Name that feeling: Two artists coin words for climate change

A dozen people — artists, scientists, academics and writers — turned up at The Bureau of Linguistical Reality’s first word salon in January 2015. They were all friends of San Francisco-based artists Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante, founders of this project.

None of them had any idea what a word salon was. They showed up, some joked, because of the promise of dinner.

Once everyone had settled in, the group was offered a single prompt: What is a feeling associated with or provoked by climate change, for which you wish there was a word?

On an unusually warm night in an unusually warm winter, with California also in the midst of a drought, the prompt sparked a discussion that lasted hours. “People stayed, chatting, till 1 am,” says Escott.

In the years since, the bureau has held numerous word salons, pop-ups and online sessions with groups across the US, and in the UK, France, Spain and Canada. From these, Escott, 43, and Quante, 44, have gathered more than 500 words (“with many more left unrefined in notebooks,” Escott says), and are gradually uploading these to the project website.

Each word is meant to serve as a starting point from which to delve into one’s own and others’ experience of the climate crisis. “Using words as architecture, we want to create a space where we honour personal as well as cultural or region-specific experiences,” Quante says. Excerpts from an interview.

What are some core principles that guide your linguistic process?

Quante: The strategy adopted by most US climate groups is to tell people what to do, which doesn’t work. We focus on using humour, curiosity and self-driven learning to co-create words with people, letting them have agency.

This is facilitated through four modalities: the word salons; a faux bureau (with a table-chair set-up and us in playsuit uniforms) that pops up at climate meets, art and science exhibitions, etcetera; performance-based lectures at universities; and our website, which allows people to write to us if they want to submit words.

Escott: Often, we encounter people who have for the first time been given the space to sit and talk about their individual feelings and experience of the crisis. While just providing that opportunity is already enough, naming those experiences by co-creating a neologism is also very powerful for them.

Quante: We only accept neologisms for feelings or experiences you have personally had. We don’t collaborate with people who want to speak on behalf of others or name other people’s experiences.

Escott: But it’s a collaborative process. Someone will suggest a word; or it will emerge from a group. We will arrive at a definition together, fine-tune it later, share it with that group or individual over email, and they are welcome to help recast the definition.

Have you seen any of these words filter into the public lexicon?

Escott: It’s always amazing to hear the words in public. A friend recently texted me from a jazz show. They were playing a song named Blissonance (the mixed experience of bliss and dissonance one experiences when enjoying time in nature while also recognising how one’s presence in that place can be negatively affecting it). That was a word coined at one of our word-making salons in California, in 2015.

British philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton used the word shadowtime (a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously; the sense that our preparation for the future might be in vain due to climate disruptions) three times during a lecture.

These words themselves, and the process of creating them, is an effort to open ourselves and our participants to new ways of thinking, and providing a chance to sit with emotions arising out of the times we live in. It’s what we at the bureau call convergencies (convergences of emergencies) and emergination (the possibilities that can emerge from this).

What are the challenges in keeping such a project alive across years?

Escott: This is an independent art initiative, so in many ways, it’s a passion project. We do get funding through grants such as the French Ministry of Culture’s ArtCOP21 Grant in 2015; the Kindle Project’s Makers Muse Award & Grant in 2016, and the French Ministry of Culture’s Environmental Arts Prize in 2016, and stipends and honoraria for hosting the project at various institutions and lectures.

Quante: We function at the intersection of art and the climate movement. So foundations are often unsure if we’re “climate change enough” or “artistic enough”. But we’ve had offers to create a book of the neologisms, and given that we’re an ongoing artwork, it will hopefully translate into a series.