The Big Green is a Creative Europe project that unites environmentally engaged artists, cultural- and performing arts institutions, academics and NGOs, spread across thirteen European countries. Over a period of four years they experiment with ways of using art to promote sustainability and innovate the arts in an eco-sensitive manner.
In order to inspire ecological imagination, we need to encourage change and raise awareness. Artistic imagination stimulates (re)imagination. Both within the ecological field as well as in, and beyond the arts.
The partners that take part in The Big Green are:
New Theatre Institute of Latvia (LV)
University of Bucharest – Hateg UNESCO Geopark (RO)
During their collaboration on various projects, the partners apply a few important values and guidelines that are interwoven in these projects:
Positive Utopias: we urge artists to create forward-looking, positive narratives which expand our imagination and our concept of what is possible.
Artivism: using art as a tool for fostering social change & disseminating critical information about the ecology and the climate.
Ecological Learning: using art as a method of learning about the environment.
Natural Heritage Interpretation: reinterpreting what role our environment plays in our individual and collective identities, our relationship with nature, our responsibility towards it. What do we inherit and what heritage do we pass on to the next generations?
Research: measure and analyze how art can contribute to behavioral change related to social-ecological transformation.
Policy & framework building: sharing best practices, providing guidelines on how artists and scientists can best work together and build a facilitative policy environment to better utilize the potentials of the sector in promoting sustainability.
THE BIG GREEN X COLLECTIEF WALDEN
Collectief Walden is an Amsterdam-based nonfiction, site-specific theatre group that’s been making work about ecology, sustainability and the climate since 2013.
Collectief Walden is one of the partners of the consortium The Big Green and coordinates the project Nature as Inspiration. This project aims to develop and document performances and installations that have an international artistic profile and reach, but innovatively incorporate sustainable production methods and aim to inspire the great societal transformations that Europe is facing. In the coming years, five projects will emerge from Nature as Inspiration:
Het Gewicht van Lucht / The Weight of Air (2023-2024)
The Weight of Air is an open call for artists to create a work locally, along the lines of a
Collectief Walden ‘recipe’ that’s based on the artistic profile and methods of Collectief Walden. The Weight of Air is a collaboration between five commissioning partners in Riga, Wroclaw, Ancona, Faro and Amsterdam. We invite a selected group of international artists to address the shared theme of air, and create a work in their country. Air is so ubiquitous it’s easily taken for granted. It’s volatile, no one seems to own it and yet it’s our collective responsibility. Questions about safety, composition, quality, access, pollution and impact are notoriously difficult to address. We ask artists who are up for a challenge to create a work reflecting on the most pressing local issues surrounding air where they are.
If selected, artists participating in The Weight of Air commit to a collaborative process taking place between October 2023 and July 2024. The individual works will be shown during festivals in each participating country, and will be presented as a visual group exhibition during Művészetek Völgye (Valley of Arts, 2024).
With Latvijas Jaunā Teātra Institūts, Art Transparent, Marche Teatro, Sciaena and Collectief Walden as commissioning partners, and Pro Progressione as Hungarian producer.
Windstilleven / Szélcsendélet (2024)
The Hungarian revival of Collectief Walden’s existing Dutch production WINSTILLEVEN: SZÉLCSENDÉLET at Művészetek Völgye (Valley of Arts), Hungary.
With Pro Progressione as Hungarian co-producer.
SOIL (2024-2025)
Soil is an open call for artists to create a work locally, along the lines of a
Collectief Walden ‘recipe’ that’s based on the artistic profile and methods of Collectief Walden The Weight of Air is a collaboration between five commissioning partners in Riga, Wroclaw, Ancona, Faro and Budapest.
Soil is one of the most sensitive and large organs on this planet. Disturbed ecosystems as well as disturbed balances are reflected in its deteriorating quality. Polluted soils, deforestation, degraded soil, conflict over resources, agricultural monoculture: a lot of the climate change processes that are occurring can be linked to soil. This open call encourages artists to reimagine and reshape the relationship between soil, humans and the rapidly changing balances on this earth.
We ask the artist to investigate their local (issues around) soil, and to be open to adjusting their practice to the site-specific conditions of their location.Working with the shared theme of SOIL the artists are invited to create a site-specific work in their country.
If selected, artists participating in The Weight of Air commit to a collaborative process taking place between September 2024 and August 2025. The individual works will be shown during festivals in each participating country, and will be presented during Homo Novus International Festival of Contemporary Theatre.
With Latvijas Jaunā Teātra Institūts, Art Transparent, Marche Teatro, Sciaena and Pro Progressione as commissioning partners, and Collectief Walden as coordinating partner.
I Was Born by the Water (2026)
I Was Born by the Water is a new international co-production, a landscape theatre show exploring what divides, and what unites Europe, through the lense of Europe’s great bodies of water and the European Watershed.
The project will run simultaneously in Portugal and The Netherlands, at various ends of European bodies of water. With Sciaena as Portugese co-producer.
Amsterdam Residencies (2027)
From the five artists or artist groups selected by both Marche Teatro and Jauna Teatra Instituts for the open calls, Collectief Walden will invite two participants to residencies in Amsterdam, leading up to the Over het IJ Festival, where these artists will present a work. Further Amsterdam partners will be Tolhuistuin and the Academy of Theatre and Dance.
