Facilitators Kanerva Kivistö and Sara Teperi, MA students, University of Lapland. Collaboration with the On the Frontline of the Climate Crisis project (funded by the Kone Foundation), Aki Lintumäki, Korinna Kortsström-Magga and a local high school in Rovaniemi. The group of high school students as workshop participants and art teacher Hanna Korhonen as the third workshop facilitator. Workshop period from October to November 2023. Solastalgia was presented at the Arctic Spirit Congress’s opening reception in November 2023.
Text: Kanerva Kivistö and Sara Teperi, University of Lapland, Finland
Cover photos: Sara Teperi, 2023 (left), Aki Lintumäki, 2023 (right).
Summary
Within the framework of our master’s thesis, we planned and carried out a workshop period where a group of young people living in Rovaniemi, Finland, were able to process and express their views on the climate future through their co-artwork Solastalgia, for an international audience in the Arctic Spirit Congress. In this case, the concept of young people’s climate future refers to their future prospects as well as climate change-related feelings, knowledge, and desires for sustainability action.
As climate change reaches the Arctic and the North, our communities and ecosystems, young generations will have to face these changes and issues related to climate change throughout their lives. The idea of the workshop was for young people to process and express their views on the climate future through art-based practices. The activity is based on the participatory practices of community art through several art-based techniques and subtasks.
At the beginning of the workshop, the students had an opportunity to choose between three groups, each emphasizing a different approach: the emotion, knowledge, and action groups. The participatory practices of community art appeared as three different art-based techniques. Creative writing worked as a way to dive into one’s climate emotions, media art provided an opportunity to process climate future more objectively, and performative art centred around the desire for action. During the three-week workshop, the groups worked towards the final artwork with the help of subtasks designed for each group separately.
The subtasks of the emotion group consisted of writing a stream of thought, illustrating it, and creating a soundscape for it. The knowledge group wrote about their favourite place and brought it into a visual form as a photomontage. The action group explored the world of performance art through different exercises, including embodiment and materiality. As a result of the workshop process, the communal artwork Solastalgia was created. Solastalgia consists of the emotion group’s videos, the knowledge group’s photomontages and news about Lapland’s climate future, and the action group’s live performance around the meaning of winter.
Solastalgia was presented at the Rovaniemi Arctic Spirit opening reception in November 2023. Arctic Spirit is an international conference event that focuses on topics related to the Arctic areas. The aim of the workshop was to present local young people’s views on the climate future through art-based practices for an audience concerned with the future of the Arctic, including policymakers and representatives of academia.
We evaluated the functionality of the workshop activity through participants’ experiences of inclusion. Firstly, inclusion was fulfilled when the students experienced the subtasks as helpful while tracing their views on the climate future. One of these students noted that writing a stream of thought helped to uncover their climate emotions. Secondly, participating in the event and presenting one’s art there gave some participants a feeling of influencing change. One student found it remarkable to be close to policymakers. For us, these expe-riences seem like successful inclusion. Our proposal for similar future activities is to focus on participatory practices of performance art instead of many art forms.
References:
Albrecht, G. (2005). ’Solastalgia’, a new concept in health and identity. PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature, 3, 44–59. https:// doi.org/10.4225/03/584f410704696.