Past event
Building Collaboration from the Ground Up: Centre for Sustainable Curating and Synthetic Collective Departmental Seminar with Professor Kirsty Robertson
This talk provides an introduction to two projects that have formed the core of my research over the past decade: the Synthetic Collective and the Centre for Sustainable Curating. The Synthetic Collective is an art-science collaboration focused on tracking, characterizing, and visualizing plastic pollution in the Great Lakes Watershed. This region of North America contains 21% of the world's surface freshwater reserves and currently experiences plastic pollution levels that exceed those of the “Pacific Garbage Patch.” We sample for pre-industrial plastic pollution and then use the results to create artworks and exhibitions designed to reach multiple audiences. A core question is: how can the work that we are doing not cause further environmental harm? This question led to the formation of the Centre for Sustainable Curating, a hub for teaching, learning, and sharing information focused on museums and environmental and social justice. The CSC encourages the development of low-waste, low-carbon exhibitions and artworks while tackling a core question in the field: while museums have long been known as excellent storytellers and educators—sharing information about climate change, for example—they are often extravagant energy users, with exhibition cycles that produce extensive waste. By exploring these two projects and sharing examples as diverse as fatbergs, rotting potatoes, degrading artworks, and seaweed glue, this talk addresses the “what now?” of researching and teaching about pollution and the climate emergency.