What is the role of art in achieving a sustainable economy?
I always make time in November for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. With a genuinely world-class selection of new music performances on my doorstep, it’d be rude not to.
For the third year, the festival spent a day considering ‘The Current Climate’, with free concerts and events intended to explore the cultural world’s influence on sustainability.
The first performance was from Finnish composer Matilda Seppälä, with a piece explicitly about climate activism in which she described her personal involvement with direct-action protests to an electronic backing. Other pieces during the day approached the subject in a less direct way, raising environmental themes in the subject of the artwork, sometimes in ways that wouldn’t be apparent to a listener who hadn’t read the programme notes.
In a post-concert conversation with Anu Ahola of sustainable performing arts platform Elma, Seppälä acknowledged that art is not the most effective tool for activism, but noted that artists can use their platform to reach a larger or broader audience than activists alone.
There is of course a risk that environmentally-themed art which intends to raise awareness or change people’s thinking can tip over into preachiness or public relations – which means it can be easily dismissed or, perhaps the biggest sin, just become bad art.
But perhaps the bigger risk is that arts organisations commission examples of such environmentally-themed work – melting glacier symphonies, as Seppälä called them – which don’t actually have any real effect on anything apart from giving a moral backrub to the organisers and audience. (Inevitably, the day also included a performance which “reimagines the soundscape of melting ice”.)
The main challenge for the arts industry is the environmental cost of its own operations. As with anything that involves an international roster of performers and audience, music festivals like Huddersfield’s can have a significant climate cost in travel emissions alone. There is growing recognition of this – at last year’s festival, an Irish group literally made a performance of the fact that they’d travelled to Huddersfield by ferry and public transport.
Practically, it’s up to the event organisers and performers to minimise and mitigate that impact. The good news is that there is a growing roster of initiatives such as Music Declares Emergency in the UK (and Elma in Finland) which offer support to help do that. Check out their Music Industry Climate Pack (pdf) for some practical advice – parts of which should also be of interest to organisers of corporate events.