Can Art Drive Environmental Action in Southeast Asia?
Speaker
Chair
Scientific representations of environmental change are crucial for understanding a changing planet. But the likes of models and graphics do not always connect with people in a way that sparks reflection or action. In contrast, art also offers a different perspective by allowing personal, experiential expression and interpretation of environmental change, creating space for people not only to understand environmental problems, but to feel and respond to them. Importantly, art also offer ways of navigating the increasingly difficult politics surrounding climate and environmental action. This is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where environmental activists and civil society organisations have long had to negotiate political sensitivities, restrictions on civic space, and competing economic and development priorities.
But bringing art and environmental science together raises its own questions. Who should lead the creative process: the artist or the scientist? How can scientific knowledge inform art without instrumentalising art into a science communication tool? What makes a “good” art-science collaboration? Most importantly, how do we know whether environmental art actually has an impact?
In this talk, Dr. Felicia Liu reflects on these questions through two recent experiments in environmental art-activism in Malaysia. The first brought together artists and environmental researchers from the UK and Malaysia to co-produce an exhibition exploring changing seasons and seasonality under environmental change. The second takes a very different form: a commissioned gamelan composition and performance exploring haze and peat, translating research on one of Southeast Asia's most persistent environmental challenges into music and performance.
Drawing on the process of developing these projects, Dr Liu will share some of the conceptual and practical challenges of environmental artivism. She will also reflect on their early outcomes and what these experiments might teach us about the possibilities and limitations of using art to foster environmental engagement and action in Southeast Asia.
Speaker & chair biographies
Dr. Felicia Liu is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainability in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of York. Her research is guided by her curiosity about the interaction between capital, society and nature in the Anthropocene. A core part of her work focuses on sustainable finance as an important tool in (re)mediating the relationship between human and non-human nature in contemporary times. Built upon her PhD that focussed on the development of sustainable finance in Asia, her current research looks at sustainable finance in the realms of biodiversity and fintech, including biodiversity finance disclosure and data needs, innovative market instruments for nature finance, and green fintech. Felicia is also interested in how society makes sense of anthropogenic environmental changes, as reflected in her ongoing work on environmental art activism, and media portrayal of new Seasons of the Anthropocene caused by pollution and land use change.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
*Banner photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash
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