rachelgrant

A moment of realisation, change and/or disruption

Both a moment of disruption and realization was leaving the final trace in Biella and handover between the groups. A disruption as I’m a curator and wouldn’t normally think about presenting research in this way and a moment of realisation in the ways in which I could think about presenting research material in the future.

A moment of connection

A moment of connection was in Biella with Elena, Franseca and Sophie. This connection was made mostly in the informal moments of shared and new experiences; food, landscapes and people.

Tools / methods / resources to share

Resources
Social scientist Leslie Mabon’s work on a Just Transition.
https://energyvalues.wordpress.com/about/

Artist Brett Bloom’s writings ‘Petro – Subjectivity De – Industrialising Our Self Of Self’
https://www.academia.edu/18494906/Petro_Subjectivity_De_Industrializing_Our_Sense_of_Self

Speculative Fiction writer Ursula K LeGuin’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’

Researcher Annabel Pinker’s ‘Tinkering with Turbines: Ethics and Energy Decentralization in Scotland’
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327235970_Tinkering_with_Turbines_Ethics_and_Energy_Decentralization_in_Scotland

Rehearsing Hospitality’s Companion Species 1&2. Frame Contemporary Art Finland, publications available as PDF
https://frame-finland.fi/en/tietoa-alasta/julkaisut/

Researcher Sheena Wilson’s ‘Energy Imaginaries Feminist and Decolonial Futures’
http://sheenawilson.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Energy_Imaginaries_Feminist_and_Decoloni.pdf

A question you are left with

Are there ways of working together in the future?

Something you will carry forward

The’ traces’ format is something I will carry forward as a way of thinking about the presentation of ongoing research to others.

I'm a freelance Curator based in Aberdeen in the North East of Scotland. In 2018, I set up the curatorial platform Fertile Ground which takes a grounded, context-specific approach. The projects often support new commissions of work, are interdisciplinary, and attempt to remain sensitive to site during this process. A food bank, a library, and an industrial estate have been sites of previous projects.

Aberdeen is not post-industrial but rather sit’s awkwardly in the grinding persistence of the oil economy. It’s arrival in the 1970s has restructured and transformed urban development, politics, and cultural identities. In recent years a new post-oil imaginary has emerged in the form of an 'Energy Transition Zone' [ETZ] a proposal led by oil tycoon Ian Wood and the city’s local development plan. Its focus is on job creation for the renewable energy market, the zone itself is the land needed to house business and infrastructure for the industry and gives weight to the city’s attempt at re-branding from the self - proclaimed ‘Oil Capital of Europe’ to an ‘Energy city’. Currently the ETZ is cited on top of what is currently St Fitticks Park one of the last green spaces in Torry, Aberdeen South. The land includes skate parks, playparks, a forest, wetlands, meadows and ponds. If the proposal is granted permission this will be the fourth industrial land clearance in this community’s history.

Despite the Energy Transitions Zone attachments to ‘cleaner’ energy to mitigate climate crisis globally. The rapid development of renewable energy infrastructures globally and locally is propelled by the same apparatus as oil. In the name of progress and continuous growth the tools of destruction and radical simplification of biological and social worlds continues. The power of private finance applied to the force of public planning and a continued disregard for the land and communities that have no value.

The action research takes place within St Fitticks and invites intersections between social, biological and more than human species worlds that inhabit and relate to this environment. Working with the questions; Can the use of embedded practice support a post-oil imaginary that is social, cultural, ecological? Can it be produced by and for its citizens? How to think with energy? (past, present and futures), where does power lie?