The opportunity is part of the Samarbeta Residency Programme and includes ten days in residence at Islington Mill, SMAG & University of Salford, facilitation and technical support from Samarbeta & IKLECTIK, culminating in a live performance at Salford Museum and Art Gallery for Fat Out Fest 2024.
Throughout the day, Live Illustrator Grace Collins captured the rich conversations. Collins’ illustration records the depth and breadth of the fascinating discussions from across the symposium.
Hybrid Futures: making, showing and collecting art in a time of climate crisis. Live Illustration by Grace Collins.
Throughout the Hybrid Futures exhibition at Salford Museum & Art Gallery, questions are posed asking visitors to share how they feel about the climate crisis, and what arts organisations should be doing in response. As well as asking the audience, we’ve asked the Hybrid Futures artists what their responses to four of the same questions might be. This week Shezad Dawood shares his thoughts.
Question 1: How important is addressing climate change to you?
“I think the most pressing question of our time is how to get all people to come together around our shared planet and how we collectively make it, and not ourselves, the priority.”
Question 2: What actions are you taking in response to the climate crisis?
“I’m reducing my travel and working with collaborators to collaborate on film, digital and writing projects remotely where possible. I’ve also been looking at how and where there are ways to reduce shipping, so for a recent set of shows the works were predominantly hanging textiles that could be put together on a single roll, rather than needing multiple crates, and the rest of the works were digital files that could be transferred.”
Data about the Co2e emissions associated with Leviathan: From the Forest to the Sea presented as part of Hybrid Futures at Touchstones Rochdale in 2023.
? Danny Chivers, Hybrid Futures Environmental Consultant, has calculated that the total emissions from the first three Hybrid Futures exhibitions at Touchstones Rochdale, Castlefield Gallery and Grundy Art Gallery, are roughly equivalent to a single return flight from the UK to Indonesia (4.6 tonnes of CO2e). Reducing how much we fly is one of the biggest ways we can reduce our carbon footprints.
Question 3: “I believe art galleries and museums should…”
“Be engaging with artists, audiences, funders and colleagues to see where we can all work together to create new industry standards for how we do things, from reducing waste in exhibition design (and redesign) to hosting creative and interdisciplinary conversations to yield new ideas and collaborations between the arts, the sciences and to broaden our reach.”
Question 4: If you could change one thing to make a more sustainable world, what would it be?
“Ultimately changing the behaviour and regulatory frameworks of the world’s largest corporations remains one of the quickest and most impactful ways to accelerate change.”
Post-it notes at Salford Museum & Art Gallery, responding to the question If you could change one thing to make a more sustainable world, what would it be?
We hope that Hybrid Futures and these prompts encourage us all to reflect on our own actions, the places where we are already making changes, and where we can use our power and influence to have the biggest impact.
Hybrid Futures is open now at Salford Museum & Art Gallery until September 22nd, where you can see visitors’ answers to the questions and prompts, alongside work from Shezad Dawood, Jessica El Mal, Parham Ghalamdar and RA Walden.
Read digital versions of the information panels from the Hybrid Futures exhibition at Salford Museum & Art Gallery. These panels explore Collective Futures, Sustainability throughout the Hybrid Futures project, and some of the key themes of the artwork and exhibition: Collaboration and co-creation, Questioning, and Climate Equity and Justice.
A transcript of the spoken audio sources for Jessica El Mal‘s work, ‘The Water We Seek’, created for Hybrid Futures and included in both The Poetics of Water at Castlefield Gallery in 2023, and the Hybrid Futures exhibition at Salford Museum & Art Gallery in 2024.
An evolving hub, bringing together recordings of the Climate Crisis >> Art Action two-day symposium that took place in March 2023, alongside opportunities for local action and climate justice, and key resources shared across the two days.
The Gallery Climate Coalition Carbon Calculator is a free tool designed for ease of use to provide a quick but accurate breakdown of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions, based on metrics common to most art organisations.
As part of the wider Hybrid Futures programme Grundy Art Gallery presents a new solo exhibition RA Walden: Object transformations through the coordinate of time.
‘Object transformations through the coordinate of time’, is a solo exhibition of newly commissioned and existing works by the UK born, Berlin-based artist, RA Walden. Spanning sculpture, installation, text and moving image, the works in this exhibition mark and measure the passing of time. Drawing on reference points as varied as, quantum physics, the ecological crisis, ancient timekeeping and the life cycle of worms, Walden is asking us to consider time at both a macro and micro level. More specifically, as an artist with lived experience of a disability, RA Walden also uses their work to explore and express non-normative experiences of time. From sculptures made from hacked office clocks, to texts that ask who and what defines, ‘work’, Walden’s exhibition also provides a poetic meditation on lives and bodies whose timekeeping does not conform to the supposed ‘norm’.
The exhibition opens this Saturday, the 20th of April, until the 15th of June at Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool. For more information on the exhibition and to plan your visit, click here.
“I found the idea, discussed at one of the sessions, of ‘contributing to a future world we will never experience’ to be surprisingly calming. I have faith, even though I struggle with uncertainty.”
Collective Futures has focused on hearing from invited guests – artists, community activists and cultural strategists. Reflection has been a big part of the group’s sense-making, combining facts, feelings, interpretations and unlocking personal and professional relevance. The programme has given those involved new ways to think about their own work and/or working practices and begin to embed these individual and collective responses at carefully considered pace. The programme has led to direct action and infiltrated unexpected spaces, changing the way people think about their everyday activity for example – whether their actions go beyond sustainable to regenerative.
I also shared with (my neighbours) the story … about the polluted river which caused lots of issues in (an) area. This sparked another discussion, a wider one, about sustainability and ‘green’ initiatives, and prompted an old idea to resurface – to transform a small bit of a green space we’ve got between two of the buildings into a community garden. Everyone offered to contribute and it turned out we’ve already got all the resources we need in terms of tools, seeds, et., from people’s balcony gardens(including a 2-ton bag of soil which our neighbour has somehow been storing on his balcony since last summer. We got permission from the facilities management which I thought would be much trickier, and we’ll set the project in motion as soon as spring begins.”
Collective Futures has focused on hearing from invited guests – artists, community activists and cultural strategists. Reflection has been a big part of the group’s sense-making, combining facts, feelings, interpretations and unlocking personal and professional relevance. The programme has given those involved new ways to think about their own work and working practices and begin to embed these individual and collective responses at carefully considered pace. The programme has led to direct action and infiltrated unexpected spaces, changing the way people think about their everyday activity for example – whether their actions go beyond sustainable to regenerative.
“…the take away for me: the difference between sustainable and regenerative practices was a real piece of learning for me.”
“I’d like to broaden and deepen my understanding of what it means to have a regenerative mindset.”
Direct Short Term Outputs
creation of an urban garden,
ambition and advocacy to create a community driven university course – sustainable photography, arts and climate acceleration programme,
ambition to embed artists in school working with moss and dedicated nature group
drive to examine operational practices – team reflection, digital footprints and application of the Collective Futures model,
application of what is means to be regenerative,
active, independent collaborative between the collective – engaging school pupils from Rochdale in Manchester
the formation of strong, supportive bonds between the collective, across geographies and sectors – with a desire to continue to continue to provoke and share together.
‘The effect of these workshops will still be felt much later down the line.”
“Revelling in the ‘just do it’ mentality, unconstrained by KPI and organisation hierarchies -[these artists are] living their politics on a daily basis, anarchic and anti-capitalist – found it inspiring.”
