Using Art to Place Colonialisms Effects on Climate Change Into Perspective

The fine art exploring the truth well-nigh how climate change began

(Image credit:

Louis Henderson/ Courtesy of the artist

)

A new art exhibition offers a fuller, more rounded view of humanity's impact on the Earth – by tracing its link with colonialism. Precious Adesina talks to the artists.

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Information technology has been more than than three decades since climate change became front end-page news. In 1988, The New York Times ran an commodity titled "Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate". Ever since, discussions on the crisis take predominantly focused on how the country of the world has been afflicted past humans since the Industrial Revolution in the West – and with adept reason. The World's temperature has increased past 0.07C every decade since the belatedly 19th Century, a ascension that has been linked to the mass called-for of fossil fuels. Yet a new exhibition of work by various artists suggests that we must look farther dorsum in fourth dimension and analyse the issue from a not-Western perspective in order to get a fuller picture of the current emergency.

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The grouping show Nosotros Are History: Race, Colonialism and Climate Change opened to coincide with 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair at London's Somerset House. Through the lens of 11 artists who take a personal relationship with the Caribbean area, South America and Africa, the exhibition looks non just at the roots of global warming, just also at how it impacts the developing globe. By looking back, the link between the globe'south environmental problems, colonialism and slavery is highlighted. Also explored is how these problems still have a disproportionately negative impact on certain countries. A study released in 2020, published past two archaeologists, revealed how colonisation forced residents in Caribbean communities to move away from traditional and resilient ways of building homes to more modern merely less suitable means. These habitats accept proved to be more difficult to maintain, with the materials needed for upkeep not locally available, and the buildings easily overwhelmed past hurricanes, putting people at greater risk during natural disasters.

From the woods to the physical (to the forest) by Alberta Whittle explores the legacy of colonialism (Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Copperfield, London)

Among the exhibits is Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle's film from the forest to the concrete (to the wood), 2019, which directly explores this topic, documenting the effects of Hurricane Dorian in the Commonwealth of the bahamas. The ten-minute-long flick is stamped with the date 09.09.19, nine days afterward the disaster. "Africa produces 4% of the earth'southward greenhouse gases, the whole continent, but yet it is then at the forepart line," Whittle told culture mag The Skinny. The artist wants people in the UK to run into the disparity between their own comfort and the relative lack of comfort of their not-Western counterparts. She intertwines a number of performances with footage of destruction. "[There was] a terrible hurricane that moved through the Bahamas last calendar week," she said at the time of its premiere. "But what I see in the weather in the news in the Uk, is 'Oh isn't this wonderful, we are most to go through a period of sunshine'."

What this exhibition asks is: who we are really talking about when nosotros question how our collective actions are having an environmental consequence? According to the curator of the exhibition, Ekow Eshun, if we don't allow the people in emerging countries to speak for themselves, we force them out of the conversation and into one that isn't consistent with the facts. "Otherwise nosotros end up repeating the same narrative that nosotros've repeated for a long fourth dimension that somehow people in the developing earth are supporting characters in the drama, rather than communities that are directly affected [by climate change]," Eshun tells BBC Culture.

Louis Henderson'due south video installation is an adaptation of the poem The Sea is History by Derek Walcott (Credit: Courtesy of the artist)

Similarly, British filmmaker Louis Henderson focuses on how the Due west is primarily responsible for the disruptions to the natural world that humans have caused in his almost thirty-minute long video The Body of water is History, 2016. Henderson adapts the poem of the aforementioned name past Caribbean area poet Derek Walcott. In his poem, Walcott discusses the effects of colonisation on a community's civilization, and claims that the history of these places is hidden in the ocean. The footage in Henderson's piece features mesmerising shots of Lake Enriquillo, a lake in the Dominican Democracy that often floods due to rises in sea temperature.

Through this, the creative person explores how the exploitation of the island for its natural resources, the genocide of the indigenous population and the importation of enslaved people have contributed to the global emergency. "I am interested in identifying Columbus'due south 1492 arrival on the island of Ayiti/Kiskeya (nowadays known equally Haiti and the Dominican Republic) as a potential starting betoken for the climate crisis the world is facing today," Henderson tells BBC Culture. "I believe it's important to continually analyse and endeavor to sympathize the effects of the afterlife of transatlantic slavery, both on a local and a global scale, and how it impacted the Globe's geology and its ecosystems."

Subconscious history

Much like Whittle and Henderson, the collaborative duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla explore how outsiders have impacted the Caribbean, only they take a different approach. Their screen-printing method for the series Contracts uses layers of black ink to taint the beautiful scenery they depict. "What seem to be conventional pictures of a beautiful destination are disrupted by a layer of a unmarried colour ink, shrouding the idyll partly or completely," say the duo. "We live and work in Puerto Rico, a Caribbean isle that, since the colonial period, has been systematically exploited for its natural resource… Every bit climate change makes weather events more astringent, from droughts to hurricanes, the already vulnerable island is put in an even more heightened state of precariousness."

Artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla explore climate bear on (Credit: Courtesy of the creative person/ Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris/ Sebastiano Pellion di Persano)

Contract (AOC 50), 2014, shown at the exhibition, is a piece that is part of the larger series. In it, the pair catalogue sites in Vieques, Puerto Rico, where palm trees were used every bit markers by the Usa military to highlight where take a chance waste material was disposed. The areas are now managed by the US Department of Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service as conservation zones, according to the artists. "This paradoxical designation denies the underlying environmental and health risks of the dumps –  so toxic that in 2005 they were placed on the US Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund National Priorities Listing," they say.

Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo says that the only way to truly movement forward is to mind to the people who are explicitly afflicted by these changes to the ecosystem. "We urgently need to look at what communities that are actually on the frontlines are proposing on a grassroot level, since they are the people who are directly impacted by the climate crunch," she tells BBC Culture. Her enquiry-based fine art project, Be Dammed, investigates the environmental and social consequences of dams throughout Latin America. "By [looking at] different case studies in the Americas, I've had a chance to interact with some of these communities to highlight alternatives to these large infrastructures," she says.

A Universal History of Infamy by Carolina Caycedo is among the exhibits at the new show We Are History (Credit: David de Rozas/ Museum Associates, LACMA)

While none of these artists offer a hyper-specific call to action, collectively they prove how climatic change has affected the countries they belong to, or associate themselves with, and the importance of putting global issues into perspective. Every bit Eshun puts it: "I call up it's important that those voices and those perspectives are heard and not simply as victims but heard as people who accept agency and autonomy, and in this respect they're heard through the vocalism of artists."

We Are History: Race, Colonialism and Climatic change is at Somerset Firm, London, until 6 February 2022.

Black History Month takes place throughout October in the Great britain.

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211020-the-art-exploring-the-truth-about-how-climate-change-began

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