Artist Residencies
Photo: Dan Dinu
Celebrating art and cultural practice in landscape
The arts and cultural practice are a powerful means of reawakening our sense of the familiar, connecting to the past, and exploring possible futures. They play a pivotal role in addressing environmental challenges and are a compelling route into understanding how people are connected to landscape. Art can often articulate emotional connections to a landscape in entirely new ways.
The very notion of being human and sharing collective cultural histories is often embedded in connectivity to place, and stories, and how they are told, are a foundation for understanding the concerns and hopes of people who live in landscapes undergoing change. The use of creative participatory approaches to understand the stories of local people is critical to the work of engaging, supporting and sustaining local communities.
The Endangered Landscapes Programme has a vision for landscapes where nature thrives without the need for intensive and costly management – places where people’s connections to nature can be deepened by the surprise, creativity, and awe that it inspires. The arts can powerfully reconnect people to nature and communicate the challenges, impact, and opportunities for revival. In the context of landscape restoration, place-based artistic practice can also act as a catalyst, helping to engage new national and international audiences.
A collaboration
The Endangered Landscapes Artist Residencies and Arts Prize is a collaboration between two programmes at the Cambridge Conservation Initiative: the Endangered Landscapes Programme and the Arts, Science and Conservation Programme. Both programmes are keen to apply collaborative, transdisciplinary arts practice to celebrate the distinctiveness of the landscapes supported by the Endangered Landscapes Programme, including their communities, as well as to provide a better understanding of the hopes, ambitions and opportunities that come with landscape restoration.
The CCI Arts, Science and Conservation Programme develops pioneering interdisciplinary art actions that respond to the biodiversity and climate crisis. It explores the role that culture, and contemporary arts practice, can play in inviting exchange, dialogue, and debate around conservation issues. In particular, the programme explores how collaborations between artists and scientists have the ability to transform the way we undertake and portray conservation.
