Go Green Week
The School and Central SU combined forces and ran a highly successful ‘Go Green Week’ (10th – 14th February) across the campus.
‘Go Green Week’ is People & Planet’s annual national week of action on climate change in schools, colleges and universities. The week at Central burst forth in style with a fascinating exhibition – ‘ This is NOT Rubbish’ - by one of our PhD candidates, Tanja Beer. The display was the culmination of a project which resurrected discarded, factory offcut, salami netting and saw it revitalised as part of an eco-scenographic investigation and performance, STRUNG. The netting was then further revitalised by being upcycled into woven, stylish garments sold via charity auction, at Central’s first ‘Sustainable Arts in Higher Education’ Symposium, held as the green centre-piece of the week. These upcycled statements of fashion, as opposed to ending up as “factory,” then “theatre” production waste, found themselves highlighting the benefit of looking at waste, especially unattractive waste, as a creative opportunity and challenge.
To compliment Tanja’s work for Go Green Week, eighty-five brooches were made from our Wardrobe department’s fabric scraps. The proceeds from selling ‘scrappy’ brooches and the ‘This is NOT Rubbish’ auction, generated over £300 for a local community project; a project that seeks to enable residents, in a Camden council owned tower block, on Adelaide/Fellowes Road (NW3), to green their immediate surroundings by investing in troughs/planters to grow vegetables.
The week also saw the birth of Central’s tights’ ball, inspired by the MOTHER BALL created by artists Lenka Horakova and Anna Kompaniets and displayed outside the Embassy Theatre (in association with Platform-7) to create awareness of the impact and non-biodegradability of NYLON, particularly in relation to items of hosiery. Additionally, a ‘tights ball’ workshop and ‘scrappy brooch’ workshop were both run during the week to highlight the need to be more ‘mindful’ of what is waste, the damage it presents to the environment and the creative opportunities that it can present by reassessing our relationship with what we determine and label as rubbish.
A Green Roadshow was also run by our caterers, Bartlett Mitchell and the week culminated in ‘Woolly Pully Friday,’ where staff and students were encourage to come in and tweet pictures of themselves wearing a ‘fun’ jumper as the heating was turned down a few notches to highlight awareness of our own institution’s carbon footprint in relation to climate change.