Llyfrgell Utopias Bach Library
Dyma rai llyfrau, papurau, podlediadau a fideos sydd wedi bod yn ddefnyddiol i ni, yn cynnig syniadau ysbrydoledig, treiddiol a heriol.
Here are some books, papers, podcasts and videos we’ve found useful in some way, providing inspirational, insightful, challenging ideas.
The House of Modernity
By Oliveira Andreotti, the Decolonial Futures Collective
A story told in the indigenous story-telling tradition, drawing attention to paradoxes and complexities in ways which encourage us to relate very differently, increasing our ability to hold different kinds of dificult conversations.
140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth
Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kostas Stasinopoulos
140 drawings, thought experiments, recipes, activist instructions, gardening ideas, insurgences and personal revolutions.. there’s book launch online on 19th June 2022
The Circular Root
By Emma Fromberg
Experimenting with the metaphor of the forest to explore emergent, informal, creative, or community-organised changes
Between feminism and social practice
By Suzanne Lacy
An interview with Suzanne Lacy, exploring her approach to socially engaged art: Focusing on ethics, communication, and new art forms, she argues that contemporary social practice art draws heavily on feminist practices, including consciousness raising, expanding audiences, inclusion strategies, and naming the political in the personal.
Manual for Social Change
By Lindsey Colbourne
a blog about Suzanne Lacy’s strategies for socially engaged art
Utopias Bach and Socially Engaged Art
By Wanda Zyborska
A blog exploring where’s the art and is it any good?
Essaying Self, Wilderness, and Place: a response to issues raised by George Monbiot’s Feral
By Iain Biggs
In this brilliant essay, chiming with many of Merched y Tir’s concerns, Iain Biggs explores “George Monbiot’s almost obsessive identification with rewilding is shot through with assumptions, both explicit and tacit, about a heroic, risk-taking masculinity he sees as intolerably restricted by the demands of contemporary life.” it is concerned with “the psychosocial circumstances necessary to effect ecosophical action. I want to sketch out a basis for a political imagination on which to establish genuinely ecosophical approaches to the changes needed in order to prevent both ecological and social collapse. Nothing in what I write is intended to diminish our need to respond to the deplorable state of the UK’s rural ecologies, or as an argument against the judicious and appropriate reforestation of land in places like Plynlimon and Weardale. My exposition does however require accounting for the flaws Feral exhibits. Flaws that, as I hope events in the Welsh uplands will subsequently show, are counterproductive to its author’s aims and damaging to the need to realise genuinely ecosophical change more generally” Read more
Land2
Iain Biggs, Judith Tucker and Mary Modeen
A national network of artist/lecturers and research students with an interest in landscape/place-oriented art practice
What is the radical imagination?
by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish
An academic paper but brilliant in its scope, introducing the idea of radical imagination as change coming ‘from the root’:
“The radical imagination emerges out of radical practices, ways of living otherwise, of cooperating differently happening everywhere, all the time, in small ways and big ways, as our love, our hope, our solidarity, our critical thinking, our optimism, our skepticism, our anger and our communities fight against the powers that be.”
Cenedlaethau’r Dyfodol Cymru
gan Comisiynydd Cenedlaethau’r Dyfodol Cymru
Find out about Wales’ Future Generations Act, the Future Generations Commission, activities, the Art of the Possible and ‘Big Ideas’ for the future.
You are invited to submit your own ‘Big Ideas’, which of course, we hope might very well be very small.
For the Wild podcast
By Ayana Young
An ever growing series of transformative conversations with people working on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.
“Staying alive – for every species – requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination.
Without collaborations, we all die.”
“Shift from Utopia, no-where to now-here, Hypertopia”
A new way forward: The turmoil of 2020 provides a chance to reimagine the world
by Grist online magazine
Three calls to action:
“Ubuntu: The Dream of a Planetary Community”
By Mamphela Ramphele
“Building an Economy of Well-being and Indigenomics”
By Mark Anielski
“Telling a New Story”
By David C. Korten
The Jemez Principles for Democratic Organising
by the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice
Six principles written by forty people of color and European-American representatives who met in Jemez, New Mexico in 1996 - how to come to common understandings between participants from different cultures, politics and organizations.
Four causes of zoom fatigue and their solutions
by Stanford News
It’s not just Zoom. All video chat platforms have design flaws that exhaust the human mind and body. But there are easy ways to mitigate their effects.
We need to (find a way to) talk about …Eco-anxiety
by Caroline Hickman
A useful summary of issues relating to eco-anxiety that deals with generational differences in emotional response by focusing on the feelings of children and young people faced with adult misunderstanding or inaction. This provides some helpful insights for those who engage with children and young people as they increasingly take centre stage in protests about the need to take urgent action, whilst simultaneously often being the focus of society’s anxieties about the psychological impact of the crises and its attempt to stifle public protest.
“Breaking the Vessels”: Archetypal Psychology and the Restoration of Culture, Community, and Ecology
by Mary Watkins
This article serves as a good point of entry to the thinking of the ‘Liberation Psychologist’ Mary Watkins, who has distilled her approach from the work of writer and psychologist James Hillman, of liberation theology, and of the radical educational thinker Paulo Freire. Of particular interest to those concerned with work categorised as art, perhaps, are her discussions of “interdependence” and of Hillman’s concern with notitia, which might be glossed as the fundamental act of “noticing” or “paying attention” to the world in its fullness.
Micro LEGO Serious Play: How small can a useful tool for thinking be?
by David Gauntlett
LEGO Serious Play is a way of using LEGO bricks to express feelings and ideas. It is used by adults (mostly), to collaborate and discuss relationships and concepts. The building is done in metaphors – which might sound odd at first, but almost anyone can pick it up. The process offers a unique and powerful way for people to exchange ideas (and can be applied not just with lego but pretty much any collection of objects)
Co-creating Change
by the Co-Creating Change Network
Co-Creating Change is a network and programme which explores the role which artists, cultural organisations and communities can play to co-create change together around the UK and beyond. Their website is full of resources, stories and insights into co-creation and what does, and doesn’t work
Paths to Utopia
by Kings College London and various artists
Diverse art works by collaborations between artists, performers, architects, technologists and King’s academics created on the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s seminal text Utopia
Wefan Partneriaeth Ogwen
by Partneriaeth Ogwen
Menter gymdeithasol sy’n gweithio er budd economi, amgylchedd a chymunedau Dyffryn Ogwen
The Social Art Network
by a UK based community of artists committed to building agency for the field of art and social practice
Loads of resources, organising tools and creative inspirations. Many of them have been produced by people within the Social Art Network; others with respected allies.
A Restless Art
by François Matarasso
“A Restless Art could be called ‘everything you ever wanted to know about participatory art, but were too afraid to ask’. The book (which is free to download) combines a nuanced, careful study of participatory art with a detectable passion, born of Matarasso’s lifelong experience of the form. This is not dry dissection: the writing is lived, in the field, partisan.”
Emergent Strategy - shaping change, changing worlds
by Adrienne Maree Brown
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationshiops to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help and planet-help, designed to shape the futures we want to live.
A powerful exploration of how to facilitate change.
The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents
By Clare Bishop
A paper exploring the expanded field of relational practices currently goes by a variety of names: socially engagedart, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, participatory,
interventionist, research-based, or collaborative art. These practices are less interested in a
relational aesthetic than in the creative rewards of collaborative activity—whether in the form of working with preexisting communities or establishing one’s own interdisciplinary network.
Space for creative thinking - 29 Prompts for Curious Minds
by ClimateCultures
A series of short online ‘prompts’ by members - often linked to art works - of the ClimiCultures network. We found these usetul in helping us think differently, for example:
“How do objects obtain their symbolic power and what role can this play in orientating us toward hopeful futures?”
Wales Future Generations Commission, the Future Generations Act, the ‘art of the possible’, big ideas, events
Braiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
“To become native to this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbours too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home”
This book comes from bringing together knowledge as botanist and knowledge as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, to show us how to hear the languages of other beings and to become capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.
The CreaTures project
Promoting action for social and ecological sustainability in Europe and beyond by identifying those aspects of creative practices that contribute most effectively to positive social transformation. Asking questions like: What are the specific qualities of transformational creative practices?
Also offers free seminars and events
Superflux
Anglo-Indian studio translating future uncertainty into present day choices. They create worlds, stories and tools that provoke and inspire us to engage with teh precarity of our rapidly changing world.
Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in 2009. Includes projects such as ‘Refuge for Resurgence’ for La Biennale di Venezia
Art Tech Nature Culture (ATNC)
a global community of practice which explores the creative possibilities of ecological regeneration. In precarious times, how can we build new ways forward that challenge the inequalities of the status quo? Our ways of addressing this and our backgrounds are diverse, but we are united by a shared interest in using creative practices (e.g. arts, design, culture, hacking, research, activism) to explore alternative futures that rethink, rebuild and heal.
Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference
By Olúfémi O. Táíwò
This article challenges assumptions in the call to “listen to the most affected” or “centre the most marginalized” that has become ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles, and suggests the problem doesn’t lie so much with the core ideas, but with the prevailing norms that convert them into practice.
“A constructive approach would focus on the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding “complicity” in injustice or adhering to moral principles. It would be concerned primarily with building institutions and cultivating practices of information-gathering rather than helping. It would focus on accountability rather than conformity. It would calibrate itself directly to the task of redistributing social resources and power rather than to intermediary goals cashed out in terms of pedestals or symbolism. It would focus on building and rebuilding rooms, not regulating traffic within and between them – it would be a world-making project: aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than mere critique of the ones we already have.”
Sand Talk
by Tyson Yunkaporta
“All you can do is foster the conditions for emergence and allow it to emerge and just behave with integrity”
Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar and artist, and his book shows us what can be gained by viewing global systems through the lens of Indigenous Knowledge - reimagining our relationship to sustainability, money, power and education.
Click here for a great interview with Tyson
“There aren’t any solutions. Anyone who thinks they’ve got a solution or they have a plan or a design or anything like that, they’re an idiot. You can’t. Systems don’t operate like that. You have a thing called emergence, we know this, we know the science of it, and emergence is the only thing that can deal with these kinds of complexities. So all you can do is foster the conditions for emergence. I can’t have a solution, that would just be my narcissism talking. Nobody can. That’s insane. It would just be another stupid complicated, teetering, horrible, corruptible system that would come out from that.”
Values Modes
By Chris Rose/Cultural Dynamics
A segmentation model based on how we are motivated. Really useful way of remembering that not everyone is motivated by the same things as ‘we’ are (whoever ‘we’ might be), and the dangers of one group who tend to dominate change programmes, institutions etc, trying to enforce their world view/motivations on others.
Activism vs Antagonism: Socially Engaged Art from Bourriaud to Bishop and Beyond
By Jason Miller
This article asks of artists engaging in political activism, social engagement, and public dialogue: Where is the art? How do I interpret and evaluate this activity as art?
The Long 90s: Revisiting the Arts Social Turn
By Lars Bang Larsen
As the social persists as a theme in artistic practice and art history, as well as in the ‘social practice’ programmes of art schools, it seems urgent to articulate the limit of art’s integration into society. Perhaps it is time to re-conceptualize the aesthetic as a mode of thinking in order to articulate difference, new outsides and the transcendental, understood as the condition of historical practices and that which lies at the edge of social relations. The present cannot only be changed from its inside. To regain its futurity it must be reconfigured from afar, too.
Just Transition - a framework for change
By the Climate Justice Alliance
“Just Transition is a principle, a process and a practice.”
Just Transition is a vision-led, unifying and place-based set of principles, processes, and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy. This means approaching production and consumption cycles holistically and waste-free. The transition itself must be just and equitable; redressing past harms and creating new relationships of power for the future through reparations. If the process of transition is not just, the outcome will never be. Just Transition describes both where we are going and how we get there.
Findings, Sightlines and Surfacings
By Kathleen Jamie, reviewed by Iain Biggs
These three collections of essays by the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie – also a keen amateur naturalist and archaeologist - represent the insights of an outstanding poet whom John Burger called “a sorceress of the essay form”. Something of the directness that is a major pleasure of these essays is indicated by her response to a long and tortuous question by a student about the complexities of the nature/culture debate. She responded by saying that, when you’re washing socks in the sink and hear a curlew cry, where’s the difference between the two?
Any reader of these three books will favour particular essays, but they are all excellent.
Findings Sort of Books, 2005
Sightlines Sort of Books 2012
Surfacings Sort Of Books 2019
Findings contains two essays – ‘Crex-Crex’ and ‘Fever’, that I cannot read without tears pricking my eyes. ‘Crex-Crex” is a prose ode to the corncrake and to the world of the Hebrides, that climaxes with a conversation that characterises the corncrake as a “little god of the fields”. ‘Fever’, which is a meditation on illness prompted by the near-death of her partner, Phil. It contains a wonderful passage that responds to a friend’s asking who she prays to. She wonders how she would explain to Phil that she “had not prayed”. Adding:
“But I had noticed, more than noticed, the cobwebs, and the shoaling light, and the way the doctor listened, and the flecked tweed of her skirt, and the specked bird and the sickle-cell man’s feet. Isn’t that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, our paying heed”?
Sightlines says with me less for individual essays than for its powerful conjuring of people and places. The various islands she visits and the people who are caught by a few sparse words as if by a first class black and white photographer. Polly, who works the land and with whom she talks, wakeful in a shared dark room, becomes “just a voice, a lilt and sad laugh”. Surfacings continues in much the same vein as the two earlier books, but with an additional sense of edge that’s at once apparent in ‘The Reindeer Cave’, with its location of environmental concern in place, deep time, and everyday family concern. Two beautiful essays grounded by archaeological sites – ‘In Quinhagah’ and ‘Links of Noltland’ pick these concerns up in different ways.
However, the coda to the book, the short essay ‘Voice of the Wood’, concludes with lines that seem to underpin her own best understanding of how the concerns she’s raised are best addressed, given from the perspective of a Scots poet who has absorbed both the slightly puritanical slant of her country and gone so far beyond it.
“You are not lost, just melodramatic. The path is at your feet, see? Now carry on”.
Mysticism for Beginners
By Adam Zagajewski
This poem seemed to me to sum up something of what we're after and I love the ambiguity of the conclusion.
Added by Iain Biggs
ImaginAction Podcast
by ImaginAction
In these times of incertitude and disruption, we have a choice, we can collapse into old patterns, or we can see in the crisis an opportunity to start over. More than ever, we need in these times to gather across borders, open our minds, hearts, listen to the wisdom of the body and the Earth. In ImaginAction Podcast we converse with Social Artists and Facilitators supporting the regeneration of our world.
La Escuela
an artist-run platform for radical learning and collective making in public spaces. We understand art as a form of knowledge production, and education as an artistic practice in itself. La Escuela seeks to bring learning and art to everyone by partnering with universities, institutions, and communities to create formative projects in public spaces throughout Latin America. La Escuela is rooted in a long genealogy of Latin American artists and educators who seek to bring education closer to real contexts, so as to learn and act on them. Through public learning, we propose a transdisciplinary program where diverse forms of practices coincide through the transformative capacity of education.