Our team decided to respond to the wicked problem of climate change using our own friendship as the starting point. Since friendship touches many aspects of our lives, ranging from food to fashion to travel and experiences, all the way to mental health and the loneliness epidemic, we realised it was a potent ground for making varied kinds of interventions all tying back to Climate Change. Our reflections on the structure and intentions of the Across RCA experience also led us in this direction - considering the emphasis on cooperation and collaboration as the main learning outcomes.
Our objective is to use friendship as our lens to look at climate change by extending friendship to include non-human entities as well as each other, to use experiential way-finding methods to find a sustainable alternative to modern friendship rituals, and to uncover an appropriate communication strategy and suitable interventions that help us spread the insights from our experience, with the following research questions:
- How can we experience modern friendships in eco-friendly ways to create enjoyable, meaningful connections in the post- Anthropocene?
- To what extent do our immaterial existences (friendship, love) currently translate to material existence (objects: cellphones, notebooks, tables, chairs, sofas, rooms, houses, buildings...? )
- How might we extend our friendships to include non-humans as well as humans, and redefine what a friendship means and how it affects the parties involved?
- How might we reimagine human relationships if the currently unsustainable infrastructure of capitalism was not our reality?
We took inspiration from Fluxus, an avant-garde movement of the 1960s arguing that art should be a constantly shifting source of energy that anyone in society can share. Our intentions were similar: using a rich, multi-medium documentation-led approach that all team members are free to contribute to, we wanted to create snapshots of our activities. Working as an Art Collective exploring own relationships as opposed to functioning like a team working towards an external goal, we intended to design our own friendships with each other to be climate-friendly, and document the experiences we have as a group of friends - finally curating this into an experience for others to explore and emulate in their own lives.
Our outcome is a series of workshops presented in the form of a calendar, hosted in a virtual museum. It allows participants to explore eco-friendly ways of connecting and bonding with their friends through shared experiences. These activities are inspired from the various activities we did, such as live art on found materials, using lidar technology to create 3D scans of our environments, plant friends, upcycled uniforms, etc, and are designed to be accessible and doable regardless of location, skills and inclinations.
