• Climate, Power, and Possible Futures, from the Banks of the Humber Estuary

    Author(s):
    Tom White (see profile)
    Date:
    2019
    Group(s):
    TC Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities
    Subject(s):
    Art, Economics
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Energy humanities, Visual arts, Political economy
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/y6ws-4z65
    Abstract:
    Nayan Kulkarni’s Blade, Lucy and Jorge Orta’s Raft of the Medusa, and Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen’s Quicksand were exhibited in Hull during its year as the 2017 UK City of Culture. These artworks provide the impetus for an article that moves between the local, national, and global, in order to connect visual culture, climate politics, and questions of citizenship and borders in a warming world. In the first section, I discuss how Blade—a wind turbine rotor blade repurposed as a public art installation—provides the opportunity to examine the role of large-scale renewable energy transition in addressing the deep regional economic inequalities in the UK. In the second section, I consider how artworks displayed as part of the ‘Somewhere Becoming Sea’ exhibition linked Hull’s recent history to a global context of displacement and precarity, in the wake of the ongoing ‘refugee crisis’ within Europe and at its borders. In the final section, I seek to bring together a number of threads from the preceding discussion, in order to outline some alternative political horizons. I turn initially to Sean McAllister’s documentary A Northern Soul (2018) and its powerful examination of how personal debt, the toxic fuel of neoliberalism, forecloses the future. In opposition to a future of deepening inequality and climate breakdown, I trace a renewed politics of public ownership and expanded social welfare in the UK, and its place in a prospective global renewable energy transition. This is a hopeful vision, given the current political climate, I argue, but it is also an eminently feasible one.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.417
    Publisher:
    Open Library of the Humanities
    Pub. Date:
    2019-3-29
    Journal:
    Open Library of Humanities
    Volume:
    5
    Issue:
    1
    ISSN:
    2056-6700
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    4 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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