The Climate Crisis and Contemporary African Art
Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh , University of Basel, Switzerland
Biography
Sindi-Leigh McBride is a writer and scholar from Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in African Studies (University of Basel). Her essays and fiction have appeared in numerous outlets, and she co-edited Lost Libraries, Burnt Archives (2023). From Fall 2024, she will be a Postdoctoral Researcher at Princeton University.
Introduction
At the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art, Sindi-Leigh McBride worked on a book project based on her PhD research at the University of Basel. Her book investigates how art can make us think about the climate crisis in Africa, exploring how contemporary African and diasporic artists working across mediums offer insights into the causes, impacts and lived realities of climate change on the continent.
Research
During my EARTH Scholarship, I was hosted by the Edinburgh College of Art where I worked on developing the first chapters of a book project based on my doctoral dissertation, The Politics and Poetics of Climate Change in South and Nigeria. This was a cumulative dissertation, comprising five peer reviewed journal articles and a synopsis, that investigated climate change in South Africa and Nigeria, through contemporary art and literature.
Before I actually sat down to write, the experience of learning more about Scottish creative practice, especially in relation to visual arts, was incredibly beneficial. Specifically, the emphasis on botanicals and the guided tour of exhibitions at Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh were especially stimulating for the issues that I engage in my research. It was however the influence of my cohort that proved to be the most impactful.
Elemental questions
During the cohort training programme, there were a few dissenting voices – regularly voicing criticism, questioning framings and challenging inherited approaches to knowledge production – that deeply appealed to my abiding interest in questions of epistemic injustice. These are questions of relevance from Scotland to Somalia, in the environmental humanities and beyond, elemental questions that get to the heart of what it means to do research. At the end of the cohort training, we went our separate ways, and I knuckled down to write my newfound learnings into my chapters.
But some questions snagged, particularly around an identified shared interest in ‘elemental thinking’ that seems to increasingly proliferate in the environmental humanities and affiliated fields. I got in touch with two of my cohort members who had expressed interest in learning more about this topic and proposed a reading group. Together, we assembled a reading list that included publications like Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas (2010) by David MaCauley; Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater (2020) by Melody Jue and Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice (2022) edited by Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig de la Bellacasa and Natasha Myers.
This reading group is ongoing, but initiating it helped me to frame my thinking around starting my book, which begins with a discussion of an exhibition by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, from where I draw the idea of elemental solidarity as a conceptual framework. It also inspired me to pay closer attention to how actual elements have been discussed in art, science, history and technology, leading me to visit a wonderful hybrid of the two: Elements: From Actinium to Zirconium at the Ulster Museum in Belfast!
I am happy to report that I have finished writing my first three chapters as initially proposed, with all these diverse influences having wound their way onto the page and will soon be submitting my proposal to publishers!
