Emergency ArtLab
Providing prescriptions for your backyard.
By Georgie Meagher
Climate change, sustainability, “greening”, carbon talk – it’s all quite overwhelming. What used to be the unique preserve of lecture theatres, research labs, policy-makers and business executives now seems to be invading the art world from every angle. From In The Balance: Art for a changing world at the MCA to the series of Tipping Point ‘Art and Climate Change’ conferences held in cultural institutions around Australia (including Performance Space in Sydney) art is being seen as a viable source of new solutions for old environmental problems.
At the front of the pack is ArtLab, a long-term project in which a series of artists, designers and creatives have come together to form a “rapid response team of ecological health workers”. Over two years, the team will conduct five labs – in Brisbane, Sydney, New Zealand, New York and Seoul – each considering a specific local issue. The international, cross-disciplinary team includes media artist Keith Armstrong (QUT), artist/designer Natalie Jeremijenko (NYU), filmmaker James Muller, design theorist Tony Fry and sound artist Leah Barclay, with communications artist/writer Ilka Blue Nelson, roboticist/puppeteer Kirsty Boyle and environmental engineer/media artist Tega Brain. Their objective is local outcomes for global concerns.
Right now the ArtLab team is in Sydney, where a threat to the local flying fox community has highlighted the greater issue of how humans can coexist with nature in an urban environment. Responding to concerns about the impact of flying fox behaviour on the trees, the Federal Government approved a relocation of the Grey Headed Flying Fox colony that had made the Sydney Botanic Gardens its home – without thinking about the impact this would have on the animals, or the ecological fall-out for the rest of their ecosystem. And did I mention they’re endangered?
The bat/human issue highlights what the group is really getting at – the inextricable link between environmental and cultural concerns. The ecological impact is second to the cultural assumption that the trees at the Botanic Gardens are more important than any other part of it. Armstrong is quick to point out, however, that – besides their inherent value – the 22,000 colony of bats is just as big of an attraction as the trees, for the thousands of people who visit the Botanic Gardens every year.
In its quest to find solutions to the bat/human problem, Sydney’s ArtLab – the second in the series, and titled ‘Remnant/Emegency’ – has adopted the methodology of Natalie Jeremijenko’s New York-based environmental health clinic: X-Clinic. The X-Clinic is for ‘ImPatients’ – people who are tired of waiting for politicians to address local environmental health issues. You take along a concern, and are given a prescription – perhaps instructions on how to orchestrate some kind of urban intervention, for example. The prescriptions encourage a pay-it-forward mentality of conversation and social engagement. (One of the more bizarre examples included keeping a tadpole named after a local water board bureaucrat and taking it for walks in a purpose-built rolling tank.)
As part of the Remant/Emergency ArtLab, the team have spent two weeks meeting with bat experts, Botanic Gardens staff, bush regeneration specialists, architects and urban planners – all in an attempt to find participatory projects that allow Sydneysiders to improve the local environment. In terms of the immediate bat/human dilemma, the group are reimagining different models for a future Botanic Gardens, that would be designed not just with humans in mind, but also non-humans like the flying fox community.
Armstrong says of the team, “We’re provocateurs, talking about possibilities”. The paralysis that often comes with the crisis of “What to do?!” is gently eroded by this speculative project. It’s almost like they are screaming back “We don’t know!” – but with more excitement than exasperation.
What: Remnant/Emergency launch /
X exhibition opening (Natalie Jeremijenko)
When: Tuesday November 30 from 6-8pm. Remnant/Emergency artist floortalk from 5pm. X continues until Dec 11.
Where: UTS Gallery, Level 4, 702 Harris Street, Ultimo
More: remnantartlab.com / environmentalhealthclinic.net
