Carbon is an essential element to life and yet it has become a public enemy: we are told to avoid, reduce, and eliminate. The workshop ‘Carbon hurt’ poses the question: what is Carbon? And considers how we can collectively generate spaces for solidarity at work.

Participants will be given strategies and tools to achieve this from the Open Curriculum, an experimental alternative education project for the Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline project. The Open Curriculum is a learning resource to be interpreted and activated in discrete working contexts, for arts workers, environmental officers alike, and for wider publics at work to engage with critical questions of climate justice and just transition at work. Together, we will employ slowness as a strategy to mark interdependence, facilitate social interaction and processes of negotiation, and use the Open Curriculum’s four principles (love, dialogue, confidence and coherence) as tools to deploy this strategy and create space for solidarity.

Employing methods of role play and world-building, participants will be invited to enter an atmosphere composition within the Stanley Picker Gallery. The atmosphere composition will be made up of a set of sensorial physical and psychological conditions that participants will need to respond to and negotiate with in order to find solidarity.

In atmospheres we are interested in the set of physiological/environmental conditions that allow us to be alive at the same time we want to inquire about their histories, identities and how we can as individuals become atmospheres for one another (human and more than human) and exist in solidarity. In slowness we are interested in exploring how ‘being slow’ allows us to know someone intimately as opposed to consuming who they are. We believe that ‘being slow’ can help us shift our modes of perception and attune with others, create space for resonance and seep through each other’s atmospheres.