Taliesin Arts Centre is to host Everything Change, a series of discussions and events exploring the roles creativity, adaptive thinking and storytelling can play in overcoming the challenges of the climate crisis.
Featuring an international array of contributors from across the arts and creative industries, as well as the sciences, law, business, public policy, activism and education, Everything Change is a unique forum for generating debate and new ideas, driven by some of the most urgent questions of our times.
The 10-day programme will open on Thursday 10 June with novelist, poet, inventor, and two-time Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood.
Sadaf Saaz, Director of the Dhaka Lit Fest and co-programmer of Everything Change, will join Margaret to explore how writers and artists could contribute to a revolution of the communal imagination and the need to discover new forms of storytelling to meet our moment of crisis.
Sadaf said: “We are very excited about the rich interdisciplinary nature of the panels, which will explore how we can tackle the enormous challenges ahead.
“Creative artists and writers will be at the intersection of these conversations, exploring and envisaging alternate ways of how we see the world and our place in it.”
Eight online events will follow, focusing on key areas of change, Money, Food, Water, Energy, Justice, Story, and Change itself, each featuring a diverse mix of international experts and thought leaders in their fields, as well as an artist provocation.
Everything Change is a free, ticketed virtual event and includes live English captioning.
Tickets and more information on Everything Change can be found on the Taliesin Arts Centre website.
Professor Paul Boyle, Vice-Chancellor of Swansea University, said: “The impressive list of contributors, drawn from diverse fields and countries across the world, reflects our University’s belief that the climate emergency is a shared responsibility that transcends academic disciplines and national borders, and in which we all have a part to play.
“We are very grateful to the British Council for their support and are proud to be representing Wales on the global climate action stage.”
The Everything Change programme will conclude on Saturday 19 June with a closing keynote event introduced and moderated by Owen Sheers, Professor in Creativity at Swansea University, and a co-curator of the Everything Change programme.
Professor Sheers said: “We urgently need to recalibrate how we talk about, imagine, and tell stories about our relationships with nature, future generations, and how we live now.
“I'm incredibly excited by the minds and voices we're bringing together for Everything Change and by how these events might contribute to our imagining and making happen a better, brighter future for all.'
Professor Sheers will be joined by current Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Simon Armitage, and Taylor Edmonds, the recently appointed Poet in Residence for the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales — the first of its kind anywhere in the world.
Also part of the programme is the Everything Change Writers' Lab, which has been generously supported as one of the British Council's 'Creative Commissions for the Climate'.
Produced in partnership with Dhaka Lit Fest and activated by the Everything Change events programme, the Lab will provide an engine for six incredible writing talents from Wales and Bangladesh to create new narratives in response to the climate crisis.
The writers' commissioned works across poetry, fiction and drama will be showcased at Dhaka Lit Fest in January 2022. Full details of participating writers and COP 26 showcase to be announced soon.