Frances Forbes-Carbines

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Argumentative Pangloss just won’t quit. ‘All the terrible things that happened to us were interconnected’, he insists for the third time one afternoon. His audience is having none of it. ‘You may be right in saying so’, says Candide in response, ‘but we must cultivate our garden.’ – Candide, Voltaire
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Since the time of Voltaire’s Candide in the mid-eighteenth century, we as a species have not cultivated our garden. In the intervening centuries we have seen immeasurable scientific and technological progress, but environmentally things are worse than they have ever been. Our garden is charred and razed. A schoolchild in London coughs and splutters in polluted air; while far away overseas, forest fires rage and flood waters devastate millions. Whose fault is it? How can it have come to this? Embittered, the world turns its head to the twenty-eighth session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, hosted this year at Expo City, Dubai.
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Meetings will be scheduled; reports will be drafted and rewritten. Countless articles will be published – they will contradict each other; some will propagandise and others will distract. Data will be disseminated to stakeholders, along with targets and explanations. Talks will initially take place behind closed doors, in boardrooms and WhatsApp chats alike. As members of the public, our place has traditionally been outside of these rooms: we stand by and wait for the outcome. But for those of us who are determined to affect change, how might we take a step into these spaces? Perhaps art can be our guide.
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Ecological and environmental art came into being long before climate change was a subject of everyday conversation. The very earliest artists drew on the world around them; novelists in the nineteenth century used nature as a literary device to express characters’ feelings as well as their subordination to forces of nature beyond their control. ‘The hot weather of July had crept up on them unawares, and the atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an opiate over the dairyfolk, the cows, and the trees,’ writes Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
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Over the past half century, galvanised by environmental movements, artists have become more determined to make a meaningful difference to the world. Since the millennium, this has even involved working alongside policy makers. One notable Eco duo, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, took matters into their own hands and collaborated with scientists to inform their practice. In 2008 they proposed the resulting work – a floating peninsula of trees – actual trees – that would help mitigate climate change – to the European Parliament. Although it was workable, the proposal wasn’t taken up.
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Alice Sharp, artistic director of Invisible Dust, a Scarborough-based organisation which strives to ‘make the invisible, visible’ by working with scientists and artists, presents a strong case that, despite the resistance of political institutions, art can change how we treat the natural world, insisting that human beings make changes in their lives in direct response to being inspired by art. ‘The best environmental art opens the mind to new possibilities,’ Sharp said. Under Her Eye, a biannual international summit which brings together pioneering women working globally to tackle the environmental challenge of our age along a broad spectrum of disciplines, is a key example. Crucially, the role of art in this is to unite all these fields through its storytelling power. In 2018, the summit was headlined by Margaret Atwood. ‘This isn’t climate change, it’s EVERYTHING change,’ the poet and novelist warned.
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Indeed, stories are key to the question. East London-based artist Melanie Manchot said of the making of her work Flotilla – a conceptual piece, commissioned by Invisible Dust, featuring women illuminated as living figureheads on the bows of boats sailing across the night waters of the Thames – that creatives are able to instinctively visualise ways of changing how we think of the natural world and our relationship to it: ‘From the very first meeting, I had an image in my head of what I wanted to do. There had been no research as yet. We creatives, our hunch often turns out to be correct,’ she said in an audio postcard recently. But how do creatives take this instinctive vision and use it to initiate action?
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An initiative looking into how art can have the strongest ecological implications is A Feral Commons, conceived by the not-for-profit arm of Alserkal Avenue, an area of former warehouses in the industrial zone of Al Quoz, western Dubai, just miles from where COP28 will be taking place later this year. The surrounding area hosts a 3D World Selfie Museum, while online reviews wax lyrical about the buzzy vibes of cafes and shops. The site of the project itself, however, emerged through accident rather than design.
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Saudi artist Muhannad Shono was walking through an industrial area of Al Quoz when he noticed wonderful green plants growing in one of the back alleys. In the desert environment, this greenery came as a surprise. It emerged that around the air conditioning units of warehouses, grasses, bushes and trees were flourishing, fed by the condensation of the AC units.
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This idea of nature finding a way to thrive in spite of humankind plays an important part in A Feral Commons’ origins. The name of the project is drawn from American anthropologist Anna L. Tsing’s book: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. The mushroom in question is the matsutake, unique in its capacity to grow in soils damaged by humankind. ‘When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945,’ Tsing wrote, ‘it is said that the first thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom.’ Blasted landscapes, Tsing elaborates in the book, can therefore help to foster the renewal of the earth and the restitution of the commons on which we all depend. But a single mushroom cannot do this task unaided: humans must help.
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Could these AC plants, fed by condensation runoff water, constitute the commons? ‘Like mythical urban “springs” we allow the water to flow not to the gutter but towards the greater good,’ wrote Muhannad Shono in an email. The artist continued: ‘The natural world is fading out of our collective memory. We no longer recollect what nature was, like a dream it slips away as we awake. It is a gradual fading, one that transcends generations and my individual recollection of things, thus it’s hard to speak of or write about, it becomes fiction as we live it and forget it.’ A Feral Commons, then, can be seen as an environmental rescue mission, with a focus on ecologies that exist outside of human interference and control, raising questions about how we can encourage them to flourish.
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One of the other projects in the first cycle of A Feral Commons, takes place in Johannesburg: again, not from within the confines of a museum or gallery, but on a river, within an economically depressed, ex-residential area of the city. ‘The Jukskei River is one of the most polluted rivers in the country,’ lo Makandal, the artist leading the project, explained. The project itself involves the creation of a sculpture that connects two sides of a culvert: up until this point, wildlife has had difficulty crossing due to a long drop down to the water. Alongside the sculpture the wider cultural district of Victoria Yards, situated parallel to the river, is being developed: studios are opening up, in a couple of years’ time, the river will run through the precinct. Makandal works closely with Water For The Future, a non-profit organisation with responsibility for the remediation of the river. The approach they take is multilateral: economic, political, social and ecological perspectives come into play, and around a hundred people both from the community and from the wider African diaspora are employed along the river: custodians of the Jukskei, cultivating a public space that all can enjoy.
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Training and education are important parts of the programme too: ‘knowledge is shared about alien invasive species that need to be removed: there’s also been training with chainsaw handling, as well as wood cutting, bringing in an income for participants’ Makandal explains. This is important as the area around the river – ‘industrial, with areas of low-cost housing and a lot of unemployment’ – needs human innovation to bring in new income.
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One of Makandal’s first projects, further up the river, laid the ground for what success can look like, which was awarded a social impact prize, reintroduced Soweto Highveld grasses, that would have been there had there not been urban infrastructure, to the environment. ‘The idea is that the garden becomes like a seed bank for the entire remediation of the river in this part of the urban environment,’ the artist explained. The garden includes rock benches for people to sit and contemplate the flow of the river; wild fruits grow just nearby.
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As for the polluting enterprises, the NGO is gradually building relationships with each of them. This approach is having real effect: ‘[Progress] along Victoria Yards has taken five years and they’re now starting on the next block of the river. Gradually they’re getting buy-in from all the industrial buildings along the river: things are changing. […] The companies along the river are agreeing to the remediation.’
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‘I feel that the artwork along the river is encouraging and fostering a relationship, on a civic level with the community, to become aware of the river and to build a relationship with the space that they find beautiful and can enjoy,’ Makandal said of the project. I have not visited, but the idea is an inspiring one, and it’s clear that the project is having real world, tangible impacts – not only for nature, but for the community as well.
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Another project in the cycle takes place in Kingston, Jamaica, in a disadvantaged area where the only green space had for a long time fallen into disuse. Artist Camille Chedda was passing through the area when she noticed a vine with beautiful pink flowers, surrounded by bees: it was a Mexican Creeper, more popularly known in Jamaica as the Rice and Peas Bush, an edible and medicinal plant and a magnet for bees and pollinating insects.
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‘I am hoping to transform the space while using the plant that is so ubiquitous to think about the state of forgetting, hiding, removing, veiling.’ Chedda explains. ‘I don’t want to remove the plant; I want to highlight it. I am trying to think of ways we can use what is already so abundant instead of getting rid of it. It is not a symbol of neglect, it’s a symbol of value and possibility.’
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The project involves the cultivation of Lower South Camp park: sorting through the area so that the Rice and Peas bush can grow optimally, and creating an art installation within the space. But this won’t be an impersonal artwork; it’ll carry a great sense of meaning. As Chedda explains, ‘My project is at once attempting to highlight this volatile community and its members, while calling attention to the Rice and Peas Bush through an installation where imagery of community members will be embedded in a concrete block wall that will also encourage the growth of the vine.’
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Artists involved in eco art projects, I’ve noticed, are the first to highlight the limitations of art itself as a lone agent in leading to change. ‘Public art initiatives certainly help to bring awareness’, Chedda wrote via email. ‘The Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley at the COP27 climate talks highlighted so eloquently what the Caribbean has been facing and will continue to endure if larger developed nations don’t take drastic actions, but I think on a smaller scale we must overhaul certain damaging practices we have in our daily lives and try to enact better practices within our culture. We have to be able to demonstrate how each action we take has a chain reaction.’
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I realised while writing this piece that while I’d viewed several exhibits and cultural centres online, it was the public art I’d experienced in person, and contributed to, through the course of my life, that had really left an impression upon me. While several of the artworks mentioned looked intriguing on paper, it was harder to formulate a lasting emotional response to them without having experienced them first-hand. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Maybe we are just tired of the digital world, although more likely we are tired of the stuff that is dragged before us by algorithms. Humanity needs the arts if it is to save itself, but more than this, we need art that encourages people to form communities. We need the arts to make us realise that the earth should be seen as the commons rather than a series of enclosures. As we scroll past scenes of forest fires and plastic-strewn oceans, we might do better, collectively, to see what the arts have to say about the values and possibilities of nature, and think of what might be, in the future. This pragmatic thinking is, in my view, what Voltaire meant by ‘we must cultivate our garden.’
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Photo by COP28 / Christopher Pike.

Frances Forbes-Carbines is an essayist: her work has appeared in Antigone Journal, City AM, UnHerd and elsewhere. She has an MA in Classics from the University of Bristol.