During the grand opening of four new exhibitions in the Groninger Museum (GM) on 20th September, Fossil Free Culture NL (FFCNL) brought an art intervention to the festivities. The GM, the last major Dutch museum still accepting fossil sponsorship, launched its new cultural season seemingly oblivious to a summer of record-breaking drought, heatwaves, and wildfires. In response to the oversight, FFCNL felt that adding a loud note of irony to the celebration was well in order. With cakes, whistles, and pillow-shaped balloons, the collective gave voice to the escalating eco-anxiety keeping so many people awake at night.
Cupcakes were offered in advance to all attending a panel discussion on the grand subject of ‘Building the Future’, printed with a smiling totem in the museum’s new graphic frame, declaring ‘ARTWASHING? – NO THANKS!’ – referring to the PR strategy exploited by fossil sponsor Gasunie to launder its image. Shortly after the panel began, a loud chorus of sad party whistles disrupted the event, drowning out the Museum Director’s requests for silence, and their statements of support for their fossil sponsors. The collective soon filed out of the room to tour a performance ritual through the rest of the exhibition.
Heralded again by the wailing whistles, large helium pillows were released to the ceiling in various rooms, bearing stitched dream snippets of fretful sleep from the record breaking heatwaves of a summer past but not forgotten; ‘DREAMING OF BURNT FORESTS’, ‘NOWHERE TO REST’, ‘TOO HOT TO SLEEP’, ‘NO BIRDS TO WAKE TO’, and ‘SLEEPING ON SHAKY GROUND’. Performers watched in silence as each pillow made its way skywards, leaving climate dreams of ambient dread to hang over the public passing through the fossil funded exhibits.
FFCNL’s art intervention took up themes from both the party weekend, and Frances Stark’s 1999 publication – ‘The Architect and the Housewife’, which loans its title to one of the new exhibitions. Stark’s written work explores gendered divisions and power dynamics in art and life. The architect character thinks about monuments, is deemed a professional, and delivers grand designs for the future. The housewife character creates objects at home, making tangible artworks on human scales, referencing lived experience that includes subjects of care, reflection and comfort. It is in the monumental style of the architect character that we recognise the patriarchal drive, for ever new technology and promises of perpetual progress and profit. It is the quintessential style of the fossil fuel industry.
The endless hunt for new frontiers of extraction and exploitation has brought us all to the cusp of global climate breakdown. Writ large this summer past, and expected to escalate alarmingly in the coming El Niño peak next year. The compulsion for ‘progress’ and profit is collapsing in on itself. Its monuments are breaking down under the contradictions of this system, as roads start to melt and homes become hothouses. ‘Our very architecture is becoming dysfunctional. It’s increasingly clear that the blithe techno-optimism of the ruling class has lead to an ever intensifying nightmare for the rest of us.’ The ambient dread is haunting us, even in our sleep’, said Maria Rietbergen, spokesperson for the group.
Instead of indulging pollutor narratives of monumentally false solutions to the climate crisis (fossil hydrogen just the latest example), it’s time for the GM to wake up to a world in actual flames, and acknowledge an urgent cultural duty of care. Any future worth collectively celebrating is fossil free, with sponsorship from companies like Gasunie an uncomfortably remembered yesterday, and a clearly unthinkable tomorrow.
