Generative Resilience: Creative Responses to Climate Catastrophe in the North
Have you been affected by climate change impacts like flooding, wildfires, smoke or in another way recently? Do you have a story to tell, an image to share (drawing, photo, video), or some other way you’d like to creatively share your experience?
The idea that making art is separate from caring for the places we live in is a colonial one. Art is a generative way to know the land that we inhabit (and that inhabits us). In this time of climate crisis, how can art-making (re)connect us to our kin in the world around us? How can it strengthen our community networks? Our agency and the actions we take to care for place and each other?
Scroll for more info and a chance to submit your experience to our upcoming collection!
Call for Submissions:
As Northerners we look after one another. Dechinta is excited to share our next creative project, Generative Resilience: Creative Responses to Climate Crisis in the North, a collection of art and writing based on the ongoing impacts of the climate crisis, and especially the wildfires from last summer.
This collection of art and writing will focus on Northerners’, and especially Indigenous Northerners’, experiences of being impacted by climate change. The aim of this project is to learn more about how we can support each other through climate catastrophes, and share our knowledge with other northern communities.
Possible questions to spark your submission:
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How have the wildfires and/or the ongoing impacts of climate change in the north changed your daily life?
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If you were evacuated last summer, what was it like to leave your home, and what was it like to return?
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What resources did you need that weren’t available/accessible during the evacuations or afterwards? What has helped you to connect to resilience on a personal level, in your community, or on the land?
We invite you to submit your writing, visual art, videos, music/soundscapes or any other medium that can be shared in a hybrid digital/print collection.
No writing or publishing experience is necessary! We strongly encourage young and emerging artists to apply. Dechinta will be providing online mentorship opportunities for folks who want to contribute and would like to receive support. Alternatively, if you’d like to share your experience but don’t want to write or create an art piece we can do an interview with you instead and/or pair you with a writer or artist to capture your experience. Please reach out to learn more.
If you would like to submit a full draft of your piece or artwork, the deadline for submissions is March 29th, 2024!
Honoraria for Creative Work: $120
Please submit your interest, ideas, writing, or any questions you might have about the project to Nicole at nicole@dechinta.ca. For more information about Nicole, scroll down.
About Nicole
Climate Resilience and Disaster Response Research and Project Co-ordinator
Nicole Marie Schafenacker is an artist, writer and researcher with German and Ukrainian ancestry originally from Amiskwaciwâskahikan (ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ )/Edmonton. She has been living in Tàkádàdhà/T’á Hîni Wát/Marsh Lake, Yukon since 2020.
Nicole is passionate about all the ways that art can open new pathways towards land-based care and practices of solidarity.
Her first encounter with this work began in 2010 during a nine month artist residency in central Saskatchewan spent making theatre with high school students, and ultimately creating a devised theatre project with youth from the First Nations communities of Poundmaker, Little Pine, Sweetgrass and the town of Cut Knife. This formative experience showed her how art can open a unique and vital space to exchange knowledge, build meaningful relationships, and create something beautiful together.
Since then, over the last fifteen years, she has worked on projects as an artist/facilitator in traditional territories across western Canada/Turtle Island at the intersection of art, social justice and land stewardship. She completed an Interdisciplinary Studies masters on this topic, and has studied arts-based approaches to climate resilience in arctic regions at Nord University in Norway. She is absolutely thrilled to be collaborating with the Dechinta Centre on this vital project and can’t wait to connect with you.
