A child of capitalism is confused

DAVID BERRIDGE: 9/12/09 09:15. I arrive at Klimaforum, but the questions I’m asking relate more generally to my time in Copenhagen. How should I relate to this event? What does it mean to participate? What am I doing here? What contribution can I make and to what? Am I here in the guise of a learner or as someone with something to say, or how can I even articulate the degrees and balances of my position(s)?

I am full of uncertainties and contradictions. The need to produce an art project this week seems at odds with the need to find out what is going on. The need to find out what is going on regarding COP15/ Klimaforum/ New Life Copenhagen/ Question Time seems at odds with finding out more broadly about this new place I am in. Present, future and past have got all tangled up. Can I solve this dilemma by asking questions or going to workshops or wandering around town slightly lost?

As Gertrude Stein probably wouldn’t say, how do all the different issues that relate relate relate? There are the relationships and social sculpture/ engineering of New Life Copenhagen, and there are the specifics of climate change debate, both at the official conference and here at Klimaforum. Do these two projects necessarily relate or do they contradict?

Am I finding a new identity or trying to articulate existing ones? I don’t have a name badge around my neck and maybe I should make one. What side am I on in this debate? What are the sides – or, perhaps more appropriately, what new model for expressing similarity and difference?

I look through the days schedule of workshops and presentations. I feel myself sinking into the contradictions and mess of attitudes and lifestyles in the time of climate change. Or how to relate my life to the themes of some of todays Klimaforum session, even to the point of beginning a conversation. Take two session titles:

Sacred Activism: Mobilizing spiritual communities to address climate change

Sustainable Energy for Development to Reduce Poverty

I’m not saying I don’t understand what these mean on some level, but it is the precise basis and limits of my understanding that I’m pondering in the foyer of Klimaforum, along with the structure of any present or future engagement with them.

I live in Whitechapel in London. Often I write art criticism. Right now I’m drinking a latte. I like to approach subjects through enthusiasm and conviviality, sometimes. And here?

Perhaps it is a question of obtaining information, and making some changes. But what scale and how to relate the things said here to my life in London, or even to all the other aspects, desires, wishes of my temporary life here?

I’m a child of capitalism and avant garde art! I have the inner geography and economy of a 1980’s suburban London Thatcherite Britain upbringing mixed, somehow, with a Hugo Ball sound poem and the architectural sense of Kurt Schwitters Merzbau. What does that mean here?  What does it mean anywhere else? How does that relate to the blurb in the Klimaforum brochure that says:

“The absence of progress and political will urge citizens everywhere to mobilize in large numbers. We can no longer wait for politicians to finish their never ending negotiations where false solutions, based on economic growth for the rich, continue to be the pivotal point.”

Perhaps the “alternative statement of the way forward on climate change” that Alex, Rachel Lois, Mary and myself have been talking about is about embracing this mess of impulses, backgrounds, artists and lifestyle fully, until something new emerges. Perhaps that’s what a process towards an alternative statement on climate change involves. I don’t know.

09/12/09 12.22: I’m still at Klimaforum. Having interviewed some people the themes of this project and my own mood is changing. How important is mood in all of these explorations? Fragments emerge from what people say that strike me as relevant – phrases or sentences or ideas.

Maybe Question Time involves a statement that collages together 1000 of these fragments into a tapestry that has some kind of flow through all its variations of pitch, atmospheric sound, idea, accent, hesitancy and flow; anecdote, confession and rhetoric. Perhaps it is in that (dis-) continuity that ways of relating to and beyond this week and place will occur.

From what my interview subjects tell me I bring two words to our end of the day summit in Kaffe Vinyl. These are words I hope to explore with a new group of interview subjects tomorrow. They are:

(1) South

(2) Solidarity