The Current Climate: Launch Event

This event is free to attend and you do not need to book a ticket in advance.

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When it comes to climate change, what message is the music industry sending?

In the free-to-attend launch event for our new flagship series The Current Climate, we’ll be looking at the cultural world’s far-reaching influence on sustainability issues, and considering issues that involve artists, organisers and audiences around the world. Creative work has the power to emphasise and amplify our relationship to the environment, shaping our thinking and pointing to solutions.

Creative work has the power to emphasise and amplify our relationship to the environment, shaping our thinking and pointing to solutions. Through a panel discussion involving activists, programmers and representatives of the West Yorkshire region, we’ll focus on the responsibility of everyone involved in producing creative work in the music industry, as well as the infrastructure that supports it, considering ways we can generate conversations with our audiences aimed at building a greener sector.

Throughout this discussion we’ll be looking holistically at the industry’s potential as a positive force for a sustainable future. We’ll think about how artists channel environmental activism through their music, while also examining the idea of industry messaging – how promoters, organisers and festivals make climate change the topic sentence of their programming.

The discussion will be followed by a performance from Hayley Suvsite, a sound artist whose work is in constant conversation with the environment.

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Panellists:

Ryoko Akama is a representative from Culture Declares Emergency (CDE), Kirklees. A musician and programmer, Ryoko runs ame, an artist-collective organisation supporting experimental and contemporary music across Huddersfield, commissioning and presenting work for the DAI Hall venue.

Helen Brook is a project coordinator for Sustainable Arts in Leeds (SAIL), a not for profit network of Leeds-based organisations and individuals in the cultural sector looking to ensure a ‘zero carbon/zero waste’ future for the creative industries.

Cllr Will Simpson is the Secretary and Cabinet Member for Culture and Greener Kirklees.

Graham McKenzie is the Artistic Director of hcmf// (Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival).
Jo Kennedy works across projects that connect people with nature and their local environment. She is a co-director at Yorkshire Sound Women Network.

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Performers:

Working across field recording, archival sound, electronic hardware and live instrumentation, Hayley Suvsite uses her music to explore community and culture. Her work draws on first-hand oral histories and is made in close collaboration with those who can provide the most accurate document of their environment. Much of her music is immersed in the rural and urban narratives of her local Manchester, observing the city’s threatened natural spaces and our experiences preserving and polluting them.

Read our feature profile on Hayley’s work here. https://hcmf.co.uk/hayley-suviste/

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About the Current Climate:

This year, we’re proud to be launching The Current Climate, a new season of creative work focusing on climate change and sustainability in the music industry. Through a range of discussions, performances, workshops and commissioned projects that ask questions about the challenges we face in making culture greener, we’ll be inviting our community to explore our relationship with the environment.

The Current Climate will run throughout our 2022 and 2023 festival programmes, and will also be a prominent feature of our year-round activity. These events will be collaborative and explorative by design; we’re not claiming to be an authority on environmental sustainability, and we’re not aiming to settle a conversation. Instead, we want to bring in voices, identify issues, ask questions and share ideas with artists, audiences and other organisations. Through this season of work, we’ll imagine what change in the music industry might look, and sound, like.

For more information visit https://hcmf.co.uk/the-current-climate-culture-and-its-potential-to-inspire-positive-climate-action/