Art and Climate Change: Visualizing Rising Sea Levels and Urban Nature with Lilian Cooper

Lilian Cooper: 00:04 
If I see a plant that’s just made it through the pavement, I want to cheer it. When I go back to some of the coastlines, some of them are not there. I want people to stop and think and look. I’m a gorilla gardener, so I’m planting in the street, and we’ve seen within three years insects return when I got excited to see worms.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 00:28
In this episode of Climate Forward, I sit down with artist and European Climate Pact ambassador Lilian Cooper. Her work carries a quiet power. She draws disappearing coastlines, follows the rising tide line across beaches, restores forgotten plants in small urban gardens, and collaborates with scientists to make the abstract realities of climate change tangible. I’m Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi, and this is Climate Forward. Lilian Cooper, welcome to Climate Forward.

Lilian Cooper: 01:02
Thank you.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 01:03
It’s a pleasure to have you on the show today, where we’ll talk about your work as an artist, maybe some other non-art-related work, but also your role in the European Climate Pact as an ambassador. Can you please start by introducing yourself with a few words? What is it that you do?

Lilian Cooper: 01:21
I’m an artist working on climate change. My work is nature-based. I I make drawings. I’m I’m really a witness to what is happening. And because my career has been now spanning three decades, I’m really starting to see change even within my own art production.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 01:42
And you recently joined the European Climate Pact as an ambassador?

Lilian Cooper: 01:46
Yes, this last January I joined. I only recently discovered the project, and I felt I couldn’t keep doing what I do alone. We’re a team, we really need to reach out. And what I really enjoy about the Climate Pact is it’s so diverse. There are people coming from so many different walks of life, and yet we all share this one aim to help, to change, and to make people aware.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 02:19
I know that if you join the pact, um you do a few commitments, you will share how you want to make a difference with your work in the pact. What are the things that you would like to achieve with your with your participation?

Lilian Cooper: 02:35
Um I would like to reach out to more people. I think I think that’s what one of my my goals. It’s to make also art a recognized medium for passing on this message. Because I think artists have a very relevant role to play within society, and sometimes we are sidelined, and yet we’re very diverse and we s we move across all kinds of cultural and um work boundaries. So I can talk to a workman on the street, I can talk to a gardener, but I can also be talking to the director of a large research institute. That bridging effect of an artist is incredibly useful when you’re trying to bring a message across, when you passionately care, as I and many of our colleagues do in the pact about doing something.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 03:36
And then that’s a good bridge to your work, I think. W doing something. Um share a little bit with us what is it that you do in your work?

Lilian Cooper: 03:46
Well, I started now just over twenty-seven years ago working on the coastline project, which is to draw the rock edges of the North Atlantic.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 03:59
I would assume that in your work of the coastlines, when you look back twenty-seven years ago you see some change.

Lilian Cooper: 04:07
We when I go back to some of the coastlines, some of them are not there. I worked uh on the Îles de la Madeleine in Maritime Quebec, and it’s a very soft sandstone. You you can actually touch it, it’s it’s friable, it it comes off in your hands. It it’s barely more sand than stone, and yes, the headlands that I drew no longer exist, which is a quite a sobering thought. But it was also very interesting to be in these locations where people would say things like and they’d go to their neighbors and they’d say, I think I have a bit of a problem. And the local community would gather round and they would check the soil and they say, Yes, the water is rising. So the seawater was entering into the landscape to the point that the ground was so sodden that the house has to be moved. And then it is physically two-story houses are actually moved up the slope.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 05:06
You were just talking about the we of or we we touched upon the tide line uh the shorelines, the coastlines that you were uh drawing for a long, long time. You still do this today? Is that still something that’s ongoing?

Lilian Cooper: 05:18
Aaron Ross Powell It is an ongoing project. I had left it to one side for a while because I have been rather obsessed by my recent research. But yes, I’m longing to get back.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 05:29
What are your recent projects then that take up your time?

Lilian Cooper: 05:33
Well, at this very moment, I’m working on a project about the uh re the rehabilitation of weeds. So I’m working on a project about um uh the use medical use of historic historical medical use of plants. Um the taking something that people actually revile, like uh dandelion, or at the moment I also produced a book on um and stinging nettles, which are really not popular. I mean you have to work quite hard on the PR of for these plants. And there’s something extraordinary when you read about it and you see the uses and the fact that we have lost all that knowledge so quickly.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 06:27
There are probably a lot of plants that are put into a certain category, or if we’re talking about weeds, n I do think that we are as a world a little bit evolving from very black and white thinking this is a good plant, this is a bad plant, more towards it depends. Because uh on the one hand, this is about the you know, removing the stigmata of certain plants or weeds as you called them before.

Lilian Cooper: 06:60
Uh they are in fact not weeds. Um I’m working with uh historical data, so I’m working in research libraries looking at sixteenth century, seventeenth century herbaria, where these plants are obviously listed completely differently and listed for their use, not for their weed quality, which is a fairly new concept. Uh I mean many people say a weed is just a plant in the wrong place, and I firmly believe that. In fact, I’m not even sure that there is a wrong place.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 07:32
And and and uh how is this project connected to the climate pact or or to sustainability?

Lilian Cooper: 07:40
It’s connected to the idea that we need green everywhere, so I’m growing these plants in my garden. I’m working I’m building a 17th-century garden in my own garden.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 07:52
Sorry, what is a 17th-century garden?

Lilian Cooper: 07:54
I’m using the example of the Snippendaal garden in the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam, which was one of the earliest medicinal gardens, and they produced lists of the plants in their gardens, so you can use that, and I use that to create, recreate the garden in my own garden. And I also am a gorilla gardener, so I’m planting in the street. Um my neighbours are now planting in the street. We’re mixing wild with more cultivated varieties of plant, and we’ve seen within three years insects return, butterflies. I mean, I got excited to see worms. You know, it was barren, and now we’ve and to do something so small and yet to have such an impact on the landscape but on the people, I think the perception of people walking past is enormous. And so that’s like a tiny example of what we within the what I within the Climate Pact want to do is show by example, uh, by showing the beauty of these objects, of these plants or these rocks or the trees. I want people to stop and think and look, and the only way they’re going to do that is by a level of enjoyment. I don’t want it to be a a waving finger, look at this, it’s good for you. It’s about um I suppose to a degree it’s about finding joy in our environment. And you know, if I see a plant that’s just made it through the pavement, I I I’m like I want to cheer it.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 09:37
The resilience of nature.

Lilian Cooper: 09:39
Yes.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 09:41
I think you know, it is connected somehow to to biodiversity, I think, is something that we especially if you look at industrialized agriculture, um maybe even particularly here in the Netherlands, you know, there’s in certain areas definitely a lack of uh and and you know, bringing a more diverse range of plants or greens that enhance each other is something we we should we probably need.

Lilian Cooper: 10:12
I’m a little worried that actually that uh nature is perceived as something that one goes and experiences whereas nature is everywhere. Even in our urban environments it’s trying to squeeze its way through the paving stones. I I think that’s something else that even within the pact I meet people who are not always thinking, hang on, nature is is everything, it’s the mold that is growing on the on the paving stone, it’s the lichens that are growing up the wall. It’s just smaller scale. It’s we have to change our scale when we look at them. It’s not the dramatic magnificence of a church painting of American land wide wilderness, but it’s still valid. It’s just all we have in many cases, and we should just nurture it. In urban environments we see sometimes magnificent roof gardens built, uh accidentally often by the birds. We see green roofs, we see people’s gardens. The Nature Monument in the Netherlands at one point suggested we could make a fi uh an extra national park by interconnecting people’s gardens, which I thought was an absolutely beautiful concept, but did require an awful lot of people to give up their paving stones, um, which I’m not sure is going to fully work. Idea fabulous exercising it, not so sure. But uh I think it’s really I I think we have to recognize that that that it isn’t one or the other, but it is predominantly one, predominantly urban or predominantly non-urban.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 11:59
And is that something that you also encounter in your work or that that makes part of your artistic practice?

Lilian Cooper: 12:05
This encouragement to bring more nature into the cities or or I think it’s also stems partly from my initial training as an architect, so that I’m very aware of my urban environment because I now live in an urban environment, having grown up in a small village in a national park. So my I’m I’m much more aware of my environment than I might be had I always grown up in the city.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 12:33
And when did you discover this interest in nature and and you know the how did that come about?

Lilian Cooper: 12:40
I can pinpoint the moment when I really started thinking about climate.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 12:45
So do tell.

Lilian Cooper: 12:46
Yes. I was watching television and a school friend of mine was on television. He’s now a professor of climate um studies in Oxford, and he predicted our present climate situation. Only everyone at the time thought he was exaggerating. Turns out he actually miscalculated a little bit and was playing it down, and in fact it happened faster than he predicted. But it was for the BBC and it had to be tamed because the message would have been a bit frightening. And as it was, everyone felt discrediting it and ignoring it would be the best option. But I never I never forgot that. When it’s someone you know, whose whose opinion you know is well researched, and he wouldn’t say that for no reason. It it followed on from childhood discussions with my parents about climate, uh, about farming, about respect for nature, which I was brought up with. My father had a lot of farming in the family. So uh it was a really a point where I thought I can no longer ignore this. I cannot, as a responsible human being. Working also with nature, because by this point I was already working, in fact, I think I was working the pink granite quarry on the Isle of Mull at the time. Um I was really aware of being in precious environments, and it was time that I actually stood up and did something about this.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 14:31
I know that you’re right. We were talking about the the coastlines, but there is another project that’s very dear to you that is connected to the coast, which is the tide lines.

Lilian Cooper: 14:44
Yes, yes. Tide Lines was a project I did, it was a quite defined project, it’s only three years long. My projects all tend to be years rather than weeks. Um and this was about rising sea levels. And I worked it was during lockdown, so it was a perfect time to take the bicycle, be entirely on my own on the coastline, drawing initially in The Hague. So I I thought it was very poetic to be in a in a landscape where in fact my Dutch family had been for 250 years. So it was a really interesting space. It was also quite scary to see the reaction of passers by, some whom would just actually physically I’m sorry, verbally abuse me uh for draw for drawing tides. I was drawing the line of the tide as it came in over my paper. So I was every five minutes I would make a new series of drawings. I would work for three or four hours. These drawings would then be bound, um, and they would be produced as books. I produced uh an artist book at the same time, and very kindly the introduction was written by the director of the IHE, uh the uh UNESCO IHE Water Education Institute in Delft. And uh Eddy Moors and I have worked to work together on several on another project as well, because there’s a s a really interesting synergy between scientific research and the artistic language, which he’s very interested in, and we we connected on that level, which was fascinating. So that book is in fact in many collections now, uh, because I’ve touched a nerve, I feel. And and it is really important, and I’m very blessed to be a lucky and but also I I feel i it’s a it’s a way of making something so abstract as rising sea levels actually tangible by drawing it. And this wasn’t just based in The Hague. Afterwards I went to Zeeland, I went to Oostende, and I went to the Île de Ré in in France, where that’s actually flooded parts of it for f 50% of the island was lost in serious storms, it’s bounced back again. But I wanted to take areas which were under threat of flooding. By doing something so clean and so simple and so elemental, I wanted to bring that message over without creating fear or threatening for the majority of people. That was yeah.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 17:38
Uh and and did you uh did you pursue this a little bit or or or what is the outcome of the project? So this this book, did you also I mean, connect this to the literal you know, documentation of rising sea levels or or um no?

Lilian Cooper: 17:53
It is a it it’s a series of books uh of the actual drawings. It’s an artist’s book, and I also gave a ser uh a lecture uh as part of symposium which was created for my project on um uh uh at the IHE in Delft on uh art and science.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 18:14
Okay. Can you tell a little bit more on this connection between art and science? Because I do think that’s also something that is not the first obvious thing when you think about this.

Lilian Cooper: 18:22
Well, it’s a growing field because uh it’s very difficult to communicate a lot of hard facts as data in a manner that would actually appeal to people, make it last more than two minutes in anyone’s memory, because quite frankly, faced with a large sheaf of of inform of data, information, it can get a tiny bit dry. And it is actually quite difficult for the general public to grasp it, whereas if it’s a drawing or it’s a it’s actually because this was all I think you could call it performance as well. Um when you see somebody working like that on the coast every few minutes, there was a little film made of me. It’s very interesting and it becomes suddenly what is she doing? Not here is a list of the data of the rising tides.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 19:17
Um it gives a new perspective.

Lilian Cooper: 19:19
It gives a different perspective. It it supplements, shall we say. It but it can it can do more than that. Um I mean, my other project with the IHE, for example, was and and how I initially got to know them was I was working on a water project on water quality, and I was learning about water quality thanks to them, but also um fishing out all the rubbish out of the canals in the town I live in, which is Delft.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 19:49
And water quality of the inland waterways?

Lilian Cooper: 19:52
Yes, of the canals.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 19:54
Can you tell a little bit more what what exactly?

Lilian Cooper: 19:57
Well, it was a it was for a museum. Exhibition, I was commissioned to make a project on water quality, and I chose to take the uh water outside my house because I’m lucky enough to live near the canals, and I wanted to capture that, I wanted to learn what was in the water, so I also went to water treatment plants. I spoke to the Hoogheemraadschap in uh Delft, in uh Delft London, uh to talk about the water makeup. I went to a treatment plant, uh, all these things, although they’re not manifested as data, I incorporated that within my work and my own perspective. Because everywhere I go, every project I work on, including coastlines, I work with experts in the field. So I also took some geology lessons, uh, so I had a better understanding of the rock formations that I work with from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Uh it’s it’s always uh for the for also I’ve I’ve had a lot of lovely mailing lists from and book recommendations from like Woods Hole in Boston on the uh Tide Line Project. Uh so and and my for example the project that we were going to talk about as well, the Xylotech Unpacked, that was working with a lot of laboratories, and so I was working in plant pathology departments with scientists directly working on their projects.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 21:38
Bring me with you. How does that look? When when you do a project, uh first of all, I would like to know why you work with scientists because you could also just go and draw the tideline or observe the water in the canals. But what is it that drives you to bring the scientific aspect in your work?

Lilian Cooper: 21:58
Um well, partly it’s my own background. I come from a family of academics. So for me, it was also part of this feeling that I had to bring a message over. If you’re going to have a message, that message has to be accurate, in my feeling. I feel I’m a I’m a stickler for detail. So I think that for me, research, knowing what the science is behind what I’m doing, why the landscape is behaving as it is, why, for example, there was a dead tree in at the top of the mountain where my near my my um grandmother’s home. And I didn’t know why, but I happened to be having a conversation in the Natural History Museum in Brussels, and we were talking about beetles. And the str and he explained that it was simply water stress, heat stress, and the lack of water, and then sudden downpours where many or much of it wouldn’t be absorbed, which was stressing these plants so much that uh pine boring beetles and and insects of that nature would pick strangely only the pine trees out and they would consume them. So this is a forest of living trees and dead pine trees. It’s a very weird landscape. So I I always want to know what’s happening. So of course I find out, I talk to somebody. That’s a small example. I I’m the visiting artist for the Botanic Gardens of Leiden. I occasionally bother the very generous um botanist who will answer some of my questions. Uh I he still hasn’t fully forgiven me, I think, for the question I asked about uh non-native trees, because as a well, I’ve drawn several of them as as long-term pro drawing projects, but these trees are not native to the Netherlands. They’re not even native to this hemisphere. So when this tree is planted and it’s been living here for over 200 years, does it integrate more? Does it sustain more insect life than a tree only fifty years in the country? I don’t know. I don’t know how fast it changes. I asked him, he says he doesn’t know either, so there’s some student who may be cursing me at this moment because their job is to count the insects. Because of course you have this non-native plant, and a non-native plant sustains normally only 15% of native plant insect life.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 24:39
It’s amazing how your work as an artist brings you towards insights like this. I mean, I find this super, super I did not know at all that there’s such a difference in biodiversity that you introduce.

Lilian Cooper: 24:51
Yes. And I I I didn’t know either, but it’s through seeing these things and asking questions.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 24:58
Yeah, I like how you search for a scientific foundation of many of the projects that you’re pursuing. And and and I I know we’re jumping around a little bit from you know, there’s a rough connection between coastlines, tide lines, and more. And now we’re we’re at the trees, but you know, talking about more green things and the ocean, I do know that you also have a project that looks at seaweed. Yes. And I would like to touch upon this also still.

Lilian Cooper: 25:26
Yes. The seaweed is although seven years old, it’s project, and I’m still working on it. Um at the moment I’m working with a uh we’re making a project of a professor formerly of the Natur National Museum Natura Museum Naturel, no, I beg your pardon, Museum National de Histoire Naturelle in Paris, who she’s now going to be working in the Sorbonne station in Roscoff. And she her she’s a seaweed specialist for years. Uh she wants to work on a project with me where we illustrate it with uh kelp, because of course of the importance, again to go back to forests, of kelp forests with their um absorption of CO2, it being so much more significant than we ever realized. But there are so many aspects of seaweed that it it’s such a growing interest in the general public, which is wonderful. Um but it’s it’s also important and and therefore I feel I have to know about it from a scientific point of view as well. For me, a project isn’t whole if I haven’t looked at many aspects of it.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 26:45
And what do you want to do with this project? Or what in in the project, I should rather say?

Lilian Cooper: 26:49
Well, I’ve been actually working with seaweed for longer than this project. I’ve been working with seaweed from I I worked with the state herbarium of South Australia, who were actually instrumental in introducing me to seaweed. Um Carolyn Ritchie, thank you. Uh she as uh I really didn’t realize or recognize the significance of seaweed. I would work on coastlines and I would just see seaweed. I then started learning about seaweed. I now when I go to the coast and I see seaweed floating in the in the sea, I’m so excited. I’m like wanting to get out an eye an app to identify these these plants as they’re floating. I feel like I’m in a floating herbarium. Uh but what I really found interesting, for example, is that I was in um in Brittany looking at rocks, but I also discovered in uh Quimper in south of Brittany, they had the collection of Monsieur de Bonmaison, who had collected one of the earliest seaweed collections in Herberia. And what was really interesting is the uh fifty years on Le Fre Crouant, also in Brittany, because Brittany is rich in seaweed, um named one of their seaweeds after Monsieur de Bonmaison. So Bonnemaisonia is actually named after him, which I thought was just the most wonderful concept that you could have something named after you like this. Yeah, and it’s sort of on a title. And I now fright quite frequently see Bonnemaisonia floating, and I get I get quite excited.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 28:40
Quite rightfully so, I guess. So I I like and I see this thread in your work that you always or at least in the projects you mentioned to me recently, you always work with an scientific institution or with a specific scientist to support your work.

Lilian Cooper: 29:02
Yes.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 29:02
Is that on purpose or is this something that just happens?

Lilian Cooper: 29:05
Well, initially it was it was almost accidental. Uh for example, when I started on the the one of the starting points for the um Xylotech was a meeting I had in the uh herbarium uh in the Royal in the Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney in their plant pathology department. And Ed Lou helped me tremendously. Uh and he really was one of the he introduced me to a particular type of uh plant disease which uh I was uh shocked me profoundly, but also opened my eyes. And then I actually work with micro uh electron microscopes and ordinary microscopes to see the detail. So I’m working on diff all different scales. Whether this was a conscious I think it started maybe as a few very interesting meetings, but it became so fulfilling that I couldn’t leave it alone. So I I find that I for me it’s all about research, but it’s not just about the scientific research. Uh I look at museum collections. The Xylotech began because I saw an original xylotec which had been built uh for by Frederick Slumbach of Nuremberg.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 30:29
For the people who don’t know what the Xylotech is, do you mind Spain?

Lilian Cooper: 30:32
Yes, of course, because most people don’t know. I certainly didn’t know what it means. No, it’s a library of wood. It’s essentially a library of wood samples, but this particular xylotec is in Huis Groeneveld of now Casteel Groeneveld in Baarn, and it’s the most extraordinary connection. It’s bound like a book. The spine of the book is made from the wood that it describes. So I loved that incredible connection, you know, this old, redundant scientific data being reused in as and and having a artistic value as well. I mean these were really beautiful.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 31:15
Coming full circle now to the beginning when we spoke about the climate pact, does that aspect also uh make part of the the goals or the things you want to achieve that people understand the importance of diversity in nature, in in insects around us?

Lilian Cooper: 31:36
I I worry no. And so that is part of my, I think is part of my role. But I, not being a scientist, see myself more as, shall we say, the PR agent for the insects, rather than a scientist who can exactly tell you where these insects are, their significance. Yes, I mean for me, if I’ve drawn them, I have to know are they common, are they not common, what is their natural habitat, how do they like to live. That’s also natural curiosity. I’ve got an overactive curiosity. But I want to, yes, I want to um make other people as curious as me. I think we need to start asking questions. Much like when we go into supermarkets, many people don’t ask where these things come from. You ask many children, they might think that the meat and vegetables come from plastic. We n I think we need to make connections. And that’s r uh one of my roles, I think, within the Climate Pact is to make those sort of connections.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 32:44
Yeah, and when you say this, I also immediately get the feeling that very often the scientific or the I wanna say the dry scientific background foundation, the data is much more challenging to comprehend or to relate to than maybe something that has been translated in a much more engaging art project in your instance.

Lilian Cooper: 33:12
I think because we are very visual we have become a very visual uh culture. We uh much of our lives are surrounded by telephones, it’s by images on phones, it’s by advertising, walking around, everything is image. Um so to speak to people in image language is probably a good language to use. Uh we are much more uh unconsciously educated in visual language, all of us, whatever our training, because of our environment. But sadly, sometimes we miss the awareness of and the significance of insects, worms in my garden. These and these are important. And we need to in many places, because so many pesticides are being used in the countryside, the diversity of nature is actually stronger in urban environments. If you look at things like uh down my street, we had a headshot. Um, my Australian neighbor had never seen one, so I had to explain to him about it, which was also quite fun. Um but it’s it’s this sort of constant it’s it’s being aware, it’s sharing, it’s it’s recognizing that uh we need to make this accessible. And dry data can be quite exciting too, I admit. I I get quite interested by it, but I’d like to make it so accessible that everyone can enjoy it.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 34:49
I think that’s a great closing word, to be honest. That’s I couldn’t have said that better. Um It was very fascinating to hear about your practice, all the work that you do, and I think that art is another puzzle piece in talking about climate change and talking about the challenges that our world faces today, and it’s a it can be a beautiful way of bringing a topic to more people in a new way. So I really like that.

Lilian Cooper: 35:19
I I think art has always played an incredibly living role in our lives, and I think sometimes we forget that now, but we only have to look at places like Lasco to know that art has always been part of humanity.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 35:35
Well, Lilian, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down with me and have this super interesting conversation. I really appreciate it.

Lilian Cooper: 35:43
Well, thank you.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 35:44
I wish you all the best for the future. Is there a project that you’re working on at the moment and that you still want to mention, or maybe you can already share a little bit what you’re working on now?

Lilian Cooper: 35:57
Well, there is one project that I’m I’m at the moment fundraising for, which is very dear to my heart. It is a development on the uh herbarium theory, uh herbarium series. I’m building a um chained library based on medieval chain libraries, and I’m using it, it’s a library of banned book languages.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 36:22
So I’m taking sorry, what is a chained library?

Lilian Cooper: 36:26
Again, only thanks to my research have I found out about chained libraries. In Hereford Cathedral, for example, there is still one of the earliest remaining chained libraries. It’s a library usually of manuscripts, which are physically chained to reading tables, partly I think because books were so valuable and you can’t trust an academic. I wanted to use that language of chains to use it also with the idea of banned languages, because I have many cultures in my background and I know many people of diverse cultures. So I’m also looking at the Basque country because, of course, working there drew me very much to the Basque culture, and I know a Basque scholar who will I hope can help me on this. My sister speaks is a fluent Gaelic speaker, so she’s going to help me on the band Gaelic because that was also banned. Um it just increases. I everyone I know has contact with a band language of some form. And I love the idea that there are these books chained with the languages that are bound in them and that are also banned. So that’s my project at the moment.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 37:42
Well, the best of luck with this. It does sound really, really interesting. So I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing and hearing more about this in the future. And Lilian, once again, thank you very much for joining me today and uh all the best for the future.

Lilian Cooper: 37:55
Thank you.

Mansur Philipp Gharabaghi: 37:60
In this episode, we explored how Lilian Cooper’s art makes the shifting edges of our climate visible. From coastlines and gardens to the overlooked beauty of weeds and insects. Her reflections remind us that creativity can open pathways to understanding where numbers fall short.