ART DOESN'T MATTER WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE
Dylan Todd (Music Technology)
Project Description
Gen Z is poised to be our leaders in the fight for climate justice but our minds are breaking at the emese weight of the global situation. Our activism and art focused on disasters, mistakes, and fear or at best hopefully solutions that to a nihilist seem like a liberal pipedream. Our focus on sustaining the environment is not sustainable on our minds. Multiple times a week, I watch my Gen Z friends shut down a minute into a conversation about politics or climate crisis due to the overwhelming weight it causes. We are traumatized and our “I won't make a difference so it doesn't matter” attitude is a response to protect ourselves. I want my project to be a collective release and sharing of our trauma. We as a generation have moved the political social and mental health conversation forward drastically but are seemingly avoiding the vulnerability thats required to help each other as a community. How often we preach about checking in on each other but never do. We need to craft a social movement or attitude of sharing the burden together and creating tools to help our activism stay sustainable.
Am I making those tools with this piece? Hell no. But I do want to create a beautiful spectacle that prompts joy, community, and questions about our own shared trauma, fears, and anxiety around climate change.
Core questions
How can we center community, love, and mental sustainability within the climate movement?
How do we collectively address the mental burden and trauma climate disasters and impact is having on us? It often goes unspoken even in academic spaces. We focus so heavily on the disaster that we forget ourselves and our well being.
As Gen Z how can we address our shitty attitude towards the world. We are overwhelmingly pessimistic and tend to give up when faced with challenges. This attitude is a trauma response to disasters we have repeatedly faced since our birth as a generation. Instead of cynicism and anger how can we heal as a generation and bring ourselves to a better place and effect change?
What are you missing physically or mentality to provide you the self sustainability to avoid burnout?
Do we unravel as one or we regenerate as one?
What can we learn and incorporate from queer escapism?
Is finding time to enjoy life and community imperative to sustainable climate activism?
Context
This project is focused primarily on Gen Z, but also intended to be a learning tool to help older generations understand Gen Z trauma around the weight of climate change.
“Our heart is moved by what we cannot save.
“We unravel as one or we regenerate as one.”
“Loss is guaranteed to come, we are at the point of gross imbalance where “to save” Is now imperative. This word, from the old French savur - keep, protect, redeem - offers us a chance to restore and rebuild, to recommit ourselves. But saving doesn’t mean holding on to or petrifying current system’s- quite the opposite. It means retrieving a ways of living and being that have been side lined and suppressed. “
- Adrienne Rich, Natural Resources
The Lancet’s Reporting on Climate Anxiety in Young People
Dylan Todd (Music Technology)
Project Description
Gen Z is poised to be our leaders in the fight for climate justice but our minds are breaking at the emese weight of the global situation. Our activism and art focused on disasters, mistakes, and fear or at best hopefully solutions that to a nihilist seem like a liberal pipedream. Our focus on sustaining the environment is not sustainable on our minds. Multiple times a week, I watch my Gen Z friends shut down a minute into a conversation about politics or climate crisis due to the overwhelming weight it causes. We are traumatized and our “I won't make a difference so it doesn't matter” attitude is a response to protect ourselves. I want my project to be a collective release and sharing of our trauma. We as a generation have moved the political social and mental health conversation forward drastically but are seemingly avoiding the vulnerability thats required to help each other as a community. How often we preach about checking in on each other but never do. We need to craft a social movement or attitude of sharing the burden together and creating tools to help our activism stay sustainable.
Am I making those tools with this piece? Hell no. But I do want to create a beautiful spectacle that prompts joy, community, and questions about our own shared trauma, fears, and anxiety around climate change.
Core questions
How can we center community, love, and mental sustainability within the climate movement?
How do we collectively address the mental burden and trauma climate disasters and impact is having on us? It often goes unspoken even in academic spaces. We focus so heavily on the disaster that we forget ourselves and our well being.
As Gen Z how can we address our shitty attitude towards the world. We are overwhelmingly pessimistic and tend to give up when faced with challenges. This attitude is a trauma response to disasters we have repeatedly faced since our birth as a generation. Instead of cynicism and anger how can we heal as a generation and bring ourselves to a better place and effect change?
What are you missing physically or mentality to provide you the self sustainability to avoid burnout?
Do we unravel as one or we regenerate as one?
What can we learn and incorporate from queer escapism?
Is finding time to enjoy life and community imperative to sustainable climate activism?
Context
This project is focused primarily on Gen Z, but also intended to be a learning tool to help older generations understand Gen Z trauma around the weight of climate change.
“Our heart is moved by what we cannot save.
“We unravel as one or we regenerate as one.”
“Loss is guaranteed to come, we are at the point of gross imbalance where “to save” Is now imperative. This word, from the old French savur - keep, protect, redeem - offers us a chance to restore and rebuild, to recommit ourselves. But saving doesn’t mean holding on to or petrifying current system’s- quite the opposite. It means retrieving a ways of living and being that have been side lined and suppressed. “
- Adrienne Rich, Natural Resources
The Lancet’s Reporting on Climate Anxiety in Young People
