The Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) is an artist group working in regional NSW with farming communities facing the challenges of ongoing drought, land degradation and the impacts of a changing climate.
Objectives
KSCA seeks to contribute to the efforts of farming communities to effect meaningful cultural change, and build resilience, well being and community cohesion through socially engaged art projects.
We seek to apply the strategies and practices developed within art to challenge convention, change perceptions, facilitate communication, and strengthen collaborative capacity.
Method/approach
The principal concept behind KSCA’s methodology is that of art as cultural adaptation: the understanding that art is the process through which we adapt culture to better respond to our changing world. The primary implication being that this activity is not exclusive to the art world, and that in fact it is practiced wherever people adapt their culture in response to social and material change.
Our work to date has predominantly engaged with farming communities across regional NSW who are seeking to adapt the culture of farming practice to methods that improve soil health and biology, reduce chemical inputs, and increase water retention. This change is driven by economic and environmental factors and has brought us into contact with farmers directly responding to the diminishing rationale of conventional farming in the face of ongoing drought, land degradation and climate change.
Key findings
Our methodology has developed across three major projects through which we explore the capacity of art to participate in cultural change outside of the art world. My presentation will follow the KSCA journey as it has so far unfolded, with a focus on the questions that have arisen and the discoveries made along the way. What, for instance, can art contribute to the efforts of a community to effect meaningful cultural change?
How do we negotiate the needs of a community to communicate across the differences of its members? How can we communicate the social and material realities of isolated rural communities with broader audiences, with decision makers, and stakeholders?
How do we reach out to and engage with the more conservative members of the communities we are working with? How can our activity reinforce the natural strengths of a community to support its members while permitting it to undergo the difficult processes of effecting meaningful change?
Conclusions
If we take the founding assumption of cultural adaptation as given, that art does not begin in the art world, it leads us to the conclusion that art need not end in the art world either. Art need not end its life as an object in a gallery, but can contribute its energy, its capacity to reflect, challenge, communicate, strengthen and affirm the endeavour of communities seeking to effect positive change within their own context.
Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation.
Poster.
#FarmingAgricultureLandManagement