Art by Us
While most people know about the issues around global warming and climate change, they are not completely aware of how, in practice, it will also impact them. For this reason, we wanted to create an experience that shows not only the explicit but also the implicit effects of climate change on the daily lives of people in Amsterdam. Furthermore, it was important to us to create an experience in which people can actively interact. By taking part in the experience, people realise that they have an impact themselves – on the installation but also in reality – and even a bigger impact acting together with others. In the end, like in any art exhibition, it is up to us to make our own conclusions and take due action. In Art by Us we want to make something clear: We have the power to determine how we live and how that impacts our daily lives.
The exhibition took place in lab111, an art-house cinema in Amsterdam.
Interactive Painting
To show how we and the city have to change to limit human-made climate change, we decided to depict a scene in the streets of Amsterdam and create different scenarios of how the future could look like. The visitor can walk towards the painting while walking towards the future. This shows the explicitly visible cause (how we live, how the cityscape changes) and effect (weather) of climate change in the city.
Impact Paintings
We wanted to show that global warming has an impact across the whole planet. What happens in one part of the world affects the rest of us, regardlessly. For example, predictions show that half of the land used to grow coffee might not be suitable by 2050. Hence, less coffee will be available to us here in Amsterdam, even though the weather conditions might not change as drastically.
The paintings indicate the changes we might experience on our everyday life in the future
Toolkit
With this toolkit, we want to inspire and enable other people and organisations to build their own installation in their city.
Through answering some questions about their city, artists and art pieces relevant to the city, and with the information about useful tools and with the help of our documentation, they should be able to create their own unique experience.
Co-Creation
We facilitated an online co-creation session with users (arthouse cinema visitors) and experts of different fields to gain new input and ideas, and further to find out what makes sense.
Furthermore, we did various user tests to examine assumptions we made in the team-design and co-design sessions.
2021 | teamwork with Joey van Gessel, Sophie de Haan, Steven Limandjaja