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Contribution short abstract:

This project explores climate adaptation through a sculptural meganest for white storks on an 18th-century lake, surrounded by animatronic bird poos. It critiques climate messaging and art, advocating for ‘æffect’ — affective practical outcomes towards sustainable, pluriversal, speculative futures.

Contribution long abstract:

Climate adaptation strategies face a multitude of systemic and ideological obstacles, played out on the contested histories and futures of landscape/land use, with its competing demands to produce food, habitation, power, wellbeing, capital, cultural identity, alongside a rapidly declining biodiversity.

Climate messaging often entrenches these positions, as alternately catastrophic, self-congratulatory, didactic, idealised, conspiratorial, blandly universal, or politically romantic — inducing widespread inaction, or ‘stuckness’.

In addition, climate-focussed art and curation that seeks to address these issues risks failure for being either:

- tokenistic

- overly pragmatic, disappearing as art

- majority self-serving and extractive

- exploited through green washing

- detrimental to earth, people, or future through its mode of production, without overriding reciprocal positive impacts.

The most successful cultural outputs combine affect with effect, or ‘æffect’ (my term) both in their making and their residual outcomes.

As pluriversal artwork embracing multiple positions, my project aims to explore and acknowledge these pitfalls and positions as part of its making, through reflective critique contributing to insight, knowledge, and understanding.

The project’s development will call into dialogue living beings, real or imagined, from diverse spheres, sectors and communities of expertise, with their concomitant challenges and insights.

As living ‘supernodal’ artwork, my art practice research aims to manifest novel landscape relations through a reconfiguration of existing texts, forms, methods, materials, and creatures that have potent ancient, political and cultural histories as well as future-contemporary potentials, to prefigure speculative imaginaries in which multiple entities creatively, or disharmoniously, coexist.