Arts centre Cove Park is to work with academics in response to the climate change emergency.
The residential centre on the Rosneath Peninsula celebrated its 21st anniversary this year, and from the start has featured upcycled accommodation, with visiting artists staying in converted shipping containers as well as ‘pods’ which were built for the TV series Castaway.
With patrons including Margaret Atwood and Derek Jacobi, it has served as a residential retreat for artists from all over the world, but Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey, who joined as CEO early this year, says her team are now working with academics, as well as politicians and activists.
“We’ve got gigantic issues at stake, probably the biggest threat to humankind so far,” she said.
“It’s apparent that if we work together we may achieve better results, so why don’t we try?
“Cove Park as a collective brain wants to produce collective intelligence, if possible, around global concerns.”
The arts centre is now working with universities including St Andrews, Glasgow, Warwick, Kingston and Liverpool John Moores, as well as Glasgow School of Art, with the aim of creating an arts-based research centre.
To coincide with COP26 there will be a week-long event featuring artists, researchers, academics, scientists, politicians and activists.
“The idea is almost to use Cove Park as an academic campus, it’s a testing ground to see how different formats of conversations and different formats for relationship-making can produce,” said Francesca.
“This is going to be the launch of Cove Park’s first inquiry.
“It’s not going to be like a regular feature, it’s part of a very special year of metamorphosis.
“We are going to be talking about the past well as the future, we’re going to be talking with activists from Greenland as well an organisation in Morocco, as well as a poet from the Marshall Islands.”
Most will join in online, but others will be at Cove Park itself – including the visitor from Greenland, who will then stay in the UK for a month, teaching in London.
“People in Scotland at least will be able to come without having a massive carbon footprint attached to the trip,” said Francesca.
“But it’s also very important especially during COP to make sure that it’s not just the privileged global north to have the opportunity of any climate speech.
“It’s important to have these people physically present when these conversations take place.”
There will also be tangible signs of the arts centre’s focus on climate change – a micro-rainforest is being planted on its 50-acre hilltop site after it was named as named as one of the seven Climate Beacons in conjunction with ACT (Argyll & the Isles Coast & Countryside Trust).
The beacon programme will also feature creative workshops for children and young people, climate cafés, artist workshops in schools and a new moving image or film being commissioned.
In March Cove Park was announced as the winner of a British Council Future By Design open calI, which has seen an outdoor classroom being built, with a sister landscaping installation in the largest public park in Accra, Ghana.
But Francesca stressed that art would always be at the centre for Cove Park, and there would be no compulsion for artists staying there to take part in any of the climate-themed initiatives.
“I believe that we as a society and artists as artists would really benefit from working alongside, or at least having the opportunity to work with, the humanities and the hard sciences as well – and clearly the other way around,” she said.
“I do believe in the conjunction of different brains and I believe that a few people in the same room will probably take a better decision than one person alone when it comes to complex problems and complex issues.
“Also I really believe in the power and the responsibility that artists have, but I’m not entirely sure that society bestows onto them the respect and the status and the acknowledgement that they deserve.
“To place artistic research at the centre, but at the same time alongside scientific and academic research, this may help in making sure that artists can be recognised more as public intellectuals.”
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