Refuge is a 5 year transdisciplinary project that brings together artists, community members and emergency services to investigate arts and culture’s role in developing preparedness and building community resilience for climate related disasters.
On a freezing Friday in January, Khmer-American artist Kat Eng sits in front of retail giant H&M’s Time Square store working on a manual sewing machine. For eight hours, Eng stitches together U.S. dollar bills while wearing a surgical mask and bloodstained shirt. Her performance “</3 Less Than Three” protests the way fast fashion and consumer culture creates oppressive conditions for Khmer workers.
The money was supposed to be used to create modern art. And it was — but not in the way a Danish museum expected when it gave an artist the equivalent of $84,000. In return, it received two empty canvases.
The artist, Jens Haaning, says the blank canvases make up a new work of art — titled "Take the Money and Run" — that he calls a commentary on poor wages. One thing it's not, he says, is a theft.
The ZAD (zone à défendre, or “zone to defend”) in Western France is 4000 acres of wetland, farmland and forest that was originally intended to be built into an airport in 1965 but is now an autonomous territory occupied by 40 different collectives looking to reclaim the land. There are around 200 people living permanently on the zone, in addition to some 2,000 people coming and going.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg has teamed up with UK band The 1975 to record a song in she calls for mass civil disobedience to force action on greenhouse gas emissions.
In the track, titled “The 1975,” Thunberg recites an essay over ambient music, urging listeners to join a popular rebellion against climate change.
“Everything needs to change. And it has to start today,” she says in the song, released July 24.
Siempre Unidas is a feminist collective in the state of Quintana Roo (Mexico) that works partly through street art. In 2021, in response to the femicide of Victoria Salazar – a refugee from El Salvador who died in police custody – the collective began an anti-femicide mural project called RestaurAmoras.
Spearheaded by Latitude Artist Community, Project Easy Access Lexington (PEAL) organized team 'Bricksquad' to help make the sidewalks and streets of downtown Lexington, KY more wheelchair accessible. Armed with only a canvas bag of few bricks, sand, and some tools the teams would make their way through the sidewalks restoring bricks as needed. The damage to the sidewalks was such that the gesture was symbolic more than effectual initially.