LIKE FISH IN WATER
Our first task was to delve into the concerns, interests, languages, disciplines, and formats that underpin the work of a group of artists hailing from distant latitudes, but united by similar concerns. Together with the team of mentors, we sought to accompany the personal development of each artist with the aim of promoting their work, analysing and making visible the most relevant issues of the socio-environmental agenda emerging within the context of their specific projects, and providing references and resources from theory and practice.
Our first meetings of the programme occurred in a post-pandemic context, in the so-called “new normal” where social crises, new (and old) wars, and escalating climate disasters were increasingly palpable. The 2022 cohort was a hybrid group hailing mostly from the Global South, with huge diversity in their geographies, territories, imagination, training, methodologies, and artistic languages. The variety of perspectives in their research and interests posed a challenge that compelled us to dig deeper, get to know each other better, and learn about the relative ecological or environmental concerns of each context or territory, as well as meeting the individual needs of each artist with regards to their proposal or the communities with whom they interact.
Subject matters such as water, flows, and rivers were themes that showed up in many of the projects, so “the river” became a useful metaphor to help characterise one aspect of the group’s dynamics. Their relationships flowed like water, and connected the artists and their projects within an overarching ecosystem comprising the awardees, the mentors, CAREC team, and the special guests.
With the artists, Etcétera proposed to focus on the socio-environmental issues occurring within each of their projects, while putting emphasis on the needs and struggles of the affected communities and their response-ability –– meaning their ability to respond to such issues in a collective, social, or communitarian way. In collaboration with the team of mentors, we sought to design a programme that included content, references, and questions that challenged some presumed certainties and removed them from their comfort zones.
Guided by conceptual guidelines that traversed the mentorship process, we sought to prioritise the collective process over the individual during each group meeting. We focused on exploring concepts and challenges that emerged from both the participants and mentors, through issues such as Environmental Justice, Extractivism, Ecocide, New Natures, Human and Non-Human Rights, and Socio-environmental Imagination. Throughout the programme, the artists addressed some of the vast and unresolved environmental problems faced by humanity today through photography and the visual arts, science and new technologies, music, dance, and education, among other practices. Some confronted the complexity of these issues in their own territories and communities and grappled with the scant prospect of social change. Others opened a window onto unimagined worlds, transforming their hypotheses and research into curatorial projects or series of works. Others focused on ancestral knowledges, and attempted to unravel academic certainties in order to investigate other possible entanglements with nature and the other beings that inhabit it.
Beyond the individual proposals and work of each mentee, it seems important to highlight that the programme and the mentorship process sought to experiment collectively in a common project: this publication. Contained within are the flows of each participant, and their journeys along a symbolic river, which criss-crosses its way through the Global South.
Etcétera is an independent collective founded more than 25 years ago in Argentina, with multidisciplinary artistic experiences that link art and activism. On that account we want to stress the importance and innovative nature of including a mentorship programme –– which spans a year-long period –– within an award for Artistic and Cultural Responses to the Climate Crisis. The existence of these types of programmes and awards enables the support of cultural and artistic experiences that exist at the fringes or beyond the mainstream cultural market, but which are just as necessary as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.
To Eat, To Create
Etcétera