Exhibition project "For A Completely Different Climate"

FOR A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CLIMATE

An exhibition project by Oliver Ressler
Curated by Marco Scotini

Galleria Artra, Via Burlamacchi 1, 20135 Milan, Italy,
artragalleria@tin.it
Till January 30, 2009, Tue to Sat, 15.00-19.00

For images and a webversion of the 3-channel slide installation please
check out: http://www.ressler.at/for_a_completely_different_climate/

The exhibition project "For A Completely Different Climate" deals with
an emerging social movement that questions and selectively fights the
response (or non-response) of states and corporations to climate change.
This leftist movement has the potential to mobilize especially in
Britain, where in August 2008 a Climate Camp was organized to close the
Kingsnorth coal-fired power station east of London. Although the
Kingsnorth station will be shut down, the energy corporation E.ON plans
to build, at the same location, a new coal-fired power station that will
assure profits for the next few decades. This project completely
conflicts with the necessary goal of reducing CO2 emissions. Preventing
a new coal-fired powerplant in Kingsnorth is of great symbolic value,
since a successful resistance could mean the end of other planned
projects for coal-fired powerplants elsewhere in Britain.

The centre of the exhibition "For A Completely Different Climate" is a
3-channel slide installation, based on 96 photos taken in the Climate
Camp and at the demonstrations and blockades of Kingsnorth. These photos
are combined with short texts and audio recordings of the demonstrations
and workshops. In a presentation lasting 16 minutes, three connected
projections will be shown on an 18-metre-long wall of the gallery. The
exhibition also includes three light boxes combining photos with police
search protocols and information sheets that identify state repression.

"For A Completely Different Climate" is my third project focusing on
climate-change concerns. The "100 Years of Greenhouse Effect" was done
in 1996 (Salzburger Kunstverein) and followed in 2000 by "Sustainable
Propaganda" that used a series of exhibitions to comment on the
hegemonic discourse of "sustainable development" (exhibitions included
Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin). Ever since Al Gore's documentary "An
Inconvenient Truth" (2006), that is based on his slide shows, the debate
about global warming has been part of the mainstream. Gore believes that
trading emissions rights and using clean and efficient technologies can
prevent global warming. However, "For A Completely Different Climate"
uses the medium of a slide show to focus, above all, on resistance to
the existing system and provides space for people who in contradiction
to Gore believe that market-compatible approaches such as emissions
trading is not about the protection of the climate, but instead only
about ensuring continued capitalist growth. As noted in the
installation's audio recordings, CO2 emissions continue to rise years
after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol. Climate change could therefore
only be confronted through a radical transformation of society that
would effectively challenge the existing distribution of wealth and
power-relationships that are guaranteed by the military.