Love Ssega is a Musician, Artist and current Arts Foundation Music For Change Fellow 2022. Having started as the original frontman of Clean Bandit, Love Ssega has gone on to work with Philharmonia Orchestra, tour China as a Musician in Residence for the British Council and PRS Foundation and release music with Parisian fashion house Kitsuné. As a visual artist, he has collaborated with Slow Factory in New York and is part of their debut MoMA PS1 exhibition.

In recent years, he has turned his considerable talents to campaigning for climate justice. As a culmination of this activist work, Love Ssega has been collaborating with the National Gallery X (National Gallery and King’s College London) and Nesta to create Love Ssega’s HOME-Zero. We caught up with him to hear more about the project.

Grace Nicol: Love Ssega’s HOME-Zero is your new project, can you tell us a bit about it?

Love SSega: HOME-Zero is a partnership between Nesta and The National Gallery X. The intention behind the partnership is to support artists and creatives to develop a unique creative experience that helps inspire a net-zero carbon future. 

I feel that it is timely, in a cost of living crisis caused by our structural addiction to fossil fuels, that a commission such as HOME-Zero demonstrates that musicians and artists can tackle these questions with the backing of our big cultural institutions. 

For my HOME-Zero project, I have hosted two events at the National Gallery; a workshop involving Londoners aged 18-35 years and a promenade performance tackling climate justice and a call for more sustainable social housing. I feel very lucky to have had this performance on Earth Day, 22nd April 2022 right in the National Gallery with some great performers and artists. It is my hope that this action will create awareness and impact, beyond the events, to bring people together and tackle some of the issues we are experiencing due to climate change. I intend to make this happen practically through the creation of a film that will represent the outcomes of the workshop and performance (premiering in July 2022) and through gathering and sharing opinions, raising awareness, bringing together communities, and connecting with what young people think.

This is an ambitious multi-arts project that I have the fantastic opportunity to bring to people. It presented a creative challenge to link home emissions to the climate crisis to highlight what we could improve on. Given the type of artist I am, I wanted to involve underrepresented voices by focussing on sustainable social housing as a topic, predominantly people of colour, to bring these opinions to a wide audience. 

The music I composed for the performance and film was inspired by the National Gallery’s world-class collection and the views of 18–35-year-old Londoners from diverse backgrounds previously recorded at the workshop in National Gallery X Lab. I was honoured to bring different voices into the National Gallery and to show that climate action should be creative, positive and uplifting. How often do you get a chance to curate something in your hometown in front of internationally renowned Turner, Constable, Gainsborough, and Caravaggio paintings? It’s an absolute honour.

Grace: Why is this project so important, particularly now?

Love Ssega: This project is important on two fronts. First and foremost, to address the climate emergency and inequality surrounding it, in this case making sure social housing is also front and centre of the green transition. The second important point is the chance National Gallery X and NESTA have given me to show that art can be a catalyst for change. I want to show that artists of all stripes are tackling big questions. As society we are seeing the cost of living crisis is so strongly linked to our addiction to fossil fuels, so we have to build a future away from them right now. 

Grace: What do you hope to achieve with the HOME-Zero project?

Love Ssega: I hope people can realise how much the climate emergency is not only linked to the sustainability of the planet but to our quality of life, so we are all implicated in this problem, and it affects us all. As we all know, the current system isn’t working. My aim for Love Ssega’s HOME-Zero is to highlight the connections between the climate emergency and the social housing crisis and to bring Londoners together to dream up ways of tackling this. Key to my project is the principle that live performance and art can be used as a catalyst for change and that community and collective goals can have the power to influence society. Not only do I want to bring different ideas to people through music and art, I also wanted to show positivity, be it through the workshop speakers or the poets, actors and dancers in the performance.

Grace: Who are the other artists that you are working with on the project? How is it to collaborate across artforms?

Love Ssega: My musical collaborators here are the genre-shifting Shadwell Opera who have worked with binaural sound, premiered an opera at the Mariinsky Theatre and curated a show and experience for schoolchildren at Alexandra Palace Theatre. Falmouth-based designer Dominick Allen created the most innovative new upcycled instruments I have ever seen. He is taking old radiators, heating tubes, furnaces and turning them into controlled tuned instruments. This has been such a creative process for me in a world where so much is done on computer with synthesised instruments. This is so exciting, and I was thrilled to write even more music with these four instruments. It’s also great to upcycle items that create a lot of home emissions and use them not only as educational talking points but to make art.

For the performance, I wanted to bring in different voices and, in particular, the Black experience to the National Gallery. Therefore, I was delighted to work with Solomon O.B. and Kieron Rennie to commission new poetry from them and also dance artists Paris Crossley and Krystal S. Lowe. All four artists have a rich history of cross-arts collaboration, so this was another opportunity to show that Black art has no bounds. Nor can or will it be pigeonholed to certain spaces or limited to certain forms.

Grace: How is community important to your work on a micro and macro scale?

Love Ssega: Community is very important and became even more so during the pandemic as we all looked inward. Social movements such as Black Lives Matter showed the inequalities to many in the UK and across the world - triggered by events in the US, but also highlighting deep-rooted systematic problems in other countries too. When we look at housing for instance, it was not too long ago that we had the Grenfell tragedy. The worry for many communities is that if resident voices were ignored there, what are the chances that they are going to be listened to as part of any green transition. Confidence must be rebuilt where trust has been lost. Otherwise, we can’t heal a divided society. My work here is all about healing rifts and bringing people together. I have a different audience to the National Gallery historically, however, this is something I can change and attempt to merge through my work. If art isn’t about the people, then it is a personal extravagance.

Grace: What role do you see the arts having in society?

Love Ssega: I think one of the roles of the arts is to bring different angles and emotional experiences to people. Young people have been doing this a lot with global school strikes and online campaigns, however, we can’t just leave it to them. Art has always been rebellious, urgent, and challenging. Glastonbury started with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament lest we forget. Somehow the press in the UK have convinced people that 120,000 cheering for Jeremy Corbyn at the Pyramid Stage are the enemy, rather than a Conservative Party in Government now wanting to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and planning to repeal the Human Rights Act. The environment is on the backburner for that lot and the media won’t push it up the agenda, so it is for us artists to make a noise.

I wish it were another way, but we don’t have time to sit around and wait. Left wing, right wing, or undecided, we all suffer together if the planet dies.

Images by Sophie Harbinson. For more information and to keep up to date on the film premiere click here.