9. Representing the Climate Crisis: Aesthetic Framings in Contemporary Performing and Visual Arts

Developing and staging intricate ecological interconnectedness without reinscribing an anthropocentric ontology is a challenge that artists have been addressing in various ways—spanning a disparate continuum of narrative and dramaturgical experimentation. For example, Chantal Bilodeau’s series of plays The Arctic Cycle (since 2014) has generated a layered panorama of the Arctic states, teasing out their complex fragile ecologies as places already living through the planetary future that global warming is increasingly visiting on a grander scale. Aspiring to co-create the plays with local community leaders, activists, politicians and scientists, Bilodeau weaves multimodal tapestries of spoken word, music, dance and puppetry that capture the intersectional nature of challenges flowing from the receding ice as well as attendant economic and cultural upheavals. As a non-Indigenous practitioner, she thereby interlaces her plays with thematic and dramaturgical references to Indigenous ontologies, incorporating aesthetic anchors (e.g. Inuit sound architectures) that resist a straightforward anthropocentric reading—instead imbuing the frozen landscapes with vitality and transformative agency (Balestrini, 2020). This sites the human story within an independent, animated cosmos that forestalls reductive readings and instead draws attention to overlooked dependencies. In the context of the Global South, Taofia Pelesasa’s Te Molimau (2019) adopts a similar approach, transporting the presumably “far away” implications of climate change into the geographical and temporal “right here”. Staging the final farewell from her Pacific Country of Tokelau in the year 2060 as the sea casts its blanket over the beloved home, protagonist Vitolina performs a last fatele to honour and reconnect with her culture that—in the very act of staging—reaffirms its enduring strength and orientational capability in the theatrical as well as the audience’s felt present. Paying homage to all the world stands to lose in the face of hesitant (non)action on global warming, Pelesasa draws her audience into the fold of an interconnected, life-affirming ecology in which humanity finds an integrated home among a sprawling web of organic and inorganic matter. Framed as a eulogy, the play calls the audience to action in the present to prevent theatrical fiction from turning into a bitter future lived reality.

Marrugeku’s Cut the Sky—Five Songs for the Future (2015) is an epic-scale performance work that equally “dances forward” the implications of our present actions. It explores strategies for ontological reorientation based on the concept of “Bugarrigarra [creation time that is ever present]”,³ which Dalisa Pigram, Rachael Swain and their team use as dramaturgical framework for their work (Pigram & Swain, 2021). Rendered in non-chronological vignettes that traverse the past, present and future, the work’s unifying centre is provided by evocations of the Kimberley landscape of northwest Australia, within which it was created. Trans-Indigenous storytelling⁴ (i.e. dance, poetry, song and large-scale video projection) induces a deep desire for audiences to consider the vulnerability of the land as a result of human intervention and makes a plea for a different future. As creators Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain note, the intercultural work “is a meditation on humanity’s frailty in the face of our own actions. In a burnt landscape, a group of climate change refugees face yet another extreme weather event” (2021). The focus is on the Earth’s surface, the sky and what lies below—with specific consideration of the impact of mining in the Kimberley at the core of the storytelling. Cut The Sky moves forward and back in time in an “attempt to come to grips with the sprawling nature of climate change—and with who or what is in control as we ask how we value what is above and below the earth’s crust” (ibid.). Its fragmentary, nonlinear and relational aesthetic that subtly explores “custodianship [and] mythopoesis” (White, 2015) thereby implies that answers to this question can never be found in definite, exhaustive or one-sided terms but must account for the multivariate web of relations that exist between the human and non-human across interlacing temporal and spatial scales.

David Finnigan’s Scenes from the Climate Era (2023) is a play that comprises 50 short scenes performed within an 80-minute timeframe. In its world premiere at Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, Carissa Licciardello’s staging embraced an “aesthetics of scarcity”, comprising five actors on a bare stage without any props other than simple chairs and a table. It anticipated and realised at small scale the play’s key act of advocacy, which is to reduce humanity’s global carbon footprint (Flack, 2023). The vignettes deal with myriad topics, including a family attempting to live through an extreme heatwave of daily 55 °C with only a single, failing air-conditioning unit, or characters seeking to escape a flash flood in a small coastal town. The tone is conversational, humorous at times, as ethical and practical questions arising from each decision are weighed up—resonating with international productions such as Dawn King’s The Trials (2022). The play makes clear that—while the world itself will never end—the future of humanity and all life forms will be bleak if we do not take tangible and decisive action on all fronts. The inclusion of debate and questioning creates a kind of bargaining with the audience to catalyse meaningful action in the present, before it is too late. As characters’ reasoning and reference points flounder in the face of extreme events, they mirror the inadequacies of our contemporary mindsets—ill-equipped as we are to productively prepare for the world humanity has been shaping over the past centuries. As Eamon Flack argues, Scenes develops a blueprint for a climate change dramaturgy—one that abandons Aristotle’s unity of time and place as well as focus on an individual’s decision making, in favour of a sprawling, disjunct and collective portrait of crumbling Earth systems that dislodge humanity from any solid reference frame into a fluid cosmos of extended transformation (2023). By foretelling likely scenarios of the future, Finnigan probes what societal and cultural changes await beyond our present horizon and develops a dramaturgical framework that may help us navigate these violently turbulent times. This work engenders points of contemplation that invite audiences to see and feel the reality of climate change anew, from different vantage points, calling for conscious engagement with our present predicaments (Fig. 9.1).

A photograph of a group of people sitting around a table in a dark room. One person is lying on the floor, while the others are sitting at the table. The room is dimly lit, with only a few lights on.

Some artists integrate direct intervention modalities into their work to catalyse immediate action, adopting a politically engaged aesthetic. For example, Uta Kögelsberger developed the layered multimodal project Fire Complex (since 2020) on US wildfires, which comprises myriad artistic elements, each in its own way arresting. One of its publicly most perceptible outputs has been the video work Cull that documents the felling of ancient sequoia and conifer trees that were destroyed in the Californian wildfires of 2020. It was shown as a five-screen installation work in galleries; yet most notably, it was realised on giant billboards in downtown Los Angeles. As Kögelsberger notes, it directly became “an agent in the public realm. Set in stark contrast to the urban environment, where the impact of climate change often seems a remote abstract reality, [it offered] a timely reminder of the impact of our daily actions”. Some of the filmed trees were up to 25 stories tall and over 2000 years old. The cinematic-scale, quiet and powerful images of these giants of the forest toppling over are almost balletic in style, yet in its eulogising tone also devastating. As Hettie Judah notes, the experience of watching Cull is “like a disaster movie. […] As the trees fall, they smash through the branches of their smaller neighbours, sending out shockwaves as they hit the ground” (2022). Kögelsberger combines activism with art and has used the Fire Complex project to raise funds for sustainable reforestation, having helped plant over 6000 trees since the project began. This approach reflects her sense of dismay that not enough is done in preparation for extreme fire events with key focus still on recovery rather than regeneration and long-term sustainable repair. Kögelsberger’s work has helped raise awareness of and funds for regeneration initiatives and garner broad public support that has led to the adjustment of US environmental laws aimed at reducing the ferocity of future blazes (Kögelsberger, n.d.). While this is an important step forward, destructive wildfires will nevertheless continue into the foreseeable future, despite reforestation and more successful forest management. Hence, we need Kögelsberger’s activist approach as well as creative methodologies that can immerse us in extreme events to teach us how to prepare for and navigate such intense experiences.

A multipronged project that sought to address the urgent need for a shift from a culture of repair to one of preparedness was Refuge (2016–2021), organised by Arts House Melbourne. As discussed by Davidson et al. in this volume, it invited people affected by or working to mitigate the impacts of climate change to bring their knowledge to bear on creatively imagining life worlds in the immediate future. Taking stock of present changes in the environment, artists like Latai Taumoepeau and Keg de Souza extrapolated from these palpable yet often overlooked trajectories. They generated performative scenarios: for example, staging drill trainings such as converting North Melbourne Town Hall into a temporary flood emergency relief centre or inviting community to contemplate scenarios of food and water shortages in compounding crises (Arts House, 2021). These stagings derived their plausibility and affective power from persuasive presentation of evidence that the “here and now” already contains the seeds of future devastation. Looking closely and listening attentively became the key to documenting change over time, while performative aesthetics⁵ allowed translating this data into meaningful scenarios that convey the future as an immediately felt reality. They gave possible futures visible shape and sensorial potency in the present, which opened people up to acknowledging dimensions of reality that they have not been perceiving yet—or even might never be capable of observing first-hand due to the limitations of the human sensorial apparatus.

Visual artists such as Jakob Kudsk Steensen, ScanLAB and Richard Mosse have dedicated much of their creative practices to expanding the limits of human perception and experience, investigating microscopic and durational methods to foster deeper appreciation for the interconnected nature of planetary life, its beauty and fragility. Novel experimental imagining and sonification techniques thereby provide the key to unlocking dimensions inaccessible to the naked eye—augmenting everyday experiences and prototyping new forms of engagement with the more-than-human world. In his large-scale installation Broken Spectre (2022), Mosse arranged 20m wide-screen panoramas that provided an arresting visual spectacle of the Amazonian rainforest and the transformations wrought by human interference. The entrancing ultra-high-resolution imagery (ranging from intense close-ups of forest floor to sweeping panoramic aerial shots) was in part generated by custom-made multispectral cameras that capture wavelengths outside of the range of human vision. Mosse and his team translated their information into fluorescent colours that add new narrative dimensions to the available data, deepening insight into the invisible transformations afoot in the complex tropical ecosystems. The result has been a dense semantic and politically engaged layering, which elucidated the complex interdependencies that cut across scales, from socioeconomic to biological, from micro to macro. It approximates a solution to the problem of representing climate change as a hyperobject that unfolds at a “scale […] that is too vast to comprehend, too minute to perceive, and too normalised to see” (Mosse qtd. in Blue, 2022).

Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s immersive live-simulated environment Berl-Berl (since 2021) lifted such experimentation to another level, using photogrammetry to generate a 3D-modelled synthesised macro-rendition of the wetlands surrounding the German capital, Berlin—blending present-day scans with reconstructions of species that have since vanished. While the camera relentlessly auto-pans over the simulated landscape, it activates sound layers mapped to features in the environment. These are, in turn, embedded into larger algorithmic structures that reflect the soundscapes of broader dynamic systems, like particular weather conditions and the circadian rhythm of the natural world. The synthesised sound is played through a network of 29 speakers dotted across the gallery space (Chapter TV, 2021). As all animation is live-simulated, each installation experience is unique and has its own unpredictable tone and affective resonance. Fostering emotional states is conducive to eliciting contemplation and reflection in the viewer—a prerequisite for any shift in consciousness and behaviour to occur. Aesthetic experimentation here translates invisible processes into perceptible entities and transforms our sense of reality by establishing new relations that become available to structure our imagination and pathways for preparatory action.

Highlighting the co-constitution of ecosystems and exploring their self-organising mechanisms is another potent way to invite audiences into an ontological reconsideration of interconnected planetary ecologies. A stand-out example in this regard is Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead (2017). The work consists of a complex arrangement of carefully engineered biological and technological systems, which are brought together in such ways that state changes in one system trigger marked transformations across all others. The work was staged in a disused ice rink in Germany and consisted of earth mounds, aquariums, live animals,⁶ cancer cells in incubators and a range of sensors that—based on data provided by the live organisms—trigger movement of physical and virtual portals in the space. The chain reactions highlight the plasticity and self-organising capabilities of evolving ecosystems, yielding a dynamic tableau of perpetual becoming that, albeit conceived and installed by the artist, henceforth eschews his directive control. The interdependency between systems, catalysed by exposure to the elements (through a permeable ceiling that admits rain and sunshine), means that constant adaptation takes place. Technology (in the form of mechanical and digital architectures), rather than designed to control the biological and atmospheric processes, is horizontally integrated—with AI algorithms scripted in such a way that they shift in response to certain state changes in the space. The AI seamlessly integrates with biological systems—bridging organic and inorganic matter, which effectively muddies any distinction between natural and cultural systems (Frohne, 2020). The result is a symbiotic chaos that discloses its interdependency and responsiveness, yet in its complexity and unpredictability must remain enigmatic to the human epistemological quest. Thus, Huyghe’s work can be read as a critical commentary on the anthropocentric assumption of human primacy and our quest for control, embedded in knowledge traditions that permeate much of Western art history.

An anthropocentric perspective blinds us to the interconnected nature of those agencies that determine the boundary parameters of our planetary existence. Accordingly, Bruno Latour identified the need for a “new climatic regime” that pays attention to the interrelated Earth systems that condition our existence—i.e. atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere (2018)—with “Climate” denoting the output of their dynamic interactions. Arguing that these interrelated processes (and by extension, the Climate) have been fermenting under intensifying global warming, he proposes the concept of “terrestrial agency” to capture the dynamics that underpin the ferocious floods, earthquakes and wildfires that are arriving as compounding disasters across the globe (2018). As a constituting force, the terrestrial intervenes into the fabric of our lifeworlds, forcing an ontological repositioning that acknowledges humanity’s circumscribed role in the wider planetary ecology. Even though the cumulative impact of our extractive practices has altered the long-term functioning of Earth systems, our ability to intervene into these ad hoc to remedy the resulting fractures remains at best limited and subject to a techno-optimistic fallacy. To work against this “slow cancellation of [our species’] future” (Fisher qtd. in Frohne, 2023), we need to cultivate a critical participatory relationship with the terrestrial, learning to perceive, relate and interact with its agency. In the performing arts, Pierre Daubigny explored the possibility of engaging with such a long-term ontological shift through an expanded emotional repertoire in his experimental play Gaïa Global Circus (2013).⁷ The work seeks “to capture, understand, feel, and represent to oneself the irruption of the new [Terrestrial] character” (Aït-Touati & Latour, 2018) and to utilise the full range of our knowledge-producing modes, i.e., “our bodies, our senses, our tools, our instruments, and all that allows us more generally to capture and assimilate the world” (ibid.). Daubigny and his team engaged in a collective writing process that involved scientists, activists and artists. They drew inspiration from scientific practices of “sampl[ing], collect[ing], measur[ing], analys[ing], transform[ing] and styl[ing]” material into the stage work. Fostering intense dialogue behind the scenes as well as on stage between stakeholders, this practice allowed practical, intellectual and affective modes to coexist and cross-pollinate. The tone of the “kaleidoscopic text” (ibid.) eschews “[didactic] discourse” and eulogising “lamento” to foster a “burlesque imaginary” that absorbs the often paralysing political posturing of climate change art through a rapid turnover of pluri-vocal vignettes. The frenetic stage action thereby competes with, and is ultimately dwarfed by, a tone-setting set design that consists of a canopy that envelopes both stage and auditorium. Sensitive to disturbances in the space (e.g. rising temperatures due to collective body heat), the eye-catching white sheet performs its own mesmerising dance that is enmeshed with yet also markedly set apart from the human drama.