Climate Change Art

Helen Moore-Parkhouse: Hi, everybody! I’m going to just let you know that we’ll start momentarily, and I’m going to turn it over to my friend Toyin to welcome us when we think everybody’s in from the waiting room. 

Thanks. 

Toyin Oladele: Thanks, Helen. Hi everyone, excited for another Town Hall session with the community. Thank you so much for joining us. 

It’s Toyin speaking, and I am so glad to, you know, and excited for this session, because I have amazing friends in the house that we’re going to be chatting with very soon. But before I go ahead I would always appreciate the opportunity that I’ve been given to live, work and play on this land, and to also say that we all here together in this space, with all of you are in that space where we’ve been able to do the work that we do, have the freedom, have the space, have the consciousness to live, to play, to work and to be excited on this land, and in the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, we work and we play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, the Tsuut’ina, the Stoney Nakoda, Chiniki, Bearspaw, Goodstoney and the Métis Government District 5 and 6, and all the people who make Calgary their home in this Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta. It’s such a privilege to do what I do and what we all do, and so I’m happy that we’re gathered here today 

Before we go on, I’d like to quickly say that thank you for sticking with us. We’ve had fun sessions in this afternoon period. I think we’ve had all our sessions between 12 and 2pm, and you’ve, you know, stuck with us. We’ve been through different topics, I was just looking at it before this session started, and I was like, Whoa! We’ve covered a whole lot of things from, you know, disability advocacy, taking care of ourselves as artists, we’ve imagined the unimaginable with newcomers and immigrants, and we’ve discussed artists as being changemakers in the community.  We’ve also looked at. You know what different organizations are doing in their own right in bringing equity into their space. And we’ve, you know, gone through the very fun stuff, and the not so fun, critical, you know, challenging things that kind of like challenged our thoughts. So I’m happy that we still have all of you, and you’re still, you still think you should join us. So that is great.  

Today we’re going into a topic that I’m particularly interested in learning a lot from, and in just listening to very knowledgeable people that I’m privileged to know, and I have worked with in different capacity in the community. I would, you know, leave them to do their thing and tell us a lot about their work, but it’s going to be about climate change and what that means, what they’ve done in Calgary and in other places, and the education that they’ll be providing for us today. But it’s not just about the education, it’s also about what this means for us as a community and where we’re going. So I’ll give it over to Ashley. Thank you for joining us and Mark and Elsha. Ashley over to you. Final thoughts from Toyin. Peace out, thank you. 

Ashley Bodiguel: Thank you, Toyin. Hello, everybody! Thank you to everybody who’s joining us live, and to those in the future who’ll be watching this recording. I really want to thank you, Toyin and Calgary Arts Development for this opportunity. I think I speak for the panelists as well when I say we really appreciate that space was made for this conversation and I really appreciate how you’ve supported us so well in the planning for this, because it is, it’s been really exciting and fun to think about. So thank you very much everybody. 

Our plan today is to discuss our questions and ideas. We’re going to share some resources that will help us learn and connect with each other, hopefully we can find ways to connect with each other outside of this session afterwards as well, and to build some confidence as a community, to be able to speak up and out and to each other more. 

In the planning of this I have noticed a little bit of tentativeness amongst my peers when it comes to discussing climate change. I often hear the response: I’m not an expert, though, and I gotta say in my decades of working in the arts. It’s the only time I’ve ever heard artists say, oh, I don’t need an audience, I’m a little worried about sharing on that. It seems to be a really scary topic. And yet here we all are. So thank you for being here. 

I recently attended this really great session hosted by Women in Climate on the topic of AI. They were sharing some informed opinions, they were doing some Q&A, there were breakout sessions, they also had some resources that they compiled collectively as a takeaway, and as someone who really loves a solid takeaway. I thought that that session was great, and it reinforced for me the value of conversations like that, where you’ll certainly learn more about what’s out there. At the very least, you’ll hear in this session other things you might not have known were happening before, and it might even add a feeling of galvanizing, just simply by listening to others talking about the same topics you’re thinking about. 

So at the end of the session, please don’t be afraid to reach out to others who are interested in talking more, because I think that having coffees and talking with each other is part of the work. 

We’ll have about an hour of storytelling, and then we’re going to go into about a 7-ish minute bio break. We’ll see if there’s, if we need a bit more time for that or not, but we’ll take a few minutes for a break partway through, and then we’ll do another hour where we’re going to be getting into some big questions.  

Throughout it all, the live audience here with us today can chat by posting questions in the chat as they come up for you. You can post them in at any time, and Angèle, our AV facilitator, we’re going to call her our aviator, the aviator will be monitoring the chat. So if you have questions for us, or if you’re having thoughts you’d like to share with the group, use that and Angèle is going to bring those to our attention. At some point, if we need to maybe get a bit more information from you about what you’ve put into the chat. We might invite you to unmute your mic and speak. If you’re not comfortable with that, no problem. You can tell us to take a flying leap. You prefer to chat. No problem. All styles of participation are absolutely welcome. And if you do happen to unmute and we’re picking up accidental background noise, for example, Angèle is there to help us mute you, so don’t take it personally if you get muted.  

Finally, quick word about making mistakes. People, we people, we people always make mistakes. And here in this conversation they are completely welcome. Whether you say something that you realize you’d like to clarify, or somebody else says something that you want to get more clarity on. I would invite you to reflect, re-jig and rather than assume intentions, ask. And that’s how we’re going to take care of each other through this conversation, with some respect and politeness, and some space to make mistakes, because conversations without mistakes, perfect conversations, are kind of boring anyways. So thank you very much for being here and being willing to make some mistakes if they happen. 

Okay, here we go. 

I am Ashley Bodiguel, I don’t know how many of you in this conversation. I know right now, I do know there’s quite a few in this network within the area that we work in. I’m in Calgary/Mohkinsstsis where we are many of us in oh, thank you for that slide, Angèle, we’re always in conversation with each other, or occasionally in conversation with each other. There’s a few people whose name, people know people. This is a network, and it expands outside of this region as well, it expands to our colleagues in Ottawa, I think we have one or two in Ottawa today feel free to drop into the chat where you’re coming from, if you want to let us know. There might be people from BC, there might be people from the United States, and I’m really glad that we’re all here together.  

So I’m a collaborator who focuses on connectedness and health and justice, and my work that I do every day, whether it’s at the Pembina Institute, which is a think tank for sustainable energy, or through works of art, tends to meet at a crossroads of art and science and craft, it’s how I relate to the world. Not as a scientist, I’m not claiming that, but I love finding those intersections between science and art. 

So if I could share a little bit of my work as it relates to the art and the topic of climate change, I would say it started around 2018 with a show that was very unique to me, and it was the brainchild of my friend and colleague, Ben Israel who dreamed up this idea for a satire guerrilla art piece which ended up being written by Ellen Close, and it was dramaturged by Vicky Stroich, and it’s called Changes in the Air. It was presented in 2018 at the Alberta Climate Summit, it was also presented at the 2018 Alberta Museum Association’s Annual Conference, and then later, in non-guerrilla fashion, it was presented for a Calgary Arts Development audience, and we can go to a slide on that Angèle. 

Thank you. 

So the way this piece looked was very corporate, very official, very suit and tie. You can see we had hundreds of people in a room who represented different levels of government, Indigenous communities, academia, and they were not expecting a satire to appear on the stage, but it did, and it was meant to bring together everybody in the room. It wasn’t meant to make fun of anybody, it was meant to poke fun at all of our collective experiences. 

Angèle, you can go to the next slide on that.  

This was Ben, and I just love this photo because you can see in his face a mix of trepidation, engagement, amusement. We had no idea how it was going to be received. We had hopes, but in the end it was such a relief to get through it, and nobody died. 

So that was my first foray into this idea of climate art for me, it led to connecting to this network that I was describing these folks in and around where I live, working on the issue of climate in the arts.  

That then led to the initiation of a series of work that’s been taken on by downstage theatre. And that’s how I met Elsha. It’s an annual engagement in Climate Change Theatre Action which is a global initiative started by Chantal Bilodeau, who lives in New York. It takes place every two years as part of a global cycle of climate-based artwork.  

You can actually go to the next slide, Angèle. Thank you.  

It’s an important community event that now partners with the Immigrant Council for Arts and Innovation, which is how I met Toyin, and it continues in its efforts to engage with new audiences. So every two years Downstage Theatre has this event as part of the bigger global event happening, and is, and we’re looking for ways to engage different pieces of our communities. How do we bring more people into the room, both as makers, but also as collaborators and audience. 

Next slide, please.  

And then last November. I co-created a piece with, oh, and I would also call it a work in progress with the wild and wacky interdisciplinary artist, Barbara England. We called it Passion of the Crisis. Mark came in as a collaborator as well, and we had a pretty interesting time. It was a one-night kind of a thing as part of the Fluid Festival in 2024, and there we were exploring the ideas of guilt, this collective guilt we carry about maybe we don’t recycle enough. So we tried to introduce humour into our work, and that was something that’s always been a value for me is, how do I bring humour to the work. 

Right, so it was my work with Downstage Theatre, co-curating a stage reading for the Climate Change Theatre Action event that led to bigger conversations for me, and have sort of continued to grow from there. And I just am very thankful for this opportunity today to connect and share with you all. So, thank you. That’s where I’m coming from. 

Next, I’d like to introduce Elsha Yeyesuswork who is a multidisciplinary artist and administrator, joining us from Mohkinsstsis/Calgary, Alberta. 

Elsha holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and uses a systems-focused approach in her creative practice and community building work. Originally from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Elsha’s personal and professional outlook is shaped by her lived experience as a diasporic Black woman. 

As a ceramicist she draws inspiration from ancestral creation methods exploring the intersection of cultural heritage and contemporary expression, and Elsha is going to be speaking more to this about her personal experiences and work. She has previously served as community programs director at Downstage Theatre, which is where we met, and as research and program development lead at M:ST Performance Art Society where she championed initiatives that platformed emerging artists and BIPOC communities.  

In her role as editor-in-chief of ISSAY! Magazine. Elsha has worked to amplify global voices from across North America, Europe and Asia. And I would just say, Elsha, as somebody who’s worked with you, it’s a pleasure to work with you. You take care of the people around you, and you’re so thoughtful about your work and the people who we’re going to be interacting with. And I’m really happy that you’re here with us today.  

So if I could hand it over to you to speak about your experience with climate change and art for a while it would be great. End of thought, Ashley. 

Elsha Yeyesuswork: Thank you, Ashley, that is so sweet. This is Elsha speaking. I’m going to attempt to do half as a coherent job to try and get through a little bit of my experience. I’m definitely one of those people who would consider myself not an expert, but when Ashley reached out to me to be on this panel, I just really enjoy talking to Ashley and working with Ashley and Mark, and I also have somewhat never really connected on this topic, even though it’s such a you know place of expertise that he holds, though we have worked together through our work at Downstage and Swallow-a-Bicycle. So, it feels nice to just continue to be in community with these two artists and with all of you here today. I see that there’s 32 people in this call, I don’t see anyone on the screen outside of Ashley, Mark and our wonderful interpreter. So, this feels a little intimate which I like. But anyways, yeah, I’m Elsha. It’s nice to meet you all. 

I guess, to start a little bit, maybe we go chronologically. I think my sort of introduction to climate change and climate activism, climate work beyond, just, you know, an everyday presence in our lives, and I think that’s present in our news cycle, happened while I was still at school, like my bio says, I come from an international relations background from the U of C, and towards the tail-end of my degree I was involved in a symposium about Canada’s melting Arctic waves, and what that represents for us and our sovereignty and our safety as a people, the safety of the people who inhabit the Arctic, the largely Indigenous populations that live there, and it was the first time that I really had a sort of an opportunity to think in depth about what this means here and now, in my life, in the lives of the people around me and in this land that feels really, really large and almost too large for me to understand, you know.  

So from there I graduated, became the community programs director at Downstage and continued working in arts admin for quite some time and at Downstage, like Ashley mentioned, I was the community programs director, as part of that portfolio of work I met Ashley and I met Toyin and got connected to ICAI through Climate Change Theatre Action in our biannual program that we run. 

It was sort of my job to figure out how these different moving parts could come and work together. It was really important for me to create a program that was sustainable, sustainable beyond just sort of our climate understanding of that word, but something that could represent an opportunity that folks in our community could rely on year after year, specifically newcomers, so attaching a program for newcomer artists to gain employment opportunities with Climate Change Theatre Action, which already works on this two-year cycle, felt sort of like the natural choice, and through that work I learned more about Ashley, Pembina Institute really became invested in the sort of academic side of this, of this topic from an artistic lens, the book by David Wallace Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, that word kicks my ass every time, was a real like a-ha! moment for me in 2021, as we were crafting the first iteration of Climate Change Theatre Action at Downstage, thinking about that show, working with the different artists, connecting with Ashley and Vicky Stroich and reading that book in tandem, and thinking about how we take these topics that are really large, and so numbers dense, and make them human enough through storytelling beyond language, beyond, you know, borders with artists across different diasporas. It was a really moving experience for me personally, and something that I feel really lucky to have been able to do more than once, and something that I hope I get to see at Downstage year after year with ICAI. 

So yeah, after I left Downstage, I joined M:ST Performance Arts Society… 

Angèle: Might have just lost the connection… 

Elsha: Hello. 

Mark Hopkins (he/him): I think you’re back now. We heard you joined M:ST Society. 

Elsha: It’s just been a lot of… can you guys. 

Toyin: Yes. 

Elsha: And can anybody hear me? 

Ashley: We can hear you. It’s breaking up. Love that Wi-fi. Okay, well, how about this? While Elsha gets the sound sorted, and hopefully Elsha is able to jump in, even if we lose video, to keep the audio, how about we… Mark? Oh, is Elsha back? 

Elsha: I just changed my Wi-fi settings and hotspotting, and I’m hoping this will be more consistent. 

Ashley: I won’t jump ahead then, keep going. 

Elsha: Oh, God, count on Zoom! Count on me and Zoom, we’re always beefing. I don’t know where I left off, I think something about M:ST might be the last thing you heard. Yeah. M:ST, we developed a lot of really interesting programming that I think I was saying doesn’t, didn’t necessarily align directly with Climate Change Action initiatives the way that my work at Downstage did, but that work continued to inform my perspective at all of the programming we did with things like developing ISSAY! Mag, we worked really hard to make sure that we were working with artists, collaborators, contractors who championed these same values. So we exclusively work with a printer called Hemlock, who is forestry, BC. Forestry… 

Ashley: Okay, we have another freeze. Ashley here, I’m just going to send a note to Elsha in case that helps. But, Mark, I’d like to go on to your bio if we could, if that’s okay and definitely circle back to Elsha’s experience, story, yeah, throwing it to Mark, perfect. Okay? 

So Mark is the co-artistic director of Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre which generates productive discomfort through art making, and he’s an associate with human venture leadership which seeks to build our collective capacities to reduce ignorance, error, waste, suffering, and injustice. That’s a lot, Mark 

Mark is on the Board of the Kawalease Arab Canadian Theatre. Did I say that right? Okay, great. He’s an ambassador of the Energy Futures Lab and founded We Should Know Each Other, a community-bridging initiative. Mark was a proud contributor to a chapter in Reimagine Fire, the Future of Energy, which is an anthology edited by Eveline Kolijn, and published in 2023. 

Take it away, Mark. 

Mark: Can do, thanks, Ashley. This is Mark speaking, and Elsha, if your Wi-fi stabilizes and you want to jump back in at any time, let me know. But yeah, I can take over screen sharing momentarily, if that’s okay. 

Really honoured to be here, thanks so much to Ashley for inviting me and CADA for hosting this. I think we talked about it in one of the pre-sessions how the initial feeling was imposter syndrome, which I think is not entirely uncommon in this area. I think, for me, at least, it’s because the crisis we are facing is so overwhelming and so large. And you know, it’s something that that occupies my thoughts and my artistic practice a lot. But any effort I make feels so small in face of the challenge that we’re facing. But I think that’s true, for, like many, many of us, so I’m really honoured to have this space to sort of unpack those feelings and talk about what we can do.  

But yeah, I want to talk a little bit about some of the stuff I am doing, so, as Ashley very kindly mentioned, I am one of the co-artistic directors of Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre, and of course my screen share doesn’t seem to be working, which is amazing. I am one of the core artistic directors alongside my wonderful colleagues Mpoe Mogale and Kris Vanesa Teo Xin-En, and I have a picture of us that I want to be sharing, and it’s not working, anyway. 

And within Swallow-a-Bicycle we’ve done a few things that sort of relate to this topic. in 2023 we premiered a show called Clothing, and Clothing is a participatory performance that tries to capture some aspects of the clothing and fashion supply chain, and the way it does that is by inviting the audience members, it’s participatory, audience members have to do things in the show, there aren’t really actors in the traditional sense. And over the course of the experience, we try to invite the audience to really like feel and experience different parts of this massive global system that we understand so little of. So, getting the sort of dopamine hit and excitement of getting new clothing, like shopping and opening gifts is part of it, but then also the, we invite them into labour to experience a bit of sort of the, oh, am I sharing again? Yay, that’s Kris, Mpoe and me. This is a Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre that hosted the performance I’m talking about, and these are some pictures of the performance. So, you can see, yeah, there’s the excitement of opening gifts getting new clothes but then here, in the sort of middle left, you can see that we actually, invite is a gentle word, we kind of force the audience to engage in some labour practices, and then we also look at the waste that is generated through clothing and supply chain systems. So we’re trying to basically highlight elements of this global system that are usually invisible. 

And at the same time as we were doing that show Calgary Arts Development partnered with Creative Green Tools Canada and Swallow-a-Bicycle joined that initiative which, really, briefly, is just an opportunity for arts organizations to track our environmental impacts by doing, like, audience surveys around how they traveled to your performance by looking at the materials you’re using, looking at the energy uses in the buildings you’re occupying, and you can sort of see here a snapshot of Swallow-a-Bicycle’s carbon footprint in 2023, and 2024, which we can certainly talk about more later.  

But another exciting thing that Swallow-a-Bicycle did recently is we joined the Green Art Lab Alliance, which, as you can see here, is a mycelium-like network of organizations that are contributing to environmental sustainability through their artistic practices. We were really really honoured to join this network. It has existed for quite a number of years, I think, since 2012, but has been centred on Asia, Latin, America and Europe, and so they just recently started a Canada/US network that we were among the first groups to be part of it. And it’s an extremely cool sort of non-hierarchical collaborative network of artists that are just concerned about climate and environment and sustainability where we can exchange like stuff that we’ve learned stuff that’s worked in our environment or express needs. So like, I don’t know if you’re an art group that did a climate protest and your members got arrested like, does anybody know a human rights lawyer that you can connect with, as a relatively extreme example. But they also have a really cool initiative called the Future Materials Bank which is a sort of living database of materials that are sort of like future proof, so moving away from, you know, disposable plastics, and often in many art practices like theatre certainly is one of them, we create a ton of waste, and I think a lot of this is actually visual arts focused where often, you know, the dyes we use, the various materials we use in art making are quite wasteful and toxic. So the idea with this future materials bank is to offer material ideas, but also processes that are more sustainable for art making, yeah, again, can talk about that more later.  

But outside of Swallow-a-Bicycle, I also am part of the Energy Futures Lab, which is a social innovation lab that is basically dedicated to supporting energy transition in Alberta and for those, like social innovation lab basically brings together people from all across the problem area. In this case, people that are all from different parts of the energy transition space, so that could be policymakers from government or engineers, or you know, whoever basically, coming together in a room to wrestle with the problems of energy transition, and me and Rio Mitchell and Eveline Kolijn were invited in about seven years ago as artist fellows, because they had a hunch that having artists in the room would help their conversation, so I’ve been part of that for I think, seven or eight years now, and have done a bunch of cool stuff with them. But one of the coolest things was Eveline, as Ashley mentioned, through the Energy Futures Lab initiated this project called the Energy Futures Portfolio, which was a print portfolio project that brought together 20 writers and 20 artists from Alberta. When I say, artists, visual artists, printmakers and other forms of visual art, to basically reflect on energy transition, to reflect on what does it mean to be in Alberta and looking at energy transition from our artistic standpoints. 

And so each visual artist was paired with a writer, and we were, kind of given free rein to look at like whatever aspect of this problem most spoke to us. And this is kind of what it looked like at the end it comes in a neat box that has these large-scale prints that we’ve been really lucky to have those on display at various galleries across Alberta, and it also got turned into a book quite unexpectedly. This publisher, Durvile & UpRoute Books, heard about the print portfolio project and said, Hey, that would make a really cool book. So this was published, I think, in 2023, Reimagining Fire, the Future of Energy, which has all the writing and all the images that were created for the Portfolio project, but also had space for additional writing, and it’s available at a bookstore near you. 

Yeah, that’s sort of the things I wanted to give a high- level overview of. Yeah, we talked about me actually reading my thing from the book. Is that still something we want to do? 

Ashley: Yeah, I think that would be great, and before you do, I had a quick question for you, Mark. You mentioned that you, that the work that you were doing was with artists and government and incorporating people from all different sectors. Do you, do you ever find that challenging, moving forward? 

Mark: Yeah, I mean, the Energy Futures Lab is definitely the place where I’ve had the most crossover. And yeah, it’s hard. Like, I think it was a really great and generous impulse for the Energy Futures Lab to bring artist fellows into the mix, but it’s a daunting space to go into like, I’m walking into a space full of, you know, geologists, chemical engineers, folks that are deep, deep in policy, representatives from First Nations, like folks that are really deeply living these challenges and have a lot of like subject matter expertise, like, you know, can talk endlessly about hydrogen or about solar panels, wind about oil sands, you know, whatever. And I come in and I’m like I make plays! But what’s been really lovely in that space has been the Energy Futures Lab like part of the reason I’m still there is, they sort of consistently affirm that my voice is valuable in that space. And in part because I’m not so deeply embedded in the industries and the systems, like, I’m an energy user, you know, like I am someone who pays my electric bill and I’m on sort of the consumer side of energy, but also as an artist I think, you know, we have different training. We are trained to ask different questions and to have things that look at things from a different viewpoint. So, when I’m stepping into like a conversation around energy investment and banking practices, I get to raise my hand and be like What do you mean by that? Or, wait, does that actually help move us towards a greener future? And often, frequently, I’m in rooms where people are having these technical conversations, and then, when I ask a question, silence falls over the room, and sometimes that’s good, and sometimes it’s not, but it at least offers a chance to sort of shift the conversation. But it’s a scary place to be, like I consistently have to sort of hype myself up to be able to be present in those spaces, because, yeah, I don’t know that a lot of people like in in those spaces understand what it means to be an artist or understands like what the world is that we live in. So yeah, end of thought. 

Ashley: Thank you, Ashley here, which calls to mind the fact that Angèle has just dropped in a PDF document in the chat for everybody here. It’ll also be posted, I hope, as a resource, I think afterwards, for people catching up with the recording. This is a list of resources that we’ve put together, refers to a lot of things that we’re going to be talking about here. We’ve already mentioned a few of them, and it reminded me Mark of you saying sometimes you’re the one in the room saying the uncomfortable thing that drop silence on everyone. There’s a great example of that. If you want to see Mark doing that in a link to a CBC story, he does it. He calls out capitalism, it’s really hilarious. Thanks for sharing that resource. Mark. 

Mark: You’re welcome! For anyone who doesn’t have time to watch the video, very briefly, they’re playing a game called Moving Conversations, where it’s about like, what does the energy transition need? And you’re supposed, someone says something, and if you agree with them you move closer towards them, and if you disagree, you move farther away. So it’d be like someone would say, What does the energy transition need? It needs more pipelines to be built, and people would, like, move towards that or move away from it. And I said, What do we need for energy transition? We need to dismantle capitalism. And the entire room, just like shifted as far away from me as possible, which was telling, yeah. 

Ashley: Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you. And yes, Mark, before we go any further, I would love to hear the piece of writing that you’re going to share. 

Mark: Sure. So like, I said. I was a writer on the project, and all of us were paired with visual artists, so I’ll share this image by Jill Ho-You, who is an instructor at AUArts, and a printmaker, y’all can see that right? Yay. So this is the piece that was a companion to, or my writing was a companion to this piece, and vice versa, so I’ll just leave that up on the screen as I read. 

So hopefully you can still see it. Yay, 

This piece is called, it’s a short story essentially, and it’s called Last Breath. 

Extinction, she whispers, isn’t a question of if, but when she smiles wryly, inhales humanity’s last breath, and then that’s it. The story goes on without us, except, of course, that’s not how she dies. That’s the Disney version, polished, philosophical, satisfying. 

We don’t know how it ends, but it’s probably messy. It’s probably soon, a hundred years from now. Let’s say she’s the great grandchild of someone alive today. She’s old enough barely to remember when weather reports came without death counts old enough to remember weather reports. 

She’s old enough to remember air conditioning and money and suburbs, and so many other things that used to seem important when she was younger and had someone to talk to, she said things like, it’s not the end of the world. Things like humans, are parasites. The world’s better off without us, and sure it might be after the last mass extinction. Ecosystems bounced back in 30 million years or so? Mammals did well last time, why not roll the dice again? Will the next dominant species cure diseases, write poetry? 

As she trekked through bone-dry forests, haunted by the bodies she left behind in the city as she survived on emaciated rabbits as starving insects survived on her. It was easier to think about everything the world would gain when humanity was gone rather than everything lost. 

She outlasts all the rest. Everyone who fried in the sun, everyone swept away in roaring floodwaters, everyone killed with smart bombs and desperate guns. She survives the plagues, the new ones, and the tenacious opportunists. She survives the fires, the hurricanes, the freezing rain, the hunger, the thirst, she survives the cascade of overlapping apocalypses until she doesn’t. And then that’s it. 

The human story, spanning 300,000 years ends with her last breath exhaled after a life of hardship on a scorched planet. It doesn’t have to go like this, if we choose differently now, if we act urgently, we could be at the beginning of the human story, instead of its conclusion. Humanity’s last breath could be breathed, not in a century’s time, but in a distant future 3 million years from now. Let’s say she’s the great times 100,000 grandchild of someone alive today. She learned about Earth in a history book, about those fleeting, deluded centuries, where we thought everything could be a factory, farms, hospitals, schools, all conveyor belts of manufactured progress. 

She learned about how we teetered right on the edge of self-destruction and the rallying efforts it took to pull us back into right relations. She was homo sapiens, but hardly thought she was the last, the branching of species had been underway for millennia and sapiens, the minority for centuries. If her bones were a little denser, her retinas a little less sensitive, it didn’t make her stand out at parties didn’t impede her research into ancient solar technologies or her work on high efficiency, energy conversion for isolated communities. 

When the documentary crew asked to feature her in a series called The Last Human. She consented with surprise and curiosity. Later it made her a little sad. She liked the aspirational quality of Homo sapiens, wise, human, plus being the last of her species, felt a bit weird, a bit lonely. 

She dies in bed, a gentle end in the care of not quite humans, as similar to us as we were to Neanderthals. Surrounded by her not quite human children and grandchildren she dies after days of nostalgic stories, of smiles, tears, and goodbyes, of her great-grandchild crawling into a sunbeam and cooing when it hits their face. 

When the news spreads, some people mutter good riddance, filthy apes, because no matter the species, hominids are hominids. Others, though, pause to ponder the end of an era, a few 1 million years of coincidence and courage, and narrowly averted calamity leading to this, a star-spanning species, still always imperfect, but evermore in harmony with the workings of the universe. 

This not quite human species will come to an end too. 

They all do. 

Extinction isn’t a question of if, but when, but every year it’s pushed back is another year of joy and pain, of discovery and adventure, of hardship and triumph and love. Every New Year means that people yesterday worked and fought and strived for people tomorrow made choices with their well-being and well-becoming in mind. 

Someday the human story will end, together day by day, year by year, choice, by choice we decide how our story will unfold. 

End of thought. 

Ashley: Thank you, Mark. There’s, I’m thinking about how to bridge this over to Elsha at the moment, because I see connections between the fact that you both work with the written word. And I’m wondering if it’s okay if we return to Elsha because of the technical glitch, and then we can bring this back into questions about the work some more. Is that all right? 

Yeah. Okay. 

So, Elsha, when we lost you, you were talking about having moved beyond the Climate Change Theatre Action pieces and the other work that had been. that you’ve been putting your time into. Did you want to carry on? 

Elsha: Sure, I might talk off camera in case of any further glitches. Maybe that’ll help, but if I go out again, please yell. I feel like I can keep hearing you, even though I’m frozen for some reason, Yeah, I don’t quite remember where I left off first off. Thank you, Mark. Also, Elsha speaking, gotta get in the habit of saying that. 

I yeah, I think I was speaking a little bit about my work at M:ST and ISSAY! Magazine post-theatre. I was sort of a foreigner to theatre when I landed there and generally feel like more comfortable in the spaces of visual arts and the written work, but have found storytelling within theatre and the effectiveness of an audience performer interaction in relaying these really complex ideas really emotionally heavy ideas extremely powerful. And I’ve tried to maintain that through my work, I guess skipping to like maybe the present day, and Ashley a little bit towards your transition going from Mark’s writing to mine. 

I have, I don’t want to say I’ve left arts administration, I might come back, who knows? But these days I feel a little bit split between the life of like an independent artist and a full time, you know, policy nerd. I’ve returned to my roots a little bit in that sense, and I full-time work for a government relations firm where I’m really deep in politics, policy stuff, government work, government workers and what have you. And when I’m not there I’m still running the magazine, and I also work for the Canadian Journal of Ethnic Studies, which publishes out of John Hopkins University through the UofC’s Sociology department. So, I feel like my writing these days has become really steeped in, you know, the technicalities of the issues that are most important to me, but also the real power of narrative storytelling, specifically when it comes to policymakers, government relations work, I think Mark kind of hit it on the head. It’s so powerful to have artists and storytellers and spaces with experts and with decision makers, because so much of what gets done just comes down to how effective you are in telling the story of your issue. And unfortunately, I think, although you know, climate change is an issue of, you know the tragedy of the commons, something that affects all of us. It is really difficult to get everyone on the same page, and everyone as equally invested, and I found it really, I found it really exciting to come into these rooms with the perspectives that I have that have been shared with me through the artists that I’ve worked with through Ashley, through Toyin, and through Mark, through everyone who’s been involved in Climate Change Theatre Action, through Claire, who wrote a beautiful, powerful essay that was informed by our work at Climate Change Theatre Action that was recently published through action and through Arts and Climate Change, actually, I think that’s the publisher’s name.  

So yeah, these days I’m writing a lot writing differently, and when I’m not there, I’m still a ceramicist still engaged in the community of visual artists here in this city, still curating and talking a lot with my peers in that space about, you know our personal responsibilities with waste and the way that we create waste, and the way that we create art and communicate our stories, and how our place as consumers of materials and of creators of substance, how that intersects, with our ceramic friends it’s a lot of conversations about how reclaiming clay, reusing this material that comes from the ground that takes up so much energy that is fundamentally wasteful, how there’s so many ways to reuse it. But that reuse comes at the cost of personal, personal costs, your physical labour, your time, your energy, your money, the process of being responsible as artists and as consumers, is, you know, for a lot of us feels like a detriment to our pockets. And I’m thinking these days a lot about how policy, how agencies, how organizations like CADA, perhaps, how grantors, how people who hold money can incentivize us as individuals, as consumers, and as artists to create in ways that is, that are responsible. And what my place is as someone who works with government to affect that kind of top-down decision making. So that’s a bit of a half-baked, messy thought. But yeah, that’s me these days. 

End of thought, I think. Back to Ashley. 

Ashley: Thank you, Elsha. Ashley here. You were talking about the waste right then, and I’m really interested in the relationship of the work and the sustainability of it. It scares me. I would prefer not to have to think about it in any kind of work. I’d prefer to just be able to do the work and not think about how, how are, how is my resource use affecting the environment, for example, and one artist who’s really inspired me in thinking about how I work with materials is also referenced in our resource list. Her name is Dr. Laura Batson, she’s based in Ottawa, she might be on the call with us today, I would love it if she had thoughts to share. But she regularly, she is… Hi, Laura! She talks about how throughout cultures in the world, we are reminded of our relationship to the materials of the earth through fundamental practices, like weaving, braiding. Laura refers to the word, remembering in a way that is so beautiful and poetic, it’s re-membering. And these are ways of thinking and interacting with materials that have really inspired me, and I know as well, Mark has included the, he talked about it earlier, but the Futures Material Bank, Future Materials Bank, that’s also a resource in our list there for people to refer to after. 

And yeah, Laura, if you had anything you wanted to piggyback on with Elsha’s thoughts like, Please do, anybody to share their thoughts in the chat, oh and any questions you may have about what you’ve heard already before we take a quick break. 

So how about we pause right now for 7 min. We are here together for two full hours, and so 7 min feels like a nice little space to do what you need to do to sort of de-screen your eyes, stretch, hydrate, and right now my clock says 12:56, we’re in mountain time, so if we were to come back at 1:03. Well, did I do math? We’ll see everybody back at 1:03. 

Thank you. 

Toyin: Thank you. 

Ashley: Thank you. Right? So for those who missed it, Laura, I did just drop a video link into the chat that she to share the group here, and we can even see if we can add it into the resource document later on. 

Thank you. 

And just reminding everybody here, please feel free to use the chat to participate. Let us know if you’re having any responses, questions, thoughts you’d like to share. We’d really appreciate it, because in the meantime, we’re just sort of talking to ourselves here, hoping you’re enjoying it.  

When we, when we were talking about our work, one thing that was coming to mind. And especially Mark, when you were reading your piece, was the question of activism, and we have, previously Mark, Elsha and I talked about the role of activism in in art, but we haven’t gotten very far and I’m wondering if we could go into that second into that thinking right now. Is all climate, art an act of protest? Is it activism? What is the intersection of art and activism? How is activism different from art? And do we need to separate them? 

These are the questions around activism that come up for me. And I have noticed that simply by making art about climate change on the topic of climate change, it’s common for people to say, you’re an activist. Curious if, Elsha Mark, if you have thoughts on that.  

Elsha: You first, Mark. 

Mark: Sure. Thanks. 

So many layers in that like, what is climate art? What is activism? Like, I think, okay, so I mean to start with I sometimes hear that, like art is inherently activist, which I do not think is true, I think a lot of art can affirm the status quo can be actually like very much in favour of not changing, of just sort of comforting those in power. And you know, at the extreme examples, you see, like Ayn Rand, was an artist, wrote very popular novels that have been super influential in the oligarchies, and you know the rise of income inequalities that we see today. That’s an artist who contributed to that, which I guess could be activists just from a really damaging standpoint. I don’t know, And I guess, like, when I think about activism, I think about folks that are on the front lines, folks that are you know, at protests that are that are actively, you know, chaining themselves to things that are that are directly impacted and directly responding to sort of the need for change. And sometimes art is that, like, and you see art in protest, you see, art, you know, placards and costumes and performances, and dance at protests that are integral to protest, integral, to sort of creating the sense of community and also creating the impact sometimes.  

But I think, you know, making a play in a theatre where we invite our audiences to, I think it’s important, I don’t know that it’s activism. I think it might be advocacy, I think it might be, I know it’s sort of semantic at a certain point. But I’m like the role of activist is really important, and it’s dangerous, and it’s on the front lines, and so I don’t want to like claim that title when I’m not at the same level of risk as an activist. That’s my thought. 

Ashley: Risk. Yeah, that’s important to remember as well. There’s a lot of people who can’t, they can’t protest, even if they want to, because of the risk involved. 

Elsha, does your work ever cross over into arenas of activism? 

Elsha: I mean, I don’t think so. I feel like, oh, Elsha speaking. I’m feeling brave, I’m gonna stay on camera. If it backfires, you let me know. Yeah, I hard agree, Mark. I think, I, how do I say it delicately, I feel like it, that kind of framing, art as activism, kind of lets us off the hook a little bit. As artists, you know. It’s like, surely that can’t be enough. Not that it’s not important because it is. And I mean, obviously, we all think we’re, it’s important, we’re in these rooms, we’ve chosen these paths through our careers, our lives and I think expression and storytelling and narrative building and art as a whole is such a foundational part of any movement, but I think designating like, artistic creation as activism, as artists, lets us feel like our work is done, and that that just can’t be enough. You know, community building, organizing, these words that kind of get thrown around a little bit in the context of what I think is activism I agree, I feel like really involves a certain level of inherent risk that you’re sort of shielded from as an artist when you get to say your work is at the end of the day expression and sort of protected by what it means to just be a person expressing a thought expressing an idea. 

You know, I think also, there’s an added layer of racialized people, people who belong to minorities, people who belong to communities that have been traditionally in our Western society, oppressed, making anything and having that be labeled as activism that I feel very resistant to, you know there’s a, and sometimes I wonder just how helpful any of these terms are in the grand scheme of things, especially when it we’re getting to like, who is subscribing these terms, are we self-identifying? Are we being labeled as, are we, and who is doing the label, is it people within community? Is it people outside of our, you know? I think it’s easy to get into the weeds of that kind of stuff and ignore the actual work that’s being done, and that needs to be done.  

So yeah, I think in general, I just, I spend very little time thinking about what category my work belongs to. And you know, even as a curator, I don’t seek out work that I view as activism, necessarily it’s really for me, like, I think, the art that I am as a consumer drawn to that, I find the most compelling and powerful and interesting is work that’s grounded in some level of context. You know, historical context and an awareness and an honesty about time and place, who you are, your lived experience and the histories that precede you, and inherently within that that has to involve some level of research, and you know facts and being grounded in truth. And that’s the kind of work that I find really compelling, and I think in general, that’s the kind of work that I think is most helpful to movement. So yeah, that’s kind of where I stand. I don’t know if that directly answers your question, Ashley. End of thought. 

Ashley: Ashley here. Considering the lived experiences of us as individual, our lived experiences within communities, those communities of which we’re a part, those communities that we identify as a part that we identify as a part of, we may or may not even realize sometimes we’re a part of a community, sometimes I wonder if all the all the artists working on climate understand they are part of a bigger community, we are a potential network of support here for each other. But when we’re thinking about that, our lived experiences, I wonder to what extent that impacts the art that we’re making. I wonder how many people actually think of that as a context. There’s a type of art making that’s very general, a very, it talks about general subjects, big buckets, and then there’s zooming in on time, place, naming people. So Elsha do you find opportunities for that? Not just in your writing. But say, in your ceramic work. 

Elsha: Can I ask you to frame that a different way for me. 

Ashley: When you are talking, when you’re feeling, when you’re reflecting on your experiences, an individual within the communities that you’re a part, do you take that into your work as a ceramicist? How does it show up in your work? 

Elsha: Yeah, of course, I think it can’t not. I think my perspective, you know, as an artist and as an individual, as a person navigating this world is you know, first and foremost about like community, like everything about me, you know, maybe that’s reductive. But a lot of what I think, goes foundational to me as a person, as an individual, as Elsha, has a lot to do with the communities that I’m in my trajectory, navigating through this world, where I come from, where the people are, where I come from, who are not here right now, who you know, the people that I work alongside, the people that I don’t get to work alongside. For a number of reasons, the systems that hold us together kind of against our will. You know, the communities that I’m a part of, because we’re sort of forced to make community together, like all of that is a part of my every day. Whether or not it’s about my work is kind of secondary, you know, like, I think, as a ceramicist, I am personally really interested in this, like, you know, ceramics as an art form is global and indigenous to every culture. Really, what does it mean to like make things that are functional and beautiful, but across culture, like what is the status of the maker? You know these traditional wares that we make these traditional artifacts and the everyday sort of home goods that we make? What is the status of like the maker, for me in Ethiopia, where do these histories like come from? What is the technique of these people. And how is there? You know the medium understood for us as a people it’s a, it’s like a lower-class thing, right for me as like someone who lives here and makes art here and navigates artistic circles. there’s something about like highbrow about it, and then I go back home, and it’s the work that I make that I’m trying to mimic in some ways the techniques that I’m studying, the people that I’m interested in the communities. I’m interested in. This is a lower-class profession, sort of a means to an end, and I’m very curious about the tension of like what an artisan has become, you know, and what the landscape of those people live in looks like, the physical landscape, how innovation and modernity and infrastructure has kind of left those people behind. And yet we’re still using these traditional tools and traditional methods of making. It’s really like messy to me. And I’m still thinking a lot about it and interrogating what it means to me, but here, you know, living in Calgary, Alberta, making connections with other ceramicists and other visual artists, period. I think you know some of my favorite visual artists in the city, Eva Birhanu, she’s a textile artist, she works with, she weaves, she works with textile mediums. Khadijah Morley, based in Toronto, is a printmaker. I’m really drawn to people who work with physicality with their hands, are using, you know materials that they are manipulating and creating something new but clearly is bound by some sort of reverence for tradition. I look at Eva’s works, and it reminds me a lot of the quilt that I’m sitting next to that belongs to my grandmother. I, you know I look at Khadijah’s work, and it feels very reminiscent of all sorts of African art that I’ve consumed and been lucky enough to be a part of. So yeah, I guess in that way I’ve always seen myself as a part of community, and it extends into my artistic outlook as a curator, as an artist, as a ceramicist. But when it comes to climate and climate communities I think, it’s interesting to me to be like a racialized person in this space, because I think obviously, there’s like kind of a I think maybe it’s changing now, but like an idea that climate change is a social issue is like a bourgeoise issue for people who have time to be worried about global warming or something, and it’s like, clearly, not that, and I think we’re catching up to things a little bit more now. But yeah, I have appreciated in the last few years the real effort that people have made, Ashley, I consider you sort of at the core of a lot of this for me who have really, you and Vicki, who really focused on community and like the emotional health part of this work, you know, thinking about grief and climate change, which is such a part of it, and connecting with you and seeing your work ripple, I think, has been a really like, it inspired me to think of myself as a part of this new community that I didn’t see myself as a part of before.  

End of thought. 

Angèle: Angèle speaking. Sorry. There is a comment in the chat, and I’ll just say it out here out loud for everybody. The connection between art and activism that excites me is the connection between the creative process, especially co-created improvised art and principles of anarchy or self-organized bottom-up movements which are central to effective movements of activism. 

Ashley: Oh, yes, thank you, Angèle, for sharing that. That was oh, Laura, yeah. So, Laura, thank you for that. 

The connection between art and activism. Yeah. 

So, Elsha, when you, were, you mentioned the connections between the community, I see our community as not, I don’t, I don’t identify as an activist. I don’t think of myself as doing activism when we are doing this work, and I think I’m agreeing with what you’re saying in terms of it’s a bit of a, it’s a bit of letting us off the hook in terms of like the work itself. At least, if I were to take that on, that’s how I would feel about it. And I see, though, like in Laura’s statement how it can also tie in, and how essential it is to the thinking. So thank you for that. 

I have a question then, coming from, you were talking about drawing and experiences from outside teachings, from cultural teaching. I’m wondering if anybody here feels responsible for understanding the science of climate change. So, we, in in other areas of our work, in our artistic practices we want to go deep into our understanding of what we’re representing and what we’re bringing forward with climate change, there’s probably a sense there that we want to understand what we’re responding to. How expert do we need to be? What is our responsibility as artists if we’re going to be taking on this topic, which can sometimes be. It’s not. Sometimes it’s always a heavy topic, climate change and its connections to all of these other social issues is heavy. It’s a lot. And I’m wondering how much you feel. We need to know about it before we make work about it. 

End of thought. 

Mark: Mark speaking, I can jump on that. I mean, my personal thinking is we should know something, and I think, like, as you said. Whenever like, when I was working on the Clothing show, we made a lot of effort to learn about clothing and clothing, supply chains and different movements and concerns within fashion so that we were responding to what’s actually happening in the world. And so I think at an artistic level, that’s important. I think, also, just on a social context level, like we are living in a world with increasingly damaging misinformation, and in some cases state sponsored misinformation. I’d say that’s true in Alberta. That’s definitely, increasingly true in the United States and elsewhere. And so having, like the basic capacity to understand like, what is science? What are what is actually going on with climate change allows us to understand when we’re being lied to and understand what is at stake. 

So I think, to a certain degree, it’s really important to understand the science. But I did read, this is a wonderful book, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson. It’s an anthology of women and femme folks from the United States or associated with the United States looking at climate solutions. And actually, I was reading the first chapter by I don’t know how to say her first name, Xiye Bastida wrote a chapter called Calling In, and I’ll just quote her. “Unsurprisingly, most people have not read the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and don’t understand how the greenhouse effect works. Some people feel like they have to know the science inside out before they can talk about it or do something about it. But here’s what I have learned. You don’t have to know the details of the science to be part of the solution, and if you wait until you know everything, it will be too late for you to do anything.” 

So I’d say, that’s the flip side that we can end up in like analysis paralysis, feeling like we don’t know enough, feel like we’re not expert enough and just not do anything, and we all need to be doing things 

End of thought. 

Angèle: Angèle speaking, there is a couple of things in the chat here, just to bring your attention to. We’ve had an artist make a comment: as realism artist, I depict the beauty of nature to remind people that if we don’t protect our planet, we will lose this beauty. That’s a very good comment, Raha. 

And then we have another one from Justina. I feel like I need the quantitative to make an argument in my field for support and policy change, but it’s the qualitative, the emotional of art that can connect people to the human issue that is climate change. It is not an abstract scientific issue. It’s one that impacts us on a very personal and emotional level. Art can help us make that connection. 

Ashley: Yes, yes, thank you for that, Justina. Actually, that reminds me of Melanie Kloetzel’s comment which we had hoped to share by video. But I don’t think we’re going to Zoom, is not,  Ashley here, sorry, Zoom is not cooperating with us. We did have a video of Melanie, who’s a, she’s a Prof at UofC, she works in dance and movement, and she also thinks about our work in the space of climate change as connecting the dots for the audience, who might not necessarily do that on their own, for whatever reason, artists who work in this space are there to connect the dots, and I thought that was a really beautiful image, very helpful. Takes a bit of the burden off as well, bit of the responsibility. I don’t have to tell you what to think, but I can show you that this is connected to that. And here’s what I think about that 

End of thought. 

I see. Nope not end of thought. Sorry, Ashley again. I see a note here, actually from Helen letting us know that because of our Zoom issues, we need to take a quick break. We’re going to take a couple minutes, no need to leave your computer. We’re just gonna make sure that everything’s a-okay on the back end, and then we’ll return shortly. 

End of thought. 

Angèle: Angèle speaking here. When we return, we have somebody with their hand raised, so they’ll ask a question. 

Elsha: Elsha speaking. Mark, when you get a chance, do you mind dropping the name of that book into the chat for me? 

Mark: I’d be delighted. 

Elsha: Thank you. 

Helen: And I’m, it’s Helen speaking, Shona, I just wonder if you could check the chat for a second. I just posed a question for you there. 

Okay, thank you. 

Shona Foster ASL Interpreter: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. 

Helen: You’re welcome. Thank you so much, and I think, okay, I think we have, we have lost our second interpreter. Zoom has for some reason decided to kick her out, so we were just wanting to make sure that it was okay with Shona to continue on her own without Lana to spell her off. So, thank you, Shona, and thank you everyone for your patience. We’re just working on the back end to try to make everything smooth. I appreciate it. That’s my end of thought. And over to you. Back to you, Ashley. Thank you. 

Ashley: Thank you so much. Thanks, Shona. 

Okay, Angèle, you said there was a hand up. 

Angèle: Yes, Sable, if you’re around you can go ahead and ask your question. 

Sable Sweetgrass: Hi, oki, this is Sable Sweetgrass. Can you hear me? Oh, okay, no. I just wanted to comment around, I think indigenous artists across Turtle Island, around the world really have been expressing in their work the concern about climate change, or the concern about the effects of that, the environment, the impact change has been having on the environment for a long time, but I think for the most part it’s been ignored. I think only recently has it been more appreciated, you know, and you know, when I was in school in the States at the Institute of American Indian Arts, looking at their catalog of visual art, it’s amazing like, to see what artists of 100 years ago were saying about the loss of species and the decimation of plant life. And so, it’s you know it, this is definitely not new, for you know, to see, you know artists expressing their concern about climate change. It’s actually been, it’s, you know, we’re lucky here in Southern Alberta to have artists like Adrian Stimson and my good late friend Troy Emery Twigg, who were constantly commenting on the loss of the bison in this, here in Southern Alberta, and what that the impact that has had on plant life, medicine things that these things are, a lot of these things are gone like animals that are disappearing. And it didn’t just happen, but it’s been happening since the early 1800s, and you know, so I think that yes, now it’s there’s probably even more urgency now that we’re seeing people are really starting to see the effects of what’s happening. But it’s, people have been expressing this for quite a while I just want to just mention that. Thank you. 

Ashley: Thank you very much. Sable. 

Angèle: Sorry, Ashley, it’s Angèle. There’s another question, Geraldine asked, Have you done any work with community around climate grief? 

Ashley: Thank you. Thanks, Angèle. Mark, Elsha, did you want to speak to that? I know that in our Climate Change Theatre Action we had climate grief counselors present as part of the talk back at the end of the pieces at the end of the performances. Is this something that you’ve ever gone deeper into. 

Elsha: Elsha, speaking. Firstly, thank you, Sable, for contributing to the conversation that was so moving, and I think speaks to some of the comments earlier about from Justina and from Raja, about our work as artists and the emotional, the emotional work that we communicate and the ways of knowing that we have access to as individuals and as members of others, communities to speak through our work. Thank you.  

Yeah. That question from Geraldine is, I guess, a good tie-in to the second iteration of Climate Change Theatre Action that we did at Downstage the theme general theme around that entire project was climate grief and a little bit sort of inspired by kind of what we’re talking about, the paralysis that people feel around the information around this topic, and how overwhelming it can be for me myself, I know, like the number side of it, I’m just allergic to numbers, period. But with climate change specifically, there’s something like really X billion tons of carbon, but also the globe is warming by 1% or 2%. It’s like astronomically high or low, and it’s hard to get a sense of scale. And all you feel all you have access to in your like live knowledge is like the feeling of dread that’s constant, so that’s why we chose that theme, in doing so we had climate grief counselors, social workers, and also youth activists who are really active in this space come and join the audience for each night of the performance and engage with the audience directly after each show for about a half hour, 45 min, and then afterwards leave a resource pamphlet for everyone who came, and with the hopes that we were doing more than just like talking through our feelings, but providing people with individuals who have real expertise and not just expertise around the issue, but expertise around like emotional health from a clinical psychological help perspective. And for me, personally, it’s been something that I’ve continued to think about and stay engaged with those individuals like for my own personal well-being. So yeah, end of thought, Elsha. On to you, Mark. 

Mark: Yeah, I haven’t explicitly done art work around climate grief, but for me, I think, like what’s been really important has been like acknowledgement of the reality without sugar coating. I remember years ago, I was on a trip to Vancouver, and I saw that the City of Vancouver was having this big climate event, and I went to it. And this was at a time that, like no like Alberta, no government official would use the word climate change when that was not part of the sort of official public discourse. And I went to this event in Vancouver, where members of city council, the mayor, like members of the provincial government, were all there, not only saying the words climate change, but like talking about their responsibilities, and like what we need to do about it. And I didn’t realize how heavy a weight I’d been holding until I was in a room where people were actually saying, Yeah, this is a problem we need to face this, and I’m seeing more and more of that like, what’s that meme going around right now that, like a lot of therapy, has historically been around like telling you that your problems are not as big as they seem to be, and being able to manage the problems, and now there’s a challenge where it’s like, oh, no, the problems are very real, but if you don’t water your plants, you’re going to have big problems and dead plants. So it’s more about like coping mechanisms. And so I think, like for me, it’s being able to figure out like how to like being in community with people that are like, yeah, we are in trouble, this is a big problem while also acknowledging our feelings and our grief around that.  

Just to really honour Sable what you shared. There’s so much Indigenous leadership in this space. One book that I’ve really enjoyed is Ideas to Postpone the End of the World by Alton Krenak, who’s a Brazilian Indigenous activist and leader, and I find that it has a lot of crossover with, I think this is a white American dude, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene by Roy Scranton. Like both of them, these are both books that don’t sugarcoat anything that are like we are in crisis, we are in trouble, but both of them are calling on us to like face that trouble, to grieve for the lives that we’ve had, to grieve for the world that we live in, and in grieving hopefully that allows us to start to imagine new futures, like to imagine ourselves forward in a way that doesn’t hold on to the most damaging aspects of what we live right now that, but that grieving is inherently a part of that. So no, I have not specifically worked in climate grief, but I think it is profoundly important.  

End of thought. 

Ashley: Ashley here question and response, what do you think is the role of hope in the work 

End of thought. 

Mark: I have complicated thoughts around hope, like we need some degree of hope, I think, to, or I need some degree of hope, but my hope isn’t attached to like specific measurables, or like, we will be able to keep warming to less than 1.5 degrees like, I don’t think it’s helpful to have hope that’s attached to specific milestones, because we keep blowing past them, and if you attach your hope to a specific thing I think that can be really detrimental. But I think my hope is grounded in the fact that, like we can change, humans have been have made really vast changes, whether it’s around human rights, civil rights, whether it’s around, you know, toxins going into the ozone layer, like humans can make change if we are able to mobilize, if we’re able to do the work. And I have a mentor who, Ken Lowe from Human Venture Leadership, like when talking about the climate crisis and sort of our all of our integrated crises. He’s like, we don’t know. We can’t know. It might be too late, like it might actually be too late to prevent extinction. It might be too late to prevent the worst outcomes of these catastrophes, and we can’t know until we get there, but one thing we know for sure is that if we do nothing it will be catastrophe, like, we know for certain. If we stay on our course, it will be catastrophic, and so the only way we can know if it’s too late is if we give it everything we’ve got, that if we actually do everything in our power to do it might still be too late. It might still not be enough, but at least we’ll know that we did everything we possibly could to prevent calamity, and that gives me hope that we’re not helpless. In the face of these crises. We have agency to make choices, even if in there, in our smaller frame and hopefully in our larger frame, to change things.  

End of thought. 

Ashley: Yeah, Ashley. Here we are in mitigation now, right? And that’s something I’ll show you, brought up prior to this conversation here when we were talking, or when we’re talking about climate change, are we aware that we’re talking about the mitigation of the effects rather than preventing it? You know, some people still think of it as preventing climate change, but we’re in it. 2024 was the hottest year on record, we have blown past our 1.5 degrees of overall warming, and so we’re in mitigation. And it was in a session with Chantal and her Climate Change Theatre Action work where I was able to spend more time reflecting on the role of hope. I tend to be a bit more cynical. I tend to be sarcastic, and I am more comfortable dealing with cynicism, and yeah, I think just sort of darker narratives. However, I do like I do appreciate humour, and it was through Chantal’s workshop and see and experimenting with themes and ideas that I was able to see that actually, hope is an essential piece of work, it’s a within the toolbox of the artist is something that we can offer to an audience. It’s a personal take, I recognize this isn’t a truism, it’s certainly subjective. But I’m wondering for you as an audience member to art, not just as a maker, but as an audience member, what do you appreciate seeing whether it’s on stage visual art, written word.  

End of thought. 

Elsha: I can go sure. Elsha, speaking Well, maybe I’ll read Mark’s comment while I’m here. The books I mentioned were ideas, oh, thank you, you’re mentioning books. Sorry. Okay, I’m easily distracted by this little pop up. Yeah, I, too, am pro-hope, very, very pro-hope over here. I don’t know, I think, as a patron of art I’m like, consistently, really excited by like the work that’s being produced in this city, and I feel like, back to our earlier conversation about like activism versus artists or whatever, although I think those labels are not very productive, I do think we all have, like our roles within movement or community, and it’s nice to be able to identify yourself as like this is me, I’m a foot soldier on the front lines, taking all the risk, or this is me, I am the communicator, or whatever, and I see artists very much as communicators of different ways of knowing, and the art that I’m really motivated by is not necessarily always like bleak or necessarily always hopeful, or you know, whatever, I think it’s like innovative. And I think artists have a really, you know, unique ability to take an existing problem, an existing set of ideas and present them in a new way and force people to challenge the way they’re thinking about it, especially with the topic that’s been hammered to death like climate change, you know, we’re sitting here in mitigation mode, in all of the dread and all of the gloom, thinking like, what could we possibly do? And I think this is like the time where we’re able to be creative, like, that’s what we are as like creatives and think differently about how we, how we posit our ideas and how we communicate.  

The art that I am really inspired by is typically really grounded in history, like in the personal history of the artist. Recently I saw Deanna Bowen’s Black Drones in the Hive at Esker, and I was really touched, and really, I don’t, what’s the word I’m looking for, like galvanized, I guess, to make my work better,  seeing someone so late into their artistic directories still be able to revolutionize with existing materials so much of that exhibition for those of you who didn’t see it is a work in archiving, I think, about Ashley’s first slide, archiving is activism. She’s pulling existing records from across Canada to weave the story of her personal history, of her family’s history, of their pattern of migration, of the displacement that they faced as individuals, and how that’s affected her life, but all of it is being told through deeds and records and storytelling through, you know, a system of knowledge that was not supposed to be open to people like her and me. So I see that, and I walked away from it feeling like I need to work harder to understand, like where I come from, where my place is in this time and place on this little floating rock in Calgary, Alberta, what my relationship to this land is what’s happening in the prairies. How do I fit into this place, and what has been told here by other people that I can go and read and maybe tell in a different way to the next person who sees my work.  

So yeah, I think archiving and retelling, we’re not necessarily like inventing the wheel or trying to be original all the time, but how do we use individual perspective to tell something differently, is what I’m drawn to as a patron.  

End of thought. 

Mark: Mark speaking. Yeah. I guess a few thoughts that came to mind, climate work that really stuck with me was called, Can I Live, it’s a online show created by supported by the Uk company Complicité and created by Fehinti Balogun, and he is, it’s sort of he’s a writer and actor and poet, and he’s originally from Nigeria, and the show, which I don’t think is showing anywhere now, but like they’ve got a website where, if you want to host a screening you can, goes through so many different aspects of the climate crisis of activism, of being an artist in face of these crises, and in particular, he really deals with the dynamics of climate inequity that you know, the global South is least responsible for the crisis of climate change and feeling the impacts most keenly and urgently, and talks not in the abstract about that, but about how like his family in Nigeria is being impacted by climate change, and his friends across the continent of Africa, and what it means for him to be a Nigerian in the UK in relation to that. So it’s a really really powerful piece and then on a flip side, I really love this book. I have so many books as props, it’s The Ministry for the Future, It’s a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, which is sort of a speculative fiction Science Fiction climate novel where he sort of starts from today, like where we are right now, well, he wrote it pre-Trump 2.0 ,so like not exactly today. But yeah, it sort of like imagines again, without sugarcoating like, how could this go, like, what are the directions that this could go using science fiction, speculative fiction as a way into that and that also relates to a local artist. Evan Medd has been leading a project called Dreaming Climate Consciousness, there’s a website, I think I’m sharing, which uses like, it ties together a lot of what we talked about like climate grief, and also works in like Science Fiction speculative fiction, to invite participants to just from wherever they’re at, whatever their experience is of the climate crisis, to use principles of sci-fi to imagine forwards like what is possible. And I know Major Matt Mason Collective, which is a theatre company that he’s part of, is currently using this methodology to make a show that they’re hoping to debut next year, which I’m really excited for 

End of thought. 

Ashley: Thanks, Ashley here. I’m wondering how you think we could be taking care of each other as makers, as people trying to create messages that are received by a public, certain audience? Are there ways that we could be taking care of each other better through this?  

End of thought. 

Ashley again.  

Elsha: Neither one of us was gonna go. 

Ashley: Oh, Elsha! Great! Please. 

Elsha: I was just gonna rock paper scissors mark about who goes first.st also speaking. Gosh, I don’t know. I think taking care of each other. It’s so loaded right? Because I think, like we’re in an era right now where people are really fatigue, and taking that feeling of fatigue and feeling like I need rest, which is, I support rest. I’ve seen, I’ve been seeing a lot of like rest is resistance talk, and I offer like a friendly push back onto that, perhaps. 

I think I think, although we are in community, although we are in, you know the common fight, the good fight together, there are those of us amongst this community, this one community, that carry different levels of risk and burden, and I think we need to be honest with ourselves about our place in that. I look at my own life, and it’s like I have a very cushy couch job, and I get to like make art for fun in this current state that we’re in where the Alberta budget just dropped and slashed arts funding. Because of my cushy couch job. I’m not worried about that in terms of like my living in the way that so many of my peers are genuinely concerned right now about their living. You know, I think about like my emotional health, and I look at my family, and where I come from, and the family I left back home, and it’s like I can feel tired, I don’t know if that gives me the right to like rest and shut down all the time, you know. So I offer that as maybe like an invitation to examine your place and see who next to you might need something and just ask, like it’s so hard to be prescriptive to a question like that, and say, like, we should be doing this for each other, we should be doing that for each other, because the we is like nebulous like, who is who’s I? Who’s you? like might change, depending on what room I’m in tomorrow, and maybe I will be in a moment of like real need next week, and I will need to call on you and might not have the strength to, and hopefully you’ll reach out and check in on me. You know, I think it’s a lot of like asking questions and checking in with each other and offering support where you can, offering your like knowledge where you can. A lot of like, being an artist and being a person in this world working is like networking, whatever that means. I encourage people to network across and not up as much as possible. And just look like next to you who is on the same level and might have a different take, a different perspective, a different resource pool and how can you maximize your joint slay together, like, you know, I think it’s worth just talking to each other a lot. There’s no way to know the answers to any of these without really really speaking to one another. So yeah, that’s my, again, half-baked thoughts. I see a question. Maybe I’ll take over for Angèle for a second. Do any of you have guidelines in your organizations or practices, or generally really thoughts about AI. Boy, do I, and aware of its dire ecological footprint. Maybe I’ll let Mark answer the question about care first, though. Sorry, Ashley, I became like a moderator in this moment.  

End of thought. 

Mark: Okay, let’s see if I can wrap, this is Mark speaking, wrap together question around AI and care. Let’s see if it’s doable. Yeah, I mean, I hear totally hear you, Elsha. I would also, though, say, like rest is resistance and especially if you’re in a position where you’re struggling to pay bills, or the government is taking action against you for your identity or so on, like finding pockets of rest and having community that can support rest is so important, and even those of us that are that are in cushy jobs and positions like, if we are not rested, like climate change is urgent, the crisis is urgent, so many of our crises are urgent, but I think part of the solution is to resist the urgency and to be able to like, support each other and build up our own capacities. But no, it’s hard to know the line of like how much do you rest, and how much do you get on the front line? So. 

And actually, on that something I love is one of the editors of that book, one of the books I showed Dr. Elizabeth Johnson, gets asked the question a lot of like, what should I do? And she created this Venn diagram where she invites us to think about like, what brings you joy? What is something that is a source of satisfaction and delight, or what are sources of satisfaction and delight. And she says, like, this is important because like, yes, there’s important work, but if you’re doing something that depletes you, you’re not going to be able to keep it up. So, like what is, what are the things that fill you? What is the work that needs doing? What are the climate and justice solutions that you see that that need addressing. And then what are you good at? What are your skills, resources, networks, like, what’s within your realm who is in your community? What skills do you have? 

And at the centre of this Venn diagram she suggests, is your climate action that the goal is to spend like as much time as possible at this intersection of what are you good at? What brings you joy and what work needs doing? And I think, yeah, that’s this is going to be a different answer for all of us, but the thing is, these crises are so vast and so all-encompassing that we need to be working on all fronts all the time. But each individual doesn’t need to be working on all fronts all the time. I think it really depends on this mix of things. So, to wrap that into AI, like, yeah, AI is a problem, AI is a problem both from the energy consumption, from its amplifying and misinformation from, etc. etc. It’s also a really helpful tool. It’s really helpful, for, especially, like I have pals who English is not their first language, and they have to write grants, and AI is a super helpful tool to take their thoughts and to put them into grant speak. I’m not going to tell them to not use that because it has a climate impact like we’re also driving our cars, we’re also heating our homes and putting our lights on using natural gas, occasionally coal, like, we are part of systems. 

That being said, if in that Venn diagram. You happen to be someone who knows a lot about technological systems, about AI and whatever large learning models. And/or you’re in the policy space that actually could have something to do with harnessing, and like, making sure that those technologies are directed in a in a helpful direction, do that. But for those of us that don’t have those means, I think, like using the tools that are available to us is not an ethical failure. It’s like we live in the world, we need to be able to operate in the world. And just because we’re doing things that contribute to problems doesn’t mean that that’s our fault, you know. So, anyway, end of thought. 

Ashley: Well, said Mark, thanks for weaving those two together so artfully. Nick, the only thing I would add to what Mark was saying about AI is that an opinion I’ve been hearing a lot about a lot expressed a lot in different communities that engage with AI is that overall, this is a tool that could be used for good. We don’t need to just think of how we use it administratively, but also how we’re using it to reach, to create the world we want to see. How do we hit our vision of the future? How can AI assist us with that? And when it comes to the climate footprint rather than cutting off use of AI looking at alternative energy sources to be able to run it making that the target. How do we? How do we make it sustainable? 

So that seems to be a popular opinion out there right now that I’m hearing. And speaking of future visions. We have four minutes left, and I would just like to throw it out there to Elsha and Mark and anybody else in the comments, what is your vision for the future of arts in Calgary? In Alberta? What is your vision of where you’re going, where you’d like to see this go? 

End of thought. 

Mark: I think, like, my experience of being an artist concerned about climate change in Calgary and Alberta has been, is uniquely challenging. Like, we’re a petro state, we’re in a province that a lot of its wealth is generated from extractive resources, from polluting resources, and I think that makes it harder to find community and engage in conversations when there’s all this, you know, my dad worked at shell, like many of us, have relationships or funders or so on, that are engaged in in polluting industries. So I really do, I guess my hope is like finding our people like, I love the Green Art Alliance, Green Art Lab Alliance, I love being part of that international network of folks because it can a) get us out of the echo chamber of just the narratives that are happening here in Mohkinsstsis, in Calgary, and see what other folks are doing elsewhere. It’s wonderful, and I don’t always want to have to look outside of our borders to find community. I hope for those of us that are working and living here, that we can talk about what is it like to live here and be concerned about climate? And what does it look like to build strategies and care and practice of connection here. So that’s what I hope for.  

End of thought. 

Elsha: Elsha speaking. Yeah, it’s super loaded. I feel like it’s such a tough, I mean, has there ever been a time when we’re like it’s such a tough time. It’s, every time this feels like it’s such a tough time. But in this particular moment where, like money, I see, climate change is sort of like the logical endpoint to capitalism, you know, like we live in this extractive system, and therefore we need to extract resources to produce wealth, and those resources in Alberta are, It is petroleum, I think, in this particular, like political climate in this space that we’re navigating right now. I think we’re going to see a move towards more like pro-oil, like more explicitly pro-oil sentiments. I think that’s going to make being an artist in Alberta a little tougher, as simultaneously arts funding is like the lowest provincially it’s ever been or something. So, it’s like it’s tough. I think, what I would like to see is less people leaving Calgary. We have so many beautiful artists in Alberta, and they just keep fleeing, and I see the conditions that we’re in, and it’s like, well, obviously, people are going to go and try and find their community elsewhere, like Mark said, so I hope that these conversations can inspire people to stay and make work here and find their people here. 

I’m envisioning institutions that are explicitly supportive of artists beyond like, lip service. I think, as individual artists there’s only so much that we can do even collectively. I think formal institutions, institutions with power and money, I think it’s great that CADA is such like a proponent of conversations like this, and I would love to see more funders and you know, these larger orgs get behind artists in meaningful ways and monetary ways, and support the work that we’re doing.  

Yeah, all of my like vision, hopeful stuff is like a little, a little bit dry and boring. It’s like, I’m envisioning money like, and that’s not like a fun answer, but I envision like a lot of a lot more money in this sector because we need it to stay alive. You know, capitalism isn’t going anywhere soon. Oil is going to get you know, big. The pipelines are coming across Canada, and I think for us to stand a chance and stay here, and yes, Mark, universal basic income, I think, but you know, but that even that universal basic income, sorry I’m going on a tangent, feels like this, you know, hot button issue. And there are ways for organizations who have resources now to act as a bridge towards that. I think we should have subsistence funding through grantors. I think that should be something that’s offered, you know. I think artists should have their rent, their housing, their studio costs, if we’re saying we value this work, and we want to see it happening more, I think you know, kind of put our money where our mouth is, even if it’s small and incremental and a little bit at a time. It’s like it means something ultimately, when we’re losing support elsewhere. You know, so that’s where I am. I would like to see industry supporting artists in Alberta, and I’d like to see institutions supporting Albertan artists and fostering these conversations.  

End of thought. 

Ashley: Thank you. We are at time, and I am the most awkward of facilitators ever, I have no transition. I’m just going to say we’ve come to an end, and here’s Toyin, and I want to thank everybody. I want to thank everybody for your contributions in this conversation, getting on the mic, sharing your links, sharing your questions. Thank you very much. It was wonderful to be a part of. 

Toyin: Wow, thank you. This was so, I’m short of words. Thank you so much. It was way more than what I was expecting. Thank you for blowing my mind, and thank you for all the knowledge, all the thoughts, and for sharing, for just being generous with your knowledge. So, it’s Toyin speaking. And with this we’ve come to the end of today’s session. Thanks for staying with us, everyone, and for being patient and for sharing your thought also. Thanks so much for all the links and everything that we have in the chat. I just want to quickly say that if we, if there are more sessions like this coming on, they would be announced by Calgary Arts Development on the website. So please stay tuned for possible more Equity Town Hall sessions in the nearest future. We will let you know. With that I’ll say bye bye and see you next time. It’s such a privilege to be in this space. I appreciate you all. Thank you. 

Thanks, Elsha, thanks, Mark. Thanks, Ashley. Thank you.