Art Initiatives Working Towards a Sustainable Future

We spoke to Yasmine Ostendorf, founder of Green Art Lab Alliance, about working towards a reduced environmental footprint and climate justice from within the art sector, imagining possible future alternatives, and learning and growing through ongoing collaboration, knowledge production and exchange.

At the end of November, the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) held its first conference, “Decarbonising the Art World”, at the Barbican Centre in London. With the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% and defining shared standards to become a waste-free industry by 2030, the conference was also the launching point for the GCC’s Decarbonisation Action Plan. The plan lays out a 10-step strategy – including measuring emissions and setting reduction targets – as well as fifty effective actions that can be taken in areas such as shipping, travel, materials and spaces.

During the conference, the writer, poet and artist Ben Okri held a reading, before which he emphasized the importance of the art sector’s role in building a sustainable future, stating: “I think the art world is potentially extremely powerful for the possibilities of climate change and actually should be one of the leaders” Because it’s through art that we can envision potential alternatives.

Imagining possible futures

Speaking about the relationship between creativity and sustainability, Yasmine Ostendorf, who founded the Green Art Lab Alliance (gala) in 2012, puts it this way: “I find that the domain of imagination, speculation, creativity and being outside of the box is crucial for starting to think about what another system might look like.” She adds that “a lot of the knowledge is already in this world” – we just need to look or listen in a different way. And this is precisely what art can facilitate.

But it’s not only creativity that can help us imagine what a sustainable future might look like – it goes both ways. Findings from a January 2020 report on the cultural sector’s activities in combating the climate crisis, conducted by Arts Council England and non-profit organization Julie’s Bicycle, indicated that “sustainability is powering creative expression,” with environmental initiatives leading to new artistic opportunities in some cases.

This comes through clearly in a recently developed project by gala and one of its partners, the Jan van Eyck Academie, called The Future Materials Bank – a continually growing and collaboratively generated database of sustainable materials for art making. Material change and sustainable artistic practice are being activated through such projects on a broader scale, simultaneously opening up space for experimentation. Similar initiatives can be found in residency programs such as Saari Residence in Finland, the community kitchen and biomaterials lab LABVA in Chile, and through artistic practices and initiatives like Lichen Kelp’s Seaweed Appreciation Society and Hannah Fletcher’s Sustainable Dark Room.

Ostendorf sees The Future Materials Bank as a source of creative inspiration, and highlights that it also serves to refute the idea that sustainability is about all of the things that we cannot, or should not, do. Instead, it enables us to recognize that there might actually be better ways – not just for the environment but for art, too. But that doesn’t mean that the focus should only be on innovation and the “new”. Rather, it’s also about the materials and practices that already exist, including waste materials that continue to circulate, and how we can put them to use toward a sustainable future.

Growing networks

It’s also precisely as an in-built network that the art sector can effectively harness its power towards environmental action. Writing on the establishment of the Gallery Climate Coalition for artnet, gallerist Thomas Dane quotes environmentalist Danny Chivers on the necessity of building a movement, as the number one way everyone can get involved and make an impact. Dane also points out that this is relatively easy to do in the art world (especially pre-Covid), where coming together for events and discussion is the standard.

Having picked up momentum over the last couple of years, it would certainly seem that the movement is growing. A number of networks have emerged – some conceived before Covid and solidified after – while the effects of the pandemic also seemed to prove that there are ways the art world can cut down on waste and emissions while still remaining active. The Gallery Climate Coalition was initiated in 2020 and formalized through weekly Zoom meetings – a momentum that would not have been possible to sustain through physical meetings. Similarly working toward net-zero emissions in the visual arts sector, Art to Zero was conceived in 2019 by visual arts workers, and formalized in 2020. And then there’s Partners for Arts Climate Targets (PACT), which was founded this year and likewise works towards collective action in reducing the environmental impact of the visual arts. All of these initiatives are also partners – forming networks within networks. And there are many others.

But it‘s not a new discussion. A number of initiatives and organizations have been leading the way in the cultural sector, including Julie’s Bicycle, which was founded in 2007 and remains instrumental in mobilizing action against the climate crisis today.

The Green Art Lab Alliance is another such initiative. Ostendorf – a curator and researcher who was working with Julie’s Bicycle at the time of the alliance’s founding – initially started gala with a Europe-based network of partners. But it quickly spread to include organizations in Asia and Latin America. The alliance outlines its shared vision in a collaboratively written manifesto and organizes a breadth of regional, international, and topic-specific activities, including working groups, residences and more.

Fcused on organic growth and building lasting relationships – what Ostendorf refers to as “networked trust” – the alliance describes itself as mycelium-like. The founder also emphasizes that this is not only a metaphor: “It’s basically biomimicry of mycelium – applying the teachings of mycelium on different levels, including in decision-making processes, the direction in which resources flow, and in being decentralized.” This also means that the network spreads through collaborations and mutual connections, allowing time to build trust between partners, and ultimately facilitating a sustainable model of growth. Among the current partners are residencies, organizations and platforms such as Julie’s Bicycle (England), Jan Van Eyck Academie (Netherlands), HIAP (Finland) and Translocal (Hungary) in Europe; Labverde (Brazil), FLORA ars+natura (Colombia), Cocina Colaboratorio (Mexico), and FIBRA (Peru) in Latin America; and Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (Thailand), culture360.asef.org (Singapore), SAKA (Philippines), and many more.

This growth, expansion of networks, and activation across the sector further accentuates the structural and systemic nature of the environmental crisis, and highlights that it goes beyond individual responsibility. Because, as Ostendorf points out, resources, knowledge and access are not equally distributed.

Building a lexicon

Discussing what has changed in the field over the years since starting gala, Ostendorf refers to the social dimension, noting a shift from a strictly science-focused idea of climate change to a more holistic conversation around climate justice and acknowledgment of intersections with ancestrality and land use, among others. “...it’s the language used, and also that it’s not just about looking at carbon and science anymore, but also understanding entanglements with coloniality, how different places are impacted, and how that’s connected to land struggles and territories.” For Ostendorf, this social dimension was also a crucial factor in the decision to expand the alliance to more parts of the world, as the climate crisis impacts different geographies in different, unequal ways.

In a similar vein, The Future Materials Bank is also working on putting together a lexicon – which they aim to diversify with various languages – because it’s necessary to think about the terms that we use, to understand what they actually mean and to whom, and to make broader understanding and shared values possible. ”If you want to have a holistic understanding, you need to understand what’s happening in different places in the world and also the words that people are using. ‘Sustainability’, for example, was not a term that resonated in various countries that we are working in. Or people used the word, but it was connected to policy or to the idea of the West or to ‘organic’– it was associated with something being expensive.”

Exchanging knowledge, sharing resources, and including many perspectives and plurality creates opportunities not only to learn from each other, but also from nature and non-human agencies. These threads will even converge in a book that’s currently in production, under the title of Mycelium as Methodology – in which Ostendorf is mapping case studies in Latin America, conducting interviews with partner organizations, and looking not only at the arts, but communities that work in a mycelial way. This also includes looking at food distribution systems, and relationships to land and territory. Speaking about the book, Ostendorf says: “the teachings that we get from that and from mycelium will be implemented again into how we organize ourselves – in some ways pragmatic and some poetic, like paying more attention to the invisible, the underground, and to silence.”

This intersection between the pragmatic and the poetic also puts the art sector in a good position to lead the way to change. Pointing out the creative opportunities that can emerge from using sustainable materials, Ostendorf refers to fishbone glue – one of the materials from The Future Materials Bank. Fishbone glue is reversible, allowing for projects from books to furniture to continually be updated, adapted, or changed. This kind of flexibility and openness to ongoing structural change is also what’s needed to address the ecological crisis – because it’s a landscape that’s never static and will require us to keep reevaluating our standards as we proceed. “We really have to navigate something that works for all of us, but is still radical enough to keep pushing the movement forward. A lot of organizations want to be associated with environmental issues, or they want to identify with being a sustainable organization. So as that progresses, you want to be ahead of the curve and think about: ‘what are we adding to what we stand for and what do or don’t we accept?”