The Making of Our Shrinking Coastlines
Art and movement have always provided me with a place for reflection and growth, a space to weave connections with others who can or want to see pathways towards justice, and a way to find and nurture networks of solidarity, care, and transformation. The Our Shrinking Coastlines series is a reflection on the beauty and precarity of our natural world. It is also a reflection on the power of art, space, and movement to bring about empowering and life-changing connections.
When faced with the profound ecological losses of our time, when words are not enough, the Cultural Geographer Whatmore encourages us to find agency, our ‘voice,’ through practice or performance, by ‘thinking and acting through the body’ (2006, p.604). This is because, as the philosopher Latour says, ‘we do not live inside, in the cellar of the soul, but outside in the dappled world.’ The Our Shrinking Coastlines series is a meditation on gratitude for what remains and grief for what has been lost. Such artworks are profound authentic expressions that support the maker and observers in creating safe spaces for challenging conversations.
Within the field of creative arts, collaboration, co-creation, and capabilities approaches are the inherent ‘attributes and dimensions’ that provide the ‘productive conditions’ for social and environmental justice to unfold (Wright et al 2022, p.56). The Participatory Arts research also establishes ‘recognition, redistribution, and representation’ as the foundational principles that a rich set of values, motivations, processes, and actions can then be built upon (Wright et al 2022, pp.56-57, 59). Such changes to entrenched and uneven power structures that reinforce disadvantage, exclusion, violence, and injustice are transformative. However, they are also challenging to achieve or sustain (Neimanis 2019).
Therefore, the concept of ‘resourcefulness,’ the process of using everyday actions of resistance to build upon existing assets, challenge discriminating power relations, and foster capacity (Jehlička et al. 2019; MacKinnon and Derikson 2013), is necessary. The arts are a powerful way to build community resourcefulness by examining existing community skills, knowledge, and resources and then building upon these through sustained partnerships.
Whether you engage in the arts as a maker, observer, at an individual or community level, they are a powerful way to reflect on and process the challenges of our time. Subscribe to my blog for more reflections on the arts and how they enrich our lives.
References:
Jehlička, P., Daněk, P. and Vavra, J., 2019. Rethinking resilience: home gardening, food sharing and everyday resistance. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 40(4), pp.511-527.
Latour, B., 2002. Body, cyborgs, and the politics of incarnation. The Body, pp.127-41.
MacKinnon, D. and Derickson, K.D., 2013. From resilience to resourcefulness: A critique of resilience policy and activism. Progress in Human Geography, 37(2), pp.253-270.
Neimanis, A., 2019. The weather underwater: blackness, white feminism, and the breathless sea. Australian Feminist Studies, 34(102), pp.490-508.
Whatmore, S., 2006. Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world. Cultural geographies, 13(4), pp.600-609.
Wright, P., Down, B. and Davies, C., 2022. Learning, making and flourishing in non-formal spaces: Participatory arts and social justice. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 17(1), pp.54-68.