CARNIVAL OF CRISIS PARADE: CREATIVE ACTION IN AN AGE OF EMERGENCY
Carnival of Crisis demonstrates that the arts can – and must – respond to the climate and ecological emergency.
UAL's Carnival of Crisis, presented by the Climate Emergency Network, demonstrated that the arts can – and must – respond to the climate and ecological emergency. Creative action is being manifested and mobilised through a season of events taking place in parallel with the COP26 Climate Summit hosted by the UK in the context of the global environmental crisis. Presented by the Climate Emergency Network, the Carnival brings together UAL’s community of students, alumni and staff, along with our global network of arts universities, our partners and our publics. Our season of talks, workshops and exhibitions positions Culture as the fourth pillar of sustainable development.
A highlight of Carnival, was the Parade for Climate Justice which took place on Wednesday 10 November. From midday on COP26 Transport Day, we encouraged the UAL community to come together from across London. We gathered in person or on social media, as we made our way to the Parade Ground at Chelsea College of Arts, opposite Tate Britain.
At Chelsea there were a series of empowering talks and performances from special guests, students and UAL leaders and an opportunity to take part in collective actions. We united as a community for a chance to connect with others in the name of climate justice and solidarity. Importantly, students were encouraged to make a creative response to the question – what do you bring? What does creativity bring to the climate catastrophe?
Sarah Temple: The Carnival of Crisis is very symbolic for me and represents 15 years of practice for sustainability to ensure that design responsibility forms a key part of student practice across LCC and UAL. The Carnival contextualises my teaching practice at a time widely acknowledged as a period of significant historical change, certainly in Education. We are familiar with working alongside Management Changemakers at UAL but historians are describing 2021 as the year of “Great Acceleration” in which not only is it impossible to consider ‘Business’ as usual but we are being forced to re-examine systems of education, the business of education, capitalism (Design supports capitalism) and the future of professional life with AI. A radical change of this kind not only alters our strategic relationships with other professionals and academics but it empowers each of us to take bold collective action, to take leadership roles in creating an educational system fit for purpose.
With the pandemic still active, extreme weather proliferating, global wildfires, desertification and refugees arriving on beaches, clearly our responsibility as educators and human beings urges us to act and communicate behavioural and societal change as a key priority affecting global habits, law, institutions and technologies. Scientists and creative communicators are uniquely positioned to determine how mankind can avoid wrecking our own means of existence. We have known that the Anthropocene is imminent and unprecedented – but as educators, we have not realised until now that this immense biological and geophysical momentum would shut down our Universities, deconstruct industrial activity, render professions obsolete and create global solidarity on basic survival fundamentals. Recent events have inevitably reorientated us as academics, as researchers, as learners, teachers and as innovators. QAA reports cannot be written swiftly enough to champion new policy development, leaving us as individuals/collectives to act, teach, publish research, influence rapid learning-culture change and bring about institute-wide innovation through leadership and validation.
Only in August 2021, this year did the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) convened by the UN, published a report declaring the devastating “widespread, rapid and intensifying” impacts before COP26 in Glasgow in November. There is now a singular global objective: to decarbonise our civilisation and my knowledge, experience and position on UAL Climate and Environment Action Group urges me to rapidly develop new educational cultures at UAL and with KE partners. I maintain that we have a responsibility as a global community of (creative) educators to urgently mitigate some of the catastrophic consequences of climate change. We understand the power that we possess as communicators to achieve policy change, we embrace the vital importance of a circular economy, the imperative to create with zero carbon, to divest, to utilise clean technologies and to operate with systems thinking – we need to consider how to swiftly and appropriately disseminate this core knowledge to all cohorts.
Prior to 2019, we have been supported by limited scholarly material: “A First Things First Manifesto” from 1964, “Design for the Real World” published in 1971 and more recently the UN Sustainability Goals.
2021 must bring more educational consensus on how we communicate the challenges and potential solutions. No more living in a nation-state system. I wrote a Responsibility Framework for the Design School in 2018 – it reminds us of our need for purpose in all we do. Beyond the RDF Framework itself, I have extensive evidence through case studies, that practice focused on key topics such as the utilisation of waste, systems thinking, value change, understanding issues of the global south, desertification and climate refugees should be at the heart of our lives. The Carnival and Parade brings a UAL community focus on these matters for the very first time.
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Written by: James Mack / Email
Sarah Temple: Conscientious Communicators Research Hub