Sustainability Way Beyond Academia Public Art as a Driver for Behavioural Change and the Participatory Quest of Gayle

The paper offers a survey on the recent academic interest surrounding the field of art and sustainability, arguing that scholars have lingered on descriptive studies, focusing on the assumed ‘emotional’ potential of art, or on an instrumental attitude towards art taken as just one more communication channel to deliver scientific data. One more strain of scholarly investigation emerged among art historians exploring recent environmentalist or ecological art, though without taking into full account its aesthetic dimension and thus how it contributes to different ways of knowledge production. The present research offers instead a take on public art practices showing their particular capability of immersing participants in a different vision and changing behavioural patterns. Analysing the programme of art and sustainability delivered at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice over a period of eight years, especially by means of the Sustainable Art Prize at the ArtVerona fair, the paper provides fieldwork on how public art bridges sustainability scholarship towards new horizons, stressing the importance of audience participation to tackle global challenges. The participatory project developed by Gayle Chong Kwan together with the students and the wider university community serves as a paramount example of paradigm shift by means of an artistic contribution in a specific social and economic context.


Good and Bad News from Planet Sustainability
In the wake of the global pandemic, it seems as if the severe climate crisis unleashed by the Anthropocene suddenly appeared both closer and further away. Closer it surely is, given the likely origin of the virus linked to an unstoppable erosion of wildlife territories driven by our overcrowded and overproducing humankind, though at the same time the environmental emergency silently slipped away from newspaper headlines to give way to the immediacy of death and lockdown (Carrington 2020). I am not arguing the pandemic did not deserve the spotlight it earned over the last year, but unfortunately reactions split over the kind of behavioural response needed, even despite the proximity to lethal events. Just a few months into the pandemic, wearing a mask turned into a political stance, while it really should be a matter of sanitary consideration and individual responsibility towards one another (Rojas 2020). If behavioural change was needed to tackle the challenges articulated by the United Nations in its very ambitious and necessary 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), then this is both good and bad news. On one side, women and men proved to be capable of instant adaptation, when urgently needed, but on the other side frictions among diverging world views only grew stronger in the short run and thus risk to undo all advancements achieved so far on the quest for sustainability. At this point, it should be evident that the mitigation-and-adaptation strategy world leaders are currently aiming at is not sufficient to address the looming climate cataclysm, if means to foster behavioural change are not found and implemented swiftly (Giannachi 2012, 124-31). It appears it all comes down to the quest of shifting profoundly rooted social and economic paradigms, as well as the underlying philosophical stances that allowed the kind of exploitation of natural resources, which led us to where we stand. However, it is by now clear that it is not a question of convincing people of harsh realities, although substantiated by scientific data and trustworthy projections, but to find ways of promoting an autonomous switch in individual attitude towards sustainable development (Wallen 2012, 234-42). As a matter of fact, sustainability challenges confronting the world are immense and problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, energy policy, poverty, gender equality and working conditions require complex social, economic and technical solutions. The overwhelming size of problems is paralleled by another difficulty, represented by the indeterminateness of the term 'sustainability' and its multifaceted nature, which unfortunately falls prey to contrasting views and consequently urges scholars as well as policy makers to resort to multi-disciplinary approaches (Lang et al. 2012, 25-43). So far, the crisis has been addressed primarily with solutions based on technological innovation, rather than those that require significant changes in human behaviour. Furthermore, the last two decades proved that information alone is not enough to inspire an effective response towards SDGs. The failure of inspiring behavioural change through rigorous scientific communication increasingly fostered international interest in the relationship between art and sustainability that supplements academic research and policy development (Connelly et al. 2016). Given its connection to ecoaesthetics, intended as a non-extractivist approach towards the interaction between humankind and the environment, art is at once credited as a practical means and a conceptual catalyst to drive human behaviour towards the accomplishment of SDGs. In this respect, sustainable art and its underlying aesthetics could be seen as new forms of knowledge production and integration within and beyond various academic disciplinary fields, complementing much needed legislative developments and shared international policies (Van Poeck, Laessøe, Block 2017).

Concepts of Sustainability and the Role of Public Art
Once the relevance of a fourth pillar for sustainability was recognised, the so-called cultural pillar, scholars have tried to approach and explore the role of art in the context of SDGs (Pröpper 2017). Especially over the last decade, the academic debate on art and sustainability has unleashed a kind of research activism that apparently produced two principle strains of research: on the one hand, descriptive studies focusing on the assumed 'emotional' potential of art; on the other hand, an instrumental attitude towards art taken as just one more communication channel to deliver scientific data. As regards the former approach, several scholars examined the role of art in shaping environmental behaviour, though merely stating that art can influence knowledge building and affect our capability of feeling empathy, but lacking a clear idea on the aesthetic mechanisms helpful to transition society towards a sustainable future (Rathwell, Armitage 2016). Concerning the latter perspective, far too often scholars from various disciplines position art at the end of the research process, in order to instrumentally convey science by exploiting artistic means such as photography, scenario building, and experience rooms, though without the actual intervention of an artist (Bendor et al. 2017). Similar observations are clearly grounded on the belief that art can be naively adopted for the sake of sustainability and that it is immediately effective as a sort of 'emotional' language that directly translates into a process of behavioural change (Thomsen 2015). In both cases, scholars and policy makers fail to understand the real potential of art, since they lack theoretical and institutional knowledge about art and art criticism that evolved with internal practices in connection to its audience, particularly with regard to public art projects in the 1970s and 1980s that explored environmentalist and feminist strains (Bois et al. 2016, 654-60). The predominance of anthropological and sociological studies as regards the cultural pillar of SDGs even led to a twofold academic drift as regards the employment of art. On the one side, there are scholars who engage in cultural resilience using artistic practices among indigenous populations, but without any connection to the concepts and institutions of Western art, thus rendering it very difficult to transfer this process of knowledge building into a global society (Athayde et al. 2017). On the other side, an increasing number of scholars directly employs artistic means to try expressing concerns about sustainability and to evoke reactions in the public, though hardly possessing the ability and experience to use those artistic media, thus ending up with something that bluntly looks like art (Curtis, Reid, Ballard 2012). However, there is one more strain of scholarly investigation that emerged among art historians, who embarked on an exploration of recent environmentalist or ecological art, as such interventions are swiftly increasing around the world (Boettger 2008, 154-61;Braddock, Ater 2014, 2-8). It must be noted, though, that this research approach is preponderantly descriptive, as it analyses the appearance of artworks, projects and even entire exhibitions connected to the topics of global warming or the Anthropocene (Dunaway 2009, 9-31). Hence, these scholarly contributions seem rather focused on trying to carve out a niche for such artistic practices inside or beyond the established art world, though hardly assessing their potential and impact on behavioural change in the context of sustainability practices.
This overview exposes the fact that recent scholarly work generally misses to grasp both the theoretical and the procedural implications of connecting art to sustainability. Two aspects in particular are hardly being explored, the first one related to the way sustainability is sensed and understood in different cultural and social contexts; the other one to the way artists may contribute to the debate on sustainability at an experiential and conceptual level in a given context. In order to do so, the primary goal should be to research the very concept of sustainability from a theoretical or even philosophical point of view, such as to determine the perception-reception or sensing-understanding process that steers the comprehension of sustainability in individuals and communities. The contribution of several scholars in the field of environmental aesthetics appears of particular relevance, since the latter focuses on our idea of the environment, which in turn affects our standpoint on ethical, social and political theories. In his quest to conceptualise the environment anew Arnold Berleant highlights that nature is neither alien nor external from the human world, thus aesthetics as a science of sensible matters can grasp the necessary theoretical and practical uniqueness of humans and nature (Berleant 1992, 14-24). Ellen Dissanayake further presents a detailed view of the origin of aesthetic understanding inquiring the relationship between our survival instinct and the human impulse to organise and elaborate aesthetically, which thus becomes instrumental in shaping our attitude towards the external world, comprising the environment and the other from us (Dissanayake 2000, 129-66). Eventually, Timothy Morton suggests that the very idea of nature and otherness holds sustainability at arm's length, thus they must be reshaped, in order to get to properly sustainable forms of culture, philosophy, politics and art (Morton 2002, 52-6). In this regard, art emerges as a favourable multi-disciplinary driver of behavioural change, though it preferably has to be what practitioners of the 1960s and 1970s called 'public art', which implies a kind of creative process that is open-ended and directly involves the audience in the construction of meaning (Crickmay 2003). Public art indeed appears capable of immersing participants in a different vision and thus serves as a cultural innovator for behavioural patterns. If public art bridges sustainability scholarship towards new horizons, stressing the importance of audience participation to tackle global challenges, then it becomes clear that specific fieldwork is needed to recognise the most effective artistic practices that also retain high artistic standards. Fieldwork is truly needed, though one that involves artists and the public to explore ways and strategies of participated creativeness, which can influence or reshape our collective sense of sustainability.

The (Field)Work to be Done in Sustainable Art
One may wonder if time is finally ripe for art to be employed as a major driver for behavioural change towards a fuller awareness of sustainability issues. Little has been done, though, to analyse and assess the role, impact and potential of art in shaping sustainable behaviour. In general, the difficulties encountered by current research on art and sustainability are bound either to the inability to go beyond the bland description of artists working in the field of sustainability, or to the naivety with which art is envisioned by many scholars as merely another means to communicate scientific outcomes (Miles 2015). To the contrary, in its own right art should be employed to its maximum aesthetic and immersive potential for a shift in individual and collective environmental paradigms. Investigating how exactly art influences our aesthetic perception and, as such, the way we sense, understand and respond to sustainability is still an open task, but it is undeniable that its effect can be paramount in determining individual and collective paradigm shifts that may even foster the improvement of cultural, social, economic, and environmental aspects. It entails also to envision sustainability not as a universalist end-state determined by supposedly valuefree dictates of scientific research, but rather as the dynamic and fluid outcome of negotiation among stakeholders and various interested parties (Lang, Wiek, Bergmann 2012, 25-30). Public art fits this processual definition of sustainability very well, since artists working in the public sphere and directly engaging with their prospective audience indeed resort to the practice of negotiation -both of means and meanings -to deliver an openended outcome (Harding 1995). Such a starting point allows to explore innovative approaches for learning and producing knowledge through art that are relevant and credible for local communities and decision makers, as well as legitimate for the wider art world. At the same time, however, it is relevant to employ art in its own right, thus avoiding to produce mere artlike interventions, but foster the participatory creation of genuine art projects recognised as such even by art institutions (Mantoan 2019, 42-3). Following this line of reasoning, thanks to a special programme at Sustainable Ca' Foscari, over the last decade we embarked on a set of art projects intended as field work on sustainable behaviour, involving both our students and the broader university community (De Marco, Gonano, Pranovi 2017, 169-72). We did not set forth to make art ourselves, but rather decided to have artists akin to sustainability issues sharing their thoughts, sensibility, and practice with our students and researchers, such as to produce an innovative and at times unexpected blend of scientific knowledge and creative solutions. Indeed, a key aspect of our efforts was experimenting how the involvement of artists, taken as actors outside academia, could contribute to a shared understanding of social, economic and ecological systems. Each time these projects involved a large group of students -between twenty and fifty each time -from across various study fields, who actively collaborated with the chosen artists to create installations, performances, exhibitions or other forms of interventions related to peculiar aspects of sustainable development (Mantoan 2016a, 3-5). The artistic contributions were thus exploited both as scientific fieldwork as well as opportunities to test the artists' work in relation to the ability to tackle sustainability topics or arouse active interest towards SDGs (Mantoan 2016b, 3-8).
Finally, in 2017 we went a step further and decided to kickstart the Sustainable Art Prize, a national recognition for artists working on SDGs, which was to be awarded each autumn at the influential art fair ArtVerona. Since then, we were able to organise three editions of the prize that gained much public attention, both at the fair and in national media. On one side, this experiment allowed us to put sustainable forms of art under the spotlight at a commercial event such as an art fair, thus stirring private galleries and collectors to support artists working on sensitive topics pertaining to the field of sustainability, further involving public opinion in the debate on SDGs (Gaeta, Mantoan 2019). On the other side, this strategy helped us to research new artistic means employed to deliver an idea of sustainability, while it also assisted artists working on similar topics to break entry barriers to the art market, which are usually difficult to overcome for those who do not linger on mainstream topics or well established practices in the art world (Mantoan 2019, 44). The mechanism of the prize awarded at a recognised art fair allowed us to find artists with a stable career in the sector that had already found the backing of an art dealer, though without finding wide recognition yet because of their social and environmental drive. Furthermore, together with a jury of experts comprising environmental scientists and art critics, we had the chance to pick the winning artist or artists from a much wider pool of candidates, since a total of around 50 artists from 30 different art galleries applied to our call for projects. 1 Hence, it can be said that the artistic contributions created by the winners at our university were definitely more compelling and consistent with regard to art historical references as compared to the independent or rather self-taught artists we had involved prior to the foundation of the award. All in all, the Sustainable Art Prize proved to be a fruitful kind of fieldwork, which fuelled our theoretical research questions on art taken for sustainability purposes, as much as it produced significant works of public art offering a unique opportunity for the practical involvement of various organisations and people.

A Strain of Public Art Projects in Venice and Beyond
Upon the inception of the Sustainable Art Prize, over a period of four years we managed to deliver three editions that proved effective in stirring the attention of the Italian art community towards public artworks addressing sustainability concerns; moreover, we were quite successful in gaining pace in the national press with mentions on the first page of the widely-read Sunday cultural edition of the financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore (Barillà 2018). First and foremost, however, we were interested in the impact that the presence of the winning artists would have on the students involved in the newly commissioned art project. As a matter of fact, the prize really was an invitation to join us in Venice and make a proposal for a public artwork to be produced at our Campus involving the university community (Gaeta, Mantoan 2019). In Venice the project always comprised an open call for students from all faculties to participate, several meetings and workshops with the artists, and a series of lectures with researchers that focused on particular aspects of the topic chosen by the winners. The more we worked together with the winners, 2 the more questions we had concerning the aims and scope of a sustainable art project. What makes sustainable art really sustainable? In what ways did the participation of students affect the final outcome? How did this experience affect the understanding of sustainability for those directly involved and for the wider audience? Could the impact of these artistic contributions be measured or evaluated in some way? Attempting to answer these questions was paramount to us, since we represented a public institution -primarily devoted to research and teaching -spending public funds on an artwork. In this regard, we felt a strong responsibility towards our university community and we intended to allow the creation of compelling artworks with the direct participation of our students. Eventually, it all came down to the relationship we were able to build with the winning artists and the mediation we could offer between the artists' ideas and the contribution of the students (Barea, Bonfante, Mantoan 2019). Some of our award winners were particularly confident in building a trust-relationship, since they were already versed in the practices of public art, namely engaging with the audience from the very beginning of the creative process and negotiating its outcome to leave space for the intervention of the public. The first edition of the Sustainable Art Prize allowed the creation of The Republic of Marvels, a project by the artist duo Vinci/Galesi with the support of aA29 Project Room gallery in the Spring of 2018 (Galesi et al. 2018). Focusing around the concept of a utopian city, The Republic of Marvels became a collective action and a traveling performance with symbols and garments covered with live flowers that aimed at raising awareness on the need for a just society to achieve sustainable development (Mantoan 2018, 7-9). In May 2019 a follow-up was organised upon the invitation from New York University on the occasion of the international conference EDRA50, the most important conference in North America about sustainable urban environments (Gaeta, Mantoan 2019). The artist Sasha Vinci created another participatory project, A Human Flower Wall, conceived as a cohesive flower parade of people that walked across the streets of the Big Apple. Starting from the campus buildings of NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn, people joined along the way with banners and signs covered in flowers to create a symbolic moving wall made of people and nature. In the artist's intention, this flower wall contrasted the idea of separation to become instead a bridge towards a more equal and inclusive society without any kind of physical or mental barrier.
Again in 2019, the winner of the second edition Paolo Ciregia was invited to produce the installation You are (not) welcome for the project titled The Defensive City: (im)perceptible barriers in the contemporary urban scenario with the support of the art gallery L'Elefante. The aim of the project was to stimulate a reflection on the coincidental, random and hidden barriers that work against sustainable development in our cityscapes (Mantoan 2019, 26-8). The artist uncovered and analysed the spread of this so-called urban decorations, which instead lead to inevitable marginalisation being imperceptible to our eyes but sensible for our body. The project helped students to gain awareness of their own urban environment, thus compiling a digital archive of photographs that captured barriers and modifications in urban landscapes. Although the students were not allowed any direct participation in the aesthetic outcome of the installation by Ciregia, the archive was transformed into a printed and digital catalogue that boosted the thoughts and propositions of our students (Barea, Bonfante, Mantoan 2019).
Although disrupted by the 2020 pandemic, the winner of the third edition Gayle Chong Kwan, supported by Galleria Alberta Pane, set forth to develop the project Waste Matters in strict connection with Ca' Foscari's community of students and academics (Bonicelli, Marinelli 2019). She reconnected her work to the 12th sustainable development goal of the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations, thus reflecting on responsible consumption and production. Her aim was particularly to address the residual value of food waste, which -far from being unproductive -could stimulate a debate over the relevance of reducing the goods and materials we dispose of in order to lessen our impact on the environment. Chong Kwan invited students and scholars to switch perspective on waste, exploring it not simply as displaced matter but as inextricably vibrant matter by means of photographing, mapping, and collecting food waste as in the tradition of herbaria and paper production.

Shifting Paradigms and the Artistic Value of Sharing
Originally planned to take place in 2020, circumstances arising from the COVID crisis urged us to protract the third edition of the Sustainable Art Prize over a period of almost two entire years. However, instead of unravelling our efforts, it gave us the opportunity to get the winning artist deeply involved in our university community, although from a safe distance. Having several months to plan the prospected activities and then to actively involve our students, the work with an internationally acclaimed artist keen on participatory practices like Gayle Chong Kwan proved extremely successful in terms of training the students in questioning and researching the consequences of deeply rooted production and consumption paradigms in the Western world. An eclectic artist with a broad cultural background, in her projects Chong Kwan indeed raises several social, political, and environmental issues, which compound different artistic and non-artistic media. Over almost two decades, she concentrated on creating works that combine her genuine ethnographic attitude, in the sense of Hal Foster, with a passion for public engagement to create a distinct poetics centred on the practice of sharing with others (Foster 1996, 1-71). At a first glance, sharing the past, present, and future appears the most eye-catching issue addressed in her projects. The artist approaches shared experiences and employs communal activity to light up historical realities and merge them with our world of beliefs, fantasies, and myths. This process leads members of the participating audience to eventually confront themselves with their history and its practical consequences, like she has done in At the Crossroads (2018), a pleasurable banquet at the British Library that subtly challenged the public's food habits in connection with the politics of food transportation and its effects on the environment. 3 Furthermore, a constant feature is the process that leads her from everyday to fantasy starting from common objects. In this way, she allows discarded materials to resurface and create something unfamiliar, thus entering a state of mind that balances between public and private, collectiveness and intimacy, openness and secrecy. A paramount example is Wastescape (2012), first produced for the Festival of the World at the Southbank Centre in London, then reprised for the Auckland Arts Festival in 2019. 4 On this occasion, she created a cave of stalagmites and stalactites made of empty milk cans that made the public aware of the necessary afterlife of plastic containers (Boetzkes 2016, 51-2). Although resorting to various media, her method interestingly remains that of transforming, processing, and preserving the chosen materials, thus it becomes impossible to characterise her solely as a landscapist, a scenographer, a poet or a public artist. She is all those artists in one person, a person focused on leading from public interest to intimate conversations by reconstructing and transforming the familiar. At an operational level she often retrieves techniques of the Pre-Modern Era, firmly rooted in the idea of the European Wunderkammer, thus creating marvellous images by physical miniature, artificial illumination, optical enlargement, and aesthetic resemblance (Lugli 1992). There is also a strong link to the Victorian past of the United Kingdom and its colonial territories, such as when she employs preservation techniques originally used for collection, study, and display. As can be seen especially in Cockaigne (2004) and Paris Remains (2008), discarded food thus turns into architectural reconstructions and photographic landscapes with a distinct Gothic as well as apocalyptic flair. 5 In her artistic process, Chong Kwan employs methods to stir individual and collective memory, thus creating spaces of projection -for dreams, beliefs, thoughts, myths, and fears -that eventually turn into places of personal recollection. Personal fantasy and collective imagination interact on the salvaged material, usually in such a way that makes recycling, restoring, reclaiming, and recovering not just an artistic gesture. In this regard, with her mobile Memory Tasting Unit (2004), she undertook a communal action that uses a narrative entanglement of food and recollections to involve all senses for a deeper knowledge of our surrounding and behaviour. 6 It seems relevant that her latest projects see an enhancement of this tendency, which grows stronger by the day opening up to proper collaborative works, such as for the collection of words and images from the dreams of various people during the COVID lockdown embroidered in Dream Tapestry (2020). 7 Gayle Chong Kwan's distinctive touch is that of an international artist deeply involved in sustainability issues, since her wide cultural background allows her to employ artistic strategies to challenge landscape, environment, and cultural ownership. As a result, her works speak of liberation from cultural appropriation and social imperialism via the reversal of a dominant perspective, thus contributing to a shift in paradigms within the community of participant public.

Not Quite at the End of a Sustainable Art Journey
Drawing to some conclusions, this contribution may have served as a survey on the general field of art and sustainability as it developed over the last decade, as well as to report and critically ponder on the fieldwork in public art done at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, particularly since the inception of the Sustainable Art Prize at the ArtVerona fair. Furthermore, the principal aim was to argue in favour of the full employment of aesthetic thinking and artistic practices in the quest to shape the concept of sustainability and deliver behavioural change. Indeed, sustainability science is facing a crisis of agency and public knowledge production, thus the field would benefit from appropriating and experimenting with types of imaginative knowledge and research provided by art through the process of aesthetic understanding. The possibilities of a contribution of art to sustainable science are only beginning to be tapped and our project at Ca' Foscari offered an opportunity to start understanding its potential, particularly as regards the kind of experiential knowledge and environmental ethics that can lead towards a truly sustainable behaviour. Our fieldwork was based on varied disciplinary approaches -holding together aesthetic and artistic stances, social and economic factors, behavioural and environmental evaluations -such as to explore what stimuli could foster change in the context of sustainable development. It shall be noted that this is a general tendency current and future EU policies require explicitly, in an attempt to understand how culture and the arts may effectively contribute to a sustainable society. As regards recent European programmes, the topic "Inclusive and sustainable growth through cultural and creative industries and the arts" was already launched under Horizon 2020, 8 while the New European Agenda for Culture is set to develop an impact framework for assessing cultural cross-overs, such as interactions between culture and other policy areas -health, welfare, innovation, and urban policy-in order to integrate cultural activities in sustainable development frameworks. 9 Nevertheless, our work is not yet done, both in scholarly research and public art projects for sustainability. The participatory practices and collaborative artworks explored at Ca' Foscari only encouraged us to produce further fieldwork and heighten our attentiveness for the assessment of art in prompting a place-based and culturally-specific agency, as well as of the degree to which a creative approach results in stable behavioural change. A thorough exploration of art as sustainability change agent is still needed, especially with regard to quantitative and qualitative methods of measurement, such as to determine the potential of certain kind of artistic practices as facilitators of nonformal learning. So far, evidence emerging from our fieldwork suggests that involving experienced artists and engaging the public offer the opportunity to study how art operates within social discourse and affects our cultural construction of sustainability, as well as how it operates within society, producing an effect on behavioural change. Resorting to the empirical work done at Ca' Foscari, in the coming years we hope to deliver an analysis and organise an international platform that may offer insights and early answers on fundamental questions concerning the impact of public art on sustainability matters. The list of open tasks is long and relevant, since several issues need proper investigation, such as how far artworks can act as a catalyst for debates about sustainability and instigate further dialogue between diverse stakeholders; or how artistic contributions may shape the aesthetic understanding of sustainability, thus offering experiential knowledge on topics related to sustainable development. We must also explore whether art is capable of addressing audiences that are not sensible to sustainability topics and maybe even prompt them to behavioural change. Eventually, we still need to assess which sustainability topics can be activated through public art, as well as which artistic strategies may achieve a stronger involvement of communities towards the accomplishment of sustainable development.
After involving dozen of artists and several hundred students, as well as the wider community at Ca' Foscari and in Venice, we have not reached the end of our journey yet. Still, we have a growing appetite for exploring the potential and impact of artistic interventions in the context of sustainability. At the same time, we long to break some more barriers that may help public artists spread sustainability concerns inside the established art world and beyond, perhaps finding autonomous support other than public financing. Building on eight years of sustainable art projects, we cannot wait to be involved in what comes next.