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Symposium: Evolving the Forest

An international gathering celebrating trees and woodlandIn collaboration with The Royal Forestry Society and Timber Strategies, we are convening an international group of foresters, artists, writers, thinkers and do-ers to look back at the last 100 years of Forestry in the UK and forward to the next. It’s for everyone who works, wanders or wonders in our varied British forests, and to help us learn from others around the world about their own cultural connections to trees and woodland. 

You can join the event for all three days, or for just one or two of the three days. Only a limited number of places remain so don’t delay…

Read more…

If you would love to attend the whole of Evolving the Forest but are finding this rather beyond your means, we do have a number of Stewarding Bursaries available. In exchange for a few hours work you can be a full delegate for £35. Interested? Please contact us right away.

Special events at Evolving the Forest

There are a number of events at Evolving the Forest open to all, not just to delegates.

On  Wednesday June 19, join us for the opening keynote by Prof. Fiona Stafford with her reflections on Why Trees Matter. Author of The Long, Long Life of Trees(Yale 2016), writer and presenter of the BBC Radio 3 series The Meaning of Trees, Prof. Stafford will remind us of the cultural importance of trees within literature and society from the 18thC on. 

Later that evening we return to Dartington’s Great Hall for a public conversation between Sir Harry Studholme (Chair of the Forestry Commission), Beccy Speight (CEO of Woodland Trust) and architect and broadcaster Piers Taylor (Invisible Studio Architects) about the future of forestry in the UK, why we love trees, and how we must learn to live differently with them.

The final keynote will be delivered as the Royal Forestry Society’s NDG James Memorial Lecture. Prof Kathy Willis CBE will talk about The framing of the UK’s forests: past, present and future. This important overview will look at how as a nation we manage, conserve and enhance forests, and how our approach to policy-making has shifted radically over the past century. 

All of these events have a very limited number of tickets available and will fill fast.

Pre-conference workshops

Finally, there are three special workshops open to the general public taking place the morning of Wednesday June 19.  These include a tour of the Forest Garden site at Dartington led by its long-term designer and manager, Martin Crawford; a guided visit to Fingle Woods where forester Dave Rickwood will guide you through the woods and explore its history and close connection to Dartington Hall, and its new and experimental approaches to contemporary forestry. The third offer is to experience a three-hour Forest Bathing session with the Nature & Wellbeing Collective at one of the Dartington estate’s very special woodland places.

Culture Speaks – A new way to speak out on climate

Across the globe, young people are stepping up as never before to confront the climate crisis. This spring, the Climate Museum is excited to present a new platform for creative youth leadership, recognizing the hunger youth have to engage with climate action.

On March 16, the Museum kicks off the first annual Climate Speaks, a citywide spoken word training program and competition for high school students, presented in partnership with the New York City Department of Education Office of Sustainability and with special thanks to Urban Word NYC.

Climate Speaks includes workshops, trainings, mentoring, a written competition, and live auditions, with 16 finalists taking the stage of the Apollo Theater on Friday, June 14. For program details, visit climatespeaks.org.

Young people deserve better than climate chaos and they know it. The report last fall from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sounded a new level of alarm, intensifying the call to transform our society and build toward a more equitable, climate-safe future. Though the window is shrinking, we still have time to act.

Youth imagination and vision have a unique capacity to inspire us all. Join us in listening to those whose future is at stake.

All high school students in the New York Metropolitan area are eligible to register for Climate Speaks. Please forward this to anyone you know who fits that description! The final performance at the Apollo Theater on Friday, June 14 is open to the general public; we’ll let you know as soon as tickets go on sale.

We are deeply grateful to our partners who are hosting Climate Speaksworkshops across the city: DreamYard, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Sunset Park High School, and Urban Word NYC.

Blued Trees Pursue the Common Good!

Public good references economic factors. Common good references common ethics. Blued Trees aligns both with culture and Earth rights to demand a new understanding of justice.”-Aviva Rahmani
Activists in Northern VA are now in touch with community members in Southern VA, near Blacksburg, who have already painted hundreds of trees. The Northern activists are considering expanding resistance to the pipelines and coordinating their legal strategies with the Blued Trees experiences. 

There are two recent interviews available, you can listen to The Art of Protecting Lands: Aviva Rahmani a State of the Art podcast recorded April 8th, 2019 as well as The Sarah West Love show, a live radio conversation recorded April 2nd, 2019 with Gale Elston, Robin Scully and Aviva Rahmani about expanding The Blued Trees Symphony in Virginia.

A Blade of Grass’s short documentary “Can Art Stop a Pipeline?” about the Blued Trees Project and “I Speak for the Trees, A Mock Trial,” is now available online!

Join us at the Idea Garden, 346 Broadway, Kingston, NY April 27th at 7 pm for a screening of the film “Can Art Stop a Pipeline?” followed by a Q&A with Aviva Rahmani.

Check out the two latest Gulf to Gulf webcasts about interdisciplinarity and the impact of art on science: “Interdisciplinarity and New Paradigms” and “Where Art Impacts Science”

If you’ll be in the New York City area this summer, consider visiting Aviva’s studio space at the LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island, part of her 2019 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Arts Center Residency!
Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution through the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) or subscribe to d.rip and follow the emerging narrative that will make an opera! 

Blued Trees is a division of Gulf to Gulf, a project fiscally sponsored by NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts), a 501©3, tax exempt organization founded in 1971 to work with the arts community throughout New York State to develop and facilitate programs in all disciplines. NYFA will receive grants on behalf of the project and ensure the use of grant funds in accordance with the grant agreements as well as provide program or financial reports as required. Any donations made to the project through NYFA are tax deductible!

Life in the City of Dirty Water at HotDocs

Life in the City of Dirty Water, a transmedia storytelling project, is an expression of decolonization and healing. Think of it as a survival guide to the urban Indigenous person.

The global premiere of the Life in the City of Dirty Water documentary will be at Hot Docs on May 1st, 2019!  

Rooted in Indigenous storytelling tradition, Life in the City of Dirty Water is a series of intimate vignettes that weave together the remarkable life of Indigenous climate change activist, Clayton Thomas-Muller. The film plunges audiences into an immersive storytelling journey, discovering the people and places and traumas and triumphs that shaped Clayton’s identity and cosmology. These are impossible stories weaving together different roles: a Sundancer, a father, a husband, an abused child, a hustler, a leader. Stories that juxtapose Clayton’s rise as a prominent Indigenous campaigner (at the Indigenous Environmental Network, Idle No More, and 350.org) with his raw and troubled journey of addiction, incarceration, healing, and forgiveness.

 SHORTS | 20 MINUTES | 2019 | CANADA | ENGLISH | WORLD PREMIERE

Wed, May 1 8:30 PM 
TIFF Bell Lightbox 4 
Screening With The Sound of Masks

GET TICKETS

Fri, May 3 3:30 PM 
Scotiabank Theatre 13 
Screening With The Sound of Masks

GET TICKETS

Sun, May 5 2:30 PM 
TIFF Bell Lightbox 4 
Screening With The Sound of Masks

GET TICKETS

Follow Clayton

https://www.facebook.com/ClaytonThomasMuller
https://www.instagram.com/clayton_thomas_muller/

The ninth annual Big Green Theater

April 25 – 28

Thursday at 7pm (PS75): Free!
Friday at 6:30pm (PS239): $50 Benefit Event + Performance
Saturday at 1pm (PS75) + 4pm (PS239): Free!
Sunday at 1pm (PS239) + 4pm (PS75): Free!

Created in collaboration with The Bushwick Starr
Directed by Jeremy Pickard

Plays written by Bushwick/Ridgewood elementary students at PS75 + PS239
This year’s plays are inspired by two big problems facing local eco-systems: Habitat Loss and Climate Change. Student playwrights have created a menagerie of characters who live in a community surrounding an urban salt marsh (much like this one in Brooklyn’s Marine Park). Throughout the plays, this community of humans and non-humans face pollution, deforestation, giant storms, poaching, and heat waves that threaten the survival of the marsh eco-system, ultimately finding solace and solutions in each other.

Playwrights:
PS75: Jason Adams, Jhoan De Jesus, Brandon Delk, Ricardo Espinal, Nancy Galindo, Leah Gethers, Jahmair Herdigein, Leanne Samulu Hunt, Aliyanna Peña

PS239: Elias Estrella, Aiden Negron, Yerlenie Nunez, Destiny Ortiz, Leah Ortiz, Abi Pathak, Adrian Ramirez, Jaelyn Raspardo, Arielys Rodriguez, Emily Sanchez, Erin Torres

FULL PRODUCTION CREDITS HERE

Big Green Theater is made possible thanks to the support of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, City Council Members Antonio Reynoso, Rafael L. Espinal, and Stephen Levin, the Revada Foundation of the Logan Family, Con Edison, and the Lotos Foundation

Art, Environment, and Justice in a Changing World

Wednesday, May 1 – 6:30-8:30 PM

Asian American Arts Alliance
20 Jay Street, Suite 740
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Climate change, environmental justice, sustainability—these terms have become increasingly crucial to our current social and political discourse. How do artists respond to these issues in their creative work? How does their artistic practice advance their beliefs in environmental justice? How can the work itself gain wider traction and raise awareness in our culture and society?

Join the Asian American Arts Alliance for a closer look at how creative practice intersects with environmental justice and activism. Five artists working in multiple disciplines will present recent projects and walk us through their origin stories and underlying rationales, approaches to artmaking and activism, and desired impact. The presentations will be followed by a moderated discussion with the artists and Q&A with the audience.

Panelists include Lanxing Fu (Superhero Clubhouse), Juliann Ma (S E A S), Jess X. Snow (AFTEREARTH), Tattfoo Tan (Heal the Man in order to Heal the Land), and Yasuyo Tanaka (If the Wind Blows), moderated by Seema Pandhya (sustainability consultant and multidisciplinary artist).

This program is free and open to the public.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and Con Edison.

ARTIST COMPLETING HER 20-YEAR QUEST TO PAINT ALL THE WORLD’S OCEANS

Danielle Eubank’s 20-year quest to visit and paint the waters of every ocean on Earth will be complete in early 2019, when she ventures to Antarctica. This, the Southern Ocean, will be Eubank’s fifth and final ocean to visit and will cap her decades-long quest to paint every ocean on the planet, hence the name of her project: One Artist Five Oceans.

“Painting all of the Earth’s oceans is about showing, through art, that the oceans sustain us – literally and, for me, artistically,” says Eubank. “There is a unifying preciousness amongst these bodies of  water – and the people and animals that rely on them.”  

A Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant awardee and a member of The Explorer’s Club, Eubank’s relationship with ocean water began as a young girl growing up near Bodega Bay in Northern California. In her travels as a young artist, she was captivated by bodies of water. She focused on painting water in its myriad conditions, refining her techniques of abstraction and realism until she was able to render their ephemeral qualities in her own style.

Eubank’s 20-year quest to paint all five of the planet’s oceans started in 2001 in Andalucia, Spain after a bicycle accident forced her to abandon her travels and spend time in a fishing village, painting the Atlantic coast. This work led to an invitation to serve as the expedition artist aboard the Borobudur Ship, a replica ancient Indonesian vessel that rounded the Cape of Good Hope sailing from Indonesia to Ghana, in 2003-4. 

The experience cemented her commitment to paint the five oceans of the world and in 2008-2010, she sailed on a replica of a 2,500-year-old Phoenician ship that circumnavigated Africa, a trip originally made 500 years before the birth of Christ. Eubank most recently (2014) sailed aboard a barquentine tall ship on an expedition to the High Arctic that took her to the northernmost human settlement on Earth. 

In each of these journeys, the vessel she sailed on in the open sea inspired her to view the bodies of water in exciting new ways, capturing each ocean as an entity, with her work portraying individual portraits of mood and emotion. 

In February 2019, she is embarking on a rare voyage to the Southern Ocean, the fifth and final ocean for Eubank to visit and capture. This journey will complete her life-long quest and will inspire the creation of a landmark series of ocean paintings which will be exhibited beginning in 2019.

Eubank is exploring the consequences of the human footprint, including climate change, on seascapes all over the world. The body of work simultaneously communicates the preciousness of water and the impact of humans on the environment.

www.oneartistfiveoceans.com


Background:

The surface of the planet is approximately 71% wáter.

There are five oceans on Earth, as follows:  Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and Southern.

Boroburdur ship at www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borobudur_ship

The ship Phoenicia at www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_Ship_Expedition

Barquentine tall ship at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barquentine

‘Connected by a Thread’

Arts Territory Exchange Residency in Sustainable Practice.

Submitted by Gudrun Filipska

The ARTS TERRITORY EXCHANGE is an organisation which facilitates creative exchange across borders and works with artists in remote locations and those whose work explores ideas of place, territory and environment. ATE’s work involves the pairing up of Artist’s across the world in creative long distance correspondences.

The first ATE Residency in Sustainable Practice took place on Art Aia’s Eco farm in Friulia, Italy this September and ran in conjunction with the Pordenone Litterary festival. The CSPA advised on the project and Meghan Moe Beiticks was on the selection panel alongside Veronica Sekules, art critic and curator at GroundWork Gallery, UK. Kelly Leonard in Australia and Beatrice Lopez in Norway had been corresponding digitally and by post for a year before they were selected by the panel and had developed an intriguing body of weaving and text based works forging a dialogue between their respective locations.

The idea behind the residency was for participants of the ATE to be able to meet face to face and spend a week intensively developing the work they had already begun, with specific focus on ideas of sustainability in its material and conceptual forms. The artists were provided with a series of contextual writings on ecology and arts practice and were encouraged to engage with some of the CSPA’s back editions.

Art Aia’s Eco farm in Fruilia provided an interesting backdrop through which to engage with ideas of sustainability extending beyond the materiality of the art world, the artists were able to visit vineyards and factories and discuss the crossovers of culture and sustainable agriculture with their host Giovanni Morassutti. Giovanni says his Art Aia residency space has its interests in ‘Creating the kind of connections between people that lead to collective civic action, political expression, community dialogue, shared cultural experiences’.

The artists already had shared interests in textiles, weaving, and installation as performative action in outdoor settings, performances which have political dimensions beyond the traditional uses of their chosen materials. Kelly installs woven works in the landscape around her home town of Mudgee, Australia – a location threatened by the open-cast coal mining. Her works are conceptual and ephemeral referencing 1970’s activist stitchers such Kate Walker and more contemporary iterations such as ‘Yarn bombing’, subverting the very domestic history of women’s tapestry weaving and stitching. They are guerrilla actions with serious messages about climate change and the destruction of habitats, stitched messages such a ‘resist’ and ‘Regent Honey Eater‘ – yet the works are sensitive to the local environment – photographed and then removed. This respect for the environment and the responsibilities of the artists within it was shared with co-collaborator Beatrice Lopez with her own practice, placing temporary compositions within the Norwegian landscape.

Beatrice and Kelly had already developed a number of ideas during their ‘digital’ and postal collaborations and began to adapt them in relation to the Italian landscape and residency space. Kelly Leonard says ‘Our year of working together in the virtual space meant we had a foundation to draw from when we met, we had a type of creative short hand already established’. Meeting in person the artists noted their physical differences in terms of, weight, body shape and age.

‘Sketch for a performance for two people’ Image Courtesy of the artists.

In the documentation of the performance works undertaken at the residency their height difference is particularly apparent, adding an interesting extra dimension to their performative works.

The artists made site responsive work in relation to a number of agricultural sites they visited, Beatrice says, ‘ Following a performance we did at the local biological vineyard, where we walked with a filtering fabric between us in front of a large deposit of processed soya that was used to create bio energy. The performance emphasised the necessity to filter and re cycle. It was also symbolic for our shared bond and collaboration for a sustainable future. The fabric was then hung up in the gallery space along with residue of soya.’

Installation in Art Aia Project space. Image courtesy of the artists.

Beatrice and Kelly share common interests in the politics of place and post colonial narratives, both researching, and feeling affinity with, the indigenous cultures of their homelands, Kelly, as an Australian of European heritage, acknowledging the cultural authority of the Wiradjuri people as the traditional owners of the land in which she makes her work.

Throughout their time working together the artists have used the phrase ‘Connected by a Thread’ as a motto through which to explore environmental causality and potential for spiritual affinity. In researching the cultures of Huichol Indians of South America, Beatrice had previously begun to work with ideas of ‘offerings’ made to the elements of the earth as a way of re dressing a balance tipped over by a culture’s obsession with production at the expense of the environment.

The Motif of the ‘offering’ is one which also comes through strongly in their collaborative work and is felt on a number of levels beyond symbolic reparations to nature. Their works are offerings to an audience, documents of performative actions, and act as residual templates of the artists physical experiences with the natural elements they work with. Regarding their work ‘Prayer Wheel’, one can imagine the performative and repetitive actions which led to its creation; the collecting of local grasses, the tying of grass bundles, positioning grass and read heads in a circle, winding sticks with colourful yarn… each wrapped stick containing a written instruction for an immersive call to action; referencing the prayers contained in a traditional Buddhist Prayer Wheel and offering potential for audience engagement.

‘Prayer Wheel’ Image courtesy of the artists. Art Aia Project space.

The ideas of repetitive and ritualistic practices are followed through in the other works made on the residency, In ‘Interconnected Walk’ the two artists walked over a three day period, in two large intersecting circles similar to a lemniscate symbol. (See a short Video documenting part of the performance Here). The work makes obvious reference to walking artists such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton but, is conceived as a walking performance for two. Watching the artists courteously side step each other as they cross paths at certain intersections is touching, saying perhaps more about their growing relationship with each other than the land scape they are marking with their repetitive footsteps.

In ‘Soft Touch’, Soft white Icelandic wool brought to the residency by Beatrice, rests on top of local detritus, broken leaves, feathers and sticks. The piece evokes both a nest and alter – the clean pristine wool, an offering to temped hands, to touch and lift its threads.

Another work ‘Water talks’ was made by recording ambient sound of water near to their residency accommodation, a land of damp earth and agricultural irrigation ditches. Overlaying the sound of water, the two artists recite a poem by Norwegian Poet Lars Saabye Christensen, Kelly in English and Beatrice in Norwegian.


The sound piece ‘Water Talks’ housed in a metal frame structure interwoven with Puzzlegrass and Reed heads.

Image Courtesy of the artists.

A further work ‘South North’, makes connections between the three countries, Norway, Australia and Italy; a silhouette of Kelly traced in pebbles is connected by a thread which runs across an antique map of Norway, out over the lintel of the window, into the Italian countryside… As well as connection between the three locations, disjunctures were also keenly felt, departing Australia at a time of drought, Kelly was shocked by how verdant Northern Italy was, saying, ‘I found the area of Italy to be too green, too rich, too comfortable…’. The impact of climate change is felt very differently in Europe, not as urgently perhaps, although a short train journey from Art Aia’s residency space, sea levels rise around a sinking Venice.

About the artists.

Kelly Leonard

I first learnt to weave as a teenager from a German Master Weaver, Marcella Hempel,  in Australia. My art practice has been re-activated since moving back to my home-town two years ago; moving from a traditional craft based medium to one that is highly conceptual, collaborative and moves across art forms responding to the environment. My work is very much informed by environmental philosophy which provides a context for both making and showing the work.

I weave on a European floor-loom what I call props for the environment which are placed in site-specific locations around  Mudgee, photographed and then removed. The locations are chosen because they are under stress from the impact of the open-cut coal mines operated by the big coal mining companies. The images are exhibited on-line and one of  my goals is to develop some alternative broadcasting methods to reach a wider audience in the near future. The work I make is pretty much process driven and I derive a lot of satisfaction from thinking of the environment as a collaborator and audience.

I make work in Wiradjuri Country whose sovereignty was never ceded, I walk on traditional land.  I try to consider all aspects of a landscape by: how it smells, tastes, feels, sounds and the multiple narratives embedded into it. The landscape is never passive, always watching me make work.  It is also a collaborator, helping me to shape the work.

Beatrice Lopez

Beatrice is an artist that works in different mediums such as painting, installation and sound. Gaining a BA from Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan as well as an exchange from the Pratt Institute in New York. She has had a solo exhibition entitled `Ritual Lines` at Art Licks festival and taken part in various group exhibitions through institutions such as White Space gallery, MAMU galleria and most recently at Galleri Vanntårnet. Through her abstract paintings in ink and soft pastel, fleeting textures appear reminiscent of inner visions and organic forms. Her multimedia works are placed in nature, using thread and organic material to create curious compositions. Her continuous interest in nature and topographies has led her to take part in the Arts Territory Exchange, an ongoing collaborative correspondence project based on nature, ecology and topographies. Exchanging ideas by post with the artist Kelly Leonard based in Australia. They met for a one week residency this fall made possible by CSPA and ATE. Beatrice participated at Performance Art Oslo event `Contemplating landscape through art` this year at Steilene in Norway. Beatrice was born in 1986 and is currently based in Oslo.


Holding the ATE residency in Sustainable Practice at Art Aia In Pordenone was an attempt to forge connections between artists, farmers, eco entrepreneurs and members of the local rural community. A weaving together of conceptual and material iterations of ‘sustainability’, interests which ATE plans on developing in various forms and in different locations in future years. Thankyou to Beatrice Lopez and Kelly Leonard for their participation in this residency.


OPEN CALL FOR ‘ECOFUTURES’ PROGRAMME – DEADLINE: SUNDAY 20 JANUARY 2019

[all info on www.cuntemporary.org/open-call-for-ecofutures]

Arts Feminism Queer (CUNTemporary) is now accepting proposals for ‘Deep Trash: Eco Trash’ & ‘Queer-feminist Ecocriticism in Live Art & Visual Cultures’, which will be part of the larger programme ‘EcoFutures’, taking place in (London, UK) in April 2019.

The programme will explore urgent topics ranging from ecological disasters and their impact on climate refugees; plastic/toxic waste and the contamination of aquatic and human bodies; the relationship between increasing air toxicity and human and animal diseases; high-speed capitalist consumption and the ungovernable production of trash and techno-waste; from neo-colonialist soil exploitations to indigenous land reclamations and green economies; the rise of temperature and sea levels and their direct effects on the environment, with a focus on the Global South / Majority World.

Artists, activists and theorists are invited to engage with these topics through feminist, queer and decolonial approaches to provide alternatives that draw from situated knowledges, eco-sustainable modes of living, non-exploitative human and animal relations within ecosystems, as well as speculative scenarios of imagined futures, nature-based spirituality, earth magick, feminine powers and ecosexuality. 

Calling for: 

  1. Performances, videos, installations, prints and other 2D/3D and time-based media artworks for the multi-disciplinary exhibition and performance club night ‘Deep Trash: Eco Trash’ on Friday 19 April 2019 at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.
  2. Theoretical output and (performative) lectures to be presented during the 1-day conference ‘Queer-feminist Ecocriticism in Live Art & Visual Cultures’ on Saturday 13 April 2019. This will be hosted by the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University and will include contributions by guest speakers Gaia Giuliani (University of Coimbra, Portugal), Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths University, UK) and João Florencio (Exeter University, UK); screenings of works by Adelita Husni-Bey and Wangechi Mutu; with more special guests from Europe and the US to be announced soon.
  3. Written contributions (articles, write-ups, interviews, short essays, cross-genre, creative writing…) for an editorial piece to be published online at www.cuntemporary.org/editorial

Your proposal may include, respond to, be affected by, but not restricted to:

  • Indigenous and native two-spirited/trans responses to land expropriations and natural destructions.
  • Connections between toxic masculinity and ecotoxicology
  • Creating sustainable micro-economies against capitalist exploitation/new forms of labour from a gendered perspective.
  • Hysteria and Nature: historical representations and contemporary subversions of the association between untamable femininity and environmental disasters.
  • Climate change and the impact on the Majority World and the ecosystems: from the rise of water levels to the Sixth Mass extinction of species.
  • Projections of monstrosity and alienation: how climate refugees face increasing racism and xenophobia.
  • Environmental disasters, alien/monster attacks and post-apocalyptic events wiping out the white, able-bodied, nuclear heteronormative family (and associated values).
  • Afrofuturist connections to botanic healing and eco-spirituality.
  • Plastic pollution in water and the ecosystems: eco-destructions and creation of new forms of water bodies’ resistance in speculative fiction scenarios. 
  • Politics of DIY and bio-hacking experimentation: cyborg organisms and non-human to human hybridisation.
  • Trash and techno-waste as resources for post-porn activism.
  • Transspecies relationality and hybridity: from animal to geological and water alliances.
  • How animal sexualities resist normative ideas of sexuality and gender and the perception of ‘natural/deviant’ in human discourses.
  • Ecology without nature or ‘dark ecology’: symptoms of ecological catastrophes and dystopic visions of ‘non-human’ worlds and societies.
  • Feminist critiques of (m)Anthropocene theories.
  • Ecosexuality as a form of resistance to heteronormative relationality and anthropocentrism.
  • Critiques and reflections on meat consumption and queer-vegan standpoints.
  • Meat, flesh and cannibalism: radical approaches to human and non-human body politics.
  • Anarchic and anti-speciesist utopias.
  • Transexuality and queer genealogies in plant and animal domains.
  • Affective Xenopolitics: anti-systemic struggles for the emergence of new alliances in bio- and ecological territories beyond the rhetoric of (nationalist and other) belonging.
  • Eco-rituals ranging from neo-paganism, wicca, green witches, radical faeries, pansexual communities and menstrual magick.
  • Shamanism and the practice of curanderas: the power of healing with herbs and channeling supernatural dimensions.
  • The impact of colonialism, globalisation and capitalist-industrial development on the ecological demise of the colonised territories and periphery countries.

To apply, please fill in the form you can find at the link below (on our website) by Sunday 20 January midnight (UK time) >> www.cuntemporary.org/open-call-for-ecofutures

Julie’s Bicycle Creative Green Awards 2018: Meet the Winners!

Julie’s Bicycle announce the winners for the 2018 Creative Green Awards

Julie’s Bicycle is proud to announce the winners of the second Creative Green Awards celebrating the many outstanding organisations taking action on climate and the environment. With over 300 Creative Green certificates awarded, the awards are a moment for the sector to showcase their leadership in climate action.

The awards are supported with sponsorship from First Mile, Seacourt Printing and Pilio with Good Energy also sponsoring the award for Highest Achievement for Improvement. We have partnered with environmental solution providers as they are innovative in the sector able to best support arts organisations turn their ambition and commitment into reality for reduction environmental impacts and engage their audiences in climate action.

The Awards were hosted last night at the Roundhouse, with contributions from Baroness Lola Young, artist Michael Pinsky and Matthew Bourne of New Adventures. 

Categories and shortlist:

Outstanding Achievement

Festival Republic

Highest Achievement for Commitment

Shambala Festival

Highest Achievement for Understanding

Universal Music

Highest Achievement for Improvement (sponsored by Good Energy)

Glyndebourne

Best Festival

Reading & Leeds Festival

Best Museum and Gallery

Discovery Museum

Best Cultural Venue

Young Vic

Best Newcomer

Siamsa Tire

Best Creative Programming

V&A Museum

Best Campaign

Lyric Hammersmith

Best Creative Group

Curzon Cinemas

Green Champions

  • Jordan Bedding – Curzon Cinemas
  • Jackie Bland – Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums
  • Vikki Chapman – Festival Republic
  • Paul Josefowski – National Theatre

Creative Green Pioneer

New Adventures

Alison Tickell, Director of Julie’s Bicycle on the awards:

“These awards  show the outstanding quality and progressive leadership on climate and the environment from the UK’s cultural community.  With energy and imagination the sector continues to drive down emissions and power up sustainable change.”

Sir Matthew Bourne, Artistic Director, New Adventures on the awards:

“New Adventures is thrilled to be the first touring company to be working in partnership with Julie’s Bicycle on a Creative Green Touring certification. As the UK’s biggest and busiest touring Dance company, we visit theatres across the world and travel to very picturesque settings. I believe that it’s important to conserve the natural beauty around us and it is something that we’re very passionate about. We hope that our Green Adventure with Julie’s Bicycle will help us to spread the word to our wonderful presenting venues and audiences around the globe about how to lead more sustainable lifestyles, so that generations to come can continue to enjoy all that our planet has to offer.”

“New Adventures is delighted to be awarded the Creative Green Pioneer award in recognition of our work with Julie’s Bicycle over the past 18 months. We are now very excited to see what we can achieve in the future, particularly on our UK tour of Swan Lake.”