conscient podcast

I really think art is one of the most important things to help tackle issues and create social change. There's that quote from Maya Angelou that goes something like ‘people will forget what you say or do, but they'll never forget how you make them feel’. The power of art is to evoke feelings that stick with people and that's often what inspires people as well. Maggie Chang is a poet, writer, and a...

The role of the artist in the climate crisis is not simply to communicate scientific information in a sort of dressed up kind of way, but really to engage the imagination to do that thing that only art can do, which is getting at these almost imperceptible shifts in identity, in purpose and meaning, and the way that we as humans think about our relationship with the natural world and our place in...

If we're going to see change happen, it's going to be because people change and that doesn't occur when you preach to them or you evangelize or anything else. It comes because people, in whatever way is appropriate for them, as individuals, begin to reevaluate the way they live, the way their friends live, and make different choices and say to the government, more has to be done. Because what we'r...

That's the thing about the future's work and foresight work is you need a very broad range of thinkers. You need people from different perspectives who speak different languages and who recognize different worldviews. I think that's always why artists will be important in that process, because they are not necessarily coming from sort of mainstream culture. They may be immersed, raised in mainstre...

I think a lot of people right now are feeling terror or feeling deep grief - worry about climate - and might mention it in a joking way over dinner, like ‘oh, well, we'll see if we're all around in 20 years’ and there's so much truth to that, to the pain people are feeling in the worry. And so in the end, I think and hope that it's helpful to share my personal emotional experience of this, even th...

It’s really important to have some sort of horizon to grasp onto and work towards and for me that is thinking about what possible worlds might exist and how can I spend my time contributing to making those worlds possible. Of course that is a huge question and it changes a lot day to day. I have been thinking a lot lately about how art and scholarship around the environment can teach and inform on...

The majority of individuals who work in this sector are deeply concerned about climate change and deeply motivated and often doing a lot about it in their personal lives but as a sector, we don't really have a vision of what our relationship is to it.  So the kinds of responses range from a kind of silence on it and trying not to look at it directly in the eye to a superficial level of conversatio...

In primal cultures, there's a tendency to interweave everything with everything else, including art. People are very creative and expressive in everyday life, through ceremony and ritual, dance and art and carving and weaving and various aspects of life that are just considered quite normal for primal peoples. Part of primal cultures is a strong engagement with and resonance with eccentricity and...

Definitely we need a cultural transformation, and no one’s better positioned to contribute to that than the arts and culture. I think part of the task that we have ahead, as artists and culture makers, is to really question how we got here in the first place, what brought us here and and what are the stories we are being told. Holà. I decided  to begin my conversation with the brilliant Mexican-Ca...

We have folks who would never define themselves as artists, but are nonetheless creative and have ideas and are imaginative. How can we get them to feel that they can do arts and express their creativity? With community engaged arts anyone can participate or contribute in any way. I think that strength and social bond makes the community strong and also it helps during times of crises that you kno...

In Canada and many other parts of the world, we've relied on policymakers and scientists to be the ones communicating around climate, and they failed because they've only appealed to people's heads and haven't appealed to their hearts and souls. I think the big conversation coming out of COP 28 - and that you but I'm sure people at SCALE and others, we've known this for a long time, but it's kind...

What happens is that you have arts and environment initiatives popping up all over the place, but everyone's pitted against one another in competing for the same grants, right? So it makes it extraordinarily difficult to organize, to strategize, and to act with a collective insight about where it is that we need to go and how we can really mobilize the power of the arts. This episode is a lot of f...

Having a conversation about the artworks and important issues such as climate change is everywhere in the globe. It's important for us also in the Horn of Africa region to talk about it through art, not politics necessarily. I feel like it opens a little bit of a door, a little bit more than the politics. Dawit Seto is an Ethiopian performing artist specializing in contemporary dance and choreogra...

About collapse acceptance : I've been in that space and it is really liberating. How I frame it for myself is : I don't know how it all turns out and it's really out of my control and to not worry about it (not that I never worry about it) but what's really in my control is : do I show up as a human being and feel my humanity and care for the people I love and the places I love and this planet I l...

We have become a bit disconnected after COVID but at the same time we are emerging more consciously while we were more complacent before. I hold hope about an inherent belief that collective liberation is a planetary right. I think we should all be always learning to reach that goal. semzyiri is a multimedia storyteller who blends surrealism, existentialism, cosmic wonder, and inner worlds with th...

I really believe that we carry the spirit of the land wherever we go. In the Western canon, they say that once you leave home, you can never return, but in the Indigenous canon, home never leaves you.  I remember Sandra Laronde contacting me when I was running the Inter-Arts Office at Canada Council in early 2000 asking me where Red Sky Performance fits in the Council’s suite of programs and silos...

My dream with AI started with curiosity about how technology can extend to the boundaries of artistic expression. I was fascinated by the possibility of emerging traditional art and forms of traditional artistry to create something entirely new and engage my passion for innovation and to explore AI as tools to enhance my creative visions and bring artistic ideas to life in ways I could only dream...

World Listening Day takes place every year on July 18, which is also Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer’s birthday. The day is organized  by the World Listening Project and is dedicated to understanding the world and its natural environment, societies, and cultures through the practice of listening. I have brought excerpts from 7 episodes from the 5th season of my conscient podcast that relate to...

I've been thinking a lot about the importance of connecting the value of the arts to everyday citizens and their own connection to creativity, whatever that might be. I think it's something we should be talking about now, not only within our communities and within the arts sector, but outside of as well : talking about the value of the arts to feelings of belonging and connection and the ability t...

Whether or not we get to a complete and total collapse or we're looking at collapses of very specific systems for it…  Right now I'm concerned with modeling what we want on the other side as best as possible so that whether or not it's a person or a machine learning algorithm as artificial intelligence, when it's looking back on the things that is basing its future decisions on, that it’s not just...

To go to a farm and take a carrot out that’s covered in dirt and wipe it off on your pants and eat it on the spot. It's something that most people don't have access to anymore. So that loss of contact with the natural world is having a radical impact on how people view it, how they value it, and how they seem to be willing to let it go. Not realizing that we depend on the natural world. We are par...

We're all going to be affected by the same outcome. When I went up to Svalbard (Norway), I went with the intention of also capturing the beauty and the terror of the reality of these changes and how they can be at once fascinating to listen to, but also devastating to the environment. You’ve just heard an excerpt from composer and environmental sound artist Mary Edwards ’ Everywhere We Are is the...

I luckily managed to move from a space of ‘I have to save the planet or else’ (and we talk about that word ‘save’) to ‘I choose to commit my life to climate change in the best way I can’ because everything that matters to me in this world stands to be lost in a climate crisis, especially one that would play out in a very severe and apocalyptic way. (Katrine) Having this I would say a calm perspect...

It is taking far too long for us to acknowledge the damage we have done to the world's water and to indigenous people and to take action : truth, reconciliation, change. Scientists have discovered that some whale songs actually evolve over time. It is my hope that the choirs who perform this work with me and all those who hear it will refuse to let what the whales are saying be lost in the ocean a...

We essentially know two percent of all different disciplines and that kind of unknownness creates a very free playground for an artist to dance in or to draw in because we know we're going through a massive crisis. The world is ending. We see chaos. We see all of that but my personal hope as an artist remains in how little we know and how little we understand about our own selves, forget the dying...