The embedded artist for Ghent to work with the Environment and Climate Service of the City of Ghent and Greentrack Ghent has been announced. The artist will work together with the City of Ghent on the specific challenges in implementing the Ghent Climate Adaptation Plan.
Embedded Artist
Anyuta Wiazemsky Snauwaert (Moscow, 1989), a Russian-Belgian artist based in Ghent, has been chosen as the Embedded Artist. She trained as a photographer and multimedia artist but does not limit herself to fixed and defined media. In her artistic practice she often sets out from the idea itself and from there on starts looking for the most suitable form of expression. This search forms an substantial part of her work, e.g. in participative projects where the result plays an equally important role as the process itself. The projects she engages in are therefore often of very diverse in kind and form.
Enhancing Participation in Desurfacing Ghent
Anyuta has been embedded in the Environment and Climate Department of the City of Ghent. Together with its climate adaptation team, she has been exploring the options for contributing to the planning and implementation of adaptation to climate change within Ghent.
Ghent’s Climate Adaptation Plan has a significant focus on desurfacing to meet both the challenges of the rising heat stress as well as heavy rainfalls and floods. Both parties agreed it would be most interesting if she could join the desurfacing project ‘Paul De Smet De Naeyer Park’.
Paul De Smet De Naeyer Park (GDSDNP) consists of different parks that are separated by surfaced road. This project aims at joining the different parts into one bigger park and desurfacing the crossing roads. The project is also supported by the Flemish government – adding another dimension of looking at climate adaptation in the wider area around the park. For this project, Anyuta will be specifically looking at and contributing to the participation process in involving the neighbourhood in the design and implementation of the climate adaptation plans for this park.
More about the Cultural Adaptations Embedded Artist Projects
This Embedded Artist commission has been announced as part of Cultural Adaptations, a project co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme and the Scottish Government, The project will see embedded artists working in the Glasgow, Gothenburg, Ghent and Dublin city regions to bring creative solutions as they deal with the intense rainfall and other impacts increasingly being brought about by climate change.
The Embedded Artists came together for the first time in March as the project partners gathered in Glasgow as part of the project’s first transnational workshop. The gathering in Glasgow saw the beginning of the project’s parallel strand, with the first in a series of workshops for managers from arts & cultural organisations on Tuesday 19th March to develop tools to help the sector when planning for climate change impacts. Artists, sustainability professionals and those interested in building links between these two areas attended an evening ‘Green Tease’ on Monday 18th March to hear from local and international partners and discuss this developing project.
