conscient podcast

We need culture to shift behaviour, because everything is culture but the mentality is that art is an adornment and not actually a tactic. I think art is a tactic. I first met Annette while I was chair of the Sectoral Climate Arts Leadership for the Emergency or SCALE in 2022 and have since then gotten to know her as an artist here in Ottawa on the traditional unceded and unsurrendered territory o...

Listening can teach us to appreciate our environment in a critical sense, but also in a kind of admiration for it. If we admire something because we think it has a depth or it has a beauty or some interesting aspects, we want to keep it, we want to foster it. I first met Sabine at the Tuning of the World Conference in Banff, Alberta in 1993. Sabine's work focuses on media art, listening culture, c...

As an artist and educator, I see that this moment calls for a way of working through decolonization and forging a path of care. I like to think of this through multispecies communities so that, as humans, we're surrounded by more than human life, even in our urban environments. This path of care for our multi-species, communities that make up the neighborhood, the community, and ultimately the ear...

I think there's a lot of focus on systems change and we need all of that, but what we really need is to change ourselves so that we can actually embody the world that we want to be in, so that has a big piece of healing and how art can be a part of that.  I heard about Kelly McInnes ’ (she/they) work from Kim Richards (see e76 and e171 ) and had a very interesting conversation with Kelly in her ki...

What would change things is love. … We ask people to act, to change, to make sacrifices, or what may be perceived as sacrifices, which in the end can turn out to be incredible things as we open up a world we didn't consider possible for ourselves; it was always love that got people to take those steps and those decisions. Born and raised in the occupied unceded sovereign territories of the Sḵwx̱wú...

One of the roles that artists play within the poly crisis is supporting us through processes of unnumbing. Sometimes we might describe it like a re-tuning of our senses through listening. All of that is about undermining the ways that we are taught to master ourselves, to not show emotions, to disconnect our heads from our bodies so that we work more efficiently within the capitalist paradigm.  I...

(Note: some quotes below have been edited for concision) Soundwalking is always like magic. It is a magical experience. It is so simple, Hildi, as you said, and it’s as much about listening to sounds or listening to absences of sound. It's not very typical in our lives. We don't live the kinds of lives that require this kind of presence. And so it’s restorative for me and calms my spirit. But also...

How can we remind ourselves that we're all creative and we're all artists? I think that we need all parts of ourselves to be able to navigate this transition that we're in as a species and as a part of the world. I first met Louise Adongo at the Transition Innovation Group (see e163 ). We spoke on Monday April 22, 2024, earth day. Louise is a bold and grounded leader in systems change, policy and...

Community arts became my initial quest in the 1980’s as a reaction against the commercial art world. How can art participate in a functional way to connect not just art educated people, but our overall communities on issues affecting them that have meaning and purpose. Can we just speak about these issues or can we actually have it be transformative in some way to actually lead to some kind of soc...

The garden doesn't have to be something that's instrumental. It can be just a place where you sit, where you're thinking of growing something, you know, where the sun shines and where photosynthesis takes place and everything is sort of manifested through the sunlight and the water. It's a fantastic thing on its own without actually having to produce a lot of stuff. Replace 'garden' with 'art'. Ba...

What you do as an artist is crucial. Do not abandon that for a desire to serve a kind of utilitarian purpose of ‘I'm gonna make sure people know more’. The faith in knowing more is the siren song of our society that constantly sees us leaping off of the vessel that can carry us through this, with this belief that we can suddenly transform society because we can provide information. Decorating clim...

Being an artist, or making art, in the context of climate is more about being a kind of light in the darkness, making us believe in ourselves and believe in the future so that we want to endeavor to save the thing that we have, our habitat. Some people like to say art can't change the world, but art can change us. Then we can change the world more effectively. I first heard about Bill Crandall fro...

Proximity proportionate responsibility: if we were to do an inventory of where all the things we own were made, that would give us a very interesting map of where our responsibility, our attention and our donations ought to go because our pressures on the global systems can be revealed. That's a much more reasonable way to interact with different crises than to simply read about it on the news and...

I’m wanting something from art, which I think is much deeper, is a re-imagination of what it means to be human. I feel like we've instrumentalized and trivialized art and actually lost its capacity to expand our thesis of how we imagine ourselves and the world around us. I asked that question because the economy that we've created around art may have actually distorted its capacity to disturb us a...

I think as musicians we have particular concerns that perhaps looking at those through an ecological lens can be helpful. One of them is to think about the structures of funding which allow us to operate and to maybe reconsider them because they might change. And to be open to that change and to find solutions. And those solutions might be that we need to advocate for other kinds of support, if we...

This is a special bilingual episode of the conscient podcast recorded on April 8, 2024 during the solar eclipse in Ottawa. The same  recording can be found on both the conscious podcast and the conscious podcast. Here is a transcript of what I said.  This is a bonus episode of the conscient podcast. It's 3.15pm Eastern Standard Time. I'm in Ottawa near the path of totality of the solar eclipse tha...

'It's kind of like sacred medicine or sacred plant medicine in a way where it meets you where you are, based on your intentions, on your setting, your relationships and everything. Where that space in between is the most powerful piece and it’s us holding the container and guiding people in certain directions. But then, here's the silence: go run with it and see what comes up for you'. - Kamea Cha...

We are in a very unstable environment right now. We don't have to be change makers. Change is happening. It is happening quickly and the pace of change is accelerating. So this ‘plan and execute’ way of engaging with the world is less and less relevant. Building this capacity to play and improvise and allow for emergent possibilities to arise is a kind of new leadership capacity that makes more se...

It's all about balance and moving away from perpetual growth mode. It's about understanding that if you're a tightrope walker, you can't stand still, because the minute you stand still, you fall off. So you have to move forwards, or backwards. There’s no qualitative judgment about whether it's better to move forward or backward. It doesn't matter. You can grow or you can shrink : it's all about ba...

We're not just talking about saving the environment. What we're first and foremost trying to get people to do is care for the environment and you can't care for the environment unless you feel part of it, unless you feel attached to it, unless you can see outside the building and understand we're not living in bubbles. What I mean by bubbles, especially, is that we're not living in an individual b...

The most interesting part to me is to discover what we're not listening to and why we are not doing that. I think it's wonderful that I've had the chance to learn this listening from so early on where you're trained to listen to the environment and at that time it was more about listening to the sounds of the environment and critiquing them, analyzing them, trying to understand them. To me that su...

I think that's what the arts contribute to these discussions. There's the possibility of that kind of emotional or embodied connection to things that, as I think these questions of climate and environment, come closer and closer to people's lives, right? We can think of the wildfire smoke here last summer, people experiencing flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, drought in real time... Through storyte...

I think artists can challenge us by showing our blind spots, in a way, educating us, but also inspiring us about what's possible, right? I think in SCALE we talk about re-authoring the world. That's what artists do. We re-author the world. We create alternative ways of even just thinking about what's desirable in the first place. I first met novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist Sanita Fejzić i...

There's a sort of pulling back and forth between these two ideas. Out of the idea of fundamental inferiority comes slavery. And out of the idea of cultural inferiority come things like residential schools, right? The logics that fuel those two things are different, but they both obviously have negative results. And I think in the modern world sometimes we still fall into that trap of thinking that...

The final episode of season 4 and my conclusion from my sounding modernity learning and unlearning journey featuring an exchange with Catherine Ingram about 'a calm presence'. See the web version of this site on a laptop or desktop computer for a complete transcription of this episode. *   * END NOTES FOR ALL EPISODES Note : I'm currently 'pressing pause' and am not producing new content until fur...