Taigh Chearsabhagh is actively engaged with environmental and climate crisis work through our wide reaching arts programming. We are one of the Climate Beacon partners for the Outer Hebrides, working to inspire public engagement and positive action in the Outer Hebrides in the run-up to and beyond the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. You can read more about the Climate Beacons project here.
With UistFilm, and in partnership with Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law & Governance, Island Innovation and Glasgow Science Centre and Youth Scotland, we launched Message in a Bottle, a participatory multi-media art project inviting people across the world, especially those in island and coastal communities, and especially young people and families, to create messages in bottles to be delivered to COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, November 2021.
We are inviting you to document your concerns about the climate crisis, sea level rise, marine pollution and biodiversity, asking questions of polluters and those in power and proposing sustainable future scenarios for mitigation, adaptation and resilience. An installation of the messages, bottles and resulting film will be created at COP26.
If you would like to send a message in a bottle, here’s how to join in.
Sting (author and singer of the huge 1979 hit Message in a Bottle for The Police) has even sent us a special recording to show support for the Climate Change Message in a Bottle project!
This project was inspired by a message in a bottle found by curator/filmmaker Andy Mackinnon on Baile Sear beach, North Uist. Andy is currently developing a documentary feature film project about this bottle and the stories of resilient islanders on two continents who are fighting to adapt to the climate crisis.
Niels Berthelsen documented placing the message in a bottle in an ice floe off the coast of West Greenland in Baffin Bay 700km north of the Arctic Circle, in 2004. Andy Mackinnon found the bottle on Baile Sear beach 18 months later.