Michele Guieu
Instagram:
Territorial Resilience
Small installation with seedlings (peas and radishes) and a map of San Jose, California.
2023
Everyone must organize their change. Individually it is crucial to change our behavior. But it is essential to mobilize collectively at a community level. Communities must prepare locally and learn to support themselves. This knowledge is crucial. This does not happen much in Western societies today because almost everyone lives an individual life based on the dependence on a very globalized system.
"A community that adapts to change is resilient; but because communities and the challenges we face are dynamic, adaptation is an ongoing process. Philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote, "In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists." For communities, resilience should be understood as a quality to continually cultivate, not a goal to be achieved. Initiatives, activists, and politicians come and go, but if resilience building is ingrained in the community culture, it can evolve as circumstances change."
Richard Heinberg, excerpt from "Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience.
- Michele Guieu
PEOPLE – 265 tags
265 tags people contributed to the Down to Earth installation.
ART should and must play an essential role as a catalyst for building community resilience.
In my recent installation, the public was invited to participate. People wrote their ideas about how they see things unfolding, the changes they would make, the changes they wished for, their hopes, and their fears. As an artist, I love public participation. It is one way to get community members to share their thoughts about the critical challenges we face. It is an exchange, a reflection. The process and the means are simple and could be implemented in many ways. The impact can be huge. It needs to be followed up and extended. I am thinking about the next iteration of the installation and how to leverage the participatory aspect even more.
Here’s an excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s lesson about the Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience from the Think Resilience course by @postcarboninstitute:
“In a democratic society, we might say that the identity of a community comes from its members, and represents a shared sense of what the community’s core qualities are, and a shared vision of what things should be like in the future.
Therefore the process of building community resilience can sometimes start with a survey—we can try to describe a community’s identity by asking people: What are the values of this community? What defines this community, and why? What do we not want to lose? What do we need to change? These kinds of questions can only really be answered by community members.”
- Michele Guieu
My Grandpa: A Tale of Simplicity & Happiness
photograph
- Michele Guieu
The End of Human Exceptionalism?
Map and photograph
20”x30”
2022
- Michele Guieu
What does success means if we want to keep a habitable planet?
Ephemeral composition
Paper, print on paper of a photograph taken on the Pacific Coast close to Santa Cruz (from a series of older prints that I am keeping),
paper dots from a previous project. 19”x25”
“All in all, if we’re going to achieve deep cultural change we face some hefty obstacles. We’ll need to find long-term ways to heal our culture so that it once more teaches self-restraint and empathy. Over the short term, we probably can’t change people’s tendency to want more. But we can define what “more” means. Richard Heinberg
- Michele Guieu
Exploring the Lifeline
Temporary assemblage made of driftwood suspended from an olive tree
Breil Sur Roya, France
7’H x 5’W x 2’D
I dream that everyone experiments with non-destructive, simple, beautiful practices, and expresses their creativity with joy. Nature, our lifeline, could be the source of everyone’s daily inspiration, courage and awe.
Don’t you think it could change the world?
[...] “The story of consumerism appealed to people’s love of novelty, and it fed on our deeply ingrained urge to display symbols of status. Advertising contains millions of images and messages, but all tell essentially the same story: human satisfaction derives from the ownership of certain objects. To get away from consumerism we will need to replace those satisfactions and symbols not just with vague promises, but with real experiences, and with stories that appeal to our deepest human aspirations. Consumerism replaced satisfying experiences of making, growing, repairing, and sharing with the momentary buzz of buying a new manufactured product. We need to reverse that bargain.”[...]
Richard Heinberg, from “Shifting Cultural Stories”, part of the Think Resilience online course by the Post Carbon Institute.
- Michele Guieu
A Natural Way of Seeing the World
Ephemeral assemblage made of driftwood
L35” x W25” x H30"
- Michele Guieu
See the Connections
Ephemeral assemblage
Made at my childhood house, at the foot of the Alps in Southern France, with driftwood found on the nearby shore.
December 2021.
- Michele Guieu
“As a global civilization, as a species, we are sleepwalking toward collapse” Peter Kalmus, NASA Climate Scientist, October 2021.
Ruins in Prat-De-Mollo-La-Preste,
Eastern French Pyrenees, October 2021
4 Photographs
Excerpt of “Collapse”, from the Think Resilience online course by the Post Carbon Institute.
- Michele Guieu
Paradox
Photograph, 2021.
- Michele Guieu
To a Regenerative Future
Ephemeral compositionLeaves from my neighborhood, map
- Michele Guieu
At the Crossroads
Digital Collage
- Michele Guieu
Now What?
Digital collage
- Michele Guieu
The genie is out of the bottle
Digital collage
- Michele Guieu
CO2 is (almost) forever
Digital photography
- Michele Guieu
Climate Change, Deep Dependency on Oil and Oil Depletion
Digital collage
- Michele Guieu
Overshoot
Ephemeral compositionPainted wood scraps from a previous project20” x 30”
- Michele Guieu
What will be the energy sources of the future?
Digital collage (photos taken in the Bay Area and in the Sierras)
- Michele Guieu
Archipelago
Branches and repurposed yarn
- Michele Guieu
Planetary Limits
Ephemeral compositionMade of natural elements found during daily walks in my neighborhood.
- Michele Guieu
When the sky is blue again, Let’s not forget about this. 2020 is screaming at us to rethink “business as usual
The photo was taken September 9, 2020, in Sunnyvale, Bay Area, where I live, as fires were raging through California, Oregon, and Washington.
- Michele Guieu
Untitled
Digital photo-collage: California fires, face mask discarded in the neighborhood, Purple Air map
- Michele Guieu
Switchpoint
- Michele Guieu
Untitled
Photograph
- Michele Guieu
Untitled
Digital photograph
- Michele Guieu
Shelter in Place Day 27
Sunprint, digital manipulation
- Michele Guieu