Artist In Residence

Art and Culture Program

Our Art and Culture Program brings together cultural and creative practitioners and Loss and Damage actors to explore the role that art and culture can play in addressing and raising awareness of the needs to address loss and damage from climate change.

For enquiries directly related to the Art and Culture Program please contact the Project Lead on teo [@] lossanddamagecollaboration.org. Please also find the project's concept note here.
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The Programs Aim

Although cultural and creative practitioners are playing a vital role in raising awareness and driving critical engagement in the climate crisis as an intersectional problem, they have largely been unable to meaningfully engage in the UNFCCC process on the issue of Loss and Damage, and therefore very few have knowingly engaged with the critical issues of non-economic loss and damage (NELD) and Loss and Damage finance.

In order to encourage greater engagement with these important issues, we believe that cultural and creative practitioners need to be given the opportunity to participate in interdisciplinary dialogues, which introduce, translate, explore and examine the concepts and technical language that make up the Loss and Damage discourse under, and outside of the UNFCCC.

They need to be supplied with entry points and a mandate to engage with the issue of Loss and Damage by critical theory relating to their disciplines authored by renowned practitioners from their field. And they need to be given financial, critical and technical support to create innovative new projects that address, and explore the need to address Loss and Damage.

In doing so, we believe that cultural and creative practitioners and the Loss and Damage actors that they engage with, will quickly be able to find transdisciplinary links between the ethical and political issues surrounding Loss and Damage finance and the key issues currently being widely explored within the arts and humanities in relation to the combined climate, human rights and environmental crisis and the drive towards decolonization.
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Who It Will Engage

The program aims to engage the following groups from both the global North and South:

‍Cultural and creative practitioners: Including but not limited to cultural theorists, art historians and curators, artists, fiction film makers, artist film makers, and documentary film makers, digital directors and practitioners working with emergent technologies such as VR, AR and 360 film, photographers, authors, performers and dancers, composers and musicians, playwrights, archivists and museologists.

‍Loss and Damage actors: Including but not limited to policymakers, academics, researchers, negotiators, legal advisors, and activists within the Loss and Damage Collaboration (L&DC) and beyond.
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Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage

Image credit: Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage

As part of ourArt and Culture Program, we launched Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage, an online artistic research residency, a series of public events and a set of commissioned texts, aimed at facilitating a transdisciplinary exchange around the issue of loss and damage caused by the climate crisis.

By building connections across different knowledge-making practices, Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage sets out to create a symbiotic network of trans-local collaborators, recognising that climate research, activism and advocacy, is an entangled and inter-relational practice involving many actors.

The Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage program is supported by the Open Society Foundations.

Open Call

Following the Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage open call, which received over 740 applications, three project proposals have now been selected for development through the program's artistic research residency.

The three selected proposals are from:

1. Gabriela de Matos (Brazil) (Candomblé terreiros: Sacred Shields Against Salvador’s Climate Crisis);

2. Nombuso Mathibela & Sibonelo Gumede (South Africa) (Phoshoza sunduz’ama bhun’ahambe: Interpreting the (in) tangible planetary futures of bow instrument ecospheres in Kwa-Zulu Natal); and;

3. Zahra Malkani (Pakistan) (A Ubiquitous Wetness).

Public Program

Taking place online between January 2024 and January 2025, the Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage public online program will feature four key moments — three workshops and an online symposium — with the aim of diversifying audiences and adding nuance and depth to public and policy-oriented discussions on Loss and Damage.

Throughout the four events, participants will gain insights into the contentious history of Loss and Damage negotiations, the ethical and political questions surrounding the issue and where Loss and Damage fits into the struggle for climate justice.

The first themed Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage workshop was held in February 2024, the second in May 2024, and the third will take place in October 2024. The Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage symposium will be held in January 2025. Please sign up to our mailing list for updates on how to attend, the events and what themes will be explored and what speakers will be present.

Texts of Repair

‍In addition to the artists research program, Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage will commission critical thinkers from the arts and humanities to explore different perspectives, aesthetic explorations, knowledges and lived experiences of the climate crisis in relation to Loss and Damage. The commissioned texts are intended to provide conceptual frameworks and critical links between the Loss and Damage discourse and themes already being widely explored within the arts and humanities in response to the combined climate, human rights, and environmental crisis, and the drive towards decolonization.

Visit the Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage website to find out more about the program : https://www.waysofrepair.com/
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Team Members

Art and Culture Program
Co-Coordinator

LenA Dobrowolska

Lena is an artist-researcher, filmmaker and educator who has been working on issues relating to political ecology and climate change for over a decade. Her current research focuses on co-creative documentation and inclusive digitalisation of intangible losses due to the climate crisis in the context of planned relocation. She has interests in decolonial and ecofeminist perspectives on climate and anticolonial research methodologies. Lena is a PhD Researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE Bristol, a Research Associate with Culture and Climate Change at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield and lectures in MA Digital Direction at the Royal College of Art.

@lenadobrowolska

Art and Culture Program
Co-Coordinator

TEO ORMOND
- Skeaping

Teo is an award-winning artist, filmmaker and photographer working on projects relating to, amongst other things, non-economic loss and damage, the governmentality of Loss and Damage and climate-induced migration. Teo also works to coordinate the Loss and Damage Collaboration’s Advocacy and Outreach, Communications, Human Mobility and Displacement, and Art and Culture programs.

@TeoSkeaping

Art and Culture Program
Co-Coordinator

Phoebe-Lin
Elnan

Phoebe is a writer and performer who sometimes makes work with and/or about food. She holds a master's in Visual Art from the CCC Research Program at the HEAD, Geneva and has worked as a creative producer at arts and environmental non-profit organisation Coalition for a Cultural Ecology (COAL), Paris. Phoebe is part of the collective as slow as possible that curates exhibitions in Espace 3353 in Geneva.

phoebelinelnan.com