season 6 of conscient begins
fifteens and roundtables about art and culture in times of crisis, collapse and renewal
I launched the 6th season yesterday of conscient podcast and balado conscient, which I announced in a previous posting : rethinking conscient (une réflexion consciente en francais) but now it is real and I’m quite excited.
I invite you to listen to the first episode of season : a ‘fifteen’ with Peter and Robert Janes:
Robert, an archaeologist and former museum director and CEO, has some advice for artists and cultural workers:
I think that the first thing artists have to do is to start telling the truth. You know, just like climate change five or six years ago, you just didn't really want to talk about it. You got shunned in polite company if you talked about it. Now we have the c word, right? We've got collapse. But the conversation hasn't started yet. And I think just broadly speaking, the artistic community… The best of the artistic community, has always been on the edge, right? The social edge. Pushing, complaining, challenging, resisting…
My conversation focused on Robert’s most recent book, Museums and Societal Collapse : The Museum as Lifeboat, which I reviewed in we have to keep fighting, but also their permaculture farm in Denman Island, TreeEater Farm and Nursery, which Peter describes this way:
I came here originally to, as an idealistic, like 23-year-old wanting to build an education center to sort of correct for what I perceived were the inadequacies of my own education. So now it's been 20 years of me sort of self-educating and trying to build a place that could do that and I guess is doing that at this point. But there's a lot of potential, different angles. What it, what it's turned into for me is developing relationships with the things that are here and the things that I've brought here and trying to figure out, like which of those relationships, I guess uses the least amount of energy, I guess you could say, and has the most like, legs as far as being something that people can rely on further into the future, past the era of now, cheap oil, so to speak. So a lot of my work has to do with setting up those systems and those relationships that'll hopefully outlive us and support other people in the future.
On the French side of conscient, balado conscient, I invite you to listen to the season opener:
https://balado-conscient.simplecast.com/episodes/e164-lea-vandycke-lempathie-cognitive-et-emotive
My conversation with Léa Vandycke, a biologist by training, environmental consultant and co-founder of Éclore, a Montreal-based organization whose vision is to place art and culture at the heart of Quebec's socio-ecological transition project. It’s positive and uplifting episode. For those in Montréal: consider joining Éclore (I have).
If you do not understand French here is Léa’s opening statement as a sample:
I think that arts and culture are a way of mobilizing people, in fact, mobilizing them in struggles, pushing them to get involved in political battles, etc., by making them understand what's at stake in a rational way. This is what we call cognitive empathy. But you can also make them feel emotions. When there's a crisis, negative emotions are bound to arise. But it's because these emotions are there that they're going to push people into action. And that's either by denouncing or by creating a feeling of love for living things, for example. So, it's more about emotional empathy. I'd say this mobilization aspect is really hyper-important for us. But there's also the whole “being well” aspect.
I’ll be publishing the first roundtable (long duration, informal banter with friends and colleagues about their passions, fears and dreams) next week.
Here are a couple of samples from that roundtable to whet your appetite:
To quickly respond to your comment about despair of the world as we know it. Obviously there is a lot of science and yeah, information about the direction the world is heading and, and I think we can assume that things will go badly before they're again good. But I would like to say that like the end of the world as we know it is not necessarily a bad thing. Like, we all know that there are huge systemic problems that are causing the challenges we're facing today. And those things need to be solved, and we need to have a fundamental shift to see them solved. Whether that will happen or whether human race will just fizzle out, who knows? But I'd like to think that change will happen and that it is possible, at least possible that it could be positive in some way, at least, maybe at the end of the day, even if a lot of hardship has to come before then. I don't know if that's hopeful or just sad, but that's my take.
We're thinking about this art science relation. And to me, it's always felt clear to me that what art can do for science is to democratize science. It's to make it more accessible. But then what I'm curious is about, about is what can science do for the arts? And I'm kind of stuck there in my own mind, like, what is it that science can do for artists? And I kind of often approach life through three pillars of beauty, which is art, goodness, which is morality and ethics, and then truth, which is the role of science, I think. And I always felt that the answer is often that the third one is always the mediator. So when trying to find how to better find that balance between art and science, then we should look to morality and ethics. And when we try to find the balance between what's good and what's true, then it's the role of art to be the mediator, and so on and so forth.
I’ll be publishing a new fifteen or roundtable exchange episode every week or so.
If you have not already done so I invite you to subscribe to get them (free) on your favorite podcast player, see the ‘LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE’ button under https://conscient-podcast.simplecast.com/ or https://balado-conscient.simplecast.com/.
You can also follow conscient podcast Facebook page and conscient podcast Instagram page to hear audio excerpts from each episode. Share what you like, etc.
Thanks for listening and engaging with the content. As always, thanks to the artists and cultural workers on conscient for their generosity.
Note: I’m not doing a narrated version of this posting.