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Creative Climate Collective at COP27: #1 Culture, Arts and New Media
A series of project presentations and interviews to the participants selected by What Design Can Do to bring their proposals at COP27, currently taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

(Re)designing a liveable future

This year alone, blistering heat waves, floods and famines have proven that catastrophic climate change is the single greatest challenge of our time. A climate emergency means that it is time for business as usual to halt, for priorities to shift and to recognize obligations and responsibilities to those most affected by the crisis. What Design Can Do believes that creative innovators are fundamental in rethinking and actioning systemic and sustainable transitions and change. However, designers are often not included in policy-making and the implementation of solutions and great ideas are not being put into action due to a system that has been designed draw profit above everything else. It is time to join forces and (re)design a liveable future.

Creative Climate Collective

To tackle the climate crisis designers need international collaboration, creativity and a hands-on mentality. That is why What Design Can Do (WDCD) and Creative Industries Fund NL initiated the Creative Climate Collective.The Creative Climate Collective is a group of 18 creative innovators from Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, the Netherlands and South Africa.

The goal of the Creative Climate Collective at COP27 is to connect to other stakeholders, advocate for design that advances action toward climate justice, exchange knowledge, experiences and ideas and build networks across geographies and disciplines. After all, WDCD’s hope lies in their collective action. In that spirit, they join those around the world who have already declared a climate emergency and invite everyone to join them.

Official graphics of the Creative Climate Collective initiative.

Interviewees

Dirk-Jan Visser is a documentary photographer and educator with a background in arts and journalism. Using walking as a research method, he is focused on the interrelationship between humans and non-human entities and their interest in a landscape. Together with artist Gus Drake they are exploring the interrelationship between humans and the environment with their project “New Horizons”. Through AI the project visualizes and depicts the different interests of non-human life in a landscape based on a visual stakeholder analysis. The result of this analysis should provide decision makers with insights into the importance of non-human life in relation to political and governing agency.

Ghalia Elsrakbi is a design professional and researcher. She co-founded Foundland Collective, an art and design research practice between Cairo and Amsterdam. Ghalia is also co-founder and the Artistic Director of Cairotronica, an Electronic and New Media arts festival in Cairo. Ghalia’s projects explore under-represented political and historical narratives by working with archives via art, design, writing, educational formats, video making and storytelling. Her work aims to critically reflect upon what it means to produce politically engaged work from the position of non-Western artists working between Europe and the Middle East.

Abla elBahrawy is an architect and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice oscillates between architecture, archaeology and art. Her project aims to raise awareness of the contemporary value of papyrus as a cultural product and local material, to question our understanding of authenticity and to form connections and create opportunities for the development of the project. Through this project Abla aims to explore and explain the importance of this papyrus as a medium and craft and how it can contribute to contemporary design.

This landscape image is an amalgamation from 10,000 images of vegetation from the Sinai, treated using machine learning algorithms, combining image to image analysis with high resolution latent diffusion models. This represents an initial sketch showing the artistic and creative potential of the New Horizon Initiative. ©Dirk-Jan Visser, Gus Drake

Interview

KOOZ What role does art or design play in overcoming social and environmental crises?

GHALIA ELSRAKBI Undoubtedly, we can do so much through art and design, from highlighting urgent problems to providing practical and innovative solutions. Creatives also have a crucial role in imagining alternative approaches and speculating future realities that will inspire other practices.

DIRK-JAN VISSER | GUS DRAKE We think three roles can be defined for art and design in overcoming social and environmental crises. First, through practical design solutions that either improve existing products or are brand new, so designs that no one had thought of before. Art and design can also trigger the imagination and make possible solutions insightful and understandable. And thirdly, art and design are the ultimate agents to facilitate conversation to overcome social and environmental crises and empower communities.

The "New Horizon Initiative" provides a visual and concrete vehicle to foster the discussion on climate change by bridging the fields of politics, business and arts. Most of the time we take landscapes for granted, so "New Horizon Initiative" shows imaginative landscapes that set the stage for nature's endless bounty, showing that new visions are possible. It ultimately represents an imagined version of what landscapes should look like when all life is represented, which promotes conversation and facilitates inclusive decision-making.

ABLA elBAHRAWY Raise awareness, change perceptions, criticize, envision and speculate, challenge the system.

Creatives also have a crucial role in imagining alternative approaches and speculating future realities that will inspire other practices.

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KOOZ COP27 will look at adaptive and resilient solutions that foster a greater biodiversity. What is your position towards these global challenges?

GHALIA ELSRAKBI Collective global actions, measures and policies must be implemented to push for effective change. However, I am also aware of the importance of engaging and activating local efforts to support these significant global actions. Artists and designers contribute as innovative mediators between these different entities and communities.

DIRK-JAN VISSER | GUS DRAKE As aforementioned, the "New Horizon Initiative" analyses and visualizes the different interests of non-human life in a landscape; in fact, it is an imaginative and investigative tool to contemplate the relationship between humanity and non-human entities in order to create a sustainable future in light of severe climate change. By showing how non-human entities perceive their environment, the "New Horizons" method provides new insights that foster inclusivity in order to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.

What would a landscape look like if non-human life such as plants, animals, insects were in charge? How does a bee see the landscape? What is the perspective of a tree? Inspired by the Rights of Nature movement, our “New Horizons” method is intended to empower non-human life and give them a voice in the formulation of political and governmental participation. Currently, there are more than 142,500 species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, with more than 40,000 species threatened with extinction. Humanity has become a force of geological proportion. Our reflections towards non-human life needs an urgent paradigmatic shift to combat climate change and its impact.

ABLA elBAHRAWY I think we need to look more on the ground, at the effect top-down decisions have. We need to think in terms of local and grassroot involvement with the environment, nature and the rest of the species on the planet for a more integrated and rooted, therefore, sustainable ecosystem. We, humans, with our individualistic values and money need to fade to the background and realize our position as a main role player in the continuation and enlargement of the environmental problems. These are caused by non-sustainable solutions and the disregard (but even maintenance and creation) of many injustices that are correlated to the environmental crisis and that directly result from executing exclusive, gigantic or superficial solutions that promote exclusivity and serve political and economic interests.

Inspired by the Rights of Nature movement, our “New Horizons” method is intended to empower non-human life and give them a voice in the formulation of political and governmental participation.

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KOOZ Have you tackled or will you tackle any of these issues in your career? If so, how? What was the main scope of your project(s) and what did you achieve? How do you intend to address these issues in the future?

GHALIA ELSRAKBI I mainly tackle these issues as a design educator. I use my design courses as a space to engage students with urgent social and environmental topics. Classrooms become a place where we invite external guests (scientists, environmental activists, farmers, etc.) to share their practic , discuss and collaborate with students on developing new ideas and strategies that will benefit the cause.

DIRK-JAN VISSER | GUS DRAKE Through the role of art and design, there is the possibility to reframe the contemporary consumer landscape and invite new perspectives on humans’ symbiotic relationship with their respective environments. We have been actively working on this topic in our previous projects, for example in the Dutch province of Groningen. Groningen can be seen as the frontier of the Dutch Anthropocene since nowhere in the Netherlands it is more visible as here: rising sea levels, salinization, declining biodiversity and earthquakes through gas mining. We consider Groningen as our foreland, the angle from which we can see where we stand on the ecological scale. Groningen is the perfect place to develop artistic practices around the “Rights of Nature” to think from an ecocentric perspective about the future, aware of the challenges that lie ahead. Along with representatives of different species we will identify various landscape elements that are important to different non-human entities. The photos that we will take of these specie's interests will be the base for a visual stakeholder analysis in order to generate through Artificial Intelligence an ideal landscape image. With this means, our goal is to empower non-human life and give them a voice in the formulation of political and governmental participation and thus contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals.

ABLA elBAHRAWY I look through my work at material objects as case studies and evidence to investigate and question not only the legitimacy and hegemony of historiography and authenticity but also identity. Through this process of tracing the history of objects of material culture, I uncover stories that tackle unbalanced contemporary practices that deplete the environment but also exploit the workers at the base of the production chain, who naturally have all the valuable experience needed for the realization of the product. A close investigation of papyrus along with the presentation of its story of disappearance, rediscovery and modern production aims at bringing us closer to understanding the craft of making the paper and the plant that is endangered. The project raises the question about sustainability: will we continue using paper as we know it today in the future? In the midst of the environmental crisis, and the fast move to virtuality and NFTs, what role does tangible heritage play in the future?

Interviewer
Published
10 Nov 2022
Reading time
12 minutes
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