Our episode today is about art and climate change. What is the role of art in the climate crisis? How can museums respond to the climate crisis?

The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art is one of the most prominent university museums in the UK. It is located in the University of East Anglia campus, and has a collection of global art. Recently, the Sainsbury Centre hired a Curator of Art and Climate Change (and he is here with us today), the very first of its kind in the UK.

Our guests today are Jago Cooper and John Kenneth Paranada. Jago is the Director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and Professor of Art and Archaeology at UEA. For more than twenty years Jago has worked for and with museums, universities, cultural ministries and heritage organisations around the world to explore and communicate aspects of the great human story. He also worked for more than 20 years on the research and public communication of climate change, with quite a few articles, books, museum exhibitions and even some BBC documentaries focused on better understanding the human experience of environmental variability and climate impacts as well as sitting on the steering committee for IHOPE, the Integrated History and Future of Peoples on Earth.

John Kenneth Paranada is the Curator of Art and Climate Change at the Sainsbury Centre. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Curating with a focus on art in the Anthropocene at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2016) and Master of Advanced Studies in Curating with a focus on Social Sculpture at Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland (2015). He has also been working towards opening the Centre for Ecologies, Sustainable Transitions and Environmental Consciousness (CESTEC) in Los Banos, Philippines – an experimental ecological platform for converging transdisciplinary practices on art, adaptations and the climate crisis in South-East Asia.

Music by Ben Sound.