Greening the arts
We’ve been at TippingPoint Newcastle this week along with artists and arts organisations from across the country, looking at how we give the urgent challenges of climate change and sustainability a cultural and artistic voice.
As part of the event Arts Council England this morning announced plans to embed environmental sustainability into funding, becoming the first arts funding body in the world to embed environmental sustainability into the funding agreements of its major programmes.
Since May 2011 Artsadmin has been collaborating with Cape Farewell, Julies Bicycle, Live Art Development Agency, Platform, Tipping Point, Michaela Crimmin and John Hartley to discuss with ACE how artists and the arts as a whole address ecological issues. The following is a joint statement from the group on today’s announcement.
For nearly a year we have been working together to encourage the Arts Council England to support artists and arts organisations who are both addressing climate change as the subject of their work and reducing carbon emissions through the practice of their work. As individuals and organisations we have many years of experience in tackling these issues and promoting, commissioning or supporting others who do likewise.
We are delighted by this announcement by ACE and its championing of this field of practice. We believe that meeting the challenge of climate change will require society, at local and global levels, to engage in decades of profound change and the arts will play a fundamental role in this vital endeavour.
The arts help shape our minds and show us different ways of living. They can open us to possibilities beyond the reach of other ways of imagining, help us to reframe our collective position in relation climate change and enable us to build a more sustainable culture.
ACE has a pivotal position in supporting artists over the long term in such a way that addressing these issues becomes a normal part of practice in all the arts. We are committed to helping ACE in this work.
Photograph: Michael Pinsky’s Plunge, a co-commission with LIFT. Photograph by Julian Andrews.