Image: Creative Climate Leadership, 2023, https://www.creativeclimateleadership.com/latest/creative-climate-leadership-australia-2023-participants-announced/, accessed: 21.09.2023.
Welcome to your Friday afternoon with The Trees! Welcome to our new Tree Guardians! I hope you’ve all had a groovy, powerful week! Get a cup of something nice…
Thanx for tolerating my radical acceptance preach last week. It was only, just slightly off-course from my blogging about arriving at an intersection for discussing co-care. Co-care is entirely crucial to the project. However the project functions in the future, however we look after each other and however our interactions with the broader communities, invite social change, reciprocal care will be at the centre. If you remember, we’ve reached a point where a decision about which area of the project we will take the application of a co-care framework to. And there are co-care applications that could be explored for all kinds of policies, decolonisation, repatriation, deaccession, community and public engagement strategies, Aboriginal staff support strategies in all kinds of keeping places… not only art galleries and we haven’t even begun to touch on other possibilities for supporting cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary co-care with the environmental sciences and other stakeholder groups.
Hey! Surprise! We’re not going down those rabbit holes today! If you’re starting to get the sense that this blogging course is often off-course, then I’m on track! Be thankful you’ve got a cup of something nice and only have this blogging thing once a week! In the meantime, keeping up with the times, today’s blog is to share an outline of the Creative Climate Leadership program I attended last week, 11th-16th September. Designed and delivered by Julie’s Bicycle, https://juliesbicycle.com/, hosted by Bundanon Art Museum, https://www.bundanon.com.au/our-stories/architecture/art-museum-the-bridge/ and supported by Creative Australia, https://creative.gov.au/investment-and-development/leadership-program/creative-climate-leadership-program/, it was a big week.
Given I’ve been in beautiful Illaroo for the week, I thought it important to share some follow-up about the Creative Climate Leadership program, with you. We stayed five nights in Bundanon’s, Bridge accommodation, with nature all around us. Julie’s Bicycle, a not-for-profit organisation, based in London designed and delivers the program and works to empower creatives and mobilise arts sectors to action on climate change, natural and social justice. Started by the music industry in 2007, the program has been delivered to over 250 creatives in 30 countries. The Australian cohort adds another 24 to the evolving network. The full list of Australia’s Creative Climate Leadership participants and Facilitators is here, https://www.creativeclimateleadership.com/latest/creative-climate-leadership-australia-2023-participants-announced/, and what an incredible bunch of creatives!
The weeks’ program was absolutely packed, 9am until at least 9pm, every day! Sessions included, Connecting to Country, Culture and Climate Change, Collaborating with First Nations People, Leadership and Resilience. One of my favourite sessions was the Welcome to Country ceremony which was led by Uncle Paul McLeod with The Doonooch Dancers. Some from the program offered Acknowledgements in reply, in language and in English, which made the ceremony even more engaging. The other two program sessions that stand out are, our artists’ expo and the workshops led by participants.
There wasn’t enough time that we could attend every workshop – we were each able to get to about one out of three on any day. It would have been amazing to go to all of them! From the workshops I went to, I got to make kin and performance with compost, failure and time; explore decolonial storytelling and scaled green targets for theatre, to recall a few. The workshops were a great opportunity to engage as a participant within other artist’s ways of seeing and making – mind officially blown! Within the context of the program and creative leadership, there was much to learn and be inspired by from the artists and their workshops!
There was a lot to take in and I haven’t processed the learning yet. I’m looking forward to hearing evaluations from the other participants. In a nutshell, the program was an opportunity to collaborate and develop ideas around cultural leadership for climate justice and as I unpack the experience, I’ll share with you along the way. One important point to note is that COP, the annual Council of Parties, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will take place in the United Arab Emirates this year and is planned for Australia, 2026, https://unfccc.int/. Makes me ask… Do we mobilise our project? If so, how? Would it be too far off-course to start conversations about this stuff?…
From the nutshell to the nut…well, she has been the seed of my practice since Plastic-free Biennale, by Lucas Ihlein and Kim Williams in 2020, https://plasticfreebiennale.sydney/about-the-project/! As I mentioned, each artist presented an engagement for our peers at the Creative Climate Leadership program and Sister GlitterNullius, did not let me down! She conducted a frij magnet making workshop, It’s all about you with Sister GlitterNullius, after dinner Tuesday night. As you can probably imagine, folk don’t really want to get up, go out into the cold night to sit in a cold room and be yelled at by a morphing nun-bird! So, the nun helped get things started by ringing her bell as loudly as possible and yelling at her group, who were still in the dining room with the others and she hunted them down to class through the dark of the night! That cemented the tone for the workshop… the yelling nun and the participants nervously giggling, belying their rebellion poorly!
It was initially intended that the workshop be a gentle moment in time, with bits of plastic, plastic toys, found objects and picture cut-outs, when the group would remember their first climate change consciousness rising, people who inspired or influenced their work and the qualities about themselves that fuel their creative practice. Well, that was the gig I pitched… in a quiet, almost meditative state, the participants would complete their own creative climate superhero symbol in a guided blind drawing on their frij magnet and build their story upon it.
Oh no! The participants had their own ideas about who was running the workshop but Sister GlitterNullius wasn’t having her workshop heisted! The workshop was full of rebellion, banter and laughter, with zero meditative quiet! Everyone shared their frij magnet stories and we lost track of time! And mind you, time was important to the workshop, because these were no ordinary frij magnets, if they were ordinary frij magnets, we’d spell it like, fridge magnets! The nun had blessed them with frij magnet, time travel magic so, in the future, the participants could activate the present, when it had become the past with as little as a memory or as much as a new skill or enhanced practice in the future! I do hope to have photos to share with you soon! For those of you who have not met Sister GlitterNullius before, you can here: https://juundaal.com/category/video-stories/. I hope you enjoy!
That about wraps up my initial reflections on the leadership program for now. As I mentioned earlier, it has been quite a bit to take in, I need time to think it through, evaluate and hopefully discuss with other participants. I hope this week’s blog has planted a couple of seeds, piqued your interest a little and sits with you as a journal entry of my accountability to the project, all of you and of course, The Trees.
Thanx for stopping by – have a magnificent weekend, everyone!
Juundaal and The Trees
Juundaal Strang-Yettica 