WORKSHOPS
Scroll to learn more about our various practice-based sessions
︎︎︎
WHAT CAN A GARDEN BE? 2020-21
In this series of workshops, talks and seminars, we will hear from artists, curators and researchers whose artistic research is grounded in practices of sustainability, decoloniality, permaculture, queering nature, place-based knowledge, building community and resilience in opposition to colonial imaginaries. The lectures will provide the stimulus for PhD workshops addressing key research methods, such as collaboration, working with ephemeral infrastructures, decolonial strategy, transdisciplinary research that challenges art–science divisions, knowledge sharing and mapping. Developing an Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths in the midst of global climate emergency, ecological breakdown and a pandemic that has accelerated racialised policing of green spaces, raises crucial questions about the histories of exclusion and extraction that the Western colonial garden has maintained, be it in the form of pleasure parks, private gardens, nature reserves or botanical gardens. From provision grounds to indigenous land pedagogies, from urban community gardens to the olive grove as place of gathering to share knowledge, and from re-wilding projects and to climate justice work, what other examples can we look to in thinking about what our garden could be?
Rehana Zaman and Priya Jay's / Research as Ceremony
October 2021 • 6:30PM 8:00PM
Daniella Vaz Gen / Sensing the Elements: Fire
Tuesday 6 July 2021y • 6:30PM 8:00PM
Fiona McDonald / Feral Practice
Tuesday 9 March • 6:30PM 8:00PM
Harun Morrison / Beacon Garden, Dageham
Tuesday 19 January • 6:30PM 8:00PM
Nida Sinnokrot / Palestine is Not a Garden
Tuesday 17 November 2020y • 6:30PM 8:00PM
DECOLONISING THE NUCLEAR, A TWODAY CHASE WORKSHOP
Tuesday - WednesdayOctober 22-23 • 2019 10:30 AM 4:30 PM
The development of nuclear technology has always relied on colonial practices of resource extraction, atomic testing on indigenous lands, exporting nuclear installations, deployment of nuclear weapons and radioactive waste storage. Many communities are already living through the slow violence of atomic tests, radioactive accidents and contaminated landscapes. Nuclear technology is at the heart of the military industrial complex, often outside democratic decision-making processes, yet it is often neglected in contemporary discourses around decoloniality, climate crisis and the Anthropocene.
This year the Nuclear Culture Research Group is considering what it means to decolonise our creative and academic research practices within nuclear culture. In an academic context this starts with tracing our own stories, expanding our networks and literature, working with and alongside communities, and leads to rethinking forms of knowledge and creative practices from completely new, or perhaps very old, perspectives. However, nuclear decoloniality starts with an attempt to re-couple the nuclear with colonial histories that have been neglected in order to isolate research into discreet work-packages for spurious reasons of security or in-depth scientific research. The workshop invites scholars of nuclear culture and artist-researchers to share knowledge, ideas and practices, to widen the scope, to extend and examine our nuclear languages and create a space for people working closely with different kinds of nuclear decoloniality from around the world. This event is a small first step on a long journey to find ways to work together.
Workshop Participants include: Lise Autogena, Alex Ressel and Kerri Meehan, Fathima Nizaruddin, Ignacio Acosta, Gabrielle Hecht
AMY CUTLER: HACKING THE NATURE DOCUMENTARY
Saturday, 10 November 2018 • 2:00 PM 5:00 PM • Room RHB 143
As much as we need to rescue the word ‘nature’ from itself, we also need to rescue the nature documentary from itself. This talk and workshop considers the potential for new critical collectivity in the ‘useful fictions’ of the twenty-first century nature documentary. Rather than by abandoning the field for a more experimental eco-cinema, how can the work of the GeoHumanities critically inhabit existing, popular templates and their forms of global dissemination? Such media are undoubtedly connected to the production of contemporary geographical imaginations (and geo-fictions) in the Anthropocene. Yet, they are often passively consumed or chronically under-analysed. Given the power these narrations have to inform and police our own intimacies, as well as their role as trans-global environmental representatives, how can we open them up to new critical remits by hijacking their fables of love, labour, gender, environment, industry, order, ethics, desire, time, and species? How can we resist the nature documentary’s conformity in a time when we should be seeing a myriad of possibilities for geography, nature-cultures, and posthuman natures? This session includes an introduction to the rhetoric of natural history film-making and its media flows (production, curating, programming), which is then used as a frame for interdisciplinary provocation. We treat the nature documentary format not as a closed system of knowledge, but as a collaborative concept or device that can ‘broadcast’ new meanings.
Dr Amy Cutler is a geographer, film-maker, and Early Career Research Fellow in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London.
CRITICAL ECOLOGIES WORKSHOP
Saturday, 17 March 2018 • 10:00 AM 11:00 AM
A day of interdisciplinary presentations and discussions on London-based organisations and eco-critical interventionsParticipants include: Nicola Triscott (Arts Catalyst), Jacqueline Hannam (Soil Scientist, Cranfield University), Sakina Sheikh (Platform), Helen Walker and Harun Morrison (They Are Here), Annie Randall (Grow Heathrow), Goldsmiths AllotmentThe ongoing research of Critical Ecologies includes questions of global warming, environmental justice, colonial dispossession, climate migration, nuclear cultures, media geology and e-waste from an arts and humanities perspective that takes scientific research and practices seriously. We formalise connections between existing areas of research and practice by bringing together established environment-focused initiatives from across Anthropology, Art, English & Comparative Literature, Media & Communications, Sociology, and Visual Cultures/Research Architecture to develop collaborations, funding bids, and curricula. Our core aspiration is to evolve new academic platforms capable of shaping public debate.