Interview with Caitlin Franzmann

AiR at the Sunshine Coast

Caitlin: I am an artist based in Meanjin/Brisbane, Queensland. I was born and grew up on Gubbi Gubbi/Kabi Kabi country, which includes land located in the Sunshine Coast, so I have a connection to this region.

My first career was as an urban planner, which already instigated within me an interest in how humans relate to their environments. I later moved into the visual arts and studied at the Queensland College of Arts. After my graduation in 2012, I started focusing on place, and working with communities, in a way that was quite relational: walking through different locations where I was working, having a lot of conversations with people, and learning stories of that place – human and more-than-human.

This socially-engaged work involves a lot of time invested in relationships and friendships, and in deep listening. Sometimes it can appear that I am not doing anything at all, in terms of what would might be seen as traditional art-making. But there is a lot that I am absorbing, and at some point in the process, it begins to manifest in sculptural works, or video and sound works, or events.

How did you get involved in the AiR programme? What motivated you to apply? What inspired your project proposal?

Caitlin: First of all, I was really interested in the idea of research based on environmental communication. That is a topic of huge interest to me, particularly with the growing sense of emergency and urgency around climate change. So, I was really curious to connect with the researchers and understand how they operate in that space and what methodologies they use to bring different perspectives together.

The location of the artist residency at the Sunshine Coast University also drew my interest. I was quite interested to investigate my own family history. My heritage on my mother's side is Danish, and when my Danish great-great grandparents immigrated to Australia in 1870, they ended up settling in Imbil, on unceded Gubbi Gubbi/Kabi Kabi country. So, I was curious to know a bit more about them, their relationship to that place, and the broader social, cultural and political contexts of the time.

Sounds quite interesting! Could you tell us more about your residency works? Now that we are around half-way into the residency, how is your project developing?

Caitlin: I would say this first month has been very much about meeting people in the local region. I have been having conversations with a local retired geography teacher, a local farmer, and a couple of foresters who work there. It is important to me also to begin conversations with traditional owners of that country: the Gubbi Gubbi/Kabi Kabi people - finding out who would be the right person to seek permission to do what I am doing on their country, and hopefully maintain a continued conversation.

My main interest in the location has been around the hoop pine plantations, partly because my ancestors were involved in the region’s timber industry. A large portion of the land is allocated to hoop pine plantation. So it is, in a way, a contested space, and I am curious about the different perspectives in relation to those ecosystems.

What exactly makes this land a contested space?

Caitlin: Well, it is a state-owned land - already an idea that is contested, as First Nations of this country never ceded their land to the Crown. It is also under lease by a private company, that manages those landscapes and profits from the timber as a resource. There are also important natural ecosystems, like waterway corridors that must be protected for environmental and cultural reasons.

I think ultimately, the effective coming together of various perspectives involves slow processes of consultation, conversation, and sharing of values, to try and find those middle grounds. I guess this is also where collaboration can happen, or co-production of sustainable futures, as the Mistra-EC programme at the University of Sunshine Coast suggests.

As an artist, how do you see the role of arts or the artists in these conversational and collaborational processes?

Caitlin: There are a couple of ways that art can play a role. I think everybody has the capacity for creative thinking and creative solutions, and I feel that artists can contribute methods and imaginings that sit a bit outside the box. Maybe that is because artists are not necessarily coming in with a particular stake in the project and can act as an interlocutor. An artist can gather stories and find ways to translate those stories in a way that is open and raises awareness around shared concerns. That said, I think a lot of artists working in the field of environment and sustainability understand the importance of interdisciplinary research and collaboration. So, I think there is a role for artists within those dynamic collaborations.

And comes my next question: How is it collaborating with researchers in an artistic project? Have you ever collaborated with academics before?

Caitlin: Yes, I have worked for a number of years with the collective called Ensayos (Nomadic Collective Research). It’s a collective that was founded in Chile, in Tierra del Fuego, and has research pods in New York, Norway, and Australia. I have been involved in Ensayos since 2018, and many of our research inquiries relate to urgent environmental issues emerging from Tierra del Fuego, and are also relevant globally. Across our regions, we share common issues, as well as methodologies and solutions. We dream up solutions together, within groups that include First Nations people, activists, scientists, anthropologists, artists, and art historians - each bringing unique qualities and understandings to that collaboration.

For AiR@USC and in terms of my collaboration with Mistra-EC research team at the University of Sunshine Coast, it has been really lovely having conversations with the different researchers, Sara Holmgren, Sanna Barrineau, and of course, Marcus Bussey, and sharing my residency experiences, and the ideas that I am processing, and also hearing what they have been working on, and sharing of resources. They have all mentioned different theories and offered readings to check out. So, it has been really generative!

(Marcus Bussey, Mistra-EC WP3 researcher and AiR@USC academic host, enters the conversation)

Marcus is here at the right time! Hello, Marcus. We were just talking with Caitlin about how it is, as an artist, to collaborate with academics, and Caitlin was saying it is just amazing! (all chuckle)

Marcus: To me, collaboration has to start with mutual respect, and then, of course, curiosity. You know, the way Caitlin sees the world, the way a forest scientist would see the world, the way a historian or a futurist -which is sort of those two areas of my specialization- would see the world... you know that there is mystery behind it all. All knowledge, from my perspective, is partial and that means we need to come together to collaborate, to generate depth of understanding, and tolerance for difference; and not just tolerance, excitement about difference! It is really exciting to be working with Caitlin, to hear about her adventures talking to old forestry people out in the bush or whatever it might be. I mean, it is just really very, very cool. I think we are really privileged to have this opportunity.

As an academic, how do you see the role of arts in environmental communication? How do you see the possible contributions of collaborations between artists and academics on environmental issues?

Marcus: The intersection of art with social issues like environmental communication has quite a long history. I first started thinking of these in the 1990s, when I read a book called “The Reenchantment of Art”, by Suzi Gablik. It is a wonderful book in which Gablik, who recently died, engages with various artists who are working to bring issues of environmental concern to the public's awareness. For me, this is about aesthetics acting in a cultural sphere to raise awareness, which is actually consciousness; to become more conscious of, to feel a connection with, a rapport with, the natural world.

Caitlin's work is also very much about that awareness: raising awareness of a community, providing stories that feed into, not simply an aesthetic production, but also a social production. You can correct me if I am wrong Caitlin, but this is the way I see it. Caitlin works on a site, where she gets lots of stories, weaves them together and produces a series of works that represent various crystallizations of awareness. So, there are these different layers of awareness, and that, to me, is really important because aesthetics, and the arts in general, and even more broadly cultural production, really build bridges between ways of knowing the world.

You could argue...well, I would argue that science has its own aesthetics. Science has its own way of finding beauty and meaning, and order and organisation, and is also allowing for disorder and chaos, and all the rest. Art does it differently though, and I think when they come together, they add value to one another. So they are mutually enriching.

Caitlin was also mentioning about the importance of collectives bringing people from different backgrounds, and the power of these kinds of collectives in dealing common issues, including the environment. Are there any such collectives at the Sunshine Coast that you collaborate time to time?

Marcus: Yes, there are some very interesting research groups at the Sunshine Coast. We have got, what you could call, more traditional types of research going on in forestry and sustainability. We also have people working on indigenous collaborations with indigenous knowledge holders. We have people working on creative approaches to tourism and sustainability in tourism. We also have the Sustainability Research Centre itself, which I am a part of and have been involved from the very beginning, and which has evolved over the many years, depending on where its focus has been.

But you know, it is really about fostering community conversations. So, we seek to engage a broader set of publics -in plural; not just a public, but different kinds of publics. Some of that research has involved some of my PhD students who have worked on regenerative futures, and that, sort of informed the preparations for the Olympic Games in 2032 to be hosted in Brisbane, which is the closest city for us. There, they have established a working group Climate Positive Brisbane 2032 working on sustainability innovations for the Olympic Games, and that is led by one of my recent PhD students Dr. Kimberly Camrass, who has just finished her work on regenerative futures.

So, there are many interesting things coming. And of course, this is not all the work. Ours is only a small university, and the mind boggles if you start thinking about some of Australia's major universities.

There is a lot going on, and I think creativity is being harnessed to help us deal with the challenges that the futures before us hold or pose. We know that this future might happen or that one. But how do we respond if we see them as questions that challenge us, as societies, as the civil society particularly? It is not just the scientific disciplines that need to rise to the challenge. However, having the intellectual, emotional, and cultural resources to deal with uncertainty is something that our society has never been very good at. The modernist societies, they are about control, and so on. I think we have not really learned to handle uncertainty for a long time…

In these conversations that I am talking about, community members can all talk from their own investment as stakeholders, and that is partly what we are trying to do with our work packages in Mistra Environmental Communication Research programme. We are trying to bring together different kinds of opportunities for people to have those “larger than life conversations” that build a sense of community, and a sense of personal investment in the projects that we are doing.

I think researchers, at the moment, seem to be becoming more humble. It is not that we are going to research, and we are going to find an answer for this or an answer for that, but we will find ways of engaging in very complex issues that we are calling “wicked problems”, for instance. But whatever we call them, our problems: they are communal, collective, cumulative problems that we need to work our way through, and with, at the same time.

Thank you Marcus, for this detailed answer. Caitlin, turning back to you, what is inspiring you the most during your time at the Sunshine Coast, while you are developing your research and your themes further? What has been easy, what has been difficult?

Caitlin: I think what is usually difficult for me at this stage of the process is having absorbed a lot of information, listened to a lot of stories, and there are so many things that spark interest, and are inspiring. One example is just going for a walk and practicing deep listening in Amamoor State Forest. In the forest, you cross over waterways, waterfalls, and move past quite old native Araucaria species (both Bunya and Hoop Pine) through areas that are dense rainforests. As you walk up along the ridge, you then witness the hoop pine plantations. Through my bodily sensations I became very aware of the distinct change in atmosphere – the visual uniformity, the sonics, even the temperature. The landscape seemed to hold many of ideas emerging from conversations I had been having.

In that same location, there was an environmental education project relating to the conservation of the wild macadamia tree - there are a lot of interesting, and concerning, stories around the macadamia species in Australia.

Actually, a lot of the work that I have done in the past follow the stories that are connected to plants, and show how the stories of one species can lead you to stories around migration, culture, governance, conservation. So, that is possibly the path that I am being led, and I am in the process of doing up sketches for sculptural works and thinking through a possible event to share these experiences and stories with others.

Do you already have a plan for the display of the works?

Caitlin: Yes, I think the great thing about the University of Sunshine Coast is it does have a university gallery, and the gallery manager Megan Williams has a lot of understanding of different spaces within the gallery and within the university that could be a good place to display the work. I also have an opportunity in June to potentially showcase the work at Metro Arts gallery in Brisbane. So, there are various opportunities or ways to present the work.

Looking forward! Would you like to add anything to what we have talked about so far?

Caitlin: I wanted to add something about the affective quality of my works. Within my work, I guess I am not only dealing with human centred conversations, I am also engaging with the “more than human” world with which people are embedded. For example, how attuning to the language of birds can offer an understanding of the changes in an ecosystem. I like to work with sound and immersive installations, because they can expand beyond the visual experience, and in participatory works that call people in to engage.

Marcus: And what you said is really interesting, Caitlin, because the work that I am involved with is looking at the use of co-creation labs, and we have been trying to theorise how they work, and in one of them we are interested in immersing ourselves in the “more than human” world. So we are not just co-creating human-to-human, but we are trying, in some way, to make sense of spaces where, let's say, the farmer stands in his field, and the field and the farmer are in dialogue in some way. The language is still formative and emerging. It is very interesting that you mentioned the same thing because, to me, we tend to leave out one of the chief interlocutors in this problem of environmental communication, which is the environment itself.

Thank you very much Caitlin, and Marcus, for this nice conversation! Wishing you the best with your work and collaborations!

Click here to read our interview with Marcus Bussey in this issue.

Click here to follow the updates on Caitlin’s residency project for AiR@USC.

Click here to read more about Mistra-EC's AiR programme.