S2 Episode 10
In Conversation with Jen Rae
In this episode we are speaking with Jen Rae, an artist-researcher, facilitator and educator whose work focusses on environmental communication with a particular emphasis on cultural responses to climate change.
Jen’s work around the climate emergency has focussed on discourses around food futures, disaster preparedness and speculative futures predominantly explored through multi-platform creative projects, research, facilitation and community alliances.
She is the Director of Fair Share Fare and the Co-founder of Fawkner Commons – creative and research-informed projects that centre food justice, land remediation and social cohesion in the climate emergency context.
In this episode, we discuss
- How the act of speculating future scenarios can benefit us as a society and the richness that creatives can offer into this space
- Jen’s work as a core artist of Arts House’s 5-year Refuge project, an initiative that brings together artists, emergency service providers and communities to rehearse climate-related emergencies and explore the impact of creativity in disaster preparedness
- Refugium, a short film Jen recently co-created with Claire G. Coleman as part of the Refuge project, which delves into the moral dilemmas of compounding existential crises through a fictional scenario of time hacking activists as they face humanity’s greatest challenge
- The importance of preserving the knowledge and skills required to meet the challenge of the climate crisis, making information accessible to our future ancestors and sharing it through meaningful storytelling
- Connectedness in communities, the importance of planning for ‘waves’ of response in compounding disasters, the link between loneliness and fundamentalist thinking and how an activist mindset can be a catalyst for acceptance and connection
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