Abstract
In 2021, the artist duo Ackroyd & Harvey floated a living sculpture out onto the Thames at Millbank, as part of a Culture Declares Emergency ceremony. Using stencilled letterforms to block photosynthesis their artwork inscribed two short sentences by poet Ben Okri onto a canvas of living grass. Spelt out in pale caps within the green surface, Okri’s words read: CAN’T YOU HEAR THE FUTURE WEEPING? OUR LOVE MUST SAVE THE WORLD Ackroyd & Harvey’s collaboration with Okri reiterates a familiar call to arms: a declaration of radical urgency which Okri has framed elsewhere as a call to “existential creativity”, as he summons fellow creatives to join him in writing now “as if these are the last days”. As one recent expression of the intractable dilemma that accepting Okri’s admonishment thrusts upon us, the essay looks to Just Stop Oil’s three-year ‘cultural actions’ campaign, and to its implicit assertion of a necessarily disruptive, interruptive aspect of such love within a violently extractive mode of culture. In seeking a coherent response to our unsought entanglement within a globalised “economy of genocide” (Albanese, UN 2025), the essay turns to Harold Pinter’s near-death acceptance speech of the Nobel Prise for Literature in 2005, Art, Truth & Politics. With Pinter’s notion of ‘smashing the mirror’ in mind, the essay weighs the relevance of ‘declarations of climate emergency’ among cultural institutions faced with successive UK governments’ active collaboration in a two-year live streamed genocide. (Published in the Dark Mountain Journal #28: Uncivilised Arts, October 2025.)
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
CLIMATE, EMERGENCY, ART, ACTIVISM, GENOCIDE, PALESTINE
