As the Paris talks draw to a close, there has been late flourish of artistic and cultural response to the potentially catastrophic threat of climate change. Some works are shouts of outrage, or attempt simply to make us connect with the reality of global warming. Others are of a more ambitious bent, seeking to be part of the solution by actively bringing people together to reimagine how we live in the world.
The campaigning work of the Beehive Collective, a volunteer-driven arts organisation in Paris for the festival of economic alternatives, has more in common with the medieval artisans who made the Bayeux tapestry than the fashionable but fleeting clicktivism of the age.
Two huge images, extraordinary in their detail, were inked by 20 artists from South and North America across nine painstaking years. Strung up between Parisian trees, they depict a kind of heaven and hell for the future development of Mesoamerica, depending on which pathways are chosen.
Subverting the style of old colonial maps, Plan Mesoamerica depicts a future of rapacious, financially-driven exploitation, one that continues across the regions even as the climate worsens, crushing local cultures and ecosystems. A scroll reads: ”Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.”
Mesoamerica is fighting back! turns the story around, reimagining the future of South and North America as a celebration of indigenous culture and ecological flourishing. Look closely and you’ll find depictions of more than 400 insect, plant, and animal species native to somewhere between Mexico and Colombia.
These are more than illustrations or simple agitprop. The works, developed following long conversations with local communities, are designed to be used as a basis for the collective mapping of different, better development paths. As the collective writes, the two pieces show “stories of grassroots organising and community resilience”, in which “a multitude of characters symbolise strategies and tactics for building and defending autonomy”.
The Danish artist Jens Galschiot has exhibited a number of installations around Paris over the duration of the talks. His work can be seen as an attempt to simplify the complex issue of “loss and damage”, a subject that has divided the global north and south.
The north has made the greater historical contribution to the emissions causing global warming. It has also shown rising antipathy towards migrants and refugees, who are likely to increase in number as a result of climate change. Yet northern governments have been slow to accept any financial responsibility for the harm caused by emissions.
Galschiot’s works illustrate these themes unambiguously. Freedom to Pollute, a kitsch, six metre-high figurine, depicts the Stature of Liberty with a smoking torch symbolic of western consumption. The fibreglass piece is surrounded by Climate Refugees, a series of bronze sculptures of people forced to flee by the impact of global warming.
But how do you make global warming more personal? The climate ribbon initiative, found across Paris from the People’s Climate summit to the Place de la République – not to mention in the public area of the climate conference itself – poses a simple question: what do you love and hope never to lose to climate chaos? Beguilingly simple yet strangely effective, the initiative offers a secular echo of lighting a candle in church, with people invited to write their answer to the question on a coloured ribbon and tie it to a crafted tree. The artists ask participants to read the replies of others and carry their wishes with them.
Similarly colourful is an experimental pop-up shelter that peaks out beneath Parisian rooftops at the festival of alternatives in Montreuil. The accordion-like structure is part of an exhibition and workshop on ecological building.But while commissioned works of art vie with labours of patient devotion, there is also a place for the quick work of a furtive spray can and stencil. Some of these messages get straight to the point.
