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As a space for dialogue and understanding, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) recognises the significance of the climate crisis as one of the greatest challenges of our time.
The annual ‘Earth Rising’ Festival, set in the historic grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin, will be a catalyst for creative thinking, imagination, and individual agency in tackling this and related issues, reimagining a more sustainable and liveable future for generations to come.
The four-day Festival of Creativity and Hope, consisting of free events and experiences aimed at addressing the climate crisis and inspiring collective action towards a sustainable and hopeful future, seeks to provoke, inspire, and empower audiences to become agents of change.
IMMA Director, Annie Fletcher, believes that public institutions like IMMA can play a significant role in the climate emergency, mobilising the museum for civic action. That role includes ‘listener’ and ‘convenor of expertise’ as well as a ‘space for joy’ in the face of climate anxiety. The museum will make civic and pedagogical space for a kind of ‘civic assembly’, to convene and engage citizens, using culture and the arts to mobi- lise environmental citizenship.
Fletcher believes that culture – be it art, music, theatre, literature, painting or film – creates a kind of intimacy, an opportunity to zoom in from big ideas to the level of the embodied human observer and participant. Zooming in from big overwhelming questions, culture and the arts create moments of intimacy or connection, providing a powerful tool to allow for a different kind of space for reflection and action.
While it is not the obligation for all artists to do this kind of work, Fletcher believes that it is both useful and interesting for IMMA to investigate this role for the arts in the context of the climate emergency.
‘Art describes and gives us a sense of understanding and, literally, imagining. It is a space where we can find and recover a sense of agency.’
Given the historic importance of the site at Kilmainham, Fletcher is keen to turn the Irish Museum of Modern Art into the ‘jewel in the crown’ of passive refurbishment and restoration. ‘These walls tell a particular story of survival…I am fascinated by how we might reoccupy the building as sustainably as possible.’
Alongside the Earth Festival, IMMA itself is destined to be transformed – in terms of its buildings and landscape – into a story of reuse, rework and sustainable restoration. Fletcher adds: ‘We are very committed to this journey and to thinking this journey out loud.’
The Festival has already attracted 9000 participants and IMMA looks forward to convening an even bigger community that can both sustain itself and begin to inform the Museum’s own journey of transformation.
Keywords: Arts, climate change, civic space, imagining, agency, ‘space for joy’, intimacy.
Links to wellbeing economy: Imagination, climate change, arts, agency.
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