Part 3 Getting into Hot Water
Notes from the Revolution Booth is the third and final exhibition arising from Getting Into Hot Water, which has been a three-year collaboration with Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice. While the earlier exhibitions explored water and our relationships with it, this exhibition turns to the hot water of the title as a metaphor for the climate and ecological crisis.
We invite visitors to consider what a more-than-human revolution might mean. What might revolution look like if humans were not its only protagonists? What might materials, waterways, weather, plants, animals or other forces have to say? And what might change if we understood revolution not as something we do to the world, but as something we participate in?
The questions remain open.
Getting Into Hot Water is a long-term social artwork that explores water and climate with the people of and around Dudley. Getting Into Hot Water aims to question the habitual ways by which we know water, stimulate dialogue regarding our relationship with water, engender a sense of curiosity and create a change in ourselves and human-water relations locally.
The key for us as social artists is process: of bringing people together, of inquiry through creative dialogue with places, entities, people and ideas, producing imaginative artistic works that are co-created and speak to others of new possibilities and more-than-human ways of thinking-doing-being.
As part of Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice, we are producing a body of processual, iterative and cumulative artwork. Getting Into Hot Water material art-things are not just product or a deliverable, they embody or carry the traces of our work; where we have been, what we have done, who (human and nonhuman) we have done it with, what we have encountered and what we have learned, serving as springboards into possibilities for the future and further process.
Climate action for us involves doing things, artistic things that take us away from the usual, mainstream climate change narratives to narratives that expand what counts as climate knowledge – many sensory, embodied, or affective ways of knowing. Perhaps our work creates imaginative capacity as a climate change resource; invites participation through experience and intimacy rather than persuasion; reveals the everyday, small, local, and neglected as a sites of climate action; makes space for ambiguity, allowing people to consider uncertainty. We consider ourselves to be activators rather than activists.
https://www.workshop24.co.uk/ https://www.gettingintohotwater.org/