Dalla nostra collaboratrice a New York Olivia Paone – Il 16 settembre, la Foley Gallery, una galleria d’arte contemporanea nel Lower East Side di Manhattan, ha organizzato una mostra pop-up curata dalla Columbia Journalism Review, alcuni giorni prima del Summit delle Nazioni Unite sul clima.
La mostra, Flood the News, chiama tutti i giornalisti ad agire e riferire sulle questioni relative alla crisi climatica.
La crisi climatica globale è stata artisticamente visualizzata esponendo circa 50 prime pagine danneggiate dei giornali mondiali e trattandole per mostrare gli effetti del cambiamento climatico sulle comunità di tutto il mondo. I dati scientifici sono stati tradotti in una visualizzazione degli effetti negativi del riscaldamento globale sul giornale. I giornali erano bruciati, danneggiati dall’acqua e alcuni congelati. Sono stati trattati per visualizzare le realtà sfortunate dell’innalzamento del livello del mare, pericolose ondate di calore e siccità, nonché lo scioglimento delle calotte glaciali, per citare alcuni effetti negativi del riscaldamento globale. E’ un peccato che la mostra sia stata solo un pop-up e non un’ esposizione di più lunga durata per il pubblico. Si è trattato anche di un’occasione per dimostrare l’efficacia di una mostra nello scatenare, sollecitare azioni per riferire notizie. L’arte e la visualizzazione della crisi climatica possono essere un linguaggio che i giornalisti (come tutti) possono comprendere per poi sentirsi portati all’azione nei loro articoli da comunicare al pubblico.
On September 16, the Foley Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, held a pop-up exhibition curated by the Columbia Journalism Review days before the United Nations Climate Action Summit. The exhibition, Flood the News, calls all journalists to take action and report on issues surrounding the climate crisis. The United Nations (UN) held its 2019 Climate Action Summit in New York on September 23rd.
The United States did not request a speaking slot at the summit and President Donald Trump said the United States intends to withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate accord, an agreement that aims to decrease global warming. He had once described climate change as a Chinese plot to weaken US manufacturing, and the Trump Administration has not taken action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. According to an IPCC report released in May, the planet has eleven
years left to take action on the climate crisis and yet in 2018, news shows have spent a combined total of only 142 minutes reporting on the climate crisis.
The void in US political and news reporting leadership to address and ebb the climate crisis was filled by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). The CJR organized an exhibition whose aim was to spark reporting on the climate crisis in the news.
The exhibition titled, Flood the News: Bringing the Climate Change Crisis to the Front Page, invited over 250 journalists from news organizations around the world to the opening on September 16 and called them to action to report on the climate crisis. The global climate crisis was artistically visualized by exhibiting around 50 damaged front pages of world newspapers and treating them to show the effects of climate change on communities around the world.
Scientific data was translated into a visualization of the negative effects of global warming on newspaper.
Newspapers were scorched, water damaged, and some frozen. They were treated to visualize the ill-fated realities of rising sea levels, dangerous heat waves and droughts, as well as melting ice caps, to name a few negative effects of global warming. Global newspapers were exhibited including the: El Paris (Spain), Moscow Times (Russia), Die Zeit (Germany), Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), The Wall Street Journal (New York) and the Australian (Austria) to name a
few.
On August 21, the Washington Post’s bleached front page visualizes the heavy rainfall and rising temperatures faced by the nation’s capital. On the caption below the front page, it says that if no serious climate action is taken, the D.C. region can expect nearly ten times as many days each year that feel like 100 degrees. There was an average of seven such days in 200, and the number could reach 70 in 2100. The front page of The Australian visualized the record drought the country faced in 2018 and studies project up to a nine-degree Fahrenheit rise in average temperatures by late in the century which could result in devasting effects to the Great Barrier Reef and agriculture. The front page of the Moscow Times illustrates the thawing permafrost across the Arctic which threatens infrastructure and the newspaper was treated to simulate this climate effect.
It’s too bad that the exhibition was just a pop-up and not on display longer for the public to view. It also calls into question the efficacy of an exhibition to spark action in news reporting. Can art and a visualization of the climate crisis be a language that that journalists understand
and are moved to action by in their reporting. (Olivia Paone)