going post-fossil in a neoliberal climate
On the transition to Fossil-free cultures
What does it mean to go post-fossil? This newly coined concept signifies the shift from burning fossil fuels (1) to using renewable, less polluting options. Importantly, the term also refers to the cultural reconstruction and mental changes that are happening as human societies face the threats of climate breakdown (2) and collapsing ecosystems. The key here is to recognize how the use of fossil fuels has shaped people’s experience of the world, of each other, and of themselves—early twenty-first-century societies are largely dependent on it, art not being an exception.
This text originally appeared in the 2018 publication ‘Contemporary Artist Residencies: Reclaiming Time and Space’ (Edited by Taru Elfving, Irmeli Kokko, Pascal Gielen), published by Valiz (Antennae – Arts in the Society Series).
Despite their unevenly distributed effects, the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels have shaped societies everywhere: communication, housing, transportation, and the global economy would all look very different without them. Going post-fossil refers to the attempts to rapidly and dramatically decrease the level of fossil fuel dependency.
The continued consumption has devastating effects on the climate and that has ramifications for all aspects of life. The term post-fossil indicates a desire to move beyond the dead end of fossil moder- nity. This calls for unlearning and rebooting, for a fundamental paradigm shift.
The global influence of neoliberal ideas and policies since the late 1980s is deeply connected with the escalation of climate change. Neoliberalism advocates an unregulated economy, privatization and loosening of state control at all sectors, rapid economic growth and fast profiteering instead of focusing on long-term goals. Thus, it effectively works against all things necessary for the post-fossil transition: more strict regulation and new legislation, binding intergovernmental agreements, supporting climate-friendly practices, and committing to long-term planning.
Over the past three decades, neoliberalism has also had a massive effect on public management and the cultural sector. Even in the Nordic countries, where some public funding for culture still exists despite severe austerity measures, new forms of public management that focus on productivity, efficiency, measurable outcomes and impact, commercial potential and a great turnout, have shifted the way art organizations see themselves and how they operate. This has created a situation in which cultural organizations may find it challenging to commit to long-term planning and projects that do not fit within these parameters.
The post-fossil transition starts by noticing how human existence is completely dependent on the biophysical constraints of our planet. This recognition is only the beginning, and already a major challenge within the field of art—possibly partly thanks to the internalization of the neoliberal ideals, which then fuse together with the persistent claims of art’s autonomy from the rest of the world. While on many other fields climate action and post-fossil discourse have already become mainstream, most art organizations seem to be only capable of addressing ecology as a theme. Taking the post-fossil plight seriously means turning away from all the things formerly considered as the criteria for a successful art institution: global networks, presence, and influence. In other words, there is high risk involved. Is acknowledging art’s entanglement in worldly processes considered as a threat to creative freedom, or is adopting more sustainable ways of organizing perhaps simply inconvenient?
Major shifts will be happening eventually as the harmful effects of burning the remaining oil, coal, and natural gas unfurl in full intensity. The question is then, what could be done to foster transitions towards livable futures instead of actively contributing to the climate breakdown? However, there is a rather urgent concern that needs to be voiced before continuing. Whenever publicly discussing these projects and subjects, an argument or a question arises from the audience: aren’t these concerns only reserved for the privileged? It is true that committing fully to the post-fossil transition is not possible if one is already struggling to make ends meet on a daily basis.
Also, not all voices seem to be taken equally seriously. The theoretical writing on the subject, especially on the need to re-think energy, seems to be dominated by (assumedly) male thinkers of Western origin. If post-fossil is considered, like ecology, as a tool or an operation system instead of as a topic or theme (3), it starts to reveal its intersectional potential. While it can help in dissecting the underlying assumptions, fallacies, and colonialist modus operandi of fossil modernity, it can turn into a perspective that cuts through a jumble of power relations.
Critical questions related to gender, race, and capitalism are an integral part of the post-fossil transition. It is absolutely necessary to ask who get to envision futures and who are being left out?
For myself, a post-fossil organization is necessarily also a non-binary and feminist one, and codes of conduct for a feminist art organization (4) might also inform the reshaping of the post-fossil organizational framework. Fossil modernity has been built on binary opposites and mechanisms of othering, and there cannot be anything fundamentally different, if this logic is not recognized and replaced.
The Role Of Residencies In The Post-Fossil Transition
Residencies can play an important part in the post-fossil transition of the cultural field as incubators for new practices and by being an example for other cultural institutions. They may expand the limits of collective imagination within and beyond the art field by showing that it is possible and meaningful to operate in a way that takes the biophysical limits of our planet into consideration.
During residencies, artists and curators often experiment with new ideas and ways of working. By having to adjust to a new environment, they usually need to develop new routines, which they sometimes continue after the residency. Especially in larger residency organizations, where several people work and live in close proximity, the element of peer support (and pressure) may amplify this effect. In this kind of residency context, where people’s daily lives and the art community are inseparably connected, it is possible to tackle ecological sustainability and post-fossil transition not just as themes in art. Instead, they can be addressed as aspects of a fundamental paradigm shift—one with potential to change how people see the world and themselves, live their lives, and how art is made and experienced.
The artists, curators, researchers, and writers who take the post-fossil practices along with them from their time in residency, spread these modes of working to other contexts as well. At present, their ideals and principles are mostly not compatible with the majority of art institutions. This can unfortunately come at the cost of being excluded, or may create friction. Adopting new ways of organizing takes extra time and effort, and in the short term it might also seem to cause additional costs to organizations. However, in the long run going post-fossil is probably also the most financially sustainable option.
As an example, my own curatorial practice has developed at HIAP (Helsinki International Artist Programme) through being constantly challenged by artists- and curators-in-residence who have a deep commitment to ecologically viable and meaningful ways of working. The shift in my thinking, and especially in doing, has been a slow and gradual process. The initial spark was a five-year project that focused on the intersections of ecology and art in particular ecosystems across Europe. (5) As an increasing number of cultural workers become openly critical to ecologically unsustainable ways of working, the institutions eventually will have to revise and readjust their codes of conduct.
Residency communities can actively support more symbiotic, symbiogenetic, and ‘sympoietic’ understandings of the world, (6) where emphasis is placed on collaboration rather than on competition, on co-dependencies instead of relishing in fantasies of independence and self-sufficiency. The above might apply especially to larger residency communities where several people live and work in close proximity, and in which the whole organization is committed to developing post-fossil practices. Under these kinds of conditions the necessary peer support and positive pressure may emerge. But smaller organizations can play an equally important role, given that they either select residents who can push the organization forward, or by deliberately building a residency programme that challenges the residents to revise and adjust their practice.
Why residencies might become potential game changers in the post-fossil shift is because they tend to operate as somewhat undefined structures where art and the everyday, public, and private realms permeate each other. A lot of people come to a residency willing to absorb and cultivate new aspects into their practices.
For residencies both large and small, building networks with like-minded organizations is a great way of building momentum and sharing knowledge and skills. It is equally important to reach out to those bodies that do not share the same concerns, to educate and invite funders and policy-makers to participate in the discussions. There are no guarantees that the call will be answered but by sharing, one already implies that a pressing concern exists and is calling for wider attention.
Transitioning: Practical Aspects And Experiments
The post-fossil transition and reconstruction have to be addressed as multi-faceted issues. However, to focus our thoughts and efforts while trying to make our residency centre less dependent on the use of fossil fuels, we chose to concentrate on a few key aspects. By changing the ways that our organization deals with energy, transportation, and food, we aim to transform HIAP gradually into a post-fossil residency centre. Travel, especially flying, is the single most fossil fuel-intensive area in the field of residencies and contemporary art more broadly. The ability to move fast from one place to another has defined success in the scene for a long time, and was also imperative to becoming widely recognized. And yet, a single long-distance flight can produce so much CO2 that it easily nullifies the benefits of all one’s climate action. Airline travel immediately multiplies the ecological footprint of individuals and organizations, and even though offsetting emissions is possible, it is a far from perfect solution. Until petroleum-based airplane fuel can be replaced with a renewable option, the only sensible solution is not to fly at all, or choosing very carefully when to fly, staying longer at the destination, compensating the emissions, and traveling light.
Many artists already refuse to fly to a residency or to an exhibition, or to realize a project if its ecological aspects are not properly considered. During the past five years that I have spent working closely with the ecological paradigm shift, encountering these refusals have become increasingly common. For art organizations that operate under the neoliberal paradigm, which emphasizes cost-efficiency from the short-term point of view, this is inconvenient. Organizing complicated travel itineraries involving multi-phased logistics by land and sea demands knowledge, effort, and time. Currently, it is also often more expensive compared to flying.
This should be taken into consideration already while planning projects by applying and allocating more funding for travel, and by considering also the planning phase and actual travel as integral parts of the residency. The residency can already require in their open call or invitation that resident fellows should use alternative means of transportation for flying. For overseas visitors, residencies should be longer and organized in one stretch instead of flying back and forth. For these kinds of longer residencies, Mustarinda and HIAP are also discussing the opportunity to spend time in both residencies as part of one trip. Instead of coercing, the residencies should come up with incentives and support, and additionally develop their own ways of compensating the unavoidable costs to the environment. These guidelines should apply to the staff as well, even though people cannot be expected to travel long distances and to devote weeks to work trips.
Another post-fossil experiment in progress at HIAP aims at increasing the energy awareness within the residency community. This happens through a study conducted in collaboration with Mustarinda, in which the residents can easily follow and affect their own energy consumption at the residency by adjusting thermostats that control the room temperature at their studio and living quarters. This is a pilot study that we hope will give valuable information about people’s responses to the possibility to better understand and control their energy consumption. Still, the level of comfort remains in the hands of each resident, so it does not affect their daily life unless they choose so.
There have also been micro experiments and practices related to food. As an example, we have shifted from vegetarian to fully plant-based menus at almost all HIAP community and public events. Attention has been paid to waste management and recycling, and the summer of 2018 also saw a small gardening experiment, with the underlying idea of getting exercise in community gardening and adding a little local fresh produce to our plates. The focus on local produce has to do with trying to become more connected to the residency environment and its traits and dynamics, as well as supporting the local economy, by buying food produced and manufactured in the region whenever possible.
Some energy during the first year of HIAP and Mustarinda’s post-fossil transition project has gone into getting to know each other and community-building through shared discussions and reading circles. The two organizations are quite different: Mustarinda is a collective consisting of a large number of volunteers, who take turns in running the Mustarinda House. Their whole operation has been constructed upon the idea of testing practices for the post-fossil transition, whereas HIAP is an association with a changing group of 10–12 people working at two locations, with 70–100 residents annually, in recent years. Ecology or post-fossil transition are not guiding principles at HIAP, instead they have gradually become an important part of the programme.
Since the aim is to turn theory into practice, this project has to be one that everyone in the organization can be part of. Its scope reaches from strategy to programming to the most ‘mundane’ decisions, or better yet it merges these seamlessly. The organization’s rhythms and cycles, the choosing of coffee, dishwashing tablets, biodegradable cups, the selection process and means of travel for the resident artists, thermostats in the studios, ways of communicating the bigger and smaller steps to different stakeholders, all need to be considered. These decisions require discussion and a slowly growing collective knowledge about the consequences of different choices. This is difficult in a situation where only few people work in the organization on a longer-term or fulltime basis, and even with them the work is mostly chopped into separate projects. This creates a challenge to the sharing of practices.
There are also no tools for evaluating a residency centre’s ecological impact that would be universally applicable as such. How to measure the change, and also question the quantified, statistical approach as the only indicator of change? All the contexts and factors shaping them are so different that tools such as carbon foot print calculators need to be tailored specifically to each organization.
The Challenge In Being All Over The Place
HIAP seems to be currently at the crossroads. While the volume of one of Northern Europe’s largest residency programmes has gradually been limited in order to foster more meaningful residency experiences with a more developed sense of community, at the same time the number and scale of international collaboration projects have increased. The collaborative projects, that often take place outside of Finland, have provided opportunities for broadening HIAP’s publics and impact. At the same time they have kept our carbon footprint growing, as well as fuelled experiences of being dislocated and dispersed. And even if we would refrain from long-haul travel completely, this feeling of being dispersed is increasingly difficult to avoid:
Climate change creates a new language, in which you have to be all over the place; you are always all over the place. It makes every animal body implicated in the whole world. Even the patient who is anaesthetised on an operating table, barely breathing, is illuminated by surgeon’s lamps which are powered with electricity trailed from a plant which is pumping out of its chimneys a white smoke that spreads itself out against the sky. This is every living thing on earth. (7)
These lines of thought by essayist Daisy Hildyard in The Second Body refer to one of the paradoxes of life in the early twenty-first century: while many borders are closing and divisions deepen, things and beings are increasingly connected through the production, distribution, and consumption chains of the global market economy — and its unwanted side effects. Hildyard writes how everyone seems to have a second body, in addition to the first physical one, entangled in globally distributed processes.
Neoliberal and traditional art world fantasies do not seem so different — both often create experiences of dispersion by detaching processes from any particular place, and rendering everything into fragmented forms. This has all kinds of alienating implications for the lived experience. In this situation, Finnish post-fossil philosophers Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén are calling for focality. The concept, borrowed from philosopher Albert Borgmann, refers to the skills and knowledge passed along generations that support sustained, thriving ecosystems in a certain area. (8) This idea could not be more distant from the custom typical of economies of contemporary art that mostly thrive on rapidly changing sceneries. Residency centres, when working in a focused way, in the long term instead of the short cycle, and re-aligned with the principles of focality, may provide testing grounds for challenging this dispersion. However, the neoliberal cultural climate sets up a real challenge to these efforts, as it is in stark contradiction with the post-fossil principles of understanding the multi-layeredness of one’s context, of becoming less productive (on the old, fossil-fuelled terms) and thus less harmful to the biosphere.
The climate and ecosystemic breakdown and their ramifications may either unify or divide people, but to address them in any meaningful way requires accepting complexity as the guiding principle. As there are no instant, simple solutions, simplistic articulations will not do. As traditional distinctions and taxonomies become unusable in the wake of climate breakdown, it is necessary to start thinking about the world through, sympoiesis, along Donna Haraway’s lines of thought, and to reshape ethics and political systems accordingly. (9) The shift to post-fossil culture and societies cannot happen without re-evaluating fundamental concepts such as nature, energy, ecology, and humanity. It is necessary to understand what kinds of ideologies and historical processes have shaped these concepts, and what kinds of power dynamics they reproduce and generate. While striving toward a more liveable planet (and more meaningful lives), the transformation of language, decision-making systems, daily habits and art practices has to be a joint process.
As all big life changes, it is not something that will happen overnight. Instead, as with all major transformations, it is a process that demands exercise in order to become a practice. (10)
Notes
Oil, coal, and natural gas.
Following artist-publisher Brett Bloom’s (one of the participants in the project Frontiers in Retreat, 2013–2018) reasoning, I use the term climate ‘breakdown’ instead of the more generally used climate ‘change’. This is because breakdown seems to be a more truthful term in the light of current research on the subject. See more in: Bloom 2015.
Media theorist Jussi Parikka writes about ecology as less an analytical concept denoting a thing than a way of looking at things and their relations, seeing it more as an operation. Parikka 2018, p. 85.
See, for instance: ‘Feminist (Art) Institution: Code of Practice’, http://feministinstitution.cz/code-of- practice/ (20 August, 2018).
Frontiers in Retreat was a five-year multidisciplinary project coordinated by HIAP — Helsinki International Artist Programme. Its concept was based on the work of curator Taru Elfving and it was curated by Jenni Nurmenniemi alongside the partners from seven residency organizations across Europe. frontiersinretreat.org (18 September, 2018).
Haraway 2017.
Hildyard 2017, pp. 13–14.
Salminen and Vadén 2015, pp. 76–125.
Haraway 2016.
Warmest thanks to curator Aleksandra Kiskonen, who coordinated the first steps of the post-fossil transition project at HIAP, in Spring-Summer 2018. Our discussions and her articulations have inspired and informed parts of this text. Her reflections on the project can be
found on HIAP Blog: Where are we now with HIAP’s post-fossil transition?http://hiaphelsinki.tumblr.com/ post/175338444821/where-are-we-now- with-hiaps-post-fossil (published 28 June 2018).
Literature
— Bloom, Brett. Petro Subjectivity: De-industrializing Our Sense of Self. Auburn (IN): Breakdown Break Down Press, 2015.
— Haraway, Donna. ‘Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble.’ In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., pp. 25–27, 45. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
—. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
— Hildyard, Daisy. The Second Body. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.
— Parikka, Jussi. ‘Cartographies of Environmental Arts.’ In The Midden, edited by Jenni Nurmenniemi and Tracey Warr, p. 85. Helsinki: Garret Publications, 2018.
— Salminen, Antti, and Tere Vadén.Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology. Chicago: MCM Press, 2015.