Embedded Files
05/02/2024
"NO ART ON A DYING PLANET"
IN CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST AND FILMMAKER OLIVER RESSLER
#ART, #CLIMATE JUSTICE, #ANTI-CAPITALISM & #THE FUTURE
In memory of Antonio Negri (1933-2023), Italian political philosopher.
“Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts. To us, it seems completely obvious that those who are exploited will resist and – given the necessary conditions – rebel. Today, however, this may not be so obvious. A long tradition of political scientists has said the problem is not why people rebel but why they do not. Or rather, as Deleuze and Guattari say; `the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): `Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?`”
Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri (2001) Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, p.210.
Oliver Ressler, “Property Will Cost Us the Earth”, Ink drawing on Hahnemühle Paper, 950 x 112 cm, 2021 (drawings: Claudia Schioppa). Exhibition view: “Defending the future”, The Gallery Apart, Rome, 2023. Photo © Eleonora Cerri Pecorella.
Oliver Ressler, 2023
Hande Eagle: You’ve been creating art related to environmental concerns for over two decades, yet I noticed that in your previous published interviews, no one asked you how your environmentalist spirit emerged. Can you tell me more about how you came to bring together art and environmental concerns?
Oliver Ressler: I was interested in political issues while I was still a student at school. I was reading some of the popular ecological texts in the late 1980s. When I was accepted to be an art student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, from the very beginning I was trying to merge my interest in politics and ecological issues with my intention to become an artist and to express myself through artistic means. It was quite a lengthy process that took several years until I found the possibility to express myself in an adequate manner. It was perhaps five years after I started studying that I produced the first works I could still take seriously today. I started to work with text, video, interviews, photo montages in the mid-1990s – I still apply the same techniques today but there is a lot of alteration within these formats.
H.E: In one of our recent email correspondences you told me that you made a conscious decision at age fifteen not to drive a car. I wanted to get into that a little bit. Was there something that triggered that response in you?
O.R: I grew up in a mid-sized city of 250,000 inhabitants. My family was living in an apartment block on the outskirts of the city but there was a good bus connection to the city centre. I saw how the private ownership of cars is actually destroying our web of lives, our cities, our health, our communities. I grew up in a household without a car and could see it’s not a big deal and you can live quite well without owning a car. I got older and older, but to this day I never got a driving licence.
H.E: You’re currently exhibiting in Rome for the third time with “Defending the Future” at The Gallery Apart. What was the feedback of the Italian audience? I’m asking because Italy is one of the most polluted countries in Europe.
O.R: Speaking to people during an exhibition isn’t representative of Italian society. However, having an academic background and to be better informed than other people doesn’t necessarily mean your impact on the earth is less harmful. In fact, it’s often the opposite: the higher the level of education, the higher the income and the higher the carbon footprint. This is what the statistics say, but of course there are exceptions. Being in Rome is always a bit strange. There’s only a small underground network, at least for a city the size of Rome. Therefore, there are too many cars in the streets which leads to traffic jams. The same problem also exists in other cities, but for a huge city with all this cultural heritage and the millions of tourists, you wished it would be different.
H.E: Do you know how many people attended the opening?
O.R: It was a bit less than what we were hoping. We had maybe 90 or 100 people over the entire evening. There was also a soccer game on so perhaps that didn’t have such a positive effect on the attendance. Openings are not always so central for an exhibition that is so video based as this one. Attending the exhibition is time-consuming, it requires the audience to think. The audience will get more out of the exhibition in the weeks following the opening because they’ll have more time to spend with the work.
H.E: On March 1, 2024, “Dog Days Bite Back” opens at Belvedere 21 in Vienna. Will there be new works premiered as part of this exhibition?
O.R: In the past five or six years I’ve primarily focused on the climate breakdown and the climate justice movements. In all the recent exhibitions, I have tried to combine different works with each other depending on the size of these exhibitions. This particular exhibition at Belvedere 21 is really big, it sprawls across 1100 square meters. It takes up the main space of Belvedere 21. It is my first solo exhibition in a museum in Vienna. We will present almost 40 different works, including video-based works, photomontages, a two-channel video installation, banners, a flag, and sculptures. So, there will be a variety of different formats exhibited.
H.E: Just out of curiosity, what’s the energy rating of the building?
O.R: I have no idea. It’s a historical building from the 1950 that was originally built as a World Expo Pavilion and afterwards relocated and adapted to the museum’s purpose. Buildings with huge glass façades like this often have very bad energy ratings, but I don’t know the specifics.
H.E: So, it’s on grid.
O.R: Yes.
H.E: How does that make you feel?
O.R: As an artist I try to use different opportunities to present my work. The main reason for this work to exist is to establish communication with an audience and you are required to deal with existing infrastructures. For ecological reasons it is usually better to reuse existing buildings and not build everything newly. But usually, the ecological aspects of buildings, or how many flights curators take around in the world isn’t the starting point of my work.
H.E: As was in the case of Artissima 2023... I don’t understand why any commercial art fair has to have another agenda other than being a platform for galleries to sell art. Personally speaking, I feel we as individuals are just as responsible for our carbon emissions as are art institutions and galleries. So, it was interesting to see your work there because it was one of the few works that fit in with their theme of “Nature as Kinship, Knowledge as Care.”
O.R: An art fair is the worst thing in terms of ecology. It is by definition an event where participants, gallerists from different parts of the world and collectors come together for an exhibition that only lasts three or four days. So often also the artworks have to be shipped via airplanes. An art fair has no educational purpose, differently to a museum exhibition that lasts for three, four or even five months and thus, has a much wider audience.
H.E: I feel that it’s self-fulfilling prophecy to brush away the guilt. “We’ve organised an event about the environment and now we can stop feeling guilty about all this pollution we’ve created all across the world.”
O.R: It’s a greenwashing event.
H.E: I think it would be better for them to have the alternative stance, i.e. “You know what, we’re here to make money, we’re here to help others make money.” It would be fairer if they had some level of honesty instead of trying to tag on another label to it. However, this seems to be the contemporary attitude.
O.R: All the big art institutions are somehow trying to pretend that they are now more conscious in adopting ecological methods. I heard the Tate Modern in London now also offers vegan food on their menu and ask their curators and artists from the UK not to fly but to take the train. But such actions are primarily to pretend there is some action while these institutions very often try to maintain their existing structures and are very hesitant to make a substantial change.
“Oliver Ressler. Barricading the Ice Sheets”, Corina Apostol, Marius Babias, Reinhard Braun, Pablo DeSoto, Gabriela Salgado, Leila Topić (eds.), Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2023.
H.E: Which brings to my mind, the title of your recently published book, Barricading the Ice Sheets. It seems like an expansive continuation of your film, Barricade Cultures of the Future, which opens with offshore wind farms. It reminded me how, for example, The Crown Estate – aka the royal family - manages the UK’s seabed and holds the rights to the resources to develop renewable energy. Do you believe that the aristocratic elite are capable of investing in good initiatives for the benefit of humanity?
O.R: I’m sure you have more information on the aristocrats in the UK than I have. In general, one of the main problems we are facing today is the huge divide between the very wealthy and the extremely poor. In order to tackle global overheating, we need to get climate justice. We need a redistribution of wealth. 25 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions come from less than 1% of the world’s population. So really, this number shows that the carbon problem is to a great extent a problem caused by the wealthy. The question is if we can really afford to have so many wealthy people on this globe with their luxury emissions, their mansions, yachts and private jets. And as investors in fossil fuels just because this is how you can generate the highest income they also cause a lot of harm. I really think we have to go after these reckless super-rich elites to avoid a complete climate breakdown to which we are already very close.
H.E: The Crown Estate’s relationships with Saudi princes and petrol barons are well-known. To me it feels as if the elite are preparing for when the fossil fuel industry is no longer viable and they need a back-up profit-making system in place, so why not invest in offshore windfarms? Their rhetoric emphasises how they are investing in green energies for the benefit of humanity but on the back of it all, I feel it’s just another strategy for them to retain their power and wealth in another mode.
O.R: [Nods] I totally agree.
Oliver Ressler, “Barricade Cultures of the Future”, 4K video, 38 min., 2021.
H.E: In an interview published in Berlin ArtLink, you stated, “The situation in print media is not that different, even though there are still progressive magazines. There are frequently reviews about my exhibitions and films in the media, but the people writing those reviews aren’t paid well enough to have the chance to really invest in writing something substantial. Also there’s not enough space for longer texts. This is really a shame.” I agree with you that remaining true to your ideals whilst making a living out of writing exhibition reviews for magazines and newspapers is really hard, but I also believe it’s a matter of why someone chooses writing for their source of income. And, most often when money enters the equation in the arts, the fee becomes an end rather than the work that is being produced. I know you work in public spaces as well as make installations, photographic work, drawings, and sculptural works alongside organising public programmes and roundtables and curating shows. Yet, being an anti-capitalist, pro-environment individual cannot be easy when banks and industry rule the arts. You unintentionally become a cog in the wheel. As is the case for the writers and journalists who request interviews from you and then what is published turns out to be something different to what you imagined. So, bearing all this in mind, do you find it hard to earn a living through your work?
O.R: Firstly, it’s not easy to make a living on what I am doing. I would not recommend it if your main interest is to generate money out of your work. However, I am an artist who has a lot of visibility, so I don’t have to be that worried to make a living out of what I am doing because I also have been doing this for thirty years. If you work with public funds and public institutions then you become part of the game. You also play according to the rules of the game. I am very much aware of this, but I still believe there is a possibility to express decent opinions through the work, from the inside of institutions where the work is then publicly exhibited. There are different contexts of where the work is being presented and what is being presented. I had a large solo exhibition in Istanbul, nearly seven years ago, in 2016 at Salt Galata. I was talking to several local people, and they told me, “Well, it’s great what you’re doing, if you were living here, you’d have probably already be in prison.” I am aware that what I do cannot be done everywhere. I documented actions of mass-civil disobedience at open-pit coal mines in Germany, where thousands of people blocked an extraction site for 48 hours. If you do something like this in Colombia, or the Republic of Congo, you might simply be shot. Not all of these techniques and strategies that are being shown and discussed in my work can take place everywhere in the world. The same applies for working as an artist as I’m doing it.
Regarding the writing about my work, it’s super-hard to influence. Sometimes you talk for an hour to a journalist and what you find in the text might be something you have said during the interview, but it does not really connect to the core of what I said. The language or terminology might have been changed. I cannot count how often what I said was changed, for example, when I was talking about anti-capitalist movements, I found it re-phrased into anti-globalisation movements. I try to be quite careful about the wording and the terminology. This can be painful. And this is the advantage of an exhibition where I as an artist am in charge of every aspect of the work in an exhibition. But of course, there are also very well-informed writers like yourself where you have a partner in a serious conversation, where you and your working methods are being challenged. This also exists and it’s fantastic.
Oliver Ressler, still from "Barricade Cultures of the Future", 2021.
H.E: Thank you. I would like to move on to talk specifically about Just Stop Oil’s actions in museums, about their methods, i.e. throwing soup or paint at famous works of art. Do you think this is working?
O.R: I think that these strategies were developed in relation to the way our media function. To throw tomato soup on a painting, or to be precise, on the glass that protects a painting, creates a fantastic image. Also the media that would never write about art would publish such an image and write a couple of lines because it’s a scandal.
H.E: But you know, some buy into it. And now, for example, in Italy, there are new eco-vandalism laws in place.
O.R: The movement probably would respond saying there is no art on a dying planet which is true and cannot really be contested. I’m quite biased in relation to some of these protests in museums. The main reason is that for so many years, I was researching on different movement strategies, and the role of artists in a social movement. For me, I have to admit, it’s a bit annoying that in such forms of protest there isn’t a real collaboration with the arts, but very well-known artworks are taken hostage in order to create attention. But I would not blame the climate movements for it; they simply found a way to create attention. It’s necessary to create this attention. On a personal level, I’m much more interested in these forms of civil disobedience that directly go after the main polluters or the governments who are responsible for the lack of regulation for polluters. I also believe that acts of mass disobedience against corporations and the governments can be argued in a better way to increase the critical public.
H.E: What about Roger Hallam’s stance? The way he organises people into action, his rhetoric…
O.R: This has been discussed a lot, I think it started in 2018, when Extinction Rebellion blocked the five bridges across the Thames. There was a lot of critique on his strategy to get as many people as possible arrested. It’s only possible if you have the privilege to be a white person and a citizen because otherwise you’ll probably be beaten up by police or sent back to your country of origin. There is a racist system that treats different people differently even if they participate in the same action. Though I think XR’s strategies got adjusted over time, Extinction Rebellion is not a main force anymore as it was in 2018 and 2019. During the pandemic, mass actions had to be halted for health reasons. Afterwards, XR’s strategies changed a lot. I was in London during one of the main events, I think in April 2023, where there was a 3–4-day blockade of governmental offices but in a much more symbolic manner, much less confrontative than the blockade of the bridges in 2018. I think it was not very successful. There was much lower attendance than originally planned and announced. They were saying that they wanted to bring one million people to block all these governmental institutions. I think the strategies will change a lot in the coming years. We will see vastly different forms of action.
Oliver Ressler, “The Path is Never the Same”, 4K video, 27 min., 2022.
H.E: As the narrator in “The Path is Never the Same” mentions, we are programmed to think in binary ways or dichotomies, i.e. nature vs. culture, “black” vs. “white”. How can we as a society stop thinking in these binary modes?
O.R: I think we need to establish a social movement that addresses all these interconnected things at the same time: the ecological questions, the economic questions, the different forms of oppression of races, minorities, Black or Indigenous peoples. There are attempts to create intersectional movements where progressive activists from different movements would come together and fight central struggles just as the one against climate breakdown. Only if our climate justice movements open up to and include progressive protagonists from other movements they will achieve the strength to change the world.
H.E: In the same film, the narrator talks about “human warmth” in relation to how one might keep warm whilst living in a forest. She says, “people sit together in a small cabin, and it warms your heart.” I suppose this is another thing that has been stolen from us. Especially with the advancement of social media and later, the pandemic. People find themselves thinking, “It’s winter, the virus is on the rise, perhaps I shouldn’t socialise.” It’s truly an unhuman way of thinking because we are social beings by nature. Do you think there’s any chance we might encounter that human warmth again?
O.R: There is an amazing book by Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark. It focuses on dark events like 9/11, a big earthquake in San Francisco in early 20th century, or a hurricane… Catastrophes during which people get killed or injured. She focuses on how at times of catastrophe people start to collaborate together, to take care of each other, to help one another. In the book she also writes that after a collapse – sometimes with several hours of delay – the authorities will take over the situation which as a result breaks these bonds that evolved in the first hours after such catastrophes. I think longer-lasting collapses unfortunately look more likely to take place in different parts of the world. This could also lead to wars or re-establishing bonds that perhaps existed hundreds of years ago but got destroyed by the tension of a system that tries to isolate us from each other or makes each of us compete with their neighbour over jobs, food, over the possibility to live and continue with life.
H.E: In reference to your work “The Desert Lives”, the majority of mainstream conservatives might say that the police having to neutralise and bring down public protest or action is a waste of the taxpayer’s money, which could be better utilised to serve social progress. What are your views on this stance? And also, have they dropped the charges against you?
O.R: During this 5-month long blockade of the construction site of a connecting street to the planned new highway in Vienna [as part of TEN-T], 50 people were sent intimidation letters. The city administration was trying different things to get rid of the protesters, and to hold the protesters liable for alleged financial losses because the street could not be built as planned, was one of them. There was a lot of media attention on this case especially because there were also two minors among the people who received the intimidation letter, who by legal means could not even be sued for joining a blockade; perhaps their parents could be, but not the minors themselves.
H.E: You were there as an artist, filming the blockade and you also received one of these letters, didn’t you?
O.R: Yes, I did.
H.E: And then what happened?
O.R: The city was hoping that people would leave the blockade because of the danger of getting sued. But no one left, and the attempted criminalisation of the protest created a huge wave of solidarity and strengthened the movement. Afterwards, the protest camp was evicted on February 1, 2022. The occupation did not exist anymore, the city got what it aimed for and proudly started to build a street no one requires. I think the city administration only wanted to intimidate people to stop the occupation but was not interested in the legal procedure itself because they knew it would be very hard to prove the personal involvement of each of the persons. They also try to avoid negative press. The city is governed by Social Democrats who in many aspects are progressive, so they don’t want to destroy this image completely.
H.E: The prominent subject of your recent films is nature’s overwhelming beauty and its intentional destruction by the capitalist system in which majority of people work 9 to 5 jobs, have children, and live in towns or cities. Because of this enforced lifestyle, people generally don’t get to experience nature on an everyday basis, they forget about it. They live mechanical, robotic lives, waking up to the ring of alarm clocks on their mobile phones, and go to bed browsing the internet. Do you think this is partly why there aren’t more people joining the climate protests? Because they feel pressured to maintain the status quo…
O.R: This might be one reason, but I think there’s a multiplicity of different reasons as to why more people don’t join the climate protests. I think the majority of us are being forced to work in 9 to 5 jobs, and if you have care responsibilities, it doesn’t leave you much time for anything else. In addition, many of us have to work in bullshit jobs and consumption makes them feel there is at least some sense of being alive. So consuming beef on a daily basis, owning a car, going on vacation twice a year is seen as a compensation for being forced to work in a job they hate. If climate movements decide to target the personal consumption of average people, talks about the necessity to take away your meat, your car, your holiday, then the capacity of expanding the movement becomes limited. Therefore, I think – for strategic reasons – it’s probably necessary to change the communication and the central targets and to really go after those institutions where the largest parts of the carbon emissions are being generated. According to different statistics, these are 100 of the largest transnational corporations and institutions such as the Pentagon, which are directly responsible for around 70 per cent of global carbon emissions. It makes a lot of sense to go after them. If we continue on this path with carbon footprints and individual responsibility – although I don’t deny that it exists – we won’t get far politically. If we want to have a more successful movement it is urgent to change the strategy.
H.E: To what extent do you think your films directly inspire change in people’s ways of thinking?
O.R: I know from personal conversations with students at universities where I organised workshops my work can have the capacity to change the way people perceive the world or how they make art in this world. Some people also started involving in social movements and change their personal lifestyles. My work includes a multiplicity of different perspectives from social movements, activists, or political theorists – these perspectives can change people’s perception of the world.
Oliver Ressler, “The Desert Lives”, 4K video, 55 min., 2022.
H.E: What lies ahead? Is there a future for humanity on earth? Are we too late? Or perhaps as you so aptly put it one of the subheadings in the 2-channel video installation “Climate Feedback Loops”, “Frozen Love. Romantic Project for the Future: Life on Earth, with no humans in it.” Or will the future simply see the rise of AI and the demise of humanity…
O.R: Good question, big question for which I have no answer of course. I think there’s no possibility for us to give up struggling even though it would have been much better to start transition towards a decarbonised more just economy twenty years ago. We are already close to 1.5 degrees across the pre-industrial level, 2023 might have been the first year this line has been crossed. Every percentage of a degree that we can avoid additional heating will consequentially make the difference for the hundreds of millions of people in the global South on whether they live or die. I think we as humanity therefore really have to fight to enable this transition and to win against the transnational corporations who try to increase their profits by simply accepting the deaths of tens of thousands of people. I really hope that there is a possibility for the existing struggle to become larger and more successful. We can also try to win more seats in government to enforce transitions. We will need people on the streets to increase pressure, we will need science, we need workers in corporations with the capacity to shut them down, and we will need progressive parties and politicians. If these cannot come together, I think the future will be very dark. Hollywood is highly successful in showing us this dystopia that’s highly likely to emerge. There is even a new genre of “climate fiction.” In my work I don’t create such dystopian images. I am more into amplifying possibilities of action or outlining possibilities for decarbonised futures, as I did for example in my photo series, “Reclaiming Abundance” where I created images that show directions towards where struggles should lead us to in my opinion. We have to come together and fight in solidarity with each other in order to win this struggle.
Oliver Ressler, still from "The Path Is Never The Same", 2022.
H.E. Yes, a global effort. Do you think it is likely to happen when we have China behaving in one way, America behaving in another way, Europe behaving in various different ways and Africa on its knees in so many ways…
O.R: I used to be more optimistic than I am at the moment, I have to admit. The past few months were really a nightmare, with all these wars and conflict not only in Ukraine and Gaza, but also the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, the war in Sudan and other African nations… At a time when people should really start to come together, to collaborate and negotiate we see more war which – besides the human suffering – also leads to massive amounts of carbon emissions. There are calculations that the first year of Russia’s war against Ukraine generated carbon emissions equivalent to the entire annual carbon emissions of Belgium. These carbon emissions are on top of the already existing carbon emissions of Ukraine and Russia. Once the war is over, I hope sooner than later, rebuilding all what’s been destroyed will amount to the annual carbon emissions of a few nations. It really is a nightmare… I really hope that we will make progress and find different spaces to sit together and talk. Everyone should be interested in the common aim of handing over a liveable planet to future generations because many of us have kids. Unfortunately, capitalism and post-colonialism make it exceedingly difficult for people to come together.
H.E: Of course. War always lines the pockets of capitalists. There’s profit-making in the arms trade and great investment value in rebuilding a completely shattered country. The ongoing wars seem to be mirror-images of one another. There are already transnational corporations trying to commit investments into war zones. I try to get my head around it and see the light at the end of the tunnel, but the light seems so far and so weak… I don’t think I’ll see the end of the tunnel in my lifetime.
O.R: I think that if we don’t see the light in your lifetime we have completely messed up the earth, and the destruction will be irreversible. With the accumulating carbon emissions in the atmosphere, we only have a few years left. This is our last chance before climate tipping points will take over completely and the heating of the world will be completely out of our control.
Oliver Ressler, still from "The Path Is Never the Same", 2022.
Oliver Ressler’s exhibition “Defending the Future” at The Gallery Apart in Rome is on display until February 24, 2024.
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