HOT Water, Gordon Institute Showcasing
“It’s our cultural climate that is responsible
for climate change, so the real change we need to be working on is
cultural,” says Dylan McGarry who will be holding an Earth Forum
workshop at the Hot Water conference, which runs from Friday to Sunday
in Cape Town.
The conference serves as a meeting
place for scientists and artists to look at what needs to be said and
what the most effective way of saying this would be.
The arts are well placed to
develop our consciousness of habits and destructive behaviour because
good art can be a mechanism for empathy, compassion and aware-ness. Good
art makes us pause to consider and debate, and visually arresting art –
charged with metaphors and symbols – stops us in our tracks, moves us,
startles us and deepens our consciousness.
In addition to panel discussions,
the conference will feature performances and artworks on exhibition to
serve as points of discussion.
On Friday evening, choreo-grapher
Tossie van Tonder presents the premiere of her newest work, The End, in
which compost is arranged and rearranged towards an alchemy of hope and
survival.
Virginia
MacKenny, winner of the 2011 Donald Gordon Creative Arts Award, will
talk about and present her specially commissioned exhibition, Threshold,
and Brendhan Dickerson will present Complicit.
Dickerson’s performance
installation on Friday night is a larger-than-life-sized, fully
articulated, swimming polar bear fire-sculpture, weaving back and forth
along a cable, six metres overhead, paddling and desperately searching
for a chunk of ice.
Mbali Vilakazi will deliver a
poetry performance, while Simon Max Bannister’s work will be exhibited
in the Hiddingh Hall, Orange Street, during the weekend.
The conference’s opening address
on Friday will be delivered by environmental attorney and author Cormac
Cullinan and the entire weekend is aimed at deepening our understanding
of the notion of art and climate change as we approach Cop 17.
People attending conferences or
workshops do so with their own concerns, but the Earth Forum workshop on
Saturday has two aims. The first is to enhance a person’s capacity to
imagine and the second is to develop the capacity to empathise with
another person.
“We have to use our imagination to experience what the other person is feeling,” said McGarry.
The intention is not so much to bring about an agreement as to explore what it means to live on this Earth.
“Imagination is at the heart of
all change. Any social movement or activity, whether developing a new
movement in environmental activism or planning your day, starts with an
inner movement,” says McGarry.
“The idea is to foster this inner
movement in every person, not as an isolated and self-serving incident,
but connected to the social world and natural world around us.”
Delegates to the conference will take part in the Earth Forum workshop on Saturday afternoon.
“Traditionally in art we see
people making objects to gain atten-tion. We’re looking for connective
aesthetics, ways to connect with the world, to give new life to the
static form and our imaginations allow us to do that,” said McGarry