Tag Archives: climate change
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The Glasgow Effect
The Glasgow Effect was a multi-layered ‘research project‘, which took place in 2016. Its central provocation was that Harrison would refuse to travel beyond Glasgow’s city limits, or use any vehicles except her bike, for a whole calendar year (1 January – 31 December 2016). On 8 January 2017, she gave a talk about the work at the Glasgow Film Theatre. On 4 November 2019, she publishes a book providing the full context for her thinking and action.
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Sustainability in Practice
Speaking at the Culture & Sustainability event organised by Julie’s Bicycle at The Tetley in Leeds, Harrison discusses the challenges and consequences of putting ‘sustainability’ into practice; specifically: her life-long project Early Warning Signs, her Environmental Policy and how her breaches of its Transportation section led to The Glasgow Effect.
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For Love or Money
Created in 2015 to highlight the main causes of Harrison’s breaches to her own Environmental Policy and the amount of carbon each produced, For Love or Money paved the way for The Glasgow Effect in 2016.
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Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund
Initiated by Harrison in 2015, the Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund (RRAAF) aims to be a new and autonomous funding scheme, which will use renewable energy to offer ‘no strings attached’ grants for art-activist projects in the UK.
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Venice Biennale: Think Local, Act Global!
Harrison self-critically reflects on the experience of taking part in the 2015 Venice Biennale (as part of Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf) in this short text for Press Room, which laid the groundwork for The Glasgow Effect in 2016. (Word count: 760)
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Life Raft
Designed as the final hole of Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf, Life Raft – a scale map of the UK floating in the adjacent canal – offers a safe haven to immigrant golf balls that can make the treacherous crossing. In a typically playful way, Harrison’s work hints towards a somewhat darker time in the future, when the continued rise in global temperatures creates a vast number of ‘climate refugees’ desperate to escape to more temperate climes.
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Dark Days
An event by Ellie Harrison offering one hundred participants the unique opportunity to stay the night in the great hall of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow as part of a pop-up community.
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The Global Race
The Global Race is an absurd vision of an Olympic games of the future, in which the brilliance of human ‘innovation‘ means we no longer need to break a sweat! At an athletics track in central Berlin, a group of ‘elite athletes’ and members of the public competed in a series of races on Segways.
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Progress Report
Created in 2014 by analysing more than a decade of personal data, Progress Report reveals how, despite espousing “sustainability“, Harrison’s own lifestyle (measured in ‘work’ – no. emails sent and ‘leisure’ – no. lengths swimming) has simply been mirroring capitalism’s “growth fetish”.
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Power For The People!
In this comment piece for The Ecologist, Harrison details how her concerns about climate change led her to start campaigning for the public ownership of our essential services and infrastructure with Bring Back British Rail and Power For The People. (Word count: 766)
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The Other Forecast
Recorded LIVE in front of a green screen, Harrison’s The Other Forecast offers her summary of the absurd consequences of capitalism, as a warning about the future we are heading towards if the system continues unchecked. Broadcast on the Big Screen at MediaCityUK in November 2013 as part of The Other Forecast project – a collaboration between Harrison & John O’Shea.
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Power For The People
Harrison launched Bring Back British Rail’s ‘sister campaign’ Power for the People in October 2013 in order to popularise the idea of returning the UK’s energy production and supply to public ownership. Together the campaigns aim to ‘join the dots’ between our most carbon-intensive industries and services to make evident the need to remove the profit-motive from all of them in order to meet the challenges of climate change.
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Bring Back British Rail
As founder of the Bring Back British Rail campaign, Harrison was invited to write about the public ownership of our railways for the Green Party of England & Wales’s The New Home Front II (p.41-42) in 2012, which looks to the post-war period for lessons on how to tackle climate change now. (Word count: 709)
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A Good Climate for Business
Written by Harrison for Artsadmin in response to her residency at Two Degrees festival in 2011. This text details her attempts to explore the relationship between capitalism and climate change, which led to the development of Work-a-thon for the Self-Employed and Early Warning Signs. (Word count: 2,758)
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Early Warning Signs
One of Harrison’s contributions to Two Degrees festival in 2011 and now on a life-long tour of UK arts venues. These four signs were designed to mimic those you might find outside a garage or a Bureau de Change. On a mission ‘promote’ climate change, they try hard to grab the attention of passers-by.
Project website