Declarer Testimony: ‘the sphere of climate action’
Declarer Esther Abramson shares her Declaration journey through connecting creative engagement, the cultural sector and the climate and ecological emergency
Culture Declares Emergency (CDE) has influenced the way I think about and engage with the climate emergency. I have a deeper understanding of climate justice because CDE highlights the interconnections of social, environmental and political issues. I came to CDE without a background in arts and culture. I connected with CDE through involvement with my local climate action group and my degree in languages which is the study of culture and how narratives, identities and behaviours are held within cultural practices, products and perspectives. I clearly saw the overlap between climate action and culture, but found it difficult at first to explain why. I now have a better understanding of how the cultural sector operates and some of the barriers to Culture declaring emergency, and have developed language around climate justice and why culture is key to facing the climate emergency. The climate emergency is a metacrisis that stems from our cultures of the past, which have influenced our present relationships with one another and our environment, and, that will be determined by the culture we take forward and with which we shape the future.
Through my work to set up a local hub I have developed my activism in more creative, collaborative and participatory ways with projects such as the Dear Earth Project, an evolving installation of Letters to the Earth which led to broader collaborations and engagement with local community groups and even Ilkley Town Council. In the process of this project, I saw creative engagement with the climate emergency as an essential lowering the barrier to climate action and a way of giving people back their agency to express how they feel about what is happening to our planet and home. It highlighted the need to create a shift in the culture around the climate emergency, not only within the cultural sector and how artists and organizations could include the climate emergency in their offerings, but also in the quotidian culture of how we receive these cultural offerings that address the climate emergency and how we interact with it in our daily lives beyond the sphere of climate action. How safe, willing and able we are or aren’t to talk about the emergency and all that is embedded within it.
My involvement with CDE has also led me to develop a visual arts practice that allows me a safe space to express myself in relation to the climate crisis and explore themes of ecofeminism, interconnectedness and nature. It has made me hyperaware of the spaces where there is a lack of acknowledgement or response to the climate emergency. I now seek out creative work that engages with this and broadens my perspective on it from music to visual art to writings.
I am committed to pushing for creative engagement with the climate emergency as an activist, as an artist and as a citizen who appreciates cultural offerings. Mostly I believe this work is necessary close to home, and so I am committed to working locally through the CDE hub I am coordinating with collaborations with other environmental groups and relationship building across diverse networks as well as through my own creative projects.
Esther Abramson is a mixed media artist working to explore our relationship with nature, and a coordinator of the CDE Wharfdale and Airedale hub. Read more about Esther’s work, practice and declaration on her declarer profile.