Case For Optimism in Riga
In preparation for the Experimental Theatre Festival Homo Alibi/Recycled, which will take place on 30.08.-02.09.2012, already on January 23, 2012, we organize a one day workshop – a Case For Optimism (C4O) – for local artists and producers run by Lucy Neal, freelance arts producer and community activist from London. The aim of the workshop is to help arts practitioners identify their personal roles and collective roles in relation to a sustainable creative practice.
Lucy Neal has been developing a programme of workshops for leaders in the field of arts and culture, exploring responses to the ongoing financial crisis, the end of the oil age and the challenge of climate change. The workshop engages practitioners in a conversation about the role of creativity, culture and art in the challenges of our times. C4O makes space for artistic directors, producers, artists, makers, museum curators, thinkers, activists, educators and policy makers with the addition of environmentalists, energy specialists, psychologists and writers to explore their own personal roles as well as a collective role for the cultural sector.
Case for Optimism facilitates an imaginative space for leaders of cultural and creative organisations and individual practitioners to deepen their understanding of, and creative response to, the inter-related issues of climate change, resource depletion and fiscal crisis. Beginning with gratitude exercises and keynote speeches from inspiring sustainability practitioners, ‘back-casting’ from the future, and exploratory frameworks to move forward, this daylong event embraces fact and feeling, play and challenge, joy and loss in equal measure.
The workshop in Riga includes contributions from Arturs Polis, founder of Ikšķile Transition Iniative, and Jānis Brizga, environmental scientist, professor at the University of Latvia and founder of the NGO “Zaļā brīvība” (The Green Freedom) who will help to frame the environmental, social and economic challenges realistically yet positively for participants.
Imagine2020 is funded with support from the European Union.
