Salt Road co-director Dr Sally Payen is part of Basque Centre for Climate Change’s ARSTCIENCE. Exploring the ways in which scientists and artists can work together to co-produce knowledge for sustainability.

‘There is a broad agreement that transformation towards sustainability is an urgent need to tackle the current environmental (biodiversity, climate, pollution) and social crises (IPBES). The concept of transformation towards sustainability is broadly characterized across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.’

‘Yet, transformation requires both understanding complex social-ecological systems (knowledge) and developing innovative processes able to change values, rules and practices in the appropriate direction (creativity). Current approaches to generate change often rely heavily on cognitive and passively transmissive forms of knowledge, neglecting embodied and experiential approaches based on creativity, which perpetuates siloed thinking and impedes the comprehensive integration of diverse ways of knowing necessary for generating sustainable, equitable, and enduring change towards sustainability.’

The Nature of Cities Festival

Salt Road’s co-director Jaime Jackson is part of The Nature of Cities Festival Europe OASIS consortium developing a proposal to work across five cities in Europe. OASIS’s goal is to advance a richly integrated framework for understanding, evaluating, and (re-imagining) co-producing common spaces that enable social inclusion, environmental resilience, democratic participation, and cultural (the flourishing of diverse Cultures) in urban peripheries spaces neighborhoods—through innovative, transdisciplinary methods, participatory engagement, and policies of design strategy that reflect lived experience. If the consortium’s bid is successful Salt Road will lead on the Artist Commission program across all cities and deliver socially engaged digital artworks with local partners and communities in partnership with Norwegian University of Life Sciences and Wageningen University.

Proposed sites:

Sheffield (Abbeyfield Park / Parkwood Springs) demonstrates community stewardship and repair culture as drivers of inclusion.

Barcelona (Canòdrom) explores democratic innovation and digital inclusion as contemporary forms of the commons.

Berlin (Wriezener Park / Nirgendwo) examines ecological regeneration and coexistence of different communities of people in dense urban environments.

Nijmegen (HEEM) integrates creative (approaches to) participation and care economies within new housing development.

Sarajevo (Museum Plaza) reconnects fragmented cultural institutions through civic and cultural and learning spaces.