These thoughts cohered further to a talk I gave in November 2022 for a series on ecopedagogy hosted by MASTER TRANS– Socially Engaged Artistic Practices (HEAD – Genève). The gap between that presentation and this publication afforded time and space for me to evolve my understanding of a sustainable sensibility for creative practice. In lieu of a conclusion, this text culminates in some draft guidelines selected from a longer list. They represent an affirmation but also an extension of the position I offered in 2022.

As an artist working in collaboration, my art practice activated reciprocal actions and responses in public contexts, while working in universities has paid my wages and supported my art practice with research grants. In 2012, to engage with the social-ecological crisis, I brought my art practice into the University of the Arts London (UAL) where I work. By making conceptual interventions, I encountered the separation of academic and artistic discourses and practices from the executive functions of the university.

Today’s cognitive capitalism operates on the logic of separationism that demands self-commodification and self-representation: a logic of exteriority that, as we know, is also engraved e.g., by social media. Equally, omnipresent media consumption, spectatorship, observation, by-standing and the outside view are qualities that society today is abundantly saturated with, and that help the efforts of late cognitive and data capitalists’ to construct hyper individualism, separation, and apathy, emotional states that manipulate and alienate subjects from their own social and expressive efforts.

I am interested in writing about my performance-based pedagogy in relation to the text-based research that more directly signals its politics. This, in order to highlight important practice-based tensions and signal something about relationships between knowing and teaching in our changing world.

In the contemporary art world, a professional sector based on the globalised market economy where I worked for over twenty years as a production manager, a curator, and later as a – mostly public – institution director, environmental awareness only started guiding my choices late in my career. I usually prioritised the production, circulation and transmission of artistic projects, and the ecological paradigm only very occasionally interfered with creative and curatorial freedom.

If you are reading this text on a computer screen, it is possible that your eyes are drying out. Prolonged exposure to bright electronic screens makes us blink less and thus reduces lubrication, which can result in a condition known as “dry eye”, causing discomfort and seriously affecting our vision. At the same time that our eye globes dehydrate in front of the screens, it is estimated that about 33% of the terrestrial globe is presently undergoing processes of aridification. Adding to global warming, the most immediate cause of aridification around the world is the inappropriate use of land by conventional livestock and agriculture.

How can we move towards a shared desire of how we would like to live? How do we act in order to better our own life or situation, while also serving a collective understanding? These are questions that need to be addressed in every living environment – within the city as well as beyond it.