Guest article: ‘Creative approaches to the energy crisis’ workshop
Dr Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi is a Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen. In this guest article, she discusses her interdisciplinary workshop ‘Creative approaches to the energy crisis’.
A workshop to remember
On 10 and 11 June 2024, I was delighted to welcome an array of stakeholders to join ‘Creative approaches to the energy crisis’, a playful interdisciplinary workshop funded by the University of Aberdeen’s Grants Academy, which I co-organised with freelance curator Rachel Grant of Fertile Ground. Our workshop assembled a diverse cohort of researchers, creative practitioners and campaigners interested in bringing the sciences and the arts and humanities closer together to explore more holistic approaches to pressing energy-related issues.
Among those who attended the workshop at the University of Aberdeen’s state-of-the-art Science Teaching Hub were independent artists with prior experience of researching our city’s entanglements with oil and gas and researchers from the University’s many schools and departments – geosciences, biological sciences, business, law, natural and computing sciences, medicine, language, literature, music and visual culture, special collections and library services. We were also joined by representatives of Culture for Climate Scotland, Friends of the Earth Scotland, Friends of Saint Fittick’s Park, North East Scotland Climate Action Network (NESCAN), Robert Gordon University and Peacock & the worm.
Our plan? To enhance interdisciplinarity and set the grounds for future collaborations and transformative research within the University and beyond.
Why bring creative approaches centre stage?
Over the last five years, I have worked on ‘Reflecting Oil: Arts-Based Research on Oil Transitionings’, which gave me the opportunity to engage in focused reflection about the unique contribution that arts-based methodologies can make to our understanding of the cultural dimension of energy transition. I have therefore also considered the potential benefit in raising further awareness about creative methodologies, especially among scientists.
Inspired by the environmental humanities work of colleagues who maintain close links with the local arts community, and my wish to give this work greater visibility, a transdisciplinary event in the shape of a workshop felt like a great opportunity. It would bring together people with different perspectives and engage them in networking and imaginative discussions about Aberdeen, Europe’s ‘energy capital’ (until recently better known as its ‘oil capital’). A workshop would also provide an opportunity to give them first-hand experience, and hopefully a transformative one, of putting a creative methodology into practice as demonstrated by creative practitioners themselves.
Our process
To help participants get acquainted, and to provide them with a practical explorative tool beyond the event, we designed a pre-workshop activity in the form of a Padlet (a virtual canvas) compiling a condensed profile for each participant. This included a headshot and a mini bio, plus a couple of questions and scholarly resources that these participants wanted to contribute to the discussion from their respective disciplines.
During the workshop itself, participants got to know each other even better through playful participatory activities led by creative practitioners. Artist Alison Scott and poet Shane Strachan gave participants key prompts to think about how oil permeates the everyday, and to come up with evocative metaphors that rethink our addiction to fossil fuels with a view to igniting fresh thinking about the energy transition. Artist Kate Downie invited participants to engage in a collective multisensorial exercise tapping into ways of relating emotionally to our surroundings and defying the mechanistic approaches often associated with the scientific and opening the stage for the ‘dreaming’ of Aberdeen.
The discussions provoked by these activities initially took place in small groups to give each participant the opportunity to speak before opening the floor to wider discussion. Participants were organised into six groups, with each group having a creative practitioner as a moderator (composer Dylan Dutot Mayne, filmmakers Sara Stroud and Callum Kellie, artist Kate Downie, poet Shane Strachan and sound artist Maja Zećo). I felt the creative practitioners would best know the approaches they customarily use in their practice and would help to keep discussion focused on the methodologies at the heart of their critical inquiry.
After engaging in a reflection about its invisibility, outfitted in PPE in one of the Science Teaching Hub’s laboratories, workshop participants encountered (many for the first time) a sample of crude oil from the North Sea, triggering further discussion and a photo opportunity with the toxic substance that has made the region a petrocultural hotspot for the last 55 years.
Creative and reflective outputs
Both days of the event were dedicated to open reflection and discussion. The second day included a final wrap-up activity in which all six groups were invited to retrace their conversations and summarise key issues in a plenary. The workshop offered participants a generative opportunity to engage outside of their comfort zone, which several of them mentioned is vital for truly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary deliberations. Participants also praised the fact that discussions during the workshop had been nuanced, touching upon interrelated issues like arts-based methods, the emotional impact of oil, the power relations and invisibility of oil, petromasculinity, community engagement, value systems, the beyond human, relationality, just transition and dreaming Aberdeen.
My plan now is to secure external funding to run a follow-up activity reuniting workshop participants around the reflective outputs that several of the creative practitioners produced as part of a post-workshop activity. The outputs embody the workshop’s creative process as well as being catalysts for fresh thought – a short piece for piano by Dutot Mayne, a tablecloth design by Kellie, a tea towel design by Scott, a reflective video by Stroud and a modernist-style graphic by Zećo. I wish to consolidate the exchange processes started during the workshop, with a view to planning future collaborative activities.
Special thanks go to Alice Toulson of the Grants Academy, technician Xavier Lo, technical resource officer Nick Vaughan, and MLitt students Joey Wiles Eagle, Vix Fowler and Rachel Venturini, all of whose outstanding support helped make this workshop a fruitful and happy event.
You are warmly invited to watch a short video about the workshop and listen to a podcast featuring several of the participants.
Contributors
Dr Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi is a Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen. She currently works on ‘Reflecting Oil: Arts-Based Research on Oil Transitionings’, an Austria-based interdisciplinary project which rethinks crude oil through a multiple-perspective approach, contributing creatively to debates around energy transition in the post-oil age.
Rachel Grant is a freelance curator based in Aberdeen and works under the platform Fertile Ground, which focuses on interdisciplinary projects, place-based approaches and (post)extractive practice.
Kate Downie is an artist whose focus is on drawing and movement. Her practice is primarily exhibition-based and strongly linked to people and place. Her work is held in public and private collections both in the UK and worldwide.
Dylan Dutot Mayne is a PhD researcher at the University of Aberdeen, studying the intersection of contemporary music composition and the changing relationship between humanity and nature.
Callum Kellie is an artist and educator based in Aberdeen. Working at Robert Gordon University, he primarily teaches media production and filmmaking skills across journalism and media courses.
Dr Shane Strachan is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen. He was the National Library of Scotland’s 2022-2023 Scots Scriever, which led him to winning Scots Champion at the 2023 Scots Language Awards.
Alison Scott is an artist, writer and art worker, often collaborating with other artists on projects. Her work is research-led, driven by film, performance and writing practices, and forefronts speculative approaches to knowledge production.
Sara Stroud is a creative practitioner and lecturer with over two decades of filmmaking experience. Her work has been commissioned and shown nationally by Channel 4, Friends of the Earth Scotland, Aberdeen Performing Arts and the Royal Scottish Academy.
Dr Maja Zećo is a practice-based researcher at Gray’s School of Art exploring identities and listening in spaces of socio-political tensions and post-conflict areas. This work informs her practice of decolonising through critical engagement with institutional, group and individual narratives.
Dr Lewis Coenen-Rowe is the culture/SHIFT Manager at Culture for Climate Scotland. His background is in classical music, working as a composer of chamber music and opera as well as teaching music in universities. He also has a background in environmental campaigning with voluntary groups in London and Glasgow.
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This article was written by Dr Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi.
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Image courtesy of Dr Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi