engaging communities creatively: abundance!

48

Upload: edenprojectwebteam

Post on 17-Jul-2015

51 views

Category:

Environment


4 download

TRANSCRIPT

In my practice at different moments I am , performing, dancing, book binding, crafting, negotiating, documenting, harvesting, planting, choreographing, listening, holding spaces, saving seeds, foraging, brewing, cooking, lobbying, welcoming, protesting, interviewing, writing poetry, feasting, responding, walking, exchanging, drawing, collecting, designing, negotiating, shaping, observing, researching, inviting people in.

why do I do what I do?

April 2013, Cornwall

Response-Ability

Projects invite alternative ways of doing and being.

My practice involves listening, observation and responding to or with people or places often in collaboration and through dialogue. This is often with existing communities or bringing a new community together around a common theme. These ‘communities of interest’ often grow and develop beyond the duration of the project.

Permaculture Principals and ethics provide project the project backbone. Joanna Macy (eco-philosopher) in Coming Back to Life outlines three ways of working towards a life-sustaining society. These categories are very useful in helping to make a framework for my practice:

• Holding Action • Creating New Structures• Shifting Perceptions to realise our interdependence

The importance of the intensely local – Naome Klein

THE CONTEMPORARY FOOD system is inherently unsustainable. Indicators of social, environmental and economic performance, such as food security, greenhouse-gas emissions, food miles, lower farm incomes and biodiversity loss highlight this fact. Extracts from a report, Eating Oil: Food Supply in a Changing Climate, Andy Jones, Elm Farm Research Centre 2001

The most political act we do on a daily basis is to eat – Dr Jules Pretty

Abundance & Grow Sheffieldwww.growsheffield.com

Vision:

To create a harvest season of practical, creative events and activities to bring people together across the city to celebrate food growing and the local harvest.

Funded by : South Yorkshire Community Champions Fund, Earthcare Trust, Open Gate Trust, Arts Council, National Lottery

In gardens, backyards, parks, hospital grounds, cemeteries, canal-sides, gap sites

In Sheffield we found: Plums, greengages, hazlenuts, walnuts, pears, apples, cherries, damsonsquincesmedlarspeaches!

Photo by PH

Abundance HandbookFree Download: http://growsheffield.com/abundance/

Fruit Routes/Eat Your Campuswww.fruitroutesloughborough.wordpress.com

Vision:

The vision of Fruit Routes is to plant fruit, nut trees and edible plants along footpaths and cycle paths across the university campus creating a spring snowfall of blossom and an autumnal abundance of fresh fruits and berries for harvesting, eating and distributing. Different varieties of pears, plums, damsons, greengages, hazels, almonds, apples and hedgerow species suited to the local environment and the changing climate will be planted with and cared for by people who live, work and pass through these places providing an annual feast for years to come. Fruit Routes provides an enriched habitat for people, plants, insects and animals as well as a location for cultural activities and outdoor learning. 2009

Funded by : Loughborough University and Big Tree Fund

Shed On Wheelswww.amculhane.co.uk

Vision:

To integrate the arts of imagination and the visual arts with practical skills of growing, cooking and harvesting. The mobile unit acts as an active tool for combining these objectives using green design techniques to create a temporary roving space that moves between different neighbourhoods and events. It will act as meeting place, eating place, a site of creative interaction, exchange, sharing and discussion. Working with local people and visitors the S.O.W will become a multi authored evolving installation using a combination of photography, visual arts and text, cooking and eating to explore themes of people, their environment and food.

Funded by Arts Council/National Lottery, Cooperative Community Fund and Plymouth City Council

Shed on Wheels, Plymouth Art Centre, 2012

Stonehouse Seedstorewww.amculhane.co.uk

Vision: An ark of seeds

To collect 100 stories about our connections to and relationships with plants Sourcing seeds and cuttings of these plants as a community resource and a celebration of diversity and making seeds are available for free to anyone who wants to grow in Stonehouse as an evolving community resource.

Funded by : Awards for All and supported by Stonehouse Action and Stonehouse Timebank

Seedstore at Plymouth Art Centre 2015, photo copyright PhotoNow

Singing to the Trees – A Wassail for 2015

Vision:

To create a new Wassail song to be sung at Exeter Community Garden to the new orchard. Referencing observed changes in seasonal patterns and their impacts on orchards highlighting climate change on a local level to contemporise this tradition.

Funded by:

CCANW (centre for contemporary art & the natural world) Kaleider, University of Exeter

Emergent themes :Lots of different ways to participateSeasonality/repeating cycles and eventsInter-generationalCollaborationCraft of CarePermaculture principals & ethicsFun!

Humans are capable of a unique trick, creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. ...As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world ,we begin behaving differently, as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our mind’s eye , we are already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it begins to come true. The act of imagining somehow makes it real..... And what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life. Brian Eno

Imagining the future

What do you see in your community?