Transition Culture

13 Apr 2015

Anne-Marie Culhane: "Art is about magic, and it’s about change".

One of the names that recurs throughout Lucy Neal’s Playing for Time is that of Anne-Marie Culhane.  Anne-Marie is an artist living in Cornwall but just in the process of moving to Devon. Rather than trying myself to describe her and what she does, I’ll leave that to her:

“I make things happen generally. I call myself an artist. But I’m generally exploring the world through my practice, which is very broad and involves a lot of time working with other people, most of the time responding to particular places that I’m working in. Also part of that practice or the process of that practice is creating my own interpretations of place.

I use drawing and I use writing and I use poetry, but that’s often a way to get towards the piece of work which is involving other people, and to get a deeper understanding of the place I’m working in so I can then create something which is very responsive to what I find there.

What is art for you?

Art to me is about changing the way that I, or other people, experience or see the world or their place in the world. It’s about magic, it’s about transformation, it’s about a moment of recognition or wonder. It’s about change. That’s either within me or about a collective sense of change or exploration.

In that, there’s a lot of questioning.  There are a lot of questions for me in art not accepting accepted views on how we might perceive each other, how we might perceive places, how we might look at the world, and it’s a constant ongoing journey into finding different ways of seeing and doing and knowing and being.

I was really interested about how, in your work, you take something that Transition groups would be doing anyway and add an art layer over the top. One example is your Fruit Roots project in Exeter.  A lot of Transition groups might say “let’s go and talk to Exeter University about planting loads of fruit trees”. They might then get the green light and organise a load of people and have a work day and plant loads of fruit trees, but your work adds another layer over the top of that, a richness and a depth and a whole different discipline to that. I wonder if you could just talk about that: what do you bring to something like Fruit Roots and what does it add to that activity?

I’ll talk about the project at Loughborough because that’s a lot more developed. I’ve just started working at Exeter University and I’ve been working at Loughborough University for four years. It’s a long-term project, so that’s a big thing for me, having a longer-term engagement with places, because I’m really interested in seasons and cycles.

I work a lot with food. I think food is really political, really inclusive, and really fundamental, and it’s an interesting and engaging way of drawing people back into contact with the land. A lot of my work  asks “what is that relationship to the land?” And of course that can be viewed in one dimension, so you can say – it’s about getting food, or – it’s about finding resources that I can use.

But actually, if we look at the roots of most culture, contemporary culture, it comes from agriculture, it’s in the word. It comes from how we relate to the land and how we’ve been given abundance or bounty back from the land, if we relate to the land in a way that doesn’t exploit it or diminish it.

There’s a celebratory element to that, a thanksgiving, a deepening of knowledge which I want to draw into all the work that I do around food. It’s not just about fulfilling a need. It’s about how that relates to us in terms of our relationship with the whole ecosystem or Gaia or whatever you want to call the bigger planet that we live on, and then reflecting on that.

You can go and plant a tree and walk off, and you’ve planted a tree. Or you can go and plant a tree and think about what that means in terms of what you might have learnt about how the tree is structured and how the tree works with the other elements, and you might draw metaphors from that. You might also look at the tree as something that connects you to the past and to your ancestors, and also that connects you into the future so you can bring your imagination into the planting of the tree.

It’s also changing the landscape to allow the possibility for biodiversity to develop, so it’s saying from this one act – it’s a bit like John Muir’s principle of everything’s attached to everything else and it’s a really fantastic way, if you work with nature or with food or with trees or with planting and then you can experience the cycles of that, it’s just a fantastic way of drawing people into the richness of what it is to be alive and part of the bigger seasons and bigger cycles and bigger patterns.

To me, that’s where historically a lot of our culture has come from, our songs and our stories and there’s perhaps been a bit of a break with that since people have been coming away from the land and have been less attached to that connection. Our connection to the land now is predominantly one-removed, a leisure thing. We look at it and say isn’t that beautiful, but actually any active relationship with dealing with plants or trees or landscapes and being in them just allows a lot more possibility.

Presumably having that layer in adds a lot more edge and potential for engaging much more widely and in a much more diverse way with the local community.

At Loughborough I backed things together, so I had a series of back-to-back led by an artist.  There’s a route now that is a kilometre long, which has about 160 fruit trees on it. The idea is that that becomes etched into the cultural life of the campus. It’s a route because it makes it easier for people to get it into their heads. The route becomes a locus for walks and talks and performances and seasonal events, and they can be about biodiversity, experiencing nature at different times of day, having feasts or musical performances, and quite a lot of those events I curate or I programme, so they bring different audiences together. That’s a really big thing for me.  I really enjoy bringing different groups of people together.

If there’s an event and somebody who’s comfortable about going to events that connect them to nature, so they come on a walk to do with bats. But then I’ll back something onto that which is a more creative, exploratory event and they come and they feel comfortable within the environment and the people that are there, then they come on and do something else that they might not have done before and learn something about themselves and maybe about being with other people that they wouldn’t have learnt before. So there’s a kid of overview and a design. I’ve done permaculture design, and that’s been a massive influence on how I conceive a project.

What can you tell us about some of the other work in portfolio?

At the moment I am working on a project in Lincolnshire which is Arts Council Research funded with another artist called Ruth Levine, and that’s looking at huge-scale arable farming.  I’m really interested in wheat and I’ve made a series of masks from wheat.  There’s a long story behind all that.

It comes out of a contemporisation and an exploration of rituals around harvest, and celebrating the seed and the continuation of the seed and of cycles, which is what a lot of corn dollies and things made out of straw were represented. But I explored it as a medium and started making these masks that can be worn for events or activism or in different situations.

They’re made for performance. Then, like corn dollies, they’re used once for the performance, so they have a life as an object, I perform in them and then they’re put back in the ground. So they’re destroyed, they’re not kept as objects that have an actual value.

On the back of that, I’m doing a residency on three different farms in Lincolnshire that farm the land in extremely different ways, just because I really want to grapple with my understanding of where our food comes from. Most of my work has concentrated on urban growing and small-scale community gardens and allotments and linking up those kinds of projects.

But I really wanted to go right to the other end of the spectrum, so I’ve gone right to massive scale industrial farming to really see and feel what it’s like to be in those places and to make some working response to that. But using wheat as the thread, so the three farms that we’re working with all grow wheat at different scales, and we’re just going to be making some work in response to that. This will include people being invited to come on the farms and get closer to the places where some of their food comes from, but that’s at a development stage.

I’m also doing a residency at the moment with Tim Lenton at Exeter University. He’s professor of climate change and it’s in the Earth Systems Faculty. We are exploring how to invite people to engage with the concepts around Earth Systems and he’s very influenced by James Lovelock, Gaia theory and how people can explore those concepts in more experiential ways.

This comes out of from what I’m picking up from him and from other research is real frustration in some of the scientific community about how the messages get communicated, and about how that message translates into action. It’s a really fantastic residency. Our work seems to back up to each other really well.

One of the things that’s been really interesting with Lucy Neal’s new book ‘Playing for Time’ is it seems to pull together all kinds of people working sometimes independently to each other or knowing of each other’s work puts them, not necessarily as part of a movement, but driven by that idea of art in service to the wider ecological crisis. I wonder if you had thoughts about why Lucy’s book matters, and what bringing all those things together does?

There’s a really lovely quote by someone you probably have heard of called Dougald Hine from the Dark Mountain Project, he’s a friend of mine.  He said “if someone were to ask me what kind of cause is sufficient to live for in dark times, the best answer I could give would be to take responsibility. Not an impossible, meaningless responsibility for the world in general, but one that is specific and practical and maybe different for each of us”.

That, hopefully, is what Lucy’s book is saying. From the people that you’ve spoken to already, you’re probably getting a whole different range of responses to a kind of common desire to take responsibility and how we all do that. It’s incredibly important that people do that in a way that’s unique to them, rather than copying or following other people.  When you do something, if you’re doing it genuinely from yourself, it’s going to be unique.  There’s something in her book which will show an eclectic range of different ways to take responsibility.

So, for example, with the project that I was involved in called Abundance, we created a handbook for that which can be downloaded free on the internet. It took two years to write because we were really clear that we didn’t want it to be something that people copied. The tone in which it’s written and the style in which it’s written and the language is about saying “this is something that worked for us in a particular circumstance with a particular group of people”.

If you were going to do this project, it’s going to be completely different for you depending on what your interests are or what the landscape’s like, so take it where you want and do with it what you want, this is just our learning and it’s for you to take from that what helps you, but ultimately the project will be shaped by you. As a model, hopefully that set the tone for what I believe, which is that we can all take responsibility but be true to ourselves in what that means for us.

What do you think The Arts bring to Transition, and what does Transition bring to The Arts?

Any culture develops art in forms of celebration, in forms of reflecting what’s going on. You wouldn’t want to have a Transition Town that didn’t ever celebrate anything!  To create something that works as a celebration needs to have some kind of genuine root, a connection to an event or season or something that’s happened. It needs to be considered, it needs to be something that has care and attention to detail, and for me that’s all part of an arts and creative practice.

There may be new songs or music that comes out of the process of how people are working together or the challenges of that, that’s going to generate creative responses, poetry. It’s an integral part of culture. I guess as an artist I can’t imagine living without any of that, it wouldn’t be worth living.

One of the things that defines Transition and community work is the fact that it’s about bringing people together in ways they might not have done before. I guess many people’s mental picture of an artist is somebody working on their own in a garret or in a field with an easel. It’s seen as a solitary practice, but that’s not the case for you, is it?

I do have, or I have had in the past when I could afford it, a space to work. My work takes place on many levels. As I said earlier, when a project’s developing, there’s a lot of time which is given over to thinking, reflecting, maybe drawing, writing, getting to know, listening.  That process for me is creative and that process has to be in part solitary.  Actually that’s not entirely true.

Part of that process is solitary, part will come from dialogue with people spending time in the place that I’m working. And then once there’s a sense of what the project might manifest as, there tends to be a very collaborative element which goes on which could involve a community, which might involve experts in particular fields of knowledge, it may involve people in communities, it might involve other artists, so quite often there’s a sense of an idea that is beyond the capacity of my skills and so I would ask another artist if they want to work with me on that project.

There’s not ever a real sense that I’m working on something in a solitary way or not like I’m putting something out there saying “this is my viewpoint on the world”.  Generally there’s a thank you list as long as your arm at the end of every project that I do, because it’s a collective process and so it’s not about one person putting forward an opinion on something. That’s really important for me.

The places that I work in tell me stuff, feed me, call me in a certain way. It’s a collaboration with a particular place as well as the people that live there. Which is why it’s really important to know that I sometimes don’t transfer from one place to another and will be shaped by that particular place, which comes back to permaculture design. The idea that you spend a lot of time observing and listening in different ways. In permaculture it would be ideally a year at least, so you can really feel how the different rhythms of the place and the people that live there impact and change over time, as well as the elements.

Here is the podcast of the full version of our conversation:

Anne-Marie is just one of over 60 artists who have written sections for Lucy Neal’s forthcoming book ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered” (see cover, right).  The book is now published.  TransitionNetwork.org readers can get £5 off Playing for Time.  Simply enter this discount code at oberonbooks.com – ONPFT2015.  Valid until 31 Dec 2015.

 

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13 Apr 2015

Why should admitting to not having a TV be "dangerous"?

Few articles about the UK’s upcoming election have raised my hackles as much as an article by Stuart Heritage entitled Ed Miliband admitting to not watching TV is a big mistake.  Heritage picks up on a quote in a recent interview with Ed Miliband for the Radio Times in which he said “I tend not to watch the news, actually” and wrote:

“This, combined with hints elsewhere that he isn’t keeping up to date with Game of Thrones, seems to border upon a dangerous admission that he doesn’t watch TV at all”.

Heritage seems to believe that not watching television is a dangerous social trait, which somehow renders people suspicious, untrustworthy, and deeply shifty.  He continues:

“And this, obviously, will not stand. We’ve all met people who don’t watch television, and we’ve all been immediately creeped out by them. It’s a generally accepted fact that the only people worse than people who don’t watch television are people who don’t own televisions, and the only people worse than those people are people who use internet comment sections to tell other people that they don’t own televisions”.

Far from it being a “dangerous admission”, I am proud to shout from the rooftops that I haven’t had a television for 20 years.  Last TV I had was a small black and white portable with a round wire aerial you had to wiggle around that we used to watch ‘Blind Date’ on.  To the best of my knowledge, my televisionlessness is not a fact that has creeped anyone out (do tell me, dear friends, if I have horrifically misread the signals here).  I am proud also to say that my kids grew up without one, and that they, presumably against the odds, managed to grow up as rounded, caring and delightful young men, more than able to make conversation on a range of topics.

One of the key questions that struck me, reading Heritage’s piece, was who actually does watch TV anymore?  Not many people I know.  Everyone under 20 that I know would rather watch stuff on YouTube, and other channel-specific  online players than actual TV.  When I do occasionally get to watch TV, I am staggered by the inane rubbish that passes as popular culture. 

My dearly beloved and I recently had two nights away, staying in a place with a TV.  We were genuinely excited that we could put our feet up and be entertained.  Having last had a telly when there were only 4 channels, having now 50 or so to choose from was sure to yield some indispensible content.  We were rather looking forward to it. 

We leapt about the channels, and in spite of our best efforts found that we ended up watching ‘Storage Wars’, where aggressive pushy North Americans come to blows over the unknown contents of shipping containers.  It was morbidly fascinating for about 5 minutes and then just depressing.  We tried some of the endless property shows where people get shown round houses just slightly out of their price bracket and wonder whether they should risk penury to appease the presenter.  Or pointless celebrity shows with people who are just famous for having been mildly famous once.  And of course the awful panel shows seemingly amusing only to the people on the panels.  Or that really cheap TV where they put cameras on the front of police cars and just edit the footage together (actually I quite enjoy that stuff).  A Golden Age of TV is isn’t.

And as for Heritage’s assertion that not being up to speed with Game of Thrones is an indication of dubious moral character, I would strongly beg to differ.  I sat through (well, actually mostly slept through) the first 3 seasons of Game of Thrones (my wife loved it, oddly), and I hated every misogynistic, abusive, unnecessarily violent minute of it.  I gave up very quickly on the pointless storyline that made no sense, and the characters I didn’t care about (i.e. all of them).  It was like flipping backwards and forwards between the Adult Channel and a Lord of the Rings DVD.  I hated it, although I appreciate that some people like that kind of thing.  Not sure which useful and constructive values it brings into the world other than the idea that you really can’t trust anyone at all under any circumstances. 

Extending Heritage’s logic, everyone in the time presumably before telly must have had an absolutely rotten time.  Endless dreary days sitting around, nothing to talk to each other about, morosely sitting waiting for John Logie Baird (see right) to pull his finger out and invent television so they’d finally have something to stimulate conversation.  No games, no conversation, no imagination, no creativity. God, it must have been dreadful. 

I think what Heritage is trying to say is that not being up to speed with Game of Thrones, Storage Wars and all the other banal stuff that fills the channels somehow means that in any social gathering you will be left without any way of conversing with anyone, with no common ground whatsoever.  That ‘popular culture’ is the only common ground left to us.  That without a basic grounding in Eastenders you will left lonely and friendless.  That Ed Miliband risks being unable to find anything to talk about with voters, ending up like someone shunned by fellow partygoers as some kind of dull social pariah. 

The reality is of course very different.  It has never happened to me that in spite of having no TV I have ever failed to find common ground with people.  When he writes “it’s a generally accepted fact that the only people worse than people who don’t watch television are people who don’t own televisions”, I could just as easily turn that on its head and say that actually I think the degree to which people get out and make the world a better place, give time to meaningful activity in their community, start new projects, learn new skills, grow some food, is inversely proportionate to the amount of time they spend watching TV.  Does a world teetering on the brink of runaway climate change need people watching more, or less TV?  Discuss. 

‘Storage Wars’ or planting out pea seedlings?  The Jeremy Kyle Show or helping organise a street party?  ‘Location, Location, Location’ or draughtbusting your home with friends and neighbours?  It’s an easy choice for me.  Does watching TV better root you in your culture and the time and place you live in, or distance you from it? 

Heritage is so wrong: personally speaking, I would be far more interested in hearing Ed Miliband saying that he is too busy helping projects in his community, spending time with his kids, teaching his kids to whittle sticks, going to see actual live music or comedy, or growing parsley in his raised beds to watch Game of Thrones.  Would he find that he has somehow lost the ability to make conversation with people?  Of course not. 

We chose not to have a TV in our family home because we didn’t want to give a high pressure salesperson for junk food corporations have unrestricted access to our children’s minds.  And because as a family trying to raise our children in a way not driven by consumerism, why would we want those values continuously undermined?  Research about the impacts of television on young children’s minds, and on their imaginations, is truly frightening.  Some psychologists now argue that children under three ought not have any exposure to it at all.  It can lead to less sensitivity to violence and a greater acceptance to the idea that violence is a way to resolve difficulties.  It can hamper educational development, increase risk of obesity and much more.  Kids growing up unable hold their own in a conversation about Storage Wars should really be the least of our concerns. 

Does all this mean I am disconnected from popular culture?  Of course not.  I listen to the radio.  I read the news online.  I, erm, talk to people.  I watch things on iPlayer – I get to watch key things as and when I want to (which isn’t very often).  I watched all of Wolf Hall in the hope that something interesting would happen.  It didn’t.  I watched Sherlock which is brilliant.  I still get to watch Match of the Day, just a couple of days after everyone else.

By making time to actually do things, meet with neighbours, do things with my kids, get involved with Transition stuff, grow my garden, I actually have REAL things to discuss with people.  The irony of the term “reality television” is striking.  I couldn’t name anyone from TOWIE (although sadly I do know what the letters stand for) but I do know the name of most people in my street, and which of them keep chickens.  Which is most real? 

“To demonstrate a blanket lack of television knowledge”, Heritage writes, “is ridiculous”.  But to assume that television knowledge is what makes people interesting and relevant is vacuous and even more ridiculous.  Come on Ed Miliband.  Come out of the TV closet (or should that be cabinet?)!  You don’t watch TV.  That’s fine.  Celebrate it.  Tell us about what you do instead.  Your knowledge of your family, your street, your garden, tell us much more about you than your understanding of Game of Thrones.    

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8 Apr 2015

Mike Thomas on Community Engagement

To open our in depth exploration of Community Engagement, one of the elements of our Support Offer, Transition Network’s Transition Initiative Support Coordinator Mike Thomas sets the scene:

We are all part of a community in one way or another. Often it is our commitment to improving the community we live in that leads to us starting up a Transition group. Involving your community should not be seen as a chore, it is part of the fun of Transition, as you personally get to meet lots of new people, run some great events, empower people to do things for themselves and build a stronger community feeling where you live. 

If Transition was a train then Community Engagement would be the engine and the people in your community would be the passengers and drivers, because ultimately Transition is a community led process. Without support from your local community, it will be very difficult to develop Transition. People in your community will support your projects, provide you with volunteers, come to your events, campaign for you and much, much more. On the other hand an unengaged hostile community can be a major barrier to Transition by criticising what you do, refusing to support you and sometimes actually actively campaign against you. So it is important to have a really meaningful relationship with your community. 

It is crucial to involve the community as early on as possible when developing Transition. Transition should feel owned by the community, but don’t expect this to happen instantly as it can take a long time for Transition to be accepted. Also community engagement should not be seen as a process that you do just at the beginning; it’s a constant ongoing part of Transition. 

When thinking about your community it’s useful to realise that the wider geographical community is often made up of smaller diverse communities. This provides opportunities and challenges for Transition as you will have communities based around geographical areas as well as communities based around identity such as religion and interests, as well as age and disability.  

Each of these communities may need to be engaged in different ways and have different needs, or you may need to think about how you make your engagement activities as accessible as possible. It can be useful to do the big list exercise in the Networking and Partnerships support element to list all the different communities in your area in order to think about some of these issues. 

From our experience there are four main reasons for engaging your community in the Transition process: 

• To raise awareness about Transition and why you are doing it.

• To help people to understand the larger issues that Transition attempts to address, such as climate change, poverty, health

• It provides a practical example of people making a difference in their community, showing that you can make a difference.

• It inspires people to get involved in Transition

The aim of Community Engagement is not to get everyone in the community actively involved in your Transition group, if this happens then great, but it is unlikely [replace with “that’s just never going to happen”]. It is much more about including the community in the Transition journey, so they feel part of it and not outside of it. Many people will not have time or the interest to be fully involved, but they may have time to come to an event or to provide some support to what you are doing. This is much more likely to happen if people are included in what you are doing in your community. 

It is very important to be open about what you are doing and to provide opportunities for people to input and to also feedback. You can involve the community in shaping the Transition vision for your community. There are many ways of doing this such as running an Open Space session, putting on a World Cafe event to get people to actually feed into the Transition vision of the community as well as fun events like swap shops, music events, street parties and picnics. Running small practical projects can be a great way to engage people in a hands on way, things like tree planting, or getting together to clean up a dirty part of the community.

We have put together a list of potential events you could put on, but really you will know best what your community likes so use that knowledge to your advantage when planning events.  Sometimes people don’t have to engage at all, but the fact that you are giving them an opportunity to engage is in itself a powerful thing. People will remember that there was an opportunity to.

Some people in your community will want to be more involved in Transition and as more people come into the project you will need to integrate them. This needs to be thought about in advance, so that people have a good experience of getting involved in Transition. Having an induction process for people is a great way of doing this, someone can meet up with the new person and explain how the groups works, tell them what is going on and what they could get involved. Your group can support them to form their own self-sustaining projects, or involve them in your existing theme groups that work with particular focus such as food, energy, communication or well being (if you have them established).

If you succeed in getting the community to support you then you will find it much easier to achieve your aims, as they will support you, help you and most importantly persuade others to. Don’t forget that community engagement should be fun and bring rewards for both you and your community. So get out there and make some new friends, throw a party, build a great vision for your community together and don’t forget to have very good cake available at all times.

We have focused on the principles behind community engagement here, to give an overview of why community engagement is important. We have a further set of resources in our Community Engagement element that includes: 

• A guide to planning and putting on events

• A guide to running open space events which are really good for community engagement

• A load of suggestions for potential events. 

It is also worth looking at the Network and Partnership Element as well, as this includes The Big List exercise, that you can use to think about the different communities that are in the wider community.

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2 Apr 2015

Isabelle Frémeaux, John Jordan and the rise of the insurrectionary imagination.

Isabelle Frémeaux (IF) and John Jordan (JJ) are the co-founders of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.  It’s a collective which , according to Isabelle, “aims at opening spaces, real or virtual, and bringing artists and activists together to work on and co-create more creative forms of resistance and civil disobedience”.  Both have a long history in campaigns and movements, as well as the arts.  I started by asking them to give us an overview of the kind of work they are involved in.

IF: The work we do has several dimensions. We do a lot of experiments. We like to call what we do experimental projects or pieces. We like the idea of experimenting collectively and accepting that sometimes things might fail, and that by embracing that capacity for failure we can be more creative. I’m by training an academic and a trainer, so I tend to be more into the training dimension of what we do.

We do quite a lot of workshops and trainings, from a day to 2 weeks with artists and activists to really see the synergies between arts and activism and often permaculture, and to see how when these three domains merge, we can create synergies for more creative, more efficient, more productive, more resilient projects that we aim to be projects that are geared towards forms of resistance and civil disobedience.

JJ: What we don’t do is ‘political art’. We’re quite critical of the notion of political art, which for us is art which is about political issues. Occasionally we make films and books but we call those “holidays in representation”. The majority of our work is not making films and books, it’s actually making these experiments which are really critiquing representation; the idea that most artists will make a performance about climate change or a sculptural installation about the loss of biodiversity or a film about climate justice.

What we are very clear about is that actually what we like to do, and what we think is vitally important, is to bring artists and activists together not to show the world but to transform it directly. Not to make images of politics, but to make politics artistic. The reason we work with these two worlds is we think that artists have a lot of creativity, a lot of capacity to think outside the box, a lot of capacity to transform things into poetics, yet often have big egos and not much social engagement.

We think activists – and of course these are generalisations – often have a lot of social critique, capacity to work collectively, but often a failure of imagination. Often the same rituals, the same kinds of demonstrations, the same kinds of tools for transforming society. By bringing these two worlds together, we think we can actually create something different.

We are always embedded in social movements. We spent 5 years as organisers within the Climate Camp and at the same time as organising the camp we were also organising workshops and actions that brought artists and activists together. For example one project was the creation of a thing called the Great Rebel Raft Regatta where we buried a whole load of boats in a forest a week before the Climate Camp happened in Kingsnorth.

The Climate Camp was a self-managed camp developed to create education and alternatives to the climate catastrophe, but it also always had an action at the end of it. This camp at Kingsnorth was actually to stop the building of a new coal fired power station that was taking place next to a power station that already existed. The project that we did, the Great Rebel Raft Regatta basically brought people together into affinity groups. We buried boats a week beforehand in the forest and with the boat was a bottle of rum. We also gave them a treasure map.

We sent people off in their affinity groups to find the buried boat with the treasure map. They would dig up the boat, sleep in the forest overnight, then at 7 o’clock run out of the forest, take their boat onto the river and go and find and block the power station. We got about 150 people, and one boat managed to block a third of the power station and shut a third of it down. For us, it’s really using forms of action that are effective in terms of having an effect on the real world, but also are fun and adventurous. The whole aesthetic of the treasure map and the bottle of rum and the people dressed up as pirates brings a playful element to activism which we think is absolutely fundamental.

You use this term ‘insurrectionary imagination’. Could you just say a little bit more about what you mean by that?

IF: The imagination has the potential and is a fundamental ingredient for insurrection. We wanted to reclaim the offensive and the defiance that is often lacking in art. By calling it a ‘laboratory’ would call on the idea of imagination without having what we feel can be quite a bland understanding and bland connotation of the word ‘imagination’ which is very often seen as something lovely and creative and child-like by actually reclaiming the existence of the defiance of what we wanted to do. This is why we put the word ‘insurrectionary’ in the name of our collective.

JJ: Here’s how we describe it on our website:

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Lab of ii) merges art and life, creativity and resistance, proposition and opposition. Infamous for touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in postcapitalist culture, throwing snowballs at bankers, turning hundreds of abandoned bikes into machines of disobedience and launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station; we treat insurrection as an art and art as a means of preparing for the coming insurrection. The Lab of ii is now in the process of setting up an international utopian art/life school on a Permaculture farm in Brittany.

We don’t actually believe in the separation between artists and activists, and we don’t actually believe in those two terms. We think the notion of art as a separate action in everyday life is a very recent phenomenon within the Western tradition. In most cultures there isn’t a separation of art and everyday life.

We think that activism, this idea that activists have this monopoly on social change, is exactly the same as art having a monopoly on creativity. Actually everyone can and has the capacity and does change the world in some way, all the time. So in a way it’s a kind of dialectical relationship, because we wanted to get rid of both those notions.  For us, creating an insurrection or some kind of revolutionary change (which we think is absolutely necessary), we have to provide the alternatives to capitalism and the climate catastrophe and resist the problems that are happening that we can’t divide.

We see the DNA of social transformation as being two strands. Being the creation of alternatives such as Transition Towns etc, and a resistance, a resistance against the fossil fuel industries, the banks that fund them and so on. One without the other is absolutely pointless, because if we don’t resist then we forget who the enemy is and there’s a massive danger that our projects become simply experiments in laboratories for new forms of green capitalism. If we don’t create the alternatives, then of course we simply have a culture of resistance and a culture that’s simply saying ‘no’ all the time and that isn’t sustainable in terms of mental health and personal sustainability because people just burn out.

Historically we see the division of these two movements being absolutely a problem, and I think the 1970s is a classic example. For us in all our projects, we try to make models of alternative forms of living. So we haven’t flown on a plane for 10 years, despite the fact that we have this international art world career, where most of the people in that world spend their life on aeroplanes. We live ecologically, we live in a yurt in a community where we set up an organic farm, where we put the land into production. For us that’s not necessarily political but that’s what we do normally anyway, and resistance work is always done without hierarchy. We teach consensus at the beginning of all our projects and we try and use permaculture principles to make them happen.

As one example, and this is relevant because our latest project is geared towards the COP 21 in Paris, the UN Climate Summit which is aiming to find a universal agreement on CO2 emissions and adaptation and so on in December this year. In 2009, we were invited by 2 museums to do projects around COP15 in Denmark, in Copenhagen. We were invited by the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen.

We had already spent some time in Copenhagen. We published a book on alternatives called Paths Through Utopias, unfortunately only available in French, Korean and German. And we spent some time in Christiania in Copenhagen, a self-managed community in Copenhagen. We noticed then, during that time, that there were thousands of abandoned bikes all over Copenhagen. So we thought: there’s the material. There’s a permaculture principle, “create no waste”.  We thought let’s see what we can do with the waste of Copenhagen with these abandoned bikes. Let’s transform them into tools of civil disobedience.

Traditionally, civil disobedience in the Gandhian, Thoreau tradition is through the body and we thought what can we do with the body and a bicycle? We proposed this to the two museums, they both agreed. In the project we worked with the Climate Camp as the movement we were working with and the idea was that we would produce prototypes in the Arnolfini Gallery where we would put 50 people together in an open free workshop, we would teach them the basics of permaculture principles and so on, and we would then go – ok, what can we do with these bikes, and design a prototype that we’d then take to Copenhagen to then scale up.

Then we had an interesting moment when both museums said “you can’t do any welding in the museum”. So we thought ok, fine, we’ll get a container outside and we can put an image in it and it’ll be a more public space anyway, so the problem was the solution. Then they had a phone call from the Copenhagen curator and she said “we’ve got a container, but there’s just one little thing. We just talked to the Police in Denmark, and there are certain rules about what is a bicycle.

A bicycle can’t have more than three wheels, it can’t be more than 3 metres long etc etc. If your objects are outside of those rules then you have to write to the police, you have to show them the design and it will take 3 weeks before they come back to you and say you’ve got the right to go on the road. So we said “well that’s very interesting, but we’re doing civil disobedience. We don’t really care whether the bikes are legal or not”. At which point there was this pause, and she was like “so you’re really going to do it…”

We’ve had this experience in the art world a lot. Basically, a lot of the art world pretends to do politics. They have these very radical texts and radical propositions. Maybe she imagined we were going to build these objects and stay in the museum, but for us that’s not the point. The point is actually to take action. Unfortunately the museum then pulled out, but we did find an ex-squat in Copenhagen which is a sort of art and cultural centre called the Candy Factory and produced a project there. About 200 people ended up being involved and took part in the demonstration against the corporate domination of the UN climate talks.

In a way this is a good example of how we think a lot of so-called political art at the moment, which is very trendy. There are endless biennials, museum exhibitions, theatre festivals which use the word ‘political’, ‘radical’, ‘socially engaged’ and so on. Actually, as far as we’re concerned, a lot of it is what we’d call “pictures of politics”.

You recently wrote that “the Left is very scared of using desire and the body and capitalism and the Right are brilliant at it”.  Can you talk us through what the implications of that are, and for Transition as well?

IF: There is a tendency amongst the Left, and of course these are massive generalisations. A tendency to feel that the problem is what people don’t know and that therefore if we can produce more facts or figures or information or reports and that people know what’s going on; if we can show the maths, if we can have better pictures of the number of species that are going extinct or the number of people that are being affected, the figures of unemployment etc, then people will react. There’s this idea that there is a large number of people who do not act because they don’t know.

Whereas we believe that very often the problem is actually what people do know, that they cling on to things and values that have been the structure of their life for a long time, and that what generally makes people move is not rational thinking but much more often desires and fantasies of what could be.

There’s a beautiful quote by an American author called Stephen Duncan that puts it very beautifully, about “the dreams of what could be”. The dreams of what could be are much more located in the emotions, in the body, rather than in the left brain. It’s really important to combine them. It’s not a question of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and saying “stop all reports, stop all research, stop all science”. But to not overly rely on them.

The numbers should be there as backup, to be used as crutches, but what is going to motivate most of us is to be able to experience emotionally and bodily a life that is more just, that is more healthy, that is more relaxed, that is more enjoyable. That’s not something that is purely rational. That is one of the knots that is very complicated to untie, the great lie of neo-liberalism and capitalism which is that more stuff necessarily means a better life. We know that it’s untrue, and yet this is something that is difficult to untie. We will manage to untie that by talking and calling upon people’s values.

At the same time, one of the notions that can be of new learning for projects like Transition Towns is that these emotions are the positive emotions of what could be, but also the negative emotions of what we know is wrong with what is going on. Actually, it is a matter of finding the balance and finding how one can feed the other and not overcome the other. Sometimes there can be a tendency to want to deny and obscure the anger and frustration at the injustice and the destruction.

Actually these emotions need to be acknowledged, and need to be used as fuel for resistance, while the emotions of what could be can be used as a tool to move forward to the alternative. It’s the combination of these two emotions that can make the social movements irresistible and indestructible, and very often the movements are indestructible when they’re only calling upon one of those. So it comes back to this DNA of the yes and the no, but I think it’s very true in the kind of emotions that we call upon in ourselves and in other people.

Permaculture is a big part of your work. Could you say a bit about that? Why is permaculture important to what you do?

IF: It offers a very inspiring and stable framework; a very stable value framework. To be able to work in the way we want, we thought that the three main pillars of permaculture are a very efficient way of making people understand that actually it’s not so complicated. Because the principles are a really good road map for working towards the system, and designs that are productive and resilient and respectful. Personally we feel very touched by the idea that you take nature as your teacher and the more you do that, the less you see nature as this external thing outside of you.

More and more you take it as a tool so that you can reintegrate yourself in nature which we’ve been taught to see as this thing…the fact that we very often talk about the environment is telling. It’s this thing that surrounds us, that obviously we’re not part of. Permaculture is an excellent tool to be able to reintegrate oneself into what is actually our only consistent. So we try to use the principles as frameworks for our experiments, and generally the spirit of permaculture is our inspiration.

JJ: And we have this 10 day training called ‘Think like a Forest’ which we have done 4 or 5 times over the past years. It’s actually very inspired – it’s a training in art, activism and permaculture and it really looks at what does art bring to activism, what does activism bring to art, what does art bring to permaculture, what does permaculture bring to art and activism and so forth, to look at it as a system of three worlds. That training was actually very inspired by a training by Starhawk, who’s an anarcho-feminist witch, very involved in the peace movement in the 80s and the alt to globalisation movement, who has a course called the Earth Activist Training Course which we both attended and was very much a big inspiration for us many, many years ago.

We modelled our course on that in a sense where there’s a permaculture element, but instead of having the witchcraft element, we replaced witchcraft with art. Her thing is earth-based spirituality, activism and permaculture, ours is art, activism and permaculture. And in a sense, art is magic. It’s a form of magic. We think that’s one of its powers, that actually things become true when enough people believe in them. Art is very good at weaving the magic that we need in these moments. 

[This is an edited version of a longer conversation.  You can hear our discussion in full in the podcast below:

John and Isabelle are just two of over 60 artists who have written sections for Lucy Neal’s forthcoming book ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered” (see cover, right).  The book is published at the end of this month.  TransitionNetwork.org readers can get £5 off Playing for Time.  Simply enter this discount code at oberonbooks.com – ONPFT2015.  Valid until 31 Dec 2015.

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1 Apr 2015

New Transition Network office is a load of rubbish

Transition Network is moving offices!  Since the organisation’s inception in 2007, it has been housed at 43 Fore Street in Totnes, in a building once described in the Sunday Telegraph as a “rickety set of rooms”.  The decision to find new premises was taken 3 years ago, but after a fruitless search for new premises, a different solution was suggested.  A small building plot, close to the office, was purchased, and we can announce today that our newly-built office will be our home from the end of this month.

In keeping with our ethics, the new office is entirely built using recycled materials.  It took staff a year to collect enough stuff to build it.  As TN’s Office Manager Jo Coish put it:

“The Board decided on an approach where we used recycled stuff, so anything non-compostable was fine.  Old bottles, plates, traffic cones, old shopping baskets, pallets.  Our builders were up for the challenge.  Oddly, people in the town were more than happy to donate.  One guy turned up with a full skip”. 

The new office is the talk of the town.  It certainly stands out from the traditional Elizabethan architecture for which the town centre is known.  But how is it to work in? TN’s Ben Brangwyn:

“It’s a bit of a squeeze to get us all in, but I like the toilet seat windows.  I’m less convinced though that the stairs, made from old Jeffrey Archer novels, will prove too durable, but it’s all the kind of thing you get if you sign up to Transition”. 

The plans managed to bypass conventional planning controls by being proposed as an art installation rather than as an office building.  This is one of the stories told in Lucy Neal’s excellent new book on Transition and the Arts, ‘Playing for Time‘.  “I think these offices will prove to become iconic”, she said at her recent book launch, “as a living, breathing example of Art inspiring Transition, and Transition inspiring Art.  I also managed to empty all the crap out of my garage”. 

Many people in Transition had already got wind of the project, and it has already inspired several similar efforts.  Transition Black Isle are reportedly close to completing the UK’s first seaweed and superglue office, and Transition Norwich are putting the finishing touches to their REconomy Centre built using a highly innovative system using prefabricated panels made from old ‘Last of the Summer Wine‘ video box sets.

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