Disaster and Artistic Measures : Hermann Josef Hack’s Project of World Climate Refugee Camp
This thesis is a study of artistic measures and climate refugees, based on Hack’ s World Climate Refugee Camp project. According to Hack, climate refugees appeared with the process of globalization. Hack claimed that the people who put climate refugees in danger are the industrialized nations, and therefore, their rejection of refugees is nonsense. He also stated that the fundamental solution would be the active participation of such nations. Thus, he travels around the world, encouraging participants and globalizing his project. Interestingly, the practical participation method of his climate calamity project is divided into four methods, which are all related to realizing the danger and presenting various solutions. First, the aesthetic of survival: the reason Hack focused on the warming trend and claimed that we have to accept the climate refugees as refugees comes from the thought that we are all potential refugees, and the anxiety that climate refugees may cause war in the end. The solution Hack found for surviving in such a world is to create “refugee camps”to notify people about the seriousness of climate change, and to put the “aesthetic for survival”in action. Second, a relation-oriented relationship: communication between Hack and the participants was done in various ways. They are experiencing a bond and emotions of an interrelationship through their actions in the experimental field, experiencing a new form of art, which they were not able to experience in a museum. Third, a utopian measure: Hack’s utopian measure started from the fear of dystopia but Hack still believes that it is not only a dream, but that it can be realized. He claims that even though the start may be feeble, it is possible to rescue children from starvation and to treat climate refugees as proper human in the end, when communication and cooperation is done the right way and properly. Fourth, the aesthetic of global relation, the internet: the new solution Hack is trying on the internet is to make more people participate in his project. It is fate that “human are the wrongdoer and the victim at the same time”, but according to Hack’s opinion, social disaster can be avoided through effort and it is optimistic that we can give form to the culture revolution we are experiencing now. Hack’s project illustrated the importance of daily life, compared to art inside a museum, through active participation of the people and opened up a new method of art through realistic responses to disasters. This is distinctive from the past exhibitions, where artists gave shape and form to ideals and an imaginary world, in that it shows that the artist and audience aim for creating a community-like structure, just like Bourriaud’s art method. Hack’s project of climate calamity illustrates that installation and action art is not only an art genre which shows installation and activities, but that it can include social and political issues and that it can be completed with the help of participants, consequently becoming a genre of modern art. Hack raises a question about art’s identity through various descriptions. Artists as planners, who base their artworks on their subjectivity or the characteristics of a specific period, the people as participants, the duet of art work and play, human and human, and further, human and nature. The practical participation method, as a measure for “disaster”, reveals the new art of the 21st century within Hack’s artworks. Even though there are several problems with Hack’s usage of art as a measure for disaster, it will actively open up a new page for the 21st century’s art with the theme of disaster.