GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
Stories to Shape the Future, with Alice Sharp
What happens when art meets climate activism? Join us for a compelling conversation with Alice Sharp, the innovative founder of Invisible Dust, as she takes us through her unique journey. From a transformative event in Berlin organized by the British Council to her inspiring encounters with climate scientists, Alice talks to us about the evolving role of art in highlighting environmental issues.
We also explore striking examples of climate art from around the globe, like Olafur Eliasson's ice block installation, as we discuss the importance of making scientific research both accessible and engaging. Our conversation also touches on the power of collaborative thinking and the necessity of merging art and science to tackle pressing environmental challenges.
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Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone, you are listening to Good Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mira Agency, istanbul, and.
Speaker 3:This is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester. This podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:So in this episode we're going to talk to Alice Sharp, who is the founder of Invisible Dust, a curatorial practice that brings the worlds of art and sustainability together, which is exciting. Actually, its mission is to stimulate debate, awareness and action, and that is the core of Good Geist. Also, invisible Dust artists include John Jonas, elizabeth Price, jeremy Diller, cornelia Parker and Gail Chong Kwan, if I spelled it correctly. Sorry if I made any mistakes.
Speaker 3:I think that was okay that much. And as well as being hugely influential, alice, if you don't mind me saying as a curator, you speak all over the world on art, climate science and, particularly exciting for Damla and I, you've just created, curated an exhibition with the artist Matt Collishaw at Borusan, istanbul, so what a perfect fit. Thank you so much for taking time to talk to us.
Speaker 4:Oh, thank you very much for inviting me.
Speaker 3:Brilliant, so we always like to kick off with a good backstory on the podcast, alex. So could you tell us how you came to be working at this intersection of art and climate action and how Invisible Dust came into being back in 2009?
Speaker 4:Yeah, actually, it is actually a very international story. I was invited by the British Council to Berlin and we had the most amazing time. It was an organisation called Tipping Point and they decided to have this event where they invited artists and scientists from all over Europe to come and uncover climate change at that time and if anyone knows climate science, they'll know that the Potsdam Institute is the centre of climate science Very, very important, significant scientists, and at the time Schnellberger was actually advising Clinton. We're going back right to a long time ago. Schnellberger was actually advising clinton, we're going back right right to a long time ago and so we were given the opportunity underneath einstein's telescope. So it was quite amazing. We had this telescope above us there's probably about 200 of us um to chat about that kind of mixing of ideas between artists and scientists, and it was the first time that I'd ever been to anything like that. I'd curated one project about um, about with an artist looking at rising sea levels previously, but I hadn't. It wasn't my whole kind of you know rationale for the kind of way that I work and suddenly I came to this um event. It was, you know, when you have those very you know, pioneering and kind of significant scientists. You're very much taken into that world that they are, you know, facing every day, and I was just very, very struck by the importance of the work and actually that there was this incredible opportunity for thinking, to kind of be fertilized between artists and scientists, and this is actually something quite new.
Speaker 4:At that time as well, you know, there wasn't that much going on. Um, and in fact, when I first set up Invisible Dust, quite often when I used to go and see artists or galleries, they'd say, oh, it's a bit niche, which you can't believe now, with climate change, and you know, and certainly across the UK, there's just so many projects that are about kind of climate change and you know, and certainly across the UK, there's just so many projects that are about kind of climate change and environmentalism. But at that time in 2009, it wasn't so, you know, it wasn't so much part of artist practice and I think there was a kind of worry that it would be too instrumentalizing of the science rather than this kind of collaboration and this kind of discussion of ideas. And so I had this opportunity and with Invisible Dust, one of the first scientists I met was an air pollution scientist and I asked him you know how do you do your science, how do you look at your, the air pollution? And he said I measure dust through time.
Speaker 4:And I suddenly thought, wow, this is actually a scientist measuring dust. I mean it. You know it could be an art project, couldn't it? So he was saying I measure this dust. I look at the past. I look at things like Turner's paintings to show that the air pollution was very bad in the 19th century. And then I'm looking at how I can show images now that show how air pollution is, you know, in current times. And so I said well, would you be interested in collaborating with artists? And so of course he was. He was absolutely thrilled this prospect would give him some new images for his presentations. And that's kind of how the organization was born, of how the organization was born.
Speaker 4:And because I started out looking at dust, because that was kind of the first route really for me into looking at climate change and environmentalism, I then started reading a lot of different texts and I read Philip Pullman, and if you know, philip Pullman wrote the Northern Lights series and he has an actual expression in a book called the Amber Spyglass, where he actually says invisible dust, and it's about this magical quality that the dust has to take you into a new world and, as we all know, with environmentalism, that's what we're all hoping, that we actually, you know, embrace our imaginations and, whatever sector whether we're in business, whether in science, science, whether we're in art and actually look at new ways of doing things. So I was very sort of taken with this, and so that's how Invisible Dust was born.
Speaker 2:Well, that's amazing. I have a question. I did have a different question, but when you were talking I just thought of something else. As always, my mind slips to everywhere. So I have a question. With the beginning and the roots of your work, you said sustainability, climate change and this activism wasn't that much of a hype in the art scene when you started it, and now it's a hype. So my question is it really brings a lot of nice titles to mind. When you see a good artwork bringing activism, climate and the science together with the bond of creativity, suddenly your mind opens to a lot of possibilities. But when you calculate all these years since 2009 to today's art world, do you think that art also has contributed to the real conversation, the activism, or is there a possibility or is it something to watch?
Speaker 4:I think that art has been threaded through the conversation and I think the thing that's quite tricky about art and of course I'm always, you know, building partnerships and doing new projects, and so I'm always looking for funding and for partnerships and new kind of ideas is how do you show the impact and so that everyone always comes back to that? And you work in sort of um, business related areas and obviously people are very keen on impact and whilst I think impact is very important, the difficulty you've got with art is it's something which is very, very personal, which is why it works, because what happens is an art piece tells a story to you and then you think about it now. You might think about it the day you see it, might think about it two years time or you might think about it in 10 years time and it'll change your behavior, but it's not. I've seen that piece of art and therefore I'm gonna look at being better at recycling or change my electricity company or whatever else. It's not sort of this direct approach, it's much more holistic and it kind of hits you in a much more deeper way. Now I would say that's as important, and perhaps I would actually say it's more important, because I think that if people's hearts are moved by things, then they tend to then change and they tend to kind of embrace new ideas. But it is an interesting point about where art has seated in the conversation. I guess what's happened is, for example, in some of the cops.
Speaker 4:There's been some quite significant art pieces. You know, you have the Eliasson piece in 2015, which was his ice blocks which were set in a square in Paris and I don't know if you went to that and they were melting and although there were conversations about how much the carbon footprint of that, etc. It was actually a very good metaphor for what's happening. You know, we are losing things. We are. There is a sense of loss and I guess what art does is then question where is the loss, what's going to happen to it and what was my role in it? You know, when I look at this ice, where's the relationships to it and what was my role in it? You know, when I look at this ice, where's where's the relationships and, for example, I'm working at the moment in Olu, which is in um, really near the Arctic, and so I'm very involved with ice and very looking, looking at snow, and I think about that piece and think that was actually quite a powerful piece. You know, um, and they brought it to the Tate Modern in London. I don't know whether they took it to other parts of the world, but yeah, I think there were some good questions that came up for people about that.
Speaker 4:So I think art is always part of the story. The other thing that I do is bring the science in. So not all art involves scientists, and that's absolutely fine, and in fact, not all climate art involves scientists. But for me, me I'm really trying to enable some of those more difficult stories that the scientists are telling in their research papers that nobody wants to read. Let's face it, who wants to read a scientific paper? We want to know that they're doing it, we want to know that they're right, we want to have debate within science, but we don't really want to read a scientific paper. And what I can do is then bring those artists and scientists together to develop new thinking, and I'm really quite passionate about this new thinking, and I wanted to kind of give you a quote from Einstein Is now the moment to give you that.
Speaker 3:Go for it.
Speaker 4:Okay. So Einstein says Should I give you that? Go for it. Okay, no-transcript. And I just think this is absolutely brilliant.
Speaker 4:Of course, the world we've got now has been created by the type of thinking that prioritises growth and economic advancement and has completely disregarded waste, pollution, inequalities, all the problems that we have, the environmental problems, say is, for me, this kind of notion of bringing the art and science together and obviously there are a lot of other collaborators as well, historians we work with all sorts of other other other academics is to bring this new kind of thinking. So we're not just, as a world, prioritizing this very narrow view of where our society should go to, um, and I think that's very, very important. And so I feel that what we're trying to do with Invisible Task is to bring these new conversations, and we've actually got a program called Forecast, which I've developed, which has taken place over the last sort of four years, and I'm now looking at international options for it which is asking these questions about the future alice, there's so much honestly it, um, and and thank you so much for questioning the infinite growth model of capitalism before damla got there.
Speaker 3:Um, I mean just that was perfect.
Speaker 3:I thought, wow, alice got there first, but the I mean, I also what. What I thought about when you're talking then was just how much of a battering science has had over the last few years, your role in helping almost helping people to interface with science in a kind of completely lateral way. But that wasn't what I was going to ask about. Actually, what I'm interested in is the long view for what you're doing, because I know you said that in 2009, there weren't that many pieces that were focused on the climate crisis, for example, or sustainability, but there is a longer tradition, isn't there, of artists as activists going quite a long way, and I know, in the field of literature, I can't help but think of Henry David Thoreau and stuff. So, um, do you feel you're in a? Is there a tradition? That's what I'm getting. Is there a tradition behind your work? Do you feel?
Speaker 4:yeah, I think there is very much a tradition. I think, um, historically I mean, you were mentioning thoreau, who was part of the american movement, and I think one of the things I'm doing at the moment and where it will lead I don't know, but I'm doing a lot of research around the 19th century because you have these big figures that have shaped the way that we understand environmentalism now. So you have someone like humboldt from now germany it wasn't germany then, but um who was the one of the first people to understand climate change. Um, you have people like um. Interesting enough, some of the artists that I would say wordsworth colleridge were all talking about the role of nature, um, and sort of putting questions about sort of scientific thinking, going right through to people like Ernst Haeckel and George Eliot, I would argue, as well. So there's a lot of basis of artists and scientists and alongside that you've got Ruskin looking himself. I mean, one of the projects we're looking at for the future is the Storm Cloud Lecture, which, if you don't know, it's a really amazing lecture that Ruskin gave, saying that the pollution from the northern cities, from Manchester, from Bradford, was coming over the Lake District and he recognised that these clouds were filled with pollution and so he was actually recognising human caused climate change at a very early time and just the second part of the 19th century. So I think artists have had that history of being involved in these discussions and then taking to the future, which I guess would be in terms of my work.
Speaker 4:I've been looking at this idea at forecast. One of the debates that we had in forecast is does the past shape the future? Now, that's a big, big question. You, you know, when we started to have covid, people were saying should we look at past pandemics and how they worked, and do we look at the future? So that that kind of question is very well asked by artists, in fact, because artists are some of the best storytellers. How do we look at the future?
Speaker 4:Um, we did a forecast last may at the um, the gla headquarters, and we had people like ben ocre, who is incredible, discussing myths. You know the kind of ancient myths that we had, the kind of greek myths. What do they now give us for the future? What you know, what can storytelling to tell us?
Speaker 4:And, if you think about it, one of the difficulties with climate change is we really don't know a lot of the things. Of course we know that emissions are a problem, of course we know the big picture of what we, what we need to do, but how everything interrelates it's still very unknown and and you can see that with weather systems, they can't predict western weather systems beyond a few months, you know, sometimes even even a week, because they can't they know whether one thing is interrelating with another, and I think that interrelationship in our world is so key. So a lot of work I'm doing now is to look at international perspective, look at how different parts of the world are affected by climate change. Where can we bring artists and scientists together to look at those issues? So, um, is it okay to give you a couple of examples of the sort of things we're doing?
Speaker 3:yeah, definitely yeah, okay.
Speaker 4:So, um, we're looking at places like india. India's obviously um has this, um, um a monsoon which is very, very sort of fundamental in their weather system and travels around the whole of india. The monsoon has been written about and has been painted since a credible history, like thousands of years. There's a guy called Kaladesha in the fifth century who was talking about the monsoon then. So it's really important. It's not only a weather system, it's actually something that's important to Indian culture. So then we've been talking to artists, scientists, architects in india talking about how can we take a learning about the monsoon for climate change, because, of course, what's happening now is it's much more intense. There are landslides, there's huge floods, there's lots of problems. Where can we take that learning of india to other parts of the world? And so one of the things we were talking about is whether we could bring some learning from Delhi, where we're working with with some architects and designers and artists, to London, because they will have built structures that have to sustain flooding. They would have had things that they've had to kind of adapt in order to deal with this rainfall, and somewhere like London hasn't, and you know that when you're in the UK and when you do have that kind of extreme weather, which is becoming more, more common, um, you kind of feel, oh this, you know this place is not ready for it, when we haven't got that kind of knowledge. So there's some learning there that I want to do. Um, and we've been talking to some really great architects in London, like Norman Foster's architectural practice, ucl architect Bartlett bringing scientists together from different countries through this kind of art science and then having kind of engineers and scientists involved. So that's a very exciting project. And then we've got a project team talking about artists as activists.
Speaker 4:We're working with an artist called Dryden Goodwin, and it's a project that's gone on for a long time. Actually, we started it first me and Dryden in 2012. And then he did this incredible thing where he did these beautiful drawings of his son drawings of his son and he was very struck by the fact that children are affected much more by air pollution than adults, and so he did these drawings of his son and we put him on top of St Thomas's Hospital, right opposite the House of Parliament. We did this projection and that was a really, really important project for us and obviously it had that kind of link with Parliament and laws and how we can change things. And then we revisited that last year with Brie Forella, where we worked with Rosamund Adekisi-Debra, who lost her child to air pollution. Her daughter died at nine years old and then on the deficit ticket they put that the daughter had died because of air pollution. So they didn't say you know, respiratory disease or any of those things. They actually said air pollution is the cause of death, which was the first person in the world. And so her mother, rosamund, has tirelessly campaigned and you might have heard about her being very involved with Sadiq Khan and the recent discussions about the low emission zone.
Speaker 4:And we worked with Rosamund. Andden actually drew her, which was incredible. So he drew her alongside some other air pollution activists and we did these projections of the images and we reached a huge audience. We managed to do a fantastic arrangement with one of the companies that does the screens, a bit like we did when I worked with you actually, steve, and we got 13 million people saw this project, so it was really really significant right across the UK.
Speaker 4:So we're now taking that to Lahore in Pakistan, which has got those big problems of a kind of really huge growth for the city. It's gone up 10 million in the last 15 years as a place. I mean, you can't really get your head around another 10 million in that short space of time. And of course with that comes pollution, waste, et cetera. And if you look at any picture of Lahore, you just see these cars standing side by side.
Speaker 4:You know a huge amount of air pollution and then bringing that kind of air pollution activists, dryden will again draw an environmentalist in Lahore and that will become part of the project and so in that way he's enabling these activists to get a voice in a different way, which is to show themselves as part of his animations, and we'll do big projections we're hoping to get some on the tuk-tuks, which would be great going around Lahore. You know, and Lahore is like a lot of you know, global south cities, it has grown so fast and there isn't infrastructure to really support health or environment. These things get left to the wayside. They are, you know, thought to be the externalities we were treating earlier. So that's a really exciting example where the artists and the activists become very synonymous, like you were talking about, steve.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to try to bring all these threads of inspiration together in a question. I'm so happy that you gave examples all around the world and at the moment you also have a project breaking in Istanbul Very exciting actually. Also, you have been working with Ulu in Finland, the European city of culture for 2026,. All around the world and everything you say has some threads that are common in different countries. You say stories, you say real, you say experience and you say learning. And also I read an interview you gave about the exhibition in istanbul going on at the moment, and there you stated that post-modernism have brought a dystopian and defeatist world to us, the feeling, the common, mutual feeling on climate is dystopian and defeatist and, on the other hand, to combat with this feeling.
Speaker 2:You're turning to Kant, actually, and you talk about the real experiences, what we experience and what we can learn from each other and how can we turn that real experience into stories that may change something. Could we talk about this a little bit, because it seems, while criticizing postmodernism, I'm really curious about what you think about post-truth.
Speaker 4:Post-truth Okay. So yeah, I'm very interested in Kant. It ties into what I was saying earlier about the 19th century and how we have become interested in environmentalism. How did we get that knowledge in the first place? And so when I started to look at some of these people like Alexander von Humboldt and Heckel, and actually even people like Darwin, I was trying to and actually even people like Darwin I was trying to think about what were the people that influenced them in order for them to come up with the ideas that they came up with.
Speaker 4:How did Humboldt, who was travelling the world, looking at places like Venezuela and Colombia, how did he come up with his idea that everything was related to everything else? And what he was very big on is he felt that you needed to bring your imagination to the science. Um, and of course you're going to know this straight away, that is kantian. So what, what? What's kant's? Um, I think the kant contribution to particularly the way that we look at um, uh, the environment is that you're not as a scientist, you are not just doing yours, and I've had arguments with scientists, which has been quite fun for me. If you're a scientist, you don't just do that scientific experiment, you bring your own personal experiences. What's happened to you previously, you know, whether it's something about, you know going out into the weather, whether it's something to do with your family, whether it's, you know, something to do with your history or your parent, whatever, you bring experience into doing that science, and that's the kantian argument, um, and I would say that that has then led to people like, you know, humboldt and these other really significant scientists who have changed our world um, realizing that science wasn't just one of these things where you just did experiment after experiment after experiment. They needed to really bring that bigger picture into the science they were doing. So. Someone like humboldt was interesting because he was not only a geologist, which where he started out, but he also did weather measurements. Then you say he's a meteorologist, he also looked to plants and animals. He, you know, in those days it was a natural historian. We'd now say he was a biologist, you know, and so he was able to bring in these incredible different elements into the, the science he was doing. So I guess my um thinking is to kind of return back to some of that gives us an understanding of science which is quite different from just this kind of very dry, analytical thing but is about exploring not only the science but the scientists.
Speaker 4:So I'm working in Turkey, as you mentioned, and I'm working with a really amazing marine biologist who's called Murahem Balshi, and I just did a talk with him just recently and he looks at the algae problem which, if you live in Istanbul, you know, is this incredibly, quite scary problem actually, that the whole of the Bosphorus, very large parts of the Marmara have previously been covered studies this algae and in his science he's found that, you know, the waste is is contributing and, of course, the population is going up, so much in istanbul is there their infrastructure to cope with that. And so you have this kind of scientist who's trying to do something which is, you know, really, really important for istanbul, but in a way, scientists quite isolated. You know he's working away in in istanbul university and he can't necessarily ask the political questions either. I can ask them, but can he ask those questions? So, so, um, you know, what I'm hoping to do is to bring people like him, who are doing such important work, um, into into kind of people's understanding through people like, uh, matt collishaw's work.
Speaker 4:So, um, matt collishaw is doing the, the project at the moment at boris and contemporary. He's come up with this beautiful um series of um installations which are, he's called, arrhythmia and arrhythmia heartbeat, about a sort of a disturbance of a heartbeat. And the thing that was really nice about working with Matt is he also shared my real interest in the 19th century. So he's been looking back in time and in fact he went right back to the Renaissance and looked at Durer as well as Heckel, in order to understand this idea of catastrophe and you were saying about that Damla earlier, where, if we're looking at the future and we all think it's going to be an absolute disaster, how do we handle that? I mean, it's a difficult thing with climate change, um, so what he's done is he's looked at um, an old picture by um albert drura which is called the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and it's got these riders on horses and one of them is famine and one is very, very apt. Now One is death and one is a sort of starvation, you know, and they are from the Renaissance, and then he's reused that image to explore climate change.
Speaker 4:So it's kind of really interesting to kind of go backwards in order to go forwards, and I guess it's also helpful for us to see that people have had to deal with catastrophe and disaster from a long time ago. We're not the first people to deal with it. You know at the time that he was painting that loads of people were dying from the plague, you know. So I think what it is is to try and bring these kind of historical events whether they're artists, writers, scientists and give us new meanings that we can go forward on. Because I think that if we're involved in climate change and we just keep saying the same thing again and again and again, human beings just turn off. They will stop looking at these things.
Speaker 4:So I'm always thinking is there a new way to get people thinking about it? Is there a new way to include more people in it? You know, with climate change we can't just speak to the usual suspects because they're already converted. We need to hit the bigger. You know people. So I'm hoping things like forecasts, which are kind of raising those questions.
Speaker 4:You know, what is shaping how you're thinking about the future of the planet is the kind of framing of it. Now, what's shaping you? What's what's what's, what is the thing that you care about at the moment? I mean, it's interesting. Uk the water companies is a big big thing, and lots of people can't swim at the moment because it's so polluted all around the UK coast which people in other countries would probably be amazed to hear that the UK you cannot go on a beach and swim. Be amazed to hear that the UK you cannot go on a beach and swim, you know. But that's something that you could do a really amazing project about now and get a lot of people who didn't see themselves as the usual suspects involved in thinking about the climate, you know. So I'm always looking for those new, new ways of getting people involved well.
Speaker 3:This this week, though, alice, I have to say, watching the mayor of Paris jumping into the Seine for a swim was a very lovely moment for outdoor swimming. I think you know, if there was a good cleanup story, it's definitely Paris pulling off people swimming in the Seine. I'm going to, would you believe? We're just about out of time, so we have one last question for you, alice, even though I do want to go into Jared Diamond's collapse, given your last question, your last point, but and we're not going to get distracted um, our final question is um, our network is ironically called do not smile. Uh, because we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world. So our final question is what object, place or person always makes you smile?
Speaker 4:oh, that's a. That's a big question, isn't it? Blimey, a lot of people. It's funny, isn't it? Because I'm reading, uh, mary shelley at the moment, which you would think was not a book that would make you, you, you smile, because it's Frankenstein, you know, and of course it's got this kind of horror.
Speaker 4:And I'm reading it because I'm very interested in her incredible right I mean 18, 18 years old writing this incredible story about the future and she was very influenced by Galvini, about electricity and how, you know, human bodies worked, which, you know, know, ties into all sorts of different parts of the science. And, funny enough, although it is quite dark, kind of, I'm kind of smiling in a sense, of someone who was facing and, if you know about her life as well, she had some terrible, terrible tragedy. She lost three children Percy Shelley, you know, lost at sea. She, really she lost a sister. You know she was a person who was against it and to still be able to write beautiful things. You know that when you read some of her expressions I'm like, wow, that's just beautiful.
Speaker 4:She wrote this incredible description about Reef in one of the first few pages and I lost my dad recently and I just read it and thought, oh my god, that is so wonderful. It was about keeping people with you. So what I what I think is kind of makes me smile, in a sense of gives me um uh, positivity for the future is to really recognize that our artists, our scientists, our kind of authors can bring new meanings to us each time. That can give us, you know, energy, can give us confidence. Can, you know, include more people in the conversation. So that's my big smile.
Speaker 2:Steve, how many times that we had a chat on this podcast bringing Frankenstein, mary Shelley and Kant together. I think this is a first.
Speaker 3:I think I, I and Alice, you, alice, you've only just met Damla, but I can tell you that Damla has just had the perfect half hour that's lovely to hear.
Speaker 4:I'm so pleased you deconstructed capitalism before her.
Speaker 3:Then you got into uh philosophy in a very deep way, and then mary shelley popped up.
Speaker 2:I'm surprised damla hasn't exploded actually yes, I'm in love at the moment, but we have ran out of our time. But we will have ellis one, two, three times more sure. Rest assured that we will have her once again in this podcast. So, thanks to everyone who has listened to our Good Guys podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies.
Speaker 3:And make sure you listen to future episodes where we talk to more amazing people like Alice about how we can all work together to create a more sustainable future. So, Alice Damla, thank you very much. See you soon.
Speaker 4:Bye. Thanks very much Brought to you by the DNS Network.
