Special Issue: Arts

Ailie Rutherford is a visual artist, curator and the founder and artistic director of Feminist Exchange Network, a Glasgow based collective led by women and other marginalised genders which uses social and activist art to explore feminist economics in practice and in relation to women’s lived experience. Ailie’s feminist economic artworks have been shown internationally including Unbox festival (India), Institute of Network Cultures (Netherlands), Supermarkt (Germany), Rum 46 (Denmark), Van Abbemuseum (Netherlands), Sheffield DocFest (England), and Documenta 15 (Germany). In 2023, artist Ailie Rutherford was commissioned by the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) to create an exhibition and workshop series as part of the project ‘Women in multiple low-paid employment: pathways between, care and health’ (2020-2024). The academic project was the first to study the nature and extent of women’s multiple low paid employment (MLPE) in the UK. Ailie Rutherford led a series of workshops at GWL entitled ‘Mapping Women’s Work’. The resulting exhibition Pouring Out, Pouring In shared prints and other outcomes from the workshop series wherein the women involved mapped out their multiple paid and unpaid roles, thinking together about what a more equitable economic system might look like. This excerpt is from the Pouring Out, Pouring In exhibition booklet, co-authored by artist Ailie Rutherford along with lead researcher Louise Lawson, at University of Glasgow, and GWL curator Caroline Gausden. It describes the process and shares prints and other outcomes from the workshop series which visualized the complex nature of work and care for many women. Pouring out, Pouring In demonstrates how artistic work intersects with the Degrowth Agenda to collectively research and develop alternative socially just futures. The work is funded by the Nuffield Foundation, an independent charitable trust with a mission to advance social well-being.

In Céline Keller’s Who is Afraid of Degrowth?, the publicly accessible debate on degrowth is curated and restaged in a comic format. Keller’s illustrations not only visualize the conversations as they happen across a range of platforms—from snappy, heated retorts on “X,” to long scholarly treatises, memes, and infographics floating around the web—but contextualizes them within the network of references and influences. Moreover, drawing on Victor Fei Lim’s framework for multimodal discourse analysis, Keller’s own stance within the debate becomes clear through the illustrations and her staging of the mise en scene and the mise en page (to apply Geraint D’Arcy’s terms, 2020). This review examines how Keller not only indexes the argument for and against debate, but inserts her own arguments through the visual plane, showing how Who is Afraid of Degrowth? imagines an alternative to the current patterns of public discourse.

The essay explores how speculative fiction and sound art can serve as powerful tools for envisioning and promoting desirable futures. We take extractivist practices in Mozambique as a starting subject of indignation. Reflecting on how artistic mediums allow for an emotional and imaginative critique of real-world issues, such as neocolonialism and environmental exploitation. We argue that fictions shape societies and that our world is driven by dominant narratives - such as capitalism or growth metrics like GDP - that often obscure alternative ways of living and being. By blending speculative fiction with sound art, our theater play The Dynamic Ministry of Insubordination aims to challenge these prevailing dystopian narratives that dominate our cultural and political landscapes. Through our theater and radiophonic play, we critique the exploitation of resources and labor, exploring the absurdity of modern practices through the lens of a post-capitalist, animist future. We call for a reclaiming of imagination to foster hope and envision utopian futures. The work highlights the need to shift from an anthropocentric worldview and embrace a more holistic understanding of existence, where humans, non-human beings, and inert matter share agency. Through artistic expression, we wish to question established hierarchies and inspire paradigm shifts that promote more sustainable, equitable, and joyful futures.