Transformational Creative Practices: Interventions Towards Sustainable Futures

• In Event: Un/Making a Difference 1: materialities, textiles, making, mending & inventing

Abstract

Due to ecological breakdown and the climate crisis we urgently need to find new ways of living within the earth’s limits. In pilot research Light et al. (2018) find that creative practitioners – including artists, curators, designers and citizen-led collectives – are creating a range of transformative interventions that change participants’ orientation to the world, their sense of agency and sense of potential. Creative practitioners are catalysing change by gathering publics around issues that matter to them in a variety of domains, and using a range of aesthetic, affect-driven, playful and participatory interventions that have multi-layered impacts across a range of scales.

Our presentation explores the qualities of this category of ‘transformative creative practice’ (Light et al., 2018) and how these un/making practices contribute to the everyday acts of imagining and crafting arrangements for more liveable worlds. Despite reports of a ‘crisis of imagination’ in the stories we tell about climate change (Ghosh, 2016; Morton, 2013) our empirical work finds adaptive organisations, that are creating expanding and tentacular multi-layered practices that enrol multiple publics, often moving towards expanded imaginaries via mundane steps – engaging hesitancy, improvisation and speculation in compelling forms of ‘material participation’ (Marres, 2012).

Authors

• Lara Houston, University of Sussex

• Ann Light, University of Sussex

• Kat Braybrooke, University of Sussex