Our gallery and bookshop will be closed Friday 29 and Saturday 30 March for the bank holiday weekend.

Menu
sunlight doesnt need a pipeline
Events

Watch Together – Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline Festival

Friday 7 October 12pm - 8.30pm (timetable below) NewBridge Gallery

Watch together in our screening room a fantastic festival programme by our allied project Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline.

Watch together in our screening room a fantastic festival programme by our allied project Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline by curator Dani Admiss.

This community festival and teach-in will be live-streamed from Stanley Picker Gallery London. Featuring commissioned talks, performances, film screenings and music.

We will have food and refreshments to join in with this critical watch-together. We will discuss NewBridge’s participation in this collaborative literacy and climate justice project in search of transformative and regenerative repair for the art sector and beyond.

Schedule

12pm    Lunch in The NewBridge Project Gallery Space

1pm     Screening Room – The NewBridge Project Gallery Space

PART ONE – WATCH HERE

Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline Opening Words. Remembering (Relations not Accounted For)

1.20pm   Taking Museums to the Orchards, Chanelle Adams.

1.50pm   [Dis]Entangle Nature, Fossil-Fuelled Progress, and the Self, Tatjana Soding + guests.

Followed by a joint Q+A.

BREAK – hot drinks and biscuits provided

PART TWO – WATCH HERE

Disturbing Redistribution (Chair: Paul Mickelthwaite)

2.55pm    Digital Decarbonisation + the Arts, Anne Pasek; A Pluriversal Ledger, Samuel Onalo; Access, Inclusion, Low-Carbon, Arjun Harrison-Mann of Studio Hyte.

4.05pm    The Glasgow Effect, Ellie Harrison + Sophie Hope.

BREAK – hot drinks and biscuits provided

PART THREE – WATCH HERE

Reconfiguring Reparation

5pm       Our Community Inheritance, Cecilia Wee + guests.

5.30pm  The Anti-Offsetting Primer, Luiza Prado + Maxwell A. Ayamba.

BREAK – hot drinks and biscuits provided

PART FOUR – WATCH HERE

6.30pm    Interbeing, Marija Bozinovska Jones

6.50pm   Love, dialogue, confidence, coherence — is this radical education? Chair: Susannah Haslam, Charles Pryor, Apex Zero, Araceli Camargo, Megha Ralapati, Lou-Atessa Marcellin.

7.35pm  Closing vote and Ceremony.

7.45pm   Kingston’s Stylophone Orchestra Performance.

Programme Details

About Sunlight Doesn't Need a Pipeline

Anti-Offsetting Primer, Open CurriculumHolistic Carbon Reporting

Links Co-created Decarbonisation Plan

All pathways towards decarbonisation must first begin to reckon with the climate emergency’s roots in racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018). For centuries, colonialism and imperial industrialisation has undervalued, extracted and commodified planet earth and its inhabitants, creating disparity and inequity worldwide. Acknowledging that art and knowledge are often centralised and shaped through Eurocentric and global north structures, Chanelle Adams’ offers a framework for interacting with colonial institutions. In her essay Right to Rest (In Peace) she rethinks relations to the presences that remain in the museum through a lens of colonial Hauntology.

Disrupting ways of knowing and seeing that have long been normalised is central to Tatjana Söding’s “evolutionary remembering” project, [Dis]Entangle Conceptualisations of Nature, Fossil-Fuelled Progress, and the Self. Through personal and collaborative research, Söding worked with guests to enliven histories between fossil fuels, progress, and nature from various historical and ideological standpoints, creating an expanded timeline linking lived experiences with histories of carbon and subaltern oppressions.

Luiza Prado and Amazoner Arawak both bring forward voices that have been systematically othered and silenced. Arawak presents Genocídio Yanomami de Haximu a Palimiu (Yanomami Genocide from Haximu to Palimiu), a film detailing resistance to illegal gold mining gangs that are currently terrorising Amazonian tribes in Brazil. True accountability, by its very nature should push us to grow and change, to transform. In her cooperative learning project, Anti-Offsetting Primer, Luiza Prado presents other possible ways of doing art outside spheres of extractivism and carbon accounting. From archaeological knowledge on motherhood and healing in ancient Lebanon to an environmental walking group for BAME and refugee communities—Prado collaborated with art workers engaged in anticolonial research and repair to help her reconfigure terms of reparation and restitution in the context of art production.

One of the key challenges for repair and reparation is the distribution and redistribution of wealth. Because many aren’t equipped to achieve wealth through traditional systems, Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline advocates that wealth in the arts must include intangible assets, from well-being and health, to opportunity, relations and networks. In Our Community Inheritance, Cecilia Wee, in collaboration with a West London community, reflects on what intergenerational wealth means to them. Structured as a participatory budgeting project, Wee invites the group to write ‘theirstories’ of wealth and invest in a project that they think best serves their communities environmental concerns. For many artists around the world the accumulation of wealth is just not possible. As many try to recover from the pandemic and continue to adapt to increasing climate change risk, it is clear that the systems that bring forth wealth are flawed and broken, shunning marginalised, subaltern and more-than-human communities feeding discrepancies in opportunity and power. In A Pluriversal Ledger, Samuel Onalo and Dani Admiss use the lenses of blockchain and the pluriversal to offer a speculative thought experiment that rethinks the idea of value in the arts sector.

The UK, and by extension its Creative Art industry, has an outsized responsibility to do its fair share in meeting 1.5 degrees. From diverting funds, restitution of human remains and artefacts, fighting for freedom of movement or stopping debt collection and privatisation, reparations are one important route to rebalancing inequity. But how are collective decisions reached on redistribution? What forms of living must be forgone, given up for others, or let go? In The Glasgow Effect: A Tale of Class, Capitalism & Carbon Footprint, Ellie Harrison talks about the connections between literal and social mobility, her own Environmental Policy and the need to balance personal responsibility with collective action. In a speculative essay, Vague Decay Now! Sean Roy Parker explores the necessary dematerialisation of art production accompanied by illustrations by Lauren Doughty using natural dyes from Parker’s practice. Digital technologies are both a problem and a solution for climate change. They look to be increasingly necessary to the work of creating a more efficient and decentralised energy system at the same time the tech sector’s emissions have grown considerably, fuelling land use conflicts, harmful global supply chains, and toxic e-waste. Anne Pasek’s Digital Decarbonisation Consensus & Conjectures project gathers stakeholders in the arts sector to evaluate the challenges and opportunities they face culminating in the drafting of a set of consensus statements that diagnose the intersecting problems at hand and propose clear directions for stakeholders going forward.

The Open Curriculum is an experimental educational project that critically reflects and reimagines what carbon literacy for arts workers might mean. The curriculum, as an instrument of institutional education, is an infrastructure to be better put to work: practically curriculum/curricula is/are the composition/s of subjects that form another instrument of institutional education, a programme. This open curriculum is an open composition, initiated by Susannah Haslam it evolves through the encounters of Araceli Camargo, Megha Ralapati, Apex Zero, Charles Pryor, and Lou-Atessa Marcellin in their work as practitioners and thinkers crossing thresholds of study. Through the subjects carbon, solidarity and work, and following bell hooks, this curriculum is built with love, in dialogue, with confidence and by cohering voices, forming and offering an open speculative, experimental alternative learning infrastructure to the Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline project.

The Plan will be published at the end of October 2022.

Events

The NewBridge Project
Shieldfield Centre
4-8 Clarence Walk (off Stoddart Street)
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE2 1AL

 

The NewBridge Project is accessible. You can find out more here, or feel free to contact us prior to visiting if you require additional information regarding access and facilities.