“To be silent is not neutral”: Curating collective action at The Climate Museum
Anais Reyes and Dilshanie Perera in conversation with Katharina Anzengruber and Elke Zobl
You’ve already mentioned one format, the Talking Climate discussion series. We are very interested in how you work, and what kind of formats and spaces you create to inspire action on the climate crisis. Could you tell us something about the different programs you have—and particularly your Climate Action Leadership Program?
DP: The Climate Action Leadership Program (CALP) is focused on youth engagement and advocacy. It’s a way for us to work with high school students primarily from New York City, but also from across the United States and internationally, too. It doesn’t matter if they have a background in climate or not—students might already be organizing environmental clubs or even marches with their schools, or they might have no prior experience at all. We want to be able to empower young people so they can begin their own climate conversations or host campaigns at their schools, neighborhoods, or communities. We want to help students to see that climate change is something they can perceive all around them and take action on. The climate crisis might affect them, their families, and their communities in different ways. Being able to see themselves not only as individual actors, but really as members of various communities who can act as agents of civic engagement and raise their voices in advocacy. We have different tools that we share with students, including a project called “Climate Art for Congress,” an illustrated letter-writing campaign for students from kindergarten to twelfth grade. These students are part of a population who are not yet of voting age, but who can still communicate their passions, their experiences, their perspective on climate, and the issues that they see as most pressing in the world to their congressional representatives through this project. With the recent launch of the Beyond Lies campaign, we’ve also been able to educate young people in fossil fuel disinformation and media literacy. That’s been a big part of CALP that we’ll extend from the summer through the end of the year.
AR: Our way of working with the students helps them become more confident in talking about what they used to see as a challenging topic. That’s really what we want to do with every program that we do. With our youth programs specifically, we’re able to work with students very closely. It has the effect that these students become so ready to do whatever is required to take action on the climate crisis. I don’t want to gush about how proud we are of them, but they inspire us. They tell us that we’ve changed their lives, given them a voice and a purpose. It’s reassuring to see that version of what we do working for them and thus working for us—creating people who are civically engaged to protect the climate and ourselves.
DP: I completely agree with you, Anais—it’s really a privilege to work with young people who have both the moral clarity and the sense of urgency. The climate movement itself is led by young people—by young women of color, particularly. Being able to see all of the creative ways that they’re thinking about political engagement, climate action, and creating art that motivates action from such a young age is really incredible.
I understood your museum moves around, without having a fixed space. Could tell us a bit about this mobile aspect? You also said that you have an action room as one of the core features of your exhibition. How do you inspire action specifically in the museum?
AR: We don’t have a permanent location right now, but we focus on putting on city-wide public art projects and using pop-up spaces as we work toward scaling up. For the last few years, we’ve been grateful to have a space for interdisciplinary exhibitions on Governors Island, a cultural hub just an 8-minute ferry ride away from Manhattan. We have an old house there that we’ve transformed into our museum space with the help of the Governors Island programming team. In 2019, we hosted our Taking Action exhibition there. It was the first exhibition we did after realizing that we had to build participatory actions into every program we do. We realized that we risked talking about climate change and then people leaving our exhibitions uncertain of what they could do, or worse—feeling hopeless. We couldn’t have either of those things. We had to build momentum. This exhibition in particular connected climate, science, and society. It first took people through climate solutions currently being implemented across NYC and the globe. Then it discussed political and social barriers to progress, such as fossil fuel money in politics and the lack of climate coverage from mass media. In the final room, you could take curated actions related directly to those barriers to progress. The five actions were: (1) Talk to three people about climate change and break the cycle of silence on climate; (2) join an organization that is already doing work on climate justice; (3) sign a petition to pressure the media to make climate change a central topic in the 2020 presidential election debates; (4) call your representatives and tell them to take the No-Fossil-Fuel-Money Pledge; and (5) switch your bank to one that does not invest in the growth of the fossil fuel industry. Through the run of the show, we were really trying to figure out what people responded to, what was most effective, what was needed, what we could do in related programs, and how we can promote these actions. Ever since then, we know we have to be very strategic on how to connect people with action. It must be empowering; people have to feel they can have an impact. And they really can. In the action room of this exhibition, we offered stickers to people for each action they took and invited them to add them to a nearby wall as a symbol of their commitment. By the time the show ended, the wall was covered in thousands and thousands of stickers. The interaction created a visual representation of a shared purpose and possibility with others and exhibited the importance of seeing the impact of your actions as part of a larger movement. Through this, we were able to create a sense of motivation, direction, and togetherness, rather than leaving people to despair in doom and gloom. We think a lot about this idea of “stubborn optimism,” which was coined by Christiana Figueres, the architect of the Paris Agreement. We realize that a lot has to be done, but there are a lot of things we already know we need to do, and we just have to come together with resolve and do them.
Dilshanie Perera, Anais Reyes, Katharina Anzengruber, Elke Zobl ( 2021): “To be silent is not neutral”: Curating collective action at The Climate Museum. Anais Reyes and Dilshanie Perera in conversation with Katharina Anzengruber and Elke Zobl. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 12 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/to-be-silent-is-not-neutral-curating-collective-action-at-the-climate-museum/
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