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“The energy and climate-change crisis stands as a unique social and ecological challenge… Those least responsible for climate change are the worst affected by it…” Vandana Shiva, Indian Activist, 2008

Artist-activist group PLATFORM and their collaborators propose C Words, a two-month investigation into carbon, climate, capital and culture. Based on PLATFORM’s 25 years of research, art and action, C Words cross-examines the present and looks to the next two decades. How did we get here? Where are we going? Who’s deciding? Who’s made invisible? Whose future matters? PLATFORM members will be in residence at Arnolfini throughout the project.

Over 25 events, installations, performances, actions, walks, courses, discussions and skills-sharing will build towards the moment of public departure to the protests at the contested COP 15 in Copenhagen. This isn’t art which merely describes the problems of climate justice. C Words investigates how everything from carbon offsets and transport, to racism and bank accounts play their part in the carbon web. How will culture be produced in a low energy future? Can we imagine our way from here to there?

C Words includes seven new commissions:

Ackroyd & Harvey: The Walking Forest
In the spirit of slow travel, bring a small tree or sapling to add to The Walking Forest, Ackroyd & Harvey’s Bristol time-based artwork.

African Writers Abroad: All Change!
African Writers Abroad (PEN) presents new commissioned work and workshops from poets Dorothea Smartt and Simon Murray on climate change and justice.

Hollington & Kyprianou with Spinwatch: Adams and Smith
Adams and Smith are auctioneers of late capitalist period artefacts, with provenance and history provided by Tamasin Cave and Spinwatch. Live auction included.

Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home’s Half-Term Holiday
Two adults and three children will set up a homemade activist cell to take action against Carbon, Climate Chaos and Capitalism. Join them for their half-term holiday.

Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: Experiment Number 10
This will involve building an irresistible weapon of creative resistance, which will be unleashed during the COP 15 summit.

Trapese Collective: Experiments against Enclosure – Tools to reclaim the Commons
The Trapese Collective present dayschools, film nights and an installation for your participation. Start producing the future…

Virtual migrants: The Centre Cannot Hold
Multimedia installation, live dialogues and music performances explore the racial underpinnings
of climate change, and the potential for a super-holocaust in the global south.

Plus Amelia’s Magazine, Art Not Oil, Carbon Trade Watch, The Corner House, Feral Trade, FERN, Greenpeace, Live Art Development Agency, new economics foundation & Clare Patey, Sustrans – Art & the Travelling Landscape, Ultimate Holding Company, and others.