Each day Question Time hold a summit somewhere in Copenhagen- in cafes, street corners, domestic apartments, and train stations – after which a new statement of intent is produced towards an alternative declaration of the way forward on climate change.

Summit 20 December (Post COP15)
Attending: Rachel Lois Clapham and lots of other random passers-by
Location: Copenhagen Airport
minute taker Rachel Lois Clapham

On the 6^th December, on my way into Copenhagen, I passed a poster. On it, an aged, grey haired President Sarkozy was pictured, looking apologetic, saying :

‘I’m sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate change dot dot dot  we didn’t’

A latent apology from a world leader and COP15 delegate predicting the failure of the conference and envisioning the attendant global catastrophe.

Back then, I read the doom-laden poster as a bold statement of hope, as the setting up of the horizon line for ‘Hopenhagen’, for COP15; the conference would dispel the sure and forthcoming global disaster. Success was imminent since the conference could not fail. Too much was at stake within our own lifetimes.

I’m on my way to the airport today, C0P15 having ended with no definable agreement other than to carry on trying to agree, and I just passed the same poster.

There is a lot to be considered between my initial reading of the poster and this one.

Each day Question Time hold a summit somewhere in Copenhagen- in cafes, street corners, domestic apartments, and train stations – after which a new statement of intent is produced towards an alternative declaration of the way forward on climate change.

Summit Date: 17/12/2009

Attending: David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Alex Eisenberg, Mary Paterson.

Location: Cafe Zusammen.

Minute taker: David Berridge

We are approaching agreement. An oppressive place. You should subscribe. Its spiral is a slow, continual gradation. The shape of potential. We have to agree dates. When did we first become aware of this climate change crisis our own existence in time? One of us proposes 1984. Another says 1989. But each has their agenda, wishing to sit in their birthday chair, covered in crepe paper.

Maybe these are bargaining positions, the real year two or three years before. I do not yet have a year for acquiring awareness. Is that why I keep the minutes? How can we achieve agreement? One of us had a boyfriend who had one testicle. One of us had a boyfriend, born with forceps that slipped and poked out one eye. Maybe there will be a deal at the last minute.

This is my birthday. But everyone is in the next room watching television. The writers group have abandoned the democratic process to go off on their own and write villanelles about lego. They fight over end words, equating their predicament to the fall of the Soviet Union. Stupid writers. Perhaps no deal is happening but then there is a late intervention: if we have birthmarks we will celebrate them as parts of our body. Everyone who sees our mark in its entirety – a baroque protestant drape over half the body – has given us a letter. The letters spell a phrase:

TWICE LOST GLOVES

The story of the performance by the man in the towel at the party at 3AM has been omitted from these minutes. All his work is about testicular cancer. We chased a convoy – was it Obama? – convinced our gloves were inside. We were reassured in our failure by a man who gave us fruit and tea and lowered our bicycle seat so we could ride under the convoys that were everywhere blocking free passage through the city. Everything was nice. We were all reassured by the unfamiliarly close proximity of our knees and chin.

The agreement takes shape: We wash our hair, and sort audio files, and lose some more gloves and insist the floor be mopped. We love mopping followed by a multi-bird roast. But this 10 bird monstrosity could be deal breaking so we must be more concrete:

(a) WHERE WE ARE NOW

The lack of gloves focusses delegates attentions on the hand. An argument is made for focussing solely on The Finger. The Finger is its own delegating bloc: it points where it wishes, appearing in photographs of climate change activists and world leaders alike. Nothing about COP15 must be without the finger.

(b) SOME CONTEXT

Individuals highlighted or obliterated by The Finger find me on the internet afterwards and write to complain. I explain it is a Writers Finger, “saying” more about me than about them, a way of saving time by laughing at my writing and my finger together, a confessional trumping-perspective moment. Usually they are reassured enough not to email me again.

(c) OUTSTANDING ISSUES TO BE RESOLVED

(1) I am learning the comic timing of The Finger.

(2) I think the agreement is fine but The Finger should be in bigger type.

(3) The Finger had its third night of terrible sleep.

(4) A shaman called Angelica from Peru.

(5) The Finger gave itself the excuse not to do anything because it was so tired

(6) Drawn there by the food? No, it was more ephemeral.

(7) A sinister finger presence. A device to distract finger people.

(8) The guilt of doing finger and the guilt of not doing finger.

(9) This is the finger for me ( fear of circles).

(10) You can’t repent you just live with The Finger.

(11) We’ll give you this meaningless finger.

(12) Re-define it once The Finger is here.

DAVID BERRIDGE: I’ve been asking people what role the artist can play in debates on climate change. To think through what people told me I juxtaposed responses to this question and a quotation from the Peoples’ Protocol on Climate Change. I wonder if  the idea of the artist that emerges will satisfy any of the demands of the protocol.

First here is an extract from the protocol:

“We, the people need a platform that raises real solutions, registers our voices, and articulates our demand for social justice. Real solutions go beyond “business-as-usual” technology – and market- fixes along which powerful interests have set and confined the climate agenda. Real solutions require the reallocation of the world’s resources between and within nations for equity and social justice; the reversal of neoliberal globalization; the restoration of people’s sovereignty over resources, economies and institutions; and the compensation by the corporations and the Global North of the poor and peoples of the South for the losses they are forced to bear as victims both of climate change and the social system that is behind it.

Socially just solutions also make for scientifically and ecologically sound ones. Using natural resources equitably and democratically , and supplanting the drive for private profit with the fulfillment of social needs as the principal economic goal will reset human society’s relationship with the environment on a far more sustainable path.”

And here are some things I was told about  the role of artists:

They are like mirrors of society they present different angles of climate change

Well [the responsibility of artists is to] use paint that is er not poisonous (laughs)

How artists well mmm by doing events in the way that artists are innovative and sometime they have some ideas that might provoke people

Because I think that in one way or another people need to be provoked because you think this is something that will not have an effect on me

Because by making events or exhibitions or whatever and trying to show it effects all of us…

Artists they have this obligation, so to say, that they should use their artistic skills to show other people that we have a problem yeah

I  tried to transcribe something of the speakers rhythms because these, too, tell about the artists’ role in climate change debates. A certain stuttering and hesitation towards efficacy  -  I write after taking part in today’s climate change march through Copenhagen – also  an intertwining sense of utopia and cliche.

So, trying to distill from these insights, here are seven artistic strategies. Check any art work for how it fulfills all seven:

(1)  Mirrors

(2)  Poisonous paint

(3)  Innovative

(4)  Provoke

(5)  It effects all of us

(6)  We have a problem

(7)  Laughs

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