ABC Network bring artists and scientists together in collaborative exhibition ahead of COP26

The exhibition Among the Garbage and the Flowers addresses pressing subjects from environmental inequality to decarbonizing economies, all crucial to the upcoming debates at the COP26 in Glasgow. Brought to the 6B Centre of Contemporary Art by an international interdisciplinary collective of artists and researchers dedicated to creating and promoting artistic and ecological initiatives, the show perches at the crossroads of art and science, pushing the boundaries of both disciplines.

Among the Garbage and the Flowers is organised and curated by the founder and acting president of the Flute & Bowl, artist and researcher Anya Gleizer (University of Oxford), and the philosopher Pablo Fernandez Velasco (TCD, UCL), and features several works created by the TORCH Art, Biodiversity and Climate Network.

The show emerges primarily from creative process aligning the collaborations of the artists and scientists involved. The Flute & Bowl works through artist-scientist pairings, created through artist-residency programmes within well-known Oxford University labs. Through conferences and creative workshops, talks, fieldtrips and activities participating researchers and artists learned to combine their diverse practices into work that challenges current disciplinary boundaries.

In collaboration, there is potential to connect not only artists and scientists, but also the different artistic and scientific disciplines they work within; a key approach to addressing the climate crisis in all its scope – as much social crisis as it is environmental. The artistic disciplines represented in the exhibition range from VR, performance, spoken word, music composition and art-created-by-bacteria, while the research disciplines involved include biology, environmental science, engineering, physics, social science, finance, medicine, geography and chemistry. This diversity allows researchers and artists to discover blind spots in their respective methodologies and epistemologies. It is in the plurality of action and thought that we can find collective solutions to our collective problems.

For curator Anya Gleizer, searching beyond our current dominant paradigm is essential to address ecological emergence: "faced with systems collapse – whether we’re talking collapsing ecosystems, or our own socio-cultural networks that they contain – we must work towards a radical reconfiguration of our relationship to the natural world, with wilderness. This wilderness is as much inside us as it is outside the borders of our urban spaces – we need to be careful where we look. When talking about biodiversity or sustainability, we’re talking about systems that can support difference – and often when we set out to measure difference, we use one rubric, one ruler – this is the limitation we are addressing with this exhibition. Art can act as a different kind of compass, flexible enough to embrace different, even divergent methods. Curious enough to question. Attentive enough to notice the contradictions. When we use art to interrogate the relationships between our cultures and natural systems, we start to lose that border that cleaves them apart. What we are left with is the nature of the relating – and that’s the space where action can occur.”

"This exhibition is, above all, a questioning of our paradigms," says Pablo Fernández, co-curator of the exhibition. "We want to assume that nature is what awaits us outside the city, that the urban and the wild are opposite entities such as cold and hot, day and night. Likewise with culture and nature, or the human and the natural world. Continuing to work within this binary is what has brought us to the crisis we face today.”

The exhibition Among the Garbage and the Flowers will be showing at the 6b — 6 Quai de Seine 93200 Saint-Denis— from 10 to 22 octobre, 2pm-7pm, Wednesday-Sunday.

Meet some of the artists and scientists involved in the exhibition on Friday 5 November 2021.

Find out more about the exhibition or view the catalogue.

Art, Biodiversity, and Climate Network, TORCH Networks