Art and Culture As Solution to Climate Change? Lessons from 50 Years of “Summit Art”

Even at the earliest of UN environmental and climate conferences, i.e. from Stockholm 1972 on, artists were paying attention to these political summits and producing works directly related to the events. In recent years, more and more cultural actors (foundations, NGOs, philanthropies) became engaged in supporting artists to contribute to the official programmes of the climate summits, while other cultural actors support or engage in activism. At the same time, these supposedly different realms, i.e. the cultural sector and activism, have become increasingly blurred, as have conceptions of “political activism” since the 1960s. In my talk I want to share critical insights from artistic and activist engagements with the summit that have been institutionalized and ritualized in many ways throughout the years – and so have patterns of framing and evaluating these practices in the media, in our academic field, as well as through cultural practitioners themselves. Looking into the problems and contradictions within recent attempts of cultural practitioners and artists to contribute to discussions and politics around climate change, both from the so-called “North” and the “South”, I will critically assess the roles ascribed to “emotion” (and here the dualism between spreading “hope” vs. “despair”), awareness-raising and particular conceptions of culture in order to think about alternatives – alternatives that leave behind the traps of dualistic thinking (e.g. one that divides theory from practice, or one that argues for an abandonment of the project of modernity as a whole in favour of “retrotopian” constructions of the future that often go hand in hand with essentialising ideas around “ethnic communities” and “local solutions”). An overcoming of dualisms that often are voiced together with a rhetoric of “urgency” and “emergency” might enable more dialectical thought around political possibilities and the role of art therein.