"Where is the Environment?" asked Caroline Lucas yesterday. She's quite right to challenge the major parties - neither of whom have said anything about this most crucial of issues during the current election campaign. Across the Atlantic, it now seems that Donald Trump aims to withdraw from the Paris deal on climate change. It's a scary moment, and no mistake.
This is the time when, more than ever, we need to be listening to the voices of indigenous people, who experience climate change at the front line on a daily basis. Not only do they feel its effects particularly acutely - they also have long cultural traditions of living in close harmony with nature. In indigenous cultures, you do not own the land but care for it - passing it on as a healthy inheritance to the future. Now, more than ever, we need to be engaging with indigenous people as we try to find a way forward in our relationship with a damaged planet.
Reports from Standing Rock
ORIGINS 2017 has a range of inspiring and provocative events about indigenous ideas on the environment, beginning with REPORTS FROM STANDING ROCK on June 11 - a series of short films that show the realities of the protest and explore the depth of the Native American activists' passion to save their land and waters. Trump's refusal to engage with indigenous protestors may yet prove to be his political undoing - his failure to engage with environmental issues is certainly very dangerous for us all.
Are We Stronger than Winston?
Just how dangerous is shown in ARE WE STRONGER THAN WINSTON? by VOU Dance Company from Fiji, performing at The Place on June 23 and 24. Winston was the cyclone that hit Fiji in February 2016: the worst recorded tropical storm in the history of the South Pacific, killing 42 people and causing tens of thousands to flee their homes. In the words of the choreographer, Navitalai Waqavotuwale: "Soon the house that once sheltered us, now threatened our very lives as it collapsed in shreds around us. Soon the ocean that once fed us came pounding at our doors demanding our breath. Soon the wind that once rippled through our children's hair and carried their voices homeward, snatched them from our very arms and hauled them beyond the horizon where their voices were heard no more. And soon, mothers were burying their children, and children were burying their mothers."
Melissa Veszi as Poluknalai
A lighter but equally important take on climate change in the Pacific is offered in Sani Muliaumaseali'i’s new musical for family audiences, BABA THE BAD BABOON. In this version of a Polynesian folk tale, Baba is an experienced leader who assures the goddess Poluknalai, the supreme protector of animals and nature, that all will be well under his watch - leading to a dire loss of animals and ecology.
Angry Inuk
It's in the Arctic that the effects of climate change are probably most glaringly obvious, as the ice melts at astonishing speed. Alethea Arnaquq-Baril's remarkable film ANGRY INUK, which has been winning audience awards at film festivals across the planet, is powered by fury at the world's failure to engage with the people who actually live in the Arctic - the Inuit themselves. Their environmentally sustainable approach to seal hunting - using every part of a non-endangered species for food and clothing, and to give them traction in the global marketplace - is set in sharp contrast with the insanely wasteful approach of western interests in the Artic region.
Tanya Tagaq
So it seems only fitting that the last voice you will hear at ORIGINS this year is an Inuk voice - TANYA TAGAQ. More than a traditional throat singer, Tanya seems to embody and to vocalise the Arctic landscape itself. Her extraordinary improvised soundtrack to the silent "documentary" NANOOK OF THE NORTH is a staggering evocation of the beautiful and bare lands that sustain the planet - and that we are all too close to destroying.
Last night I was at a diplomatic party - and I met Hilary Benn. I hadn't really expected to run up against the man who, less than 24 hours before, had won applause in the House of Commons for disagreeing with his party leader and voting to bomb Syria. It seemed more than a little odd, given what he had said only two weeks before. Click here and marvel.
The air strikes on Syria are a response of sorts to the killings in Paris, but they are a knee-jerk response. Like everything David Cameron says or does, the decision to go to war was an unconsidered reaction to a short-term news agenda, playing for what he regards as immediate popularity, rather than looking towards any longer-term plan or future possibility. I recognise, of course, that we must do something - but an intensification of the conflict Daesh desires is not it. We are casting ourselves in exactly the Western crusader role they have given us in their apocalyptic narrative. The best analysis I have read of the ISIS / Daesh movement is by Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic. If this article makes one thing clear, it is that the escalation of conflict is exactly what they desire.
So the current response is not only inadequate - it is dangerous. And this begs the question - if not by bombing, how should we respond?
On one level, as Diane Abbott and Caroline Lucas articulated very clearly on last night's Question Time, there are diplomatic and economic measures that can be taken. We could start by stopping arms sales to Saudi Arabia. You can watch the debate and consider for yourself...
For me, as an artist, the question of response is not so directly political - though of course I recognise that the directly political is central. The contribution of artists is in the cultural arena, and is to do with interventions in public space that shift the quality of thought. Cultural activity changes the emotional temperature, the atmosphere. It allows certain things to become thinkable, and certain things to become unthinkable. At the moment, the unthinkable is becoming policy - and so the need for cultural response is very real.
I'm not saying that art can "Stop the War". I'm certainly not saying it can stop Daesh. What I am saying is that a mature society responds to events on a variety of levels, and that the response of artists is often the most profound - the response that can help others think through matters on a more practical level. In pre-colonial Ghana, the role of the seprewa player was to provide music in the chief's hut, as a way of enabling him to think through what to do. In Ancient Greece, the Athenian populace watched the plays of Euripides as preparation for jury service and the legislative process.
So - what music, what theatre do we make at this moment? How do we counter destruction with creativity? How can we re-member what was blown apart? How can we find any sort of beauty to set against the violence?
The day before the Paris massacre, I went to see the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Royal Academy. A great deal of this show seems to me to be grappling with precisely the questions that Paris has thrown at us. His subjects are almost always to do with meaningless oppression, destruction and death. He makes art from his own imprisonment, from the vandalistic inheritance of the Cultural Revolution, from the bones of Mao's nameless victims. Most strikingly of all, he memorialises the children who died in the Szechuan earthquake.
Straight is an overwhelming artwork, particularly as shown at the RA, where it is framed by the collected and catalogued names of the children, placed on the walls like a war memorial. The 150 tons of steel bars that constitute the artwork are taken from the wreckage of the schools where the children died. The buildings collapsed because these bars buckled so easily - Ai's video in the same room explains the engineering failures, and the huge challenges of gathering the names, finding out what he could about the children, straightening the bent metal. But it has been straightened, and lies in the RA as a testament to an intense and difficult dedication. The bars have to be straightened, the artwork says, because their not being straight is the reason 5,000 children died. To straighten them is a memorial, an act of reparation, a political gesture.
If we can begin to inject something of this depth and emotional intensity into our own cultural space, if we can begin truly to memorialise our lost youth, then perhaps we can begin to move beyond the current simplistic 'eye for an eye', revenge-driven militarism. Perhaps we can begin to think, and feel, a little differently. We desperately need to.
Michael is the Artistic Director of Border Crossings: he will be the prime author of this blog, although from time to time we'll be inviting contributions from other people we're collaborating with.
