindness’[1] and to position audiences to consider impending climate change impacts in more relatable terms. For instance, ‘what am I going to eat if food becomes scarce where I live?’ or the question asked in the Future Proof Survival Guide project, ‘What do you know that you don’t know that you know, that we might all need to know in a disaster?’. [1] Future blindness’ is a term used by Lorenzoni et. al (2007) in ‘Barriers perceived to engaging with climate change among the UK public and their policy implications’ to explain the inability for people to perceive a future beyond 10 years.
Rich, B.D. (2014). The Principles of Future-Proofing: A Broader Understanding of Resiliency in Historic Built Environment. Preservation Education and Research, 7, 31-49.

RATION REWARDS

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Photo credit: Emma Byrnes

DEAR VIVI

The powerful word ‘REMATRIATION’ – a word Indigenous Women of Turtle Island use - is a spiritual way of life that recenters respect and care for Mother Earth and kinship relationships between each other and all life forms.
The climate emergency urgently calls upon us reconcile our colonial histories and decentre dominant narratives of the patriarchy.
How do we do this as mothers, parents and within our kinship networks?

EKO DRUM

The original Ekodrum was created during the final years of the Australian Millennium Drought, regarded as the worst drought since colonial disruption. Low rainfall, water trading, poor land and water management practices of the Murray-Darling basin and population growth led to the construction of six major seawater desalination plants to provide major cities with drinking water.

MAIN ATTRACTION QINGDAO

The polar bear - the world’s largest and fiercest land predator, used to be emblematic of the cold. But today, it is a symbol of warmth. Images of polar bears, such as Arne Naevra’s Polar Meltdown (2007) of a polar bear teetering on a small piece of ice, have been photographed, illustrated, produced, reproduced, misappropriated, circulated and re-circulated-continuously with minimal contest or understanding of the effect.
As the atmosphere inches toward a potential +2 ̊C temperature increase, the polar bear as a ubiquitous icon of climate change has prevailed and now peaked. Main Attraction is a video, a part of an ongoing project, that explores the problematics of selecting this animal from a specific geographic region to represent a global phenomenon, one that is highly complex and human.