Catalyst: reimagining sustainability with and through fine art

Abstract

ABSTRACT. How might we begin to explore the concept of the "sustainable city" in a world often characterized as dynamic, fluid, and contested? Debates about the sustainable city are too often dominated by a technological discourse conducted among professional experts, but this technocratic framing is open to challenge. For some critics, sustainability is a meaningless notion, yet for others its semantic pliability opens up discursive spaces through which to explore interconnections across time, space, and scale. Thus, while enacting sustainability in policy and practice is an arduous task, we can productively ask how cultural imaginations might be stirred and shaken to make sustainability accessible to a wider public who might join the conversation. What role, we ask, can and should the arts play in wider debates about sustainability in the city today? We explore a coproduced artwork in the northeast of England in order to explain how practice-led research methods were put into dialogue with the social sciences to activate new perspectives on the politics, aesthetics, and practices of sustainability. The case is presented to argue that creative material experimentations can be used as an active research inquiry through which ideas can be tested without knowing predefined means or ends. The case shows how such creativity acts as a catalyst to engage a heterogeneous mix of actors in the redefinition of urban spaces, juxtaposing past and present, with the ephemeral and the (seemingly) durable.Key Words: coproduction; interdisciplinarity; practice-led research; sustainability; urban INTRODUCTIONWe need, in short, to examine the way in which new materialities influence the cultural constructions we place on the environment (Redclift 2005:225).

Art and higher education for environmental sustainability: a matter of emergence?

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Do music festival communities address environmental sustainability and how? A Scottish case study

“…Research has shown that creative practices can help to fill the ‘imagination gap’ that exists in current approaches to communicating environmental sustainability (Nurmis 2016; Connelly et al . 2016; Galafassi et al . 2018; Tyszczuk and Smith 2018).…”

Exploring integrated ArtScience experiences to foster nature connectedness through head, heart and hand

“…To date, sustainability research has often focused exclusively on harnessing people's cognitive understanding, people's place in nature and the importance of nature in people's daily lives, rather than concomitantly exploring the personal, experiential, affective and emotional affinity people share with the natural world (Connelly et al, 2016; Jacobson et al, 2007; Lumber et al, 2017). While important, an information‐driven approach on its own is unlikely to engage people’s emotions or affective domain of learning and cultivate feelings of interconnectedness with nature (Connelly et al, 2016; Friedman, 2013). Integrating the arts at this juncture allows for a (re)imagining of how society's aesthetic engagement and re‐enchantment with nature can transpire (Vasko, 2016).…”