Target reached!
Funding above and beyond the first target will go towards funding further events and...
AAS: 2023 Future Events Fund!
Glasgow, Glasgow City, United Kingdom
Aim
Contribute to an events budget so the Anthropocene Architecture School can programme and resource events autonomously & equitably in 2023!
Since its bursting into life at 2019's Architecture Fringe, the Anthropocene Architecture School has made 40 events of its own happen, and contributed towards over 80 goings-on for and with others - mainly talks and workshops but also podcast episodes - across Scotland, the U.K. beyond it, mainland Europe and Turtle Island: digitally, and physically. It has created spaces for over 5600 people to connect the built environment around us to the climate and ecological crisis and cultivate their climate literacy around buildings and climate solutions, to activate and explore personal and collective agency as well as entanglements in economic, social, and political systems whilst unlearning our socialised powerlessness. To date and through it, I have been invited to guest-lecture or run workshops at over 20 traditional schools of architecture: teaching as if the climate crisis is an ongoing crisis, and emphasising the transformational role that a reimagined construction sector could play as part of a Just Transition.
The project has been featured in architectural / press internationally, and in 2023 undertook its first-ever residency at Central St Martins in London. Through its impact, I was later invited to contribute to European Sustainable Energy Week 2023 in Brussels, further demonstrating that the impact of what I have done is of an international magnitude. All of this has been achieved with scarce consistent funding - of below £80 p/month from Patreon supporters, on a gig-to-gig basis, weaving together emergent opportunities as they arise and investing a lot of passion and energy.
The Anthropocene Architecture School punches disproportionately high above its weight globally for an (architecture) school with no building and no wealth behind it but without support from its community, and those who have benefitted from or been inspired by it in the past, it shall remain reliant upon scattered, and small-scale funding, when it becomes available and overly dependent on myself. Such a project cannot be tied to an institution in order to preserve its agility, autonomy, and ability to speak truth to power without hesitation - which is fundamentally necessary during a planetary crisis.
The AAS is a vehicle for creating and stewarding spaces to connect across silos, spaces, disciplines, and time zones, learning together through collaborations with friends of the school, and by making new ones in the process, which is what this project excels at. This is an appeal for its community to support it not just with words, but with resources to crowdfund more events to bring us together into the future, that fairly compensate for time and expertise because the dependency of relying on goodwill - in architecture in particular - is exhausting too many people, and as a prefigurative project, the AAS intends to be a cycle-breaker.
This budget will be used to resource events by paying venue costs; compensating contributors for their time; meeting accessibility needs when requested; photography and recording when befitting; licensing fees for films etc.
Looking at what I have been able to achieve with the project to date, imagine how much more transformative its events could be if you, and a few dozen others, got behind it in a small, generous way.
This project successfully funded on 13th September 2023