Title: Connecting and Catalyzing: Aesthetics + Community + Ecology toward a culture of sustainability

The first forum (semi-plenary panel discussion) offers an introduction into the field of the thematic window „Art toward Cultures of Sustainability“: Which situations, which challenges is art playing with, at the crossroads of ecologies, communities and aesthetics? How does art work as a seismograph and catalyst of deeper transformations? How can art contribute to sensitize for and unpack the complexities we have to deal with in our lives? Where are the limits and the challenges for such artistic and cultural practices?

About the speakers:

Michelangelo Pistoletto is an internationally acclaimed artist and theorist, leading figure of Arte Povera and founder of the art city Cittadelarte – Fondazione Pistoletto.
Weblinks: http://www.pistoletto.it/ ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_Pistoletto

Shelley Sacks is an interdisciplinary artist working internationally in the field of connective practices and social sculpture. She regards her long-term collaborative projects such as Exchange Values, University of the Trees and Ort des Treffens (developing spaces for reflection and listening in a German city) as ‘instruments of consciousness’ and flexible frameworks that open up new ways of seeing, linking inner and outer work. Her work includes more than forty actions, site works, installations and social sculpture projects; involvement in grass roots organisations & cooperatives, and collaborating with Joseph Beuys. Shelley is Director of the Social Sculpture Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University.
Weblinks:http://www.social-sculpture.org ; http://www.exchange-values.org ; http://www.ortdestreffens.de

Davide Brocchi is a social scientist, journalist, cultural activist, founder of KulturATTAC and of Cultura21. He is also a lecturer at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, the college of Bochum and the Ecosign-Academy for Design in Cologne.
Weblinks:http://www.davidebrocchi.eu ; http://magazin.cultura21.de

About the moderator:

Dr. Sacha Kagan is Research Associate at the Institute of Cultural Theory, Research, and the Arts (ICRA/IKKK) at the Leuphana University Lüneburg ; member of Cultura21 e.V. since 2006 ; founding coordinator of the international platform of Cultura21 and founding director of the International Summer School of Arts and Sciences for Sustainability in Social Transformation (ASSiST). The focus of his scientific and cultural work is on the transdisciplinary field of arts an (un)sustainability. He is the author of Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity (transcript, 2011 ; webpage: http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts1803/ts1803.php ), and editor of Sustainability: a new frontier for the arts and cultures (VAS, 2008).
Weblinks: http://sachakagan.wordpress.com ; http://www.cultura21.net

Dear Forum visitors,

Please find below, 2 short abstracts, about the inputs that 2 of the speakers will give at this forum:

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Shelley Sacks

'A future without the ‘I’ sense is non-sense' *
or ‘a tree knows how to be a tree…’

The ‘I’ sense is the sense that enables us to sense and come close to the being of another –whether it be a small apparently static organism on a rock, a tree in a forest that is not only part of a complex life form –the forest –but also constitutes the lungs of this planet, or one of my many different kinds of human neighbors with their vast range of attitudes and behaviors … from the most selfish to the most compassionate, from the most arrogant and disconnected to the most finely tuned.

In this brief input, I will outline several theses that emphasis the importance of finding ways to work with this most complex and challenging of all earth’s creatures: the human being. In our shift from negative forms of ego-centrism to sustainable forms of eco-centrism, we must not reject the human being. Unlike a tree that knows how to be a tree, we do not yet know how to be fully human. This makes us both one of most dangerous as well as one of the endangered species. Unless we foresee a future where the other-than-human beings reclaim the planet we need to consider how aspects of systems thinking that emphasize emergence and letting things unfold can minimize the value of consciously developing our ability-to-respond.

Our work in the field of social sculpture is to develop new capacities needed to become creative ‘agents of change’ who can live and love the interconnections; who do not need to improve upon nature, but can use their creative intelligence to return - in full consciousness - to ourselves, to each other and to the other than human world: celebrating it as well as the capacities that in human beings are still only embryonic and potential.

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Davide Brocchi

On the ambivalence of art for a transition to sustainability

There is no neutral art work. A debate on the potential of arts for sustainability should start with an analysis of the ambivalent function of arts in the social system. Today art is an integral part of the unsustainable development (very often unconsciously), but can also promote its overcoming.

On the one hand art is almost the “unique selling proposition” of the “Hochkultur”: It re-produces structures of social inequality as well as visible and invisible boundaries to the ecological, social or to the emotional environments. Art is an activity of cognitively limited beings, that through artificialization communicate and materialize their cultural and mental reductions of complexity. Also monocultures began with a creative act.

On the other hand ,arts are one of the most important sources of mutations in the cultural codes and in the ways of thinking. They promote a cultural evolution of the social system. Artists are nonconformists, who try to make the reality, outside of the secure and warm daily routine, perceptible. They support a dialogue with the “alien” in ourselves.

An overriding question in the debate on arts and sustainability is: How can we break the self-referentiality and exclusivity of this discourse on culture, arts and sustainability?