Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation

Project description

The town of Kandos, from which Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation takes its name, was established in 1913 to house workers for a cement factory alongside other nearby industries. The gradual decline of the industry – with the eventual closure of the cement plant in 2011 followed by a nearby coal mine in 2014 – has led to depopulation. The town now hosts around 1200 permanent residents, whereas in the 1920s the population was 8000. These economic changes led to a need to develop new forms of employment in the area and to find a new purpose and identity for the town.

Since 2011 there has been a gradual influx of artists to the area due to a cheaper cost of living in comparison to the nearby cities. In 2013 the biennial Cementa contemporary art festival took place in Kandos for the first time. As part of the festival, artist Ian Milliss created a set of imagined tourist board adverts for Kandos promoting attractions the town did not actually possess. The idea was to playfully spark discussion about what the future of the town could look like through imagined possibilities like a solar thermal plant, botanic gardens, a fleet of plywood bicycles and a ‘groundbreaking School of Cultural Adaptation’.

Milliss’ idea of ‘cultural adaptation’ came out of his interest in the concept of ‘memetic innovation’ explored by philosopher Donald Brook. Brook argued that creative and experimental acts have existed long before institutional art practices and advocated for an alternative definition of ‘art’ to include any activity that enables humans to discover new ways of acting in the world – in other words, any activity that changes culture. Framed in these terms, innovators developing solutions to post-industrial decline or spearheading new forms of sustainable agriculture should also be valued by the arts establishment as much as those who are more traditionally seen as ‘artists’.

Artist Gilbert Grace proposed trying to actualise some of Milliss’ fictional tourist attractions for the 2017 Cementa Festival, an idea that was supported by the festival’s director Alex Wisser. The Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation was chosen as a good project to focus on initially. Grace, Milliss and Wisser were joined by other like-minded artists who became the founding members of KSCA.

Collective change through cultural adaption

The Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation has since outgrown those origins. KSCA seeks to use creative methods to help bring about real-world change. This intention involves close collaboration with different professions including researchers and farmers, and with grassroots networks in place. The organisation has a strong focus on climate change and connected environmental concerns, drawing links with local issues like farming and food production, urban planning, industrial change and infrastructure. The organisation retains a certain looseness with some projects being developed and run collectively by the whole group while others are pursued by certain members in partnership with external collaborators.

Projects typically develop over an extended period through conversations with local organisations and community leaders. These ‘superconnectors’, who have a strong understanding of local relationships and needs, work with KSCA to develop trust with residents and understand what they can usefully offer in each unique context. The aim is to stimulate processes of cultural adaptation that respect expertise present in communities and the group prefers to develop projects on the invitation of communities. However, KSCA artists are also looking for challenging and ambiguous contexts where they feel their skills will be the most useful. Artistic approaches may serve to challenge and disrupt as well as support. The outcomes of projects are not known in advance and the role of KSCA is often to use creative methods to bring together different perspectives, develop mutual understanding and build momentum for positive changes, with ideas emerging through the process.

Their first major event was Futurelands2, a three day festival of workshops and talks in the town of Kandos in November 2016, followed by a publication released the following year. Futurelands2 brought together innovative farmers, Indigenous historians and land custodians, soil scientists, economists, writers and artists to explore emerging practices in farming, land care, food and energy production. The event included talks and discussions as well as tours of a farming property and nearby national park and the installation of temporary artworks within the venue. The aim was to create a space for diverse voices to come into contact without necessarily seeking immediate agreement but celebrating creative thinking and seeking resonance between the diverse perspectives present.

An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar…

Conversations at Futurelands2 created a desire to facilitate more deep and long-term interactions between farmers, scientists and artists. Members of KSCA felt there was a need to develop a better understanding of what environmental sustainability means for farmers and to bridge urban-rural divides. KSCA artists had noticed instances of friction or misunderstanding between farmers and environmental sustainability researchers at events like a carbon farming conference in Bingara, NSW attended by group members Laura Fisher and Lucas Ihlein, and were interested in creating space to develop more understanding and collaboration.

With a small university grant (Laura Fisher was at the time employed at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney) KSCA toured the region around Bingara to hold initial meetings with farmers to develop ideas. Contacts among farmers came through an existing relationship with a regenerative agriculture education site, The Living Classroom, in Bingara, as well as through local grassroots leaders like Adam Blakester. This initial phase was important for developing the intimacy, trust and mutual curiosity between participants needed to make collaborations successful.

These relationships provided the basis for a grant application to Create NSW that funded nine collaborations across New South Wales between artists, farmers, scientists, Aboriginal knowledge holders, chefs and rural innovators from 2018-20 under the title An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar… (AFS). Each collaboration differed in its aims and approaches, but all were characterised by a process of exploration centred on a collaborative residency, with results emerging during the process rather than being predictable in advance. The project was run in partnership with Cementa inc, The Living Classroom, Starfish Initiatives and Arts North West.

A launch event attended by 120 people was held at The Roxy Theatre in Bingara in July 2018, featuring a performance from the NorthWest Theatre company that thematised the ideas behind the project and catering from the Friends of Touriandi (a catering group raising money for a local nursing home) and organic farmer-climate change activist Glenn Morris, Diego Bonetto and Marnee Fox, who designed a meal using foraged plants. The launch event created publicity for the emerging projects and offered an introduction to the overall ethos of AFS.

One of the collaborations involved artist Diego Bonetto working with rural landowners to forage and sell edible weeds to bars and restaurants in Sydney. Bonetto established an enterprise called Wildfood.Store that could link farmers with top restaurants, running a pilot programme across the two years. The idea was to reassess plants on the basis of edibility and availability so that plants that were considered ‘weeds’ could be reconceptualised as useful and inspirational. This work helps to promote more sustainable food cultures that make fuller use of naturally occurring species grown in biodiverse contexts as well as promoting regenerative farming models and offering new business models for farmers. Wildfood.Store was framed in a playful and exploratory way to help overcome some of the institutional barriers to this kind of scheme.

Another collaboration was between artist Mark Swartz, physicist Bjorn Sturmberg and farmers Erika Watson and Hayden Druce, who worked together on a project around solar energy in rural contexts. They collectively developed a sculpture that blended natural and technological inspirations around using the sun’s energy that was installed on the farm site.

They said of the results: ‘Our sculpture expresses the interconnected quality of nature’s cycles – solar energy, minerals, water and biodiversity. But it also appeals to our desire for something useful. It acts as shade covering the ground and supporting understory plants. It harvests sunlight energy, and it uses that energy to move water to places that otherwise could not have been passively irrigated. It behaves like a tree.’ In April 2019 they hosted an ‘art and farming picnic’ on the farm, which included a tour of the site, discussion around regenerative farming practices and an introduction to the sculpture by Swartz and Sturmberg. The project aimed to develop understanding of the uses of solar power but also provoke discussion and think about how solar power can be continuous with, rather than opposed to, natural systems.

In September 2019, KSCA organised a two day event, Groundswell, as part of Pulse of the Earth, a local festival held at The Living Classroom in Bingara. The event brought together elements of all the ASF collaborations and included talks, walks, food, films, demonstrations, performances and installations created by members of KSCA and their collaborators as well as external speakers and people they had connected with through the project. The event was a celebration, a forum to share results of the projects and an opportunity to explore wider connections between them and pursue new directions. In March 2021 a newspaper style publication was launched, detailing the different collaborations and including perspectives from a range of project participants. Other outputs have included academic publications, conference presentations and ongoing exhibitions.

The project has led to a wide range of ongoing work. Many of the collaborations have continued, leading to further exhibitions, events and academic publications. The project also laid the groundwork for ongoing KSCA projects like Land Studio and the Capertree Valley Hydrology Project, the latter of which came out of a connection established at events organised as part of AFS.

Sustainability issues

• KSCA use their position as artists to support the development of creative solutions at the local level, with a particular emphasis on farming, plants and land use. Often this involves creating the necessary pre-conditions for change by bringing together a wide variety of divergent perspectives and forms of expertise, fostering connections and developing networks. Sometimes these networks persist after KSCA’s involvement, leading to long-term increases in the capacity of communities to bring about change.
• Projects also involve developing and highlighting practical solutions. This might involve finding innovative methods that have been developed by local farmers and using artistic approaches to highlight these and bring them to new audiences through art galleries in the cities, as Lucas Ihlein did with Allen Yeomans’ Carbon Still as part of the AFS project, or through academic publications like Georgie Pollard’s ‘Falling in Love with Carbon’ article that was published in the journal Biochar.
• Artistic approaches are also used to highlight sustainable technologies and methods through sculpture or performance for example. This can play an important ‘visioning’ role, helping to develop ideas for the future that could be created and build enthusiasm for bringing about change.
• KSCA engages with connections between Australia’s colonial history and environmental issues, seeking to understand and platform indigenous knowledge and stewardship practices.

‘We’re not service providers working with a “client”, art tends to frustrate that relationship and create ambiguity, leaving space for unexpected outcomes. Seeking out difficult situations – these are the places where arts approaches are the most important. Other situations don’t need them.’

Lucas Ihlein, KSCA artist

Lessons, tips and advice

• KSCA adopts a ‘cultural adaptation’ approach to addressing environmental issues, recognising work done by non-artists that achieves the same kind of cultural transformation that artists want to achieve.
• KSCA emphasises bringing art out into the world, coming out of gallery spaces to operate in communities, farms and outdoor spaces. This involves encouraging creative responses by the community at large as well as traditional ‘artists’. They may also in turn bring knowledge from those places back into gallery spaces.
• Outcomes of projects are not fully known in advance, often discovering what is desirable or useful in that particular context is a key part of the process itself. The approach embraces plurality and the need to respond to a wide variety of often conflicting positions.
• There is a need to balance the autonomy and values of the community that KSCA are working with, with the need to bring something external that they might not be able to provide themselves. Artists have to be sensitive to the context, while also understanding what else they can offer and what they themselves desire or need.
• Artistic methods can provide a useful way of starting conversations. For example, artist Leanne Thompson created a light installation at a wetland site as part of a hydrology project. The fact that locals had seen the installation meant that they had heard of her and provided a way in for conversations about the site.

‘KSCA are part of a widespread phenomenon in which artists are leaving an abstract and speculative world to make works that engage with the real world […] Instead of an exhibition about sustainability, why not make it a manifestation of those principles or cultural modes the artists are playing with – so the artworks are the walls of the building.’

Alex Wisser, KSCA artist

Partners and stakeholders

• Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) is formally constituted as an incorporated association and acts as a banner for a wide range of projects. At the time of writing, members (or ‘students’) of the group include Diego Bonetto, Sarah Breen Lovett, Laura Fisher, Lucas Ihlein, Eloise Lindeback, Ian Milliss, Georgina Pollard, Manu Prigioni, Kelly Reiffer, Imogen Semmler, Peter Swain, Leanne Thompson, Kim Williams, Alex Wisser, Erika Watson and Vickie Zhang.
• Beyond this core group is a wider network of 40-60 writers, contemporary artists, Indigenous custodians, academics, farmers, festival directors, researchers and scientists.
• Residents and community groups are key participants and especially those with strong connections to the land, such as Indigenous Traditional Land Custodians and farmers. KSCA have collaborated with an array of local non-arts organisations including The Living Classroom, Starfish Initiatives, Capertee Valley Landcare, North East Wiradjuri Cultural Centre, Maldhan Ngurr Ngurra Lithgow Transformation Hub, Creative Recovery Network, the University of Wollongong and the Mulloon Institute.
• KSCA also has connections with regional arts organisations, notably Cementa inc, which organises the biennial contemporary art Cementa Festival in Kandos and is run by group member Alex Wisser, and the Creative Arts Faculty at The University of Wollongong, where Lucas Ihlein and Kim Williams work.

Funding

• Funding for the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation has come from a mixture of sources including national arts funding (Australia Council), state-based arts funding (Create NSW), national environmental funding, state-based community climate mitigation initiatives (New South Wales government) and universities (University of Sydney, University of Wollongong).
• Futurelands2 was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
• An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar… was funded by a Regional Partnerships Grant from Create NSW. This funding was important in that it allowed the flexibility for projects to develop over time without having to specify all outcomes in advance.
• Members of KSCA normally start the process of developing project ideas before seeking out funding that would fit with them. For projects to be viable for funding they tend to require an invitation, a strong idea and artists to be involved, which requires a significant amount of development time, which is often unfunded.
• The artists involved in KSCA are not paid specifically for this work and in cross-sectoral projects are often the only people in the room not on a salary. This can make devoting time to the work difficult especially given the demanding task of writing funding applications. Funding for projects is subsidised by income coming from other work by members of the group, and contributions from partnering organisations like Cementa Inc, Lithgow Transformation Hub and The Living Classroom.

Relevant links

• Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation
• Cementa Festival
• The Artist Farmer Scientist Newspaper
• Living with the Anthropocene: Love, Loss and Hope in the Face of Environmental Crisis

All images provided courtesy of Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation.