Local Dialogues – Global Movements
Open Day
presented as part of EcoFutures Festival
2-9pm
The Art Pavilion
Mile End Park, Clinton Rd, London, E3 4QY
FREE
A day-long eco-fair with performances, talks, screenings and sustainable design showcasing local and global activisms on site the exhibition Staring at the Sun.
more info at the bottom of the page
Programme
2-7pm – Info Stands, food stalls and book stalls
Platform, featuring ‘Still Waters, still’, a new commission by Laura Plant
2-6pm – Performance (durational)
Moa Johansson, Tonight is the Night Baby and Forever but No Recycling
2-6pm – Public interaction
In Residency with Xavier de Sousa and Andre Neely
Starting from historical effervescent political protests, Xavier and Andre investigate the potential of domino-effect actions that grow out of our personal and collective awareness of the urgency of environmental activism.
3-3:30pm – Performance
Timebomb Theatre, Rhino Requiem
Performers: Thierry Alexandre, Lara Buffard, Céleste Combes, Bianca Darkwoods
Live Music by: Tom Milsom
Directed by: Thierry Alexandre & Lara Buffard
4-6pm – Public Discussion
Towards Climate Justice: Decolonising Ecological Activism
Women’s Environmental Network
Farzana Khan
Suzanne Dhaliwal
Ama Josephine Budge
Susan Buckingham (convenor)
7-8:30pm – Film Screening
Shu Lea Cheang, Fresh Kill, 1994
A unique story of two young lesbian parents caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi. Set in New York where raw fish lips have become all the rage across restaurants in Manhattan. Strange things start to happen: household pets start to glow ominously and then disappear altogether; the sky opens up and snows soap flakes and people start speaking in dangerous tongues.
Fresh Kill premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, Berlin in 1994. In 1995, it featured in the Whitney Biennal, New York and was broadcast on Channel Four in the UK.
Links
Festival: https://cuntemporary.org/category/projects/ecofutures/
Event Link FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/707269106342117/
#EcoFutures
Enquiries
General info: info@cuntemporary.org
Press: press@cuntemporary.org
Accessibility
The venue is fully accessible.
Sponsors
Supporters
PERFORMANCES
MOA JOHANSSON
tonight is the night baby and forever (but no recycling)
tonight is the night baby and forever (but no recycling) is about wanting that pair of red shoes but actually not wanting it
because
once one possess the pair of red of shoes one actually wants another pair of red shoes and
it continues like that in fact it never stops and
one is stuck in an endless cycle of displeasure where ‘I love to love you baby’ plays on repeat again and again and again.
In here, materialistic desire is mistaken for sexual desire and
one makes love to a pair of red shoes and as one does so one fakes an orgasm
because
it is a reality of never ending wanting
based on dissatisfying pursues for something unattainable.
In this sculptural based performance installation, Moa Johansson questions the culture of capitalism by creating exaggerated images of obsession and excessive emotions around unnecessary items.
Moa Johansson is a performance artist working between durational performance, live art, and dance. In the context of intersectional, ecofeminist and queer reading, she investigates theories concerning the body, space, subjectivity and communication. Her performances kick up critical and joyful fuss about contemporary urgencies, using photography, choreographies and performance score to explore the possibilities and limits of stillness, time, pose and tableau through repetition and non-narrative arrangements. Moa’s current research questions the ecology of contemporary living; how to rethink a new socio-economic system for a rehabilitated on-goingness; how to puncture the value of hierarchical thinking; and how an active and response-able being can fill the cracks of capitalist ruins.
Moa has presented work around the UK and internationally, including Tempting Failure (Croydon), Summerhall (Edinburgh), Waking Life (Portugal), SPILL Festival (Ipswich), The Palace Festival (Poland), Humber Street Gallery (Hull), Thorny (Bristol), Mench Meier (Berlin) & DEEP TRASH (London).
TIMEBOMB THEATRE
Rhino Requiem
Performers: Thierry Alexandre, Lara Buffard, Céleste Combes, Bianca Darkwoods
Live Music by: Tom Milsom
Created by: Thierry Alexandre & Lara Buffard
“Let us grieve,
Let us Love,
Let us fight.”
Rhino Requiem is a mission to engage, arouse, provoke, inspire and empower: an exercise in connecting with the implications of the current sixth mass extinction while celebrating the mystical beauty and sheer wonder of the natural world. The piece was first initiated as a response to the death of Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, which galvanised artists from multiple disciplines to come together and explore ways of acknowledging the emotions elicited by the extraordinary loss the planet is currently going through. Their concerns – that overwhelming pain and a widespread sense of powerlessness was leading to general numbness in humankind – resulted in the first Rhino Requiem being performed in Hampstead Heath and developed into a full-scale theatre show.
Part requiem and part ritual, this piece takes the audience on a journey deep into the heart, that most sensitive and neglected part of our spirit. Contacting our personal and collective grief is central: if we don’t grieve, we don’t let ourselves love, and if we don’t let ourselves love we won’t fight. Poetry, dance, movement, live music and spectacular costumes fuse in this visceral theatrical experiment, drawing on Butoh dance to explore survival, collective grief and rebirth. To be performed in the beautiful outdoor grounds of the Art Pavilion, this boundary-breaking, cathartic, otherworldly spectacle will focus on the possibility of shifting our emotions away from hope and hopelessness, to spur us into direct action.
Timebomb Theatre is a multimedia, genre-defying theatrical company, delivering avant-garde interventions to 21st century audiences. Directed by Thierry Alexandre, the company is composed of a wide range of ages and abilities. Bringing together physical theatre, performance artists, poets, dancers, actors, feelers and live musicians, they produce compelling, addictively engaging, operatic-scale Dance Theatre. Through immersive interventions they aim to channel and manifest profound mysteries and suppressed collective energies, to express the inexpressible, to transform and release undiscovered potential to support the Earth, humanity and the scarred relationships between them.
www.thierryalexandre.com @vivethierry
TALK
WOMEN’S ENVIRONMENTAL NETWORK
Kate Metcalf will talk about WEN’s work linking feminism with the environment, in particular their work supporting local women’s groups in Tower Hamlets, their Soil Sisters project working in five women’s refuges and their pioneering Environmenstrual Campaign.
Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) was founded to offer a different way of thinking about and acting on environmental issues, using the perspectives and voices of women – often overlooked and undervalued in the environmental movement. 30 years on, we’re still paving the way for more women to lead conversations and be part of the decision-making on environmental issues. In the current climate, with the recent public interest in plastics and the environment, resurgence of interest in feminism and the discussion of menstrual product waste, we’re in a unique position to bring these topics together and inspire action. WEN is the only UK charity working on issues that link women, health, equality and the environment.
FARZANA KHAN
Her discussion will be on this idea of “Bodies of Conscious Counter Culture”: exploring connection, disconnection to our bodies as part of remembering and embedding our lives in ecological justice.
Farzana Khan is a writer, cultural producer and award-winning arts educator. Co-founder and Director of Healing Justice London, which uses non-eurocentric methods to build models of repair and self-transformation in communities of colour, Farzana has over 10 years of background in Youth and Community work and is a trustee at the Racial Justice Network. Her work has been particularly focused on arts-based education projects both in the UK and internationally.
Farzana’s work and writing focus on gender, racial justice and self and social transformation, and how to interrupt cycles of harm and violence in service of community repair and self-healing. Previously, Farzana worked at Platform London, a climate and social justice organisation working across arts, education, research and activism. During this time, she also acted as creative and strategic director at Voices that Shake, a project that brings together young people, artists and campaigners to develop creative responses to social injustice. Farzana’s academic focus is on radical and transformative education through creativity. A Fellow at the International Curatorial Forum, she is currently mapping cultural resistance in the UK through the curation and launch of the Black Cultural Black Activism Map, supported by the Stuart Hall Foundation.
SUZANNE DHALIWAL
Suzanne will explore how surviving into the future as a queer woman of colour means imagining & birthing ecological justice movements outside of the colonial non-profit industrial complex.
Suzanne Dhaliwal is a queer advocate provocateur, interdisciplinary artist, lecturer and environmental justice and anti-oppression trainer. In 2009 she co-founded and was director of the UK Tar Sands Network, which challenged BP and Shell investments in the Canadian Tar Sands in solidarity with frontline indigenous communities for a decade, which spurred the internationalisation of the divestment movement. Suzanne has led campaigns and artistic interventions to challenge fossil fuel investments in the Arctic and Nigeria that violate the rights of indigenous people, and of those seeking justice in the wake of the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster.
Suzanne worked alongside the Ogoni People and British-Nigerian artist Sokari Douglas-Camp to send a life-size bus sculpture to Nigeria for the 20th anniversary of the execution of the Ogoni 9 and Ken Saro-Wiwa with Platform. Her corporate and financial campaigning most recently challenged the insurance industry on their underwriting of highly polluting coal projects and tar sands projects. Suzanne has worked as a media consultant to support the Indigenous Environmental Network to secure international media during the COP21 and COP23 climate negotiations and continues to work as a media consultant to centre frontline Indigenous voices in the climate movement. She was a part of the Art Not Oil coalition for 6 years challenging BP and Shell’s corporate sponsorship in the arts and then went on to complete a Master of Arts in Social Sculpture in Oxford to address the lack of representation and on-going white supremacy in the UK climate justice movement. She has written multiple articles on the subject, most notably in the Guardian. She has lectured at Oxford University on white supremacy in environmentalism and has offered creative strategy workshops to decolonise activism and to find pathways to re-centre indigenous, black, POC and frontline voices and strategies in the movement for a decade. She is currently working as a producer and interdisciplinary artist in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannedhaliwal/
AMA JOSEPHINE BUDGE
“The great stuff of Melucia’s many folds, overflows into substances not tangible as liquid or solid, vegetable or mineral. We are Melucia. That is all.” Reading from her speculative exploration Feeder, which embodies the challenges, co-dependencies and possibilities of her theorisation of “Intimate Ecologies”, Ama Josephine Budge presents a visceral, eerie and tentacular engagement with climate colonialism, fiction and queer pleasure. *Feeder was published by Skin Deep Magazine “Food” issue, 2018.
Ama Josephine Budge is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism. Her practice aims to activate movements that catalyse human rights, environmental evolutions and troublesomely queered identities.
Ama’s fiction and non-fiction has been published internationally, in Aperture, The Independent, Dispatch Feminist Moving Image, Skin Deep, CHEW Magazine, among others. She is convenor of I/Mages of Tomorrow anti-conference, co-founder of The Batty Mama queer black club & performance night, and initiator of Self Love and Ecstasy pleasure collective (aka SLAE). Ama has a background in performance art with a BA in Contemporary Performance Practice (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). Subsequently, she undertook an MA in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy (Goldsmiths) and produced a thesis which explored Queer Modes of Encounter with Climate Colonialism and Black speculative art practices. Now a PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies with Dr Gail Lewis at Birkbeck, Ama’s current research takes a queer, decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and Kenya.
https://www.amajosephinebudge.com/
SUSAN BUCKINGHAM (convenor)
Susan’s professional work has always been closely related to her commitment to social and environmental justice. For ten years she was a trustee of the Women’s Environmental Network, having worked on a number of waste and food projects and helped to establish WEN’s Climate Change Manifesto. Following her long academic career, Susan currently works independently as a consultant, researcher, writer and speaker with various organisations, from Friends of the Earth to the Nicholas Poulantzas Institute in Greece.
She is currently an advisor on gender for two EU environmental projects relating to waste minimisation and marine research.
Susan’s recent work on embodiment and the environment has led to collaboration with Elena Cologni on the material performance of ecofeminism. She has recently contributed chapters to books edited by Friends of the Earth, Sherilyn MacGregor, and Marjorie Griffin Cohen, and curated a section dedicated to gender and environment for Terry Marsden’s Sage Handbook on Nature. She is now completing a revised edition of her own book, Gender and Environment, for publication by Routledge in 2020 as well as editing a book series on gender and environments, in which she hopes to publish on gender, art and ecology.
SCREENING
Shu Lea Cheang
Fresh Kill, 1994
1h 18mins 41 secs
United States | English | Colour | Stereo | 4:3
Shu Lea Cheang’s witty narrative Fresh Kill envisions a post-apocalyptic landscape strewn with electronic detritus and suffering the toxic repercussions of mass marketing in high-tech commodity culture.
“Fresh Kill’s title refers to a fictitious landfill that dominates Staten Island. Junk rules many of the film’s compositions, and, thematically, the film revolves around the detritus of an urban consumer society in which transnational corporations bring raw materials from the Third World, contaminating goods and people in the process, and dump them in the borough. Fresh Kill makes sense out of this refuse by exploring connections among people on the edges of corporate capitalism and off-center in a white, bourgeois, heterosexual world. From the beaches of Taiwan’s Orchid Island, used as a nuclear waste site in the 1980s, to the shores of New York’s Staten Island, Fresh Kill collapses the globe in solidarity against racism, sexism, and the excesses of transnational corporate capitalism as resistance circulates through networks originally designed to facilitate the exchange of labor, commodities, and capital.” -Gina Marchetti
Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker working with various art mediums and film formats, including installation, performance, net art, public art, video installation, feature length film and mobile web serial. Her artistic pursuits demonstrate a desire to cross the boundaries of society, geography, politics, and economic structure, thus redefining genders, roles, and mechanisms.
As a net art pioneer, Cheang’s BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her network installations, including Bowling Alley (1995, Walker Art Center, USA), Baby Love (2015, Palais de Tokyo, Paris), often employ electronic interactive devices to construct open networks that permit public participation. Her multi-player participatory networked performance, including Moving Forest (2008, transmediale, Berlin), UKI (2009-2016) are realized in collective impromptu mode. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination, crafting her own “science” fiction genres of new queer cinema: eco-cybernoia (FRESH KILL, 1994), scifi cyberpunk (I.K.U., 2000), and scifi cypherpunk (Fluidø, 2017). Born in Taiwan in 1954, lived in New York City for two decades, Cheang is currently residing in Paris.
