Climate Exchange Platform #3: Art and Collective Action

Join members of Decolonize This Place (Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon), 4BID Gallery (Tiana), and Extinction Rebellion Arts Circle Amsterdam (Freija and Esther) for a conversation on art and collective action. In this session, contributors will share experiences from their work, and discuss topics including solidarity-building, bringing art into protest spaces, and methods for using art to ignite socio-political change.

Questions around institutional interventions will be considered, as well as creative strategies for organizing. In this session, contributors will provide introductions and examples of their work before engaging in a one-hour facilitated discussion, followed by a 45-minute Q&A.

Participating collectives:

Decolonize This Place (DTP) is an action-oriented, decolonial formation that resists and unsettles settler colonial structures in our cities as it builds movement infrastructure of care and solidarity on the path of collective freedom and liberation. Organizing, research, aesthetics, and action are rooted in interconnected struggles that are anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist. The university, museum, and city are sites of struggles and organizing. They are sites of refusal, sabotage, infrastructure, sanctuary, play, exit. Let them be sites of training in the practice of freedom. When we breathe we breathe together.

4bid is a non-profit space, a project and a platform for art and artists based at the former squat and cultural venue OT301 in Amsterdam. The space has a double function: at times a ‘backstage area’ where activities, studies, and processes are visible to an audience of visitors in an unofficial manner; and an organized presenting platform that shows work which has been produced in the space. They offer a variety of recurrent activities open to the public: exhibitions/open studios, workshops and performances/installations under the following themes and dreams: GO GREEN, LESS COMPETITION, IRL RELATIONS, COLLECTIVITY AND FLUIDITY, and DIY AND SUSTAINABILITY.

Extinction Rebellion Arts Circle Amsterdam discusses and plans arts projects and workshops to make Extinction Rebellion Nederland beautiful, exciting and visible. They always welcome new volunteers interested in planning and leading arts workshops and projects. If you make or create things and want to support the rebellion and don’t see them already putting on workshops for something, then come along and connect with other interested rebels and bring your expertise and ideas to the rebellion.

This online workshop is organised by Marik de Koning, Madalen Claire Benson, Jane Lawson and Julien Thomas.

The Climate Exchange Platform will launch throughout April and May 2024 with a series of four online workshops and panel discussions. It is a network of participating art academies and post-academic institutes including the Planetary Poetics master's programme at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Art and Ecology master's programme at Goldsmiths University in London and the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Through the Climate Exchange Platform we want to share experiences, perspectives, and working methods between art schools with programs focused on aesthetics and ecology--particularly those that directly focus their artistic practices on the unfolding ecological catastrophe--and the public at large. The development of the platform is organised by students and alumni from the various participating art schools under the guidance of artist Dorine van Meel. This first series of online panel discussions and workshops is organized by members of the platform. The Climate Exchange Platform is initiated by Planetary Poetics at the Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) and supported by VIS, Virtuele Internationale Samenwerking.