Cédric Carles
Interview
What is the motivation behind your work?
As an artist I’ve been obsessed with the climate emergency since 2001 and created Atelier21, when I met people from the Swiss IPCC in Lausanne. I was shocked when I realised that extreme weather conditions are coming and saw the inertia of society (and even my friends and family on these topics). All my energy as an artist and inventor/innovator is focused on the impact we can make to change this situation. To do this it is essential that we bring people together, whether it is through a dance floor or creating a shared infrastructure, my work is aimed at enabling people to build an inspiring future together.
Please Talk A Bit About The Process Of Your Work.
My work has always been highly collaborative. I’m from a generation of artists who work collectively, rather than as a "solitary genius". As Emmanuel Tibloux, director of the National School of Decorative Arts expresses it: “In art and design schools, the priority is not to train solitary geniuses, but to contribute to the emergence of groups capable of reinventing our ways of living and inhabiting, underlines, in a ‘forum of the world’. I feel like being part of a group, part of a tribe. My approach with the paleo-energy timeline is about using the knowledge of our past to create our future. This explores forgotten patents, low-carbon and lowtech technologies we exhume to make a shared resource of solutions, art pieces and performances that revitalise and bring them closer to reality and everyday people's lives. These are published in the book: Retrotech and Lowtech. In spite of the classifications and distinctions imagined by the history of contemporary art, it seems that our work remains unclassifiable, difficult to identify, transcending the so-called existing borders between practices, at the same time visual artist, performer, designer, scenographer, designer of pedagogical tools, energetician. We have also produced low carbon parties since 1999 with autonomous sound systems. These parties are supporting our technical research and give more purpose to parties themselves. The SolarSoundSystem as we’ve dubbed it, is based on an international multidisciplinary collective in Paris, Marseille, Pays Basque, Berlin, TelAviv, Lausanne, Zurich and HongKong, composed of artists, engineers, designers, musicians, makers, DJs and others. They all bring something different to create unique experiences and events. We have always thought energy transition and culture are a multi-field collaboration without boundaries. To stay connected with the crowd and the core team, we run a web-radio, radio3s.org, hosted with solar energy, promoting our network of artists and label. We collaborate with a bunch of famous artists playing really different kinds of music, like Matt Black (Ninja Tune, ColdCut), Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), DJ Boris (Panorama Bar), Ben Green (Civil Civic), Alain Ho (DJ Yellow) and more. We also dig up a lot of emerging artists from all over the world to promote them on the solar hosted radio.
Where Has Your Work Engaged With Systems Change-Making?
Atelier21 is a vehicle for us to empower people, local governments, private sector and other actors to re-discover the next generation of decentralised, renewable infrastructures. Over twenty years, we’ve hosted 1000 solar & bicycle-powered dance parties, exhibited at multiple UN Climate COPs, and created renewable energy systems with communities around the world. In this time, we’ve also worked on the Solar Penny, an energy tax to fund renewables in Switzerland, experimented with solar powered balloons for transport with the Aerocene project, fabricated renewable energy labs in shipping containers, animating workshops and a maker network of students to fight energy poverty, and created a timeline and digital museum of low carbon technologies. At present we’re rolling out the RegenBox, a forgotten patent for a portable system that can recharge non-rechargeable alkaline batteries and a Paleo H2O water project. Our vision is that we do not have enough time to wait for future innovations, so we have to retrofit and regenerate the world and make do with what we have. We are still performing with our network of SolarSoundSystem(s) to bring the party and make the earth green again!
