Dinner for the Future 2021-22

Project Lead: Dr Suzie Fraser, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA)

Project Researchers: Dr Danielle Wyatt, Faculty of Arts & Prof Timothy Reeves, Victoria Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub

i. Melbourne Climate Futures, CRX Funding 2021

In 2021, CoVA received funding from the newly launched Melbourne Climate Futures (MCF) institute towards the CCR Studio. As the only creative arts project funded by MCF in its first round of CRX grants, the CCR Studio represented an experimental and innovative intervention into discussions around climate futures at the University of Melbourne. Funding for this project also highlights an emerging acceptance that novel and experimental approaches are now necessary in order to surmount challenges in preparing for unforeseen climate conditions in the future.

This project began to take shape with discussions between Suzie Fraser, Danielle Wyatt, Timothy Reeves and two longstanding members of the Dookie community, Elizabeth Evans and Andrew Sands. Evans and Sands previously worked at the Dookie campus as coordinators of the Seed Bank. Evans and Sands are also practising artists and have worked as creative producers and gallerists, with their expertise bridging the environmental and cultural sectors. Through their social and professional connections, several community members from Dookie were invited to participate in a working group to discuss the necessities and requirements of community resilience, along with a group of agriculture researchers and postgraduate students from the Dookie campus. The group first met together in March 2022, sitting outside at dusk at the campus.

The activities staged through the MCF funding included a series of workshops and a semi-performative exhibition titled ‘Dinner for the Future’.

ii. Creative Workshops 2022

Following several months of discussions between campus and community participants, a series of creative-led workshops were planned to build rapport among the working group and co-design the story that would be experienced and told at the ‘Dinner for the Future’ in September 2022.

The themes of the workshops reflected early discussions among the working group and comprised: ‘climate grief’, ‘interspecies empathy’, and two workshops on ‘making things’. These were identified by the group as necessary issues to address to prepare for uncertain environmental conditions and to rectify problematic characteristics of our current experiences of the environment.

In early discussions among the group, climate-related grief was identified as an experience which is often suppressed through media and consumer distractions, leading to destructive and disassociated interactions with the environment by individuals and organisations. By giving time to exploring grief together in the first workshop (led by artist and playwright Luna Mrozik Gawler), the group opened a discussion of the experience of climate grief as a valuable stage in moving from inertia to active participation in preparing for our climate futures.

Empathy was also identified as a valuable tool for building preparedness, particularly in relation to interspecies care. If the health of the environment is affected detrimentally by human neglect – through pollution, waste and excessive reliance on extractive industries – care for the environment and the other species (plant and animal) we share the planet with is seen as necessary to improve the health of the environment going forward. And through that, to improve the experience of communities. Empathy was identified as a decentering of the individual human experience: placing oneself where another stands.

For the interspecies empathy workshop, the working group met outdoors on a local farm and spent time discussing: the experiences of animals and plants on the farm, the experiences of former farmers in the group and what they hoped for regarding future farming practices, and Yorta Yorta experiences of caring for Country (led by Neville Atkinson). The group shared in a mindfulness exercise and undertook meditation with sheep on the farm. The creative space-making and exercises of this workshop were also focused on spending time outside and making time to encourage dialogue between individuals and species.

The final set of two workshops were designed as sessions to make things for the set of the ‘Dinner for the Future’ performance. Since the idea for the dinner was for the working group to perform into a future time (2040), the making things workshops also provided opportunities to discuss approaches to futuring that might be utilised by the group – including a shared costume, any particular foods we might eat that would be different from commonly eaten foods in 2022 (such as a greater proportion of plant-based products and more emphasis on Indigenous plants), and narrative shaping techniques from writers like Ursula K. Le Guin. By sharing skills in making art objects and sharing expertise in innovative farming practices and ecologically sound lifestyles and diets, the group used the making things workshops as a hub of exchange, reciprocity and creative practice.

The four creative workshops proved highly successful in building trust among the group (spanning campus and community members), opening up conversations around resilience and possible shared futures, and developing a premise for the performative final activity in which members of the working group would dine together twenty years in the future.

iii. Presentation at Science to Practice Forum 2022

In June 2022, the CCR Studio was put forward by the Victoria Drought Hub to represent the Dookie campus in the Future Drought Fund’s Science to Practice Forum. Fraser, Evans and Sands presented on behalf of the project articulating information about the activities to date and describing their respective relationships with the Dookie region. As one of the only arts presentations invited to present at the 3-day conference, the CCR studio was prominent in the program and the presenters received a number of messages and emails from other attendees related to future collaboration opportunities.

The Science to Practice Forum was a high-profile, national platform to profile the creative-led methods of the CCR Studio. With agriculture researchers, industry representatives and policy makers at the Forum, communicating the project’s aims clearly was essential, in part using scientific and policy language to explain creative arts strategies such as “semi-performance” and “futuring”.

Profiling the project in a public and national conversation about climate change resilience, related to both environment and community, was an important step in securing impact for the project outside of the cultural sector. Moreover, the nature of this project meant that arts practice was represented not as an illustrating tool, but as a dynamic suite of processes and strategies through which new ideas could be shaped.

iv. Dinner for the Future

On 10 September 2022, a group of artists, ecologists and University of Melbourne staff gather in an old farm shed at Dookie campus to share a meal together in 2040. The room is decorated with native grasses knotted into rhythmical sculptures and draped over old farm equipment, and vertical paintings of mycelial networks hanging from enormous 1960s blackboards. A long table is situated in the middle of the space, covered with edible mushrooms, cooked snacks, papier-mâché tubers, and simple clay bowls. On a chair nearby is a small screen playing a video of a living plant being lacquered in sticky nail varnish. Projecting across the whole space are sounds recorded in a remnant stand of white cypress pine adjacent to the rail trail path in Dookie – birds peeping and chirping and the whisper of air though trees. All of these art works were made in 2022 and have been placed in the shed to set the scene for the Dinner for the Future.

The attendees are dressed in light-coloured natural fibres. They are there with the dual purpose of sharing stories for the benefit of their past selves and enacting future visions in which they are living more positively with the environment than they are in the present. One of those purposes is more real, but through equal parts enthusiasm and slippage it is not always clear which it is.

This semi-performative dinner was planned as a playful ritual to tie together the many strands of conversation held across the CCR Studio activities to date. During the initial discussions between Fraser, Wyatt, Reeves, Evans and Sands, rituals of sharing a meal together were identified as universal experiences that might allow for a futuring exercise – playing into the near future – to stay grounded. Particularly given that none of the working group were actors, sharing food together seemed to be an identifiable way to understand the otherwise experimental experience of semi-performance everyone would participate in. Moreover, since the project centred on the campus and surrounding area of Dookie, where largescale farming had been a dominant force in community goings-on for more than a century, food cultures seemed like a fitting lens through which to consider how we can live – and perhaps thrive – in a climate changed world.

Among the working group, it was openly affirmed that our current industrial farming practices in 2022 were contributing to the devastation of soil health and contributing actively to climate change. Moreover, with rapidly growing populations and unstable economic conditions, more people in our communities needed to be fed more cheaply. In the context of this regional Victorian farming community, how could we approach discussions of our climate futures without first discussing our food futures?

What did 2040 look and feel like for the group? While there was an extended drought and a lot of devastation wrought by climate change, a lot had also changed for the better since 2022. We were farming multiple and complimentary species of crops alongside each other; soils were retaining moisture due to thriving mycorrhizal fungi; we were growing, cooking and eating more plants native to Australia; we were privileging the knowledge of living Indigenous cultures; and we were active in contributing to our adaptation and resilience. We were there at the dinner because we intended to be active.

After initially considering presenting the ‘Dinner for the Future’ for a public audience, it was felt that the first exercise in this semi-performance should be for the working group only; almost like a rehearsal. There was some nervousness and uncertainty, all of which was completely understandable – we were time traveling, after all.

Image credit: Jeremy Lines, 2022.