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2024, 2025
Tags: art, design, education, international, technology
In 2024, the Dutch Creative Industries Fund generously supported my year-long research into developing Good Praxis as a vehicle for collective education for climate action. Because of this support I could travel to Malmö and Helsinki to organise workshops and build an international network of organisations doing alternative education, such as Art School Maa in Helsinki.
Here is a translated excerpt from the application:
What is the central question or theme of the project? Explain the artistic and/or content-related starting points.
The central question in the application is: how can we desire the world differently? We have to desire the world differently because our lifestyle in the Netherlands is disastrous for the planet. The continuing growth of capitalism is killing the planet, and Western complicity in this is exacerbated by the exposure to stimuli and signals—ads, sponsored content, influencers, and our behavioural changes as a result of all these messages—that tempt us to keep consuming without immediately feeling the consequences.
Our standard of living in the Global North is killing millions of people in the Global South. The UN now speaks of a climate genocide, and authoritative climate journalist Eric Holthaus warns that “our civilisation is at stake.” If we want change, we have to want change. We have to desire the world differently.
How can we desire the world differently? And what does it take to move from individual desire to collective action? We cannot escape capitalism alone. As individuals, we are no match for the army of hired scientists, designers and other seducers of capitalist corporations. But when we organise together, when we learn from the history of solidarity, direct action and mutual aid, we see and feel that alternative ways of shaping society have existed for thousands of years, and still exist.
Good Praxis wants to make room for these alternative strategies, to develop new forms of solidarity, mutual aid and direct action through a radical pedagogy of collective creativity. Towards a new culture for a new society.
What is the reason for the project?
I have been working in art education for over 15 years, and the climate is one of the topics that students are most concerned about. At the same time, the topic is not central to the agenda of managers and supervisors. An earlier attempt to facilitate this within traditional art education failed. That is why we started doing Good Praxis outside of formal education, with artists who also see the need and who connected their network to mine.
With Good Praxis we want to explore new ways of looking at the climate crisis based on our current situation. As it is now, things are not going well. We have now gone from a neoliberalism that underestimates the consequences of our lifestyle on the climate to a neofascism that outright denies—even exacerbates—them. We have no time to lose to save what can be saved, and we will have to look for new ways to change our behaviour in all its manifestations—economic, political, and cultural.
Why do you want to carry out this project?
With Good Praxis we want to contribute to the education and organisation of climate awareness through collective creativity. With artists, designers and activists who desire new forms of collective, transformative, revolutionary action. Who do not make works that are sold to collectors at polluting biennials, who do not contribute to the plastic soup in our oceans, and who do not become part of the distraction that is green capitalism. But who find new forms for the merging of creativity and everyday life, so that we produce and consume according to need instead of supply; regeneratively and not extractively. So that we rethink our rhythms, fads and fashions, and develop new forms of producing, consuming and living together that can actually continue into the 22nd century.
What is the aim of the project?
The aim of the project is multiple. First, it is to raise awareness of the climate emergency, and our complicity in it. Then, it is to study successful examples of resistance and change that generate hope. To develop perspectives and capacity for action. Finally, it is to stimulate new forms of collective creativity that contribute to large-scale behavioural change. I am driven by the statement of the American writer and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara, who says that "the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible." With the help of this programme, I want to contribute to the climate awareness of the creative industries, and the creative development of the climate movement. So that the frame of reference of climate activists is not only a classical orchestra or traditional theatre, but that other perspectives, other lived experiences and other collective expressions become visible in the movement.
How does the project relate to existing knowledge or projects on this theme? What does the project add to the field?
We started doing the workshops because of a sense of a lack of climate awareness in the art world. The art world still behaves as if we are not in a climate emergency: artists, curators and collectors fly to international residencies, exhibitions and fairs; almost 60% of the 800,000 visitors to the Venice Biennale come from abroad, most of them by plane; and the creative industries keep producing more stuff according to supply instead of need, depleting precious resources and polluting the environment. All this has to change if we are to avoid all realistic scenarios of collapse at 1.5 degrees of warming, after which the chances of extreme flooding, drought, forest fires and food shortages could increase dramatically.