Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline

Curated workshops, Festival & Publication 

London and UK-wide

Stanley Picker Gallery, 2020-2023

www.sunlightdoesntneedapipeline.com 

Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline is an art, climate justice and collaborative learning project that explores intersectional climate justice and just transition in the arts. Across 2022, it brought together a coalition of over 200 art workers, agitators, dream weavers, makers, and caregivers, as well as local community groups and organisations in the form of workshops, labs, community learning activities, and a community festival to co-create a holistic decarbonisation plan for art workers. You can view the imaginative and useful set of resources as well as documentation, essays and legacy on the website.

Transitioning to a low-carbon planet will affect every facet of daily life but the current paths to decarbonisation, presented to us by politicians, regulators and CEOs, have numerous trade-offs and uncertainties. From Net-Zero fantasies, financialisation of nature to a burn now pay later attitude, each top-down route either reinforces a market-based and extractive approach to the environment, ignores varied individual needs, vulnerabilities and histories, or harms as opposed to protect the planet in its various entanglement of environmental, social, political and sacred ways of being.

Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline sees the climate emergency as a social and political problem, as well as an environmental one. It recognises the interconnectedness of struggles, and in doing so, works to reclaim repair as an initial step towards healing. What does a just transition look like? And how can we heal the imagined future and broken relationships of the present?

Through collective study our coalition asks questions such as: How can intergenerational wealth help communities in the face of climate emergency? What would it mean if we took museums “to the orchards”? What configurations of life are possible after restitution? Is it possible to replace carbon literacy with love?

Together we call for solutions to the climate crisis that not only reduce emissions but create a fairer and more just world in the process. The plan is a gift to all art workers in their own decarbonisation journeys. Gratitude and solidarity to all our contributing artists, researchers, activists, communities, participants and partners.

The project was commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University and it is funded by Stanley Picker Trust and Arts Council England.