'climate-action' is a blog-collaboration between visual artist Frans Jacobi and activist Asbjørn Fog-Nielsen. Text and pictures doesn't illustrate each other but are made simultaniously during a period up to and during the climate-summit, COP15, in Copenhagen, december 2009.
Asbjørn Fog-Nielsen is a 14-year old activist, from Copenhagen. His drawings are both actual registrations of real events and more free improvisations on the theme of activism and climate.
My point of departure in this case is a reference made by the writer Michael Hardt in his text ‘Politics of the Common’, where he mentions the upcoming “actions surrounding the UN Climate Conference to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009”, as an concrete example of struggles for “the common that are the primary objects of each of these movements”. I thought that these actions would also be an interesting example of those ’Aesthetics of Resistance’ that I am researching into at the moment.
My method will be the ‘Dérive’ as described by the situationists:
“A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences. Also used to designate a specific period of continous deriving.”
The Dérive is closely connected to another key situationist term ‘Psychogeograhy’:
“The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
I will try to look at the upcoming climate-actions as a psychogeographical landscape, and pass through them, making my observations on the way. As we are closing in on the COP15 - as the UN Climate Conference has now been named – the debate in Danish media is heating up, and it seems appropiate that my dérive is including media as part of this landscape.
As I make this trip, reporting back to this blog in text and interviews, Asbjørn Fog-Nielsen is making his own trip through the same landscape, using drawing and painting as his way of commenting on events. As an already experienced activist his view is from within the actions, while my position is much more of an observer, viewing events from the outside.
Michael Hardt: ‘Politics of the Common’:
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21899
On situationism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International