Land Enough

A Narrative Approach to Participatory Art-making for Climate Action.

Encouraging climate positive practices often involves debates about policies and resources, and who should share the majority burden. Psychologically speaking, they involve negative forms of reinforcement that tell people what not to do as opposed to what they can do. This leads to crisis fatigue, comfort in ignorance, and lack of belief in individual action. Studies show that positive forms of educational methods that activate preferred actions are more efficacious than punishments. Instead of negative forms of arguments constantly asking people for restraint, we use a positive form of reinforcement by designing art-making participatory performance that lets the public make creative choices in a hypothetical scenario where they face a climate change dilemma. We created long excursions using scenarios of rising sea-levels, energy deficits, waste accumulation, and wildlife diversity problems in a site-specific intervention that treats the location as an island shielded from outside influence as starting points of design fictions that ask participants to design architectural structures, mechanical instruments, geographical boundaries, and exhibition artifacts to overcome challenges in the fictional settings.

The participants take on the roles of architects, engineers, explorers, and collectors in a fictional world burdened by specific challenges of climate change, recycling and bartering with different groups for found materials to realize their designs. The outcomes consist of artworks in multiple media: sculptures, videos, sketches, and performance strategies that illustrate a positive way to overcoming issues surrounding sustainability and climate change that are exhibited in gallery form to engage the imaginations of participants and audiences alike.

Information about the participants and their creations are found in this appendix.