an understanding and critique of these
mechanisms as they play themselves
out in different cultural contexts so as to
create a variety of ecological imaginations
of the global’ (Heise 2008: 62).
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I wrote the first draft of this chapter from a creative residency at Cove Park48 in Scotland,
which inspired some of my thinking on eco-cosmopolitanism. At Cove Park, I was embedded in assemblages of local materialities, connections and ecological relations, which have far- reaching and global effects. The writing space I used was a repurposed shipping container, with a view out to Loch Long and the surrounding hills, one of which was storing Britain’s nuclear submarines. Cove Park is made up of a plurality of competing identities: a rural retreat for international artists and writers, a model of sustainable living, a relic of WWII, an elitist concept, a hypocritical marketing/funding ploy, a site of performance, dangerously caught between nuclear military sites and a romantic retreat from the world. There was no internet or mobile service in the shipping container, with a faded ID number stamped on its side as a reminder of where it has travelled, yet power lines cut across the landscape and there were airplane contrails in the expanse of sky. The ‘rural retreat’ was still very much embedded in global networks and a diversity of ecological interrelationships, with only a pair of highland cows, a loch and some mountains as a reminder of the Scottish location.
Cove Park was also the site of a gathering of the 2010–11 AHRC network project ‘Reflecting on Environment Change through Site-Based Performance’ (Performance Footprint) led by Stephen Bottoms. Network members Sally Mackey and Dee Heddon organised a weekend workshop there in February 2011 to explore ideas of living with environmental change, and ecological performance and education, inviting performance responses to the site. The network asked similar questions as this thesis: what are the actual and potential relationships between site-based performance and ecology? How might site-based performance translate to global ecological thinking? I suggest this performance work at Cove Park created responsive engagement with the materialities of the site while simultaneously examining ecological conundrums global in scale, at the intersection of ecological thinking and performance. Historian Dipesh Chakarbarty (2012) argues that ecological issues are bound up with global relations, which requires that all thinking in the current context of the Anthropocene engages with both climate change and globalisation (1). As the global effects of climate change are felt at a local level, the relationship between the local and global becomes more complex. Cove Park, a site of artistic temporary location, is a material example of these complexities and prompted my theorisation of this next aspect of my ecological performance aesthetic, both through being there and through considering the work of the Heddon/Mackey long weekend. Cove Park illustrates the way in which performance and ecology research is engaging with
these complexities because of the work that takes place there. I am suggesting that ecological performance can critique and highlight the interconnectedness of humans and environmental concerns, interrogate the tension between the local and global, and offer up new frames of thinking about and making performance. Taking this as the basic tenet and argument of the thesis, this chapter will critically engage with the concept of eco-cosmopolitanism (Heise 2008) in performance, tracing its roots and considering the way different performance events may be theorised in relation to it. As part of the overall argument of the thesis, I am suggesting eco-cosmopolitanism as an integral concept for an ecological performance aesthetic.
In this chapter, I draw on performance examples as the impetus for theoretical engagement. This strategy is different from the way performance practice is situated in other chapters. Here, the performance examples drove my thinking and theorising as they were the impetus for the evolving of my interpretation of eco-cosmopolitanism (which started out as bricolage, as I mentioned in the Introduction). In consideration of these processes, in the following, I will foreground the performance works, following them up with conceptual engagement. In reviewing the root of eco-cosmopolitanism as cosmopolitanism, the installation #crazyweather (2013), for example, provides a useful starting point for suggesting a relationship between performance and the cosmopolitan effects of climate change. While the Maldives underwater cabinet meeting (2009) is a performative event that illustrates the connection between postcolonialism and climate change. Further examples of performance that enact or reveal eco-cosmopolitanism include those from eco-activist group Liberate Tate and Platform’s Oil
City (2013). I will consider, particularly, Phakama’s Message in a Bottle (2012) and the way in
which water is trans-national and eco-cosmopolitan. Eco-cosmopolitanism is premised on a sense of planet as place, yet Massey (1997) and Harvey (1996) have each argued for senses of place that consider the imbricated nature of the local and global, as well as the flow of capital, cultural differences and access to global mobility. Message in a Bottle problematises absolute deterritorialisation as the local water projects taken on by the participants were more effective that the deterritorialised performance in London. I will also suggest that the materiality of ice in Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing’s Ice Watch (2014) dissects and amplifies eco-cosmopolitan relationships and brings the material effects of climate change into everyday life. Following cultural theorist Ursula K. Heise (2008), I argue that this kind of performance research may ‘highlight the imbrication of local places, ecologies, and cultural practices in global networks’ (210), contributing to the development of an ecological performance aesthetic that advocates for further attention to the ecological potency of performance.
Although isolated on an island in rural Scotland, Cove Park is also embedded in global networks of exchange, or in other words, it is cosmopolitan. In the artists and writers it attracts, to its global perspective on cultural works, it is enmeshed in a number of relationships (ecological and otherwise), which extend beyond ideas of nation or locality. Such tensions between the local and global, inherent and critiqued in ecological performance, are at the heart of this chapter. As Alaimo (2010) suggests there is an ethical dimension to the mesh
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of global ecological relationships: ‘concern and wonder converge when the context for ethics becomes not merely social but material — the emergent, ultimately unmappable landscapes of interacting biological, climatic, economic, and political forces’ (2). In relation to an ecomaterialism perspective, our ecological relationships are bound up with global social and political formations, with ethical dimensions operating on a globe-spanning scale.
From the idea of eco-cosmopolitanism as a central trope for an ecological performance aesthetic, this chapter will consider the way in which local and global tensions are engaged with in performance. The previous chapters have identified and theorised the concepts of immersion and dwelling as underpinning concepts for an ecological performance aesthetic, stimulated by the concept of the bio-urban. Building on the idea that we are immersed in a number of ecological relationships (which are dynamic and processual) and a planetary sense of home, in this chapter, I will trace a line of argument that suggests such ecological performance reveals and critiques the multitude of ways we are embedded in global more-than-human exchanges. I contend that eco-cosmopolitanism is a way of theorising these ecological relationships, in which we are always already participating. However, the concept of planetary community can also be totalising, potentially reinforcing normative and exclusionary ideas. The complex relationship between local and planetary views of place, and the human position within that relationship, is one that ecological performance engages with, manifests and critiques, suggesting that it is characteristic of an ecological performance aesthetic.