On August 8, 2020, Professors Leslie Carol Roberts and Chris Falliers delivered a keynote presentation for the The First International Conference for Ecological Arts Therapies, via Zoom in St. Petersburg, Russia. As part of the keynote, Roberts and Falliers (with Adam Marcus, co-founders of The Ecopoesis Project) presented How We Hear Now, a collaborative artwork launched on Earth Day, 2020.
The conference theme “Ecological/Earth-Based Arts Therapies: International and Multi-Cultural Perspectives" aligned with the ambitions and framework of The Ecopoesis Project. In their talk, Roberts and Falliers discussed how the project generates knowledge and interdisciplinary forms of practice and pedagogy around questions of ecologies that challenge disciplinary norms. They discussed the genesis of the project, its first two iterations: the 2019 gathering of invited guests from across disciplines and How We Hear Now, the 2020 sound and art installation responding to the ecology of pandemic.
An excerpt from the presentation:
Our hope is to build a work that is a tonic towards healing obliviousness—obliviousness to our shared circumstances, which includes nonhumans, from the penguins to the coral to the bivalves that cluster on floating substrate. By creating assemblies where we can be vulnerable, we press forward towards a condition of susceptibility towards ideas for how to change and heal things on Planet Earth. And Earth needs this sort of tenderness now, after hundreds of years of human-lead exploitation. And we propose that the meandering path there comes in allowing grief, sadness, joy, melancholy, weirdness, hilarity, humility to weave together.
As artists, designers, and writers, we are attuned to how things are and then we push this attunement towards a collaborative. In this, we are collectors of ideas rather than self-tasked towards generating “original ideas.”
We argue that design and art and writing can gather a collective of voices to consider—even try to understand—complex emotions associated with the climate emergency, like grief and love. That is, we invite participants to have more naked reactions to the realities of these times. So much of ecological conversation has been dominated by doomsday philosophizing and corporate-speak, both of which often point to humans as the “problem.” But what if instead we use awareness and art to look tenderly and with desire at our shared reality of living together with nonhumans in a climate emergency? In 2020, we focused on what it felt like to experience local and nonlocal ecologies within a time of pandemic, such an extreme form of environmental isolation.