Eden Project

EARTH PERFECT? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden

Cultura21, Open Calls, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This post comes to you from Cultura21

Symposium and exhibitions, June 6-9, 2013

“Since time immemorial, gardens have been key in humanity’s quest to define an ideal relation to nature. Gardens have been sources of nourishment for the body and the soul, they have been symbols of wealth and power, they have served as barriers against the wild, and much more. EARTH PERFECT? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden is a four-day symposium designed for an academic audience, garden professionals, and a general public interested in the importance and meaning of gardens.”

 Event Locations

  • The University of Delaware
  • Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania
  • Winterthur Estate Gardens, Delaware
  • Chanticleer Garden, Pennsylvania
  • The Mount Cuba Center, Delaware

 Events Include

Themed garden tours and exhibitions, as well as lectures, workshops, and academic paper sessions focusing on topics such as wellness and the garden, environment and society, historic preservation and land use, green textiles, CSAs, the garden in the visual arts, the garden in literature, the meaning and function of domestic and public gardens, architecture and the garden, the spiritual associations of gardens, gardening the planet in the face of ecological decline, political aspects of gardening, and economies of the garden.

 Featured Speakers Include:

  • Jane Knight, landscape architect of The Eden Project, Cornwall, UK
  • Stephen Forbes, Executive Director of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, South Australia
  • Emma Marris, author of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
  • Margaret Morton, photographer and co-author of Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives
  • Douglas Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens
  • McKay Jenkins, author of What’s Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World

 Call for Papers :

Abstracts and proposals for papers and panels due Dec. 15, 2012

This interdisciplinary event focuses on the importance and meaning of gardens in the past, present, and the future, and that from a wide range of perspectives, including, but not limited to the following disciplines: art, art history, architecture, anthropology, agriculture, philosophy, literature, history, horticulture, botany, landscape architecture, garden design, nutrition, and law, as well as earth and life sciences.

For instructions regarding submission of paper abstracts as well as proposals for panels or roundtable discussions, visit: http://www.udel.edu/ihrc/conference/earthperfect/call-for-papers.html

 For More Event Information

See the symposium website for more details regarding venues, programming, lodging, and registration: http://www.udel.edu/earthperfect

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Powered by WPeMatico

Eden and the overburden

Ashden Directory, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes: 

The partnership between the Eden Project and Rio Tinto has been billed as supporting education projects about sustainability and research into post-mining regeneration. This was a working partnership, not merely a “social license to operate” – the creating of a benevolent public image for corporations such as BP, Shell, Rio Tinto, through their association with cultural institutions, and now the Olympics.

One of the education projects of this partnership is a pop-up children’s book, Earthly Treasure, full of pictures of dazzling jewels and brightly coloured pages showing how modern life can only exist through minerals that must be mined.

There’s a page showing a huge open pit mine, a sombre, near-monochrome dug-out bowl. You can slide trucks to take away the “surface layer” and “pull down the tab and blast away the top layer of earth, called the overburden”.

The “overburden”. The infinitely complex soil that makes life possible is merely a weight, a waste to remove to get to the riches below. The phrasing harks back to Francis Bacon who wrote in his Novum Organum in 1620 that miners were the new class of man who would interrogate and alter nature. Nature could be “forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded”.

But now, the soil holds no more secrets. It’s only the burdensome surface layer.

This normalizing of open cast mining and mountain top removal is given to children as if a game, one more gem to absorb in their education. Many reasons may lie behind using that phrasing, but the license it condones is not merely cultural benevolence.

h/t: Robert Newman in the Guardian

 

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

Arcole Sustainable Solutions for a Fair Future series continues Thursday

Arcola, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A brief reminder about the next event in the Sustainable Solutions for a Fair Future series.

Join us this Thursday from 6pm, as Charlotte Webster from Solar Century will be discussing the global potential of solar power, including macro and micro uses; barriers to uptake and new policies, and the UK story of solar power. We’ll discuss what’s happening on the ground and what individuals can do.

Founded in 1998, Solar Century is the UK’s largest independent solar energy company and has delivered a number of high profile projects including the Eden Project, the CIS Tower and the Big Brother House. Solar Century is working on the largest solar housing project with 650 homes in South Yorkshire powered by solar electricity by 2012.

Cycle Sunday organised in partnership with Artsadmin, will take place on 12 June. It will be a jam-packed day with events, discussions, workshops and artistic interventions all about bikes and cycling. Click HERE for more information

RSA Arts & Ecology – MA in Art & Environment: 2010

news, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

University College Falmouth
MA Art & Environment: 2010

For centuries artists have interpreted and represented the natural environment. It has provided materials and subject matter, as well as inspiration and knowledge. In recent times – particularly since the growth of the environmental movement – there has been a dramatic change in our understanding of the many ways our society impacts upon the Earth. This awareness has galvanised around the fact that the relationship between humanity and our life-giving planet is in a critical state.

This change in knowledge has been reflected in contemporary art practice. MA Art & Environment, at University College Falmouth, encourages a focused engagement with ecological and environmental issues. Designed to give students the skills, expertise and confidence to operate as a professional artist in this critical area of practice, the course will also enable them to develop strategies and practices that use art as a cultural agent – as a tool for knowledge, understanding and change.

Students on the course have opportunities to benefit from the Universtity’s relationship with Cape Farewell, The Eden Project and University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability Institute.

For further information please
contact Dr Daro Montag
daro.montag[@]falmouth.ac.uk
+44 (0)1326 211077

Events: ‘Anthem’ – Beth Derbyshire at Eden Project – 14 No

Ashden Directory, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Anthem

Beth Derbyshire
with Ulrike Haage
opening performance: 14 November
exhibition continues to 9 December
Mediterranean Biome at the Eden Project, Cornwall

The Eden Project and Cape Farewell present the premiere of Beth Derbyshire’s live performance and film work, Anthem, with music by composer Ulrike Haage. Anthem is a trilogy of films with a choral component, exploring notions of land, place and nation.

Anthem assembles ideas around nationality, identity and language using the symbols of landscape and song to explore our cultural relationship to landscape. Song and landscape have long been associated with expressions on nation. Derbyshire borrows from sources such as national anthems, ancient land names and etymology to capture cultural and natural settings, to explore the connections between people and landscape through balancing components of voice, music, word and image.

The opening events will feature the early music ensemble Stile Antico. Beth Derbyshire will be in conversation with Ulrike Haage and Dr. James Ryan, Associate Professor of Historical and Cultural Geography, Exeter University.

Anthem was filmed in Newfoundland, the UK and in the Arctic during the Cape Farewell research expedition of 2007.

www.bethderbyshire.com
www.youtube.com
www.edenproject.come/visiting-eden/whats-on
www.capefarewell.com/art/exhibitions