 Rhaid i'n gobeithio ymlaen nhw, felly rhaid i'n cael ei fod yn ddod yn gweithio i gweithio ymddangos yn y llunyddion. Rhaid i'n gweithio ymlaen sy'n gweithio i Gwyrdyn sy'n gweithio i Llywodraeth Cymru. Mae'n cymdeithasol i'r pryd yn amser o'r rhaglion llunyddion yn y llunyddion, ond mae'n gweithio i'n cyd-nau i'r 4 seftember. I wnaeth i'r rhwng am ymddiadau ar gyfer y cyfnodol, ac amddir i'r rhwng y symposium yn fynd i gweithio. Felly, rwy'n rai ei wneud am Darun Peer, a'r cyrwyr wrthwynt o'r perthynau, ac mae'r cyrwyr sydd i'r srynu, ymddir i'r rhwng ymddir i'r rhaid o'r ysgrifennu ar y Pryd-Mallan Cymru, ac rwy'n rhaid o'r cofini ymddir i amdrylu Ymddir yn fynd i'r Cyfnodol, ac mae'r Cyfnodol, rwy'n rhaid i'r Cyfnodol. The symposium really provides a space to dig deeper into the histories and the futures of the rural. I'll talk about radical landscapes, the exhibition which was the spring board for the symposium. Broadly speaking, this exhibition explores our individual and collective relationship to the rural landscapes of Britain. It was initiated in early 2019, in a period just before the Covid-19 pandemic, at a time when the rhetoric around Brexit was looming large. At that time it seemed as though Brexit really foregrounded how territorial borders and thresholds could be used to determine our right to belong and to belong to land and nation. There was something which Britain was also somehow culturally and spiritually retreating from Europe. I was a power inclusion and identity esteem linked to land and access to land. At a time of great social division in society, as a curator, I asked what can Tate do? Tate is the custodian of the national collection of modern and contemporary art for the UK. Landscape art is a core tenet of that. A key aim of the show, and the symposium, was to make an exhibition and a programme that took the supposed conservative trope of landscape art, landscape painting, but to create an expanded view that was progressive and outward looking, plural, radically inclusive. An exhibition of landscape art that looked outwards to the world that reflected the breadth and the diversity of the communities of modern Britain. Landscape, not as a constructive escape, but an interrogation of what we do in the land, how artists and campaigners have reclaimed land for common purpose. It traces a continuum of art and activism from the early 20th century until now, opening up the countryside and deciding to engage with questions around trespass, land use, colonialism, the politics of botany and the struggles around civil freedoms. So, we're delighted to convene a symposium that expands on these ideas explored in the show, bringing together scholars, artists, botanical practitioners to think together about the contested spaces and to agree collective action through talks, discussions and live performances. The kick things off, I'm really delighted to introduce a first panel which explores the notion of fabricating the rural, exploring how power and military structures can be expressed within ancient and archaeological landscapes, as well as through, as well as notions of pre, as well as notions of prehistorical matriarchy, through the work of the mid-century archaeologist and writer, Jaketa Hawks, whose work features an archival aspect of the show. So, we're pleased to have the writer, photographer, and academic Ronweir, who is the visiting professor in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics, almost editor of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight in the early 1980s, and is taught at the University Group of Greenwich, Yale University and the Centre for Research on Social and Cultural Change at the Open University. Her most recent book, The Return of the Native, learned from the land, was published this year and is on sale in the bookshop on the ground floor, and I urge you to purchase it because it's really fantastic. This will be followed by a paper by Federico Teverbring, who is currently a doctoral fellow at King's College in London, formally a research fellow at the Warburg Institute in London, and has taught at the University of Surrey. There'll be an opportunity for questions from those in attendance and online after the two papers. So, I look forward to hearing your responses then. So, Ron, take it away. It's going to be a pile of water here, I can see. Thank you very much, Darren. Very good to meet you. Hello, everybody. Hope you're all well. It's wonderful to be here to see the exhibition, which, from the catalogue, you don't get that sort of sense of the vibe between all the different artworks. It's really, really exciting, even though I just had a chance to have a quick look. But I want to start with this image of a landscape, partly because I like the picture, and partly because we don't know when it was taken. There's no sort of clues, really, given that they invented balloons in the 1780s. But I want to remind us of the importance of perspective, whether we're seeing from a distance or from the air. A question of hot air, hopefully won't be too much of that. What else can you see from up there? And so on. So, I think this exhibition, and it's particularly interesting to hear about the origins of it as a sort of move in the Brexit era a few years ago, it's extremely timely. So, as Stephen Daniels, one of the key sort of theorists of landscape, wrote several decades ago, is the duplicity of landscape, the duplicity of landscape as a cultural term carrying meanings of depth and surface, solid air and superficial scenery, the ontological and the ideological that gives it its analytic potential, not despite its difficulty as a comprehensive or reliable concept, but because of it. So, this authoritarian and morally bankrupt government seeks increasing powers to criminalise what's left of our right to protest peaceably. It's more important than ever to draw upon histories of resistance in this country, as well as from elsewhere. And as the artworks demonstrate, is often the battle over the ground itself to stand, to hold, to reclaim, to protect, to refuse to give that directs us to bitter and sometimes violent struggle in remote seemingly unbuilt or certainly less built places. So, the exhibition, as I see it, is a really exciting attempt to bring historic patterns of land ownership into a relationship with contemporary campaigns for the right to Rome, to explore the politics of belonging and exclusion in ways that do not simply reproduce or accept the premise of nationalist and racist narratives, to reveal the impact of war, environmental destruction, plutocracy and privatisation in parts of the country that are so often represented as languishing outside of modern history. All these and other strands of creative, artistic and imaginative work are vital if we to address the future of life on planet earth. Yet, as Darren says, these interventions and reflections, especially those that address broad themes of trespass and inclusion, constitute a partial social history of Britain. The relationship between landscape and national identity is obviously a vast and complex topic that can crop up in many shapes and guises, often in unexpected ways, than if any of you saw that particular monstrosity in the beginning of June. I wonder if you could see it in real life, it was just a picture, whether you actually went there, you would actually see that. So, as cultural theorist Ian Chambers says about rural Britain, it's about landscapes where only the view remains common, what we encounter is always seeded by local governance and planetary forces and violently harvested by capital and property. For a long time now, I've been working on ways to understand and challenge the dominant meanings of the concept of rural, partly because of its significance and discourses of national identity, Englishness as well as Britishness. The history of industrial capitalism is the story of urbanisation, leading to a growing rift between town and country, producing what we now continue to call the countryside. This inevitably led to the representation of the rural as not only empty and out of step, but also timeless and neglected national treasure that must be restored, especially if we are to reconnect with something called nature. As David Mattless says in his book, Landscape and Englishness, which was published in 1998, the use of the rural iddle as a category of understanding seems often to reproduce that ease and slackness, which it purports to diagnose. I say especially when it's used ironically, which it very often is. I suggest we have a swear jar on the stage that any time, anybody utters the phrase that begins with green and ends with land. You've been warned. We could say that in fact the terms urban and rural remain stuck in the 19th century. My question is not so much do we have any use for them today, but what do we do with that dichotomy? Is it still useful when it means such different things in different places and contexts? So for example the word rural, if you look up indices of rural Britain you get one set of information and if you look it up in Europe it's another, if you look it up on a global scale it's another and often the word rural needs to be defined for things like, I don't know, levelling up grants and spatial distribution as a geographical category, but that's not what we mean when most people mean when they say rural. In this book about the toxic politics of English nationalism called New Model Island, Alex Niven wrote that the great divide in English life is between the cities and everywhere else. This is partly economic, there's a national crisis caused by the dearth of affordable housing everywhere, but the extent of rural poverty is seldom reported and the cost of petrol obviously is having a huge impact on people who live outside the realm of public transport. You probably saw in the M4N5 protests last weekend or Monday I think it was because of the price of petrol going out and people need to drive everywhere, drive to the shops, drive well, order online, but drive to all kinds of services and facilities, especially to work and of course there are added bills for domestic heating oil if you're not on the grid of piped gas. So let's put this on a slightly wider global context and we can see similar patterns. So I'm reminded of something I found in a conversation between Étoile Glissant and Hans Ulbricht O'Breast where Glissant wrote, the movement of the 20th century was to mega cities which killed and enslaved the countryside, but now the big cities will suffocate and will move in the other direction. So perhaps the hinterlands will flourish again, in the future, everyone will take refuge in the countryside. I also noticed in the trespass movement, the right to roam movement, the manifesto for a new English countryside, they say whoever we are, wherever we live, wherever we are from, where all shareholders in nature, the commoners need their seats at the table. I thought you could spend an hour thinking about this language, but I do wonder about the discourse of financialisation or monetisation that's contained in that manifesto. So to go back even further, Raymond Williams described the terms country and city as changing historical realities that quote, defied our real social experiences of many kinds of intermediate and new kinds of social and physical organisation. Yet, he said, we need to resist the temptation to reduce historical variation to symbols of archetypes. And he goes on, if we do not see these processes or see them only incidentally, we fall back on modes of thought which seem able to create the permanence without the history. We may find emotional or intellectual satisfaction in this, but we have then dealt with only half the problem. For in all such major interpretations, it is the coexistence of persistence and change, which is really striking and interesting, and which we have to account for without reducing either fact to a form of the other, or to put it more theoretically, we have to be able to explain in related terms both the persistence and the historicity of concepts. So that was Williams. So the focus on rural landscapes through the lens of radical landscapes demands that we investigate this polarity between urban and rural today, 50 years after Williams' hugely influential book. What work does that dichotomy perform in this age of Brexit, of global Britain, with aspirations to be a great military power, and with a defence budget that's constantly rising? What do we mean by rural today and how does it articulate to encompass fractious arguments over who belongs and who doesn't, or who feels they don't belong and who is allowed to go where? So I propose we think ecologically about this question, by which I mean much more than starting and ending with the environment. It also means avoiding being trapped within particular nationalist frames. To start with, it means working with human and non-human scales, as Dipesh Chakrabarti says in his book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. This is Chakrabarti. In thinking historically about humans, in an age when intensive capitalist globalisation has given rise to the threat of global warming and mass extinction, we need to bring together conceptual categories that we have usually treated in the past as separate and virtually unconnected. We need to connect deep and recorded histories and put geological time and the biological time of evolution in conversation with the time of human history and experience. So this is the front cover of the book for which the first picture was the back cover. It turns out the link between aerial photography and archaeology and the military is extremely interesting and significant. It goes back a lot further than you might think. Anyway, to continue with Chakrabarti, he says, and this means telling the story of human empires of colonial, racial and gender depressions and tandem with a larger story of how a particular biological species, Homo sapiens, its technosphere and other species that evolved with or were dependent on Homo sapiens, came to dominate the biosphere, lithosphere and the atmosphere of this planet. But this is an overwhelmingly broad canvas and how does it relate to particular places or individual experiences? But at the same time Chakrabarti continues, we have to do all this more over without ever taking our eyes off the individual human who continues to negotiate his or her own phenomenological and everyday experience of life, death and the world, experience that takes for granted a world that today ironically no longer presents itself as simply given. So there's a lot in there but I interpret this last point of as an echo of the feminist politics of location that Adrian Rich wrote so powerfully about in the early 80s at the height of the Cold War, the importance of writing or speaking from somewhere being accountable for where we are when we speak as well as who we are. And Rich was writing as a UK citizen at a time US citizen rather at a time when the women's blockade of Greenham Common was ongoing. She wrote the growing urgency that an anti-nuclear movement, an anti-militarist movement, must be a feminist movement, must be a socialist movement, must be an anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement. We who are not the same, we who are many and do not want to be the same. This was taken in November, I say October. I think it was probably November. My book Return of a Native is centred on an area not far from here so this was just over the hill so to speak. So while it's very important to catalogue and re-appraise that history of struggle for access against the desecration of land for new roads, against military installations, nuclear weapons, arms manufacturers, we must be wary of the danger of turning those narratives of daring and insubordination into an alternative form of heritage separated from social, political, cultural contexts in which they occurred. Many of those actions, movements even, were instrumental in radicalising those who took part, changing lives and shaping political consciousness. In other words they had a huge impact in generational terms, Rhunam Common is certainly incredibly important but let's not forget the Aldermas and Marches in the 1950s and 60s before that. And again the road protests that erupted in the 1990s had a phenomenal impact partly because of their new kinds of tactics and the communities that were assembled but also because of the visual impact on the land itself especially Twyford Down caused them the pictures and the installations in the in the exhibition. As George Mackay wrote, as the mile long gash was cut into the chalk downs, the landscape was seen to be making its own contribution to the protest. Resonant of white cliffs, the protest successfully tapped into an alternative version of England. There is landscape art at the veil of the white horse at the white man at Sir Navas. Here at Twyford Down in the last decade of the millennium there was the white wound. And many years later, Rebecca Lush, one of the participants, would claim Twyford Down was the birthplace of the modern environmental protest movement anti-fracking campaigns and extinction rebellion all flowed from this source. And of course now Newbury bypass is very often mentioned by a younger generation of activists like Guy Shrobsol who wrote Who Owns England, Nick Hayes who initiated the Right to Rome campaign and nature writers like Nicola Chester who were all being very explicit about how they were politicised at a young age actually, barely teenagers by trying to be caught up in protest to try and stop the Newbury bypass. So we certainly need to create genealogies of these kinds of political struggle that allow us to access their impact as historical events but by focusing too much on successful campaigns in the past we may miss the constant process of resistance and refusal happening in front of our eyes especially when it happens outside big cities and does not inconvenience the public. So I had to look up where Shenstone was and it is indeed in a rural area it's a village and this is very typical of the reporting. This is by Middle East Eye that really I say should know better but it's a magazine called a platform called Middle East Eye who do fantastic investigative work particularly on foreign policy and yet and yet they say it is a fantasy English village they say this is there are four pubs a War Memorial surrounded by poppies on Tuesday 23 of February a stranger driving through this picture postcard scene of English glory would have happened across the most extraordinary scene. This is really problematic this is really problematic the way in which our sense of what it means to be rural to what a village is and how that belongs within a certain canon of Englishness English national identity this has to be challenged really any opportunity and the actions of these people who are trying to shut down the Elbit weapons manufacturer drones manufacturer which is owned by the Israeli Government you know actions like this go cut across that which is maybe why it's the there's a temptation to sort of wrap it up and put it in this context but I think it underlines it underlines that discrepancy that we also sort of lazily fall back on not we people lazily fall back on to make it look as though the English rule is the last place you'd find political protest the absolutely last place but the point about dwelling too much on the past where the success or heroic defeats brings us to the problematic question of the heritage industry in which historical evidence is often transformed into timeless relics in service of commercialised commodified tourism opportunities often mobilised to promote nationalist stories of heroism and exceptionism couldn't relate I couldn't resist this particular couple it couple so in my attempt to compose an ecological history of a rural place in Hampshire I wrote that sometimes it seems that this is all that England is a bottomless pit of heritage possibilities even peeping over the edge can make you feel queasy whether with excitement fascination or nausea I was thinking you wouldn't see a sort of come to France and a picture of the Lascaux cave paintings would you I mean you just wouldn't anyway there we are so instead we should be more concerned with the future of this ground focusing our minds on how to protect all the other life forms contained in the soil but maybe there's a connection so in David Graeber and David Wengro's book the dawn of everything a new history of humanity they addressed the problem of being stuck with the idea that because we live in complex and advanced societies it's inevitable that we're doomed to accept rigid political structures and institutions rooted in hierarchy and inequality and this book's become a bestseller is translated into many languages it's a reminder of how much archaeology has to offer contemporary political theory as well as how it can change our relationship with and to the past so staying with this problem of antiquity we return to stonehenge I'm happy to see as represented in the exhibition to consider some of the challenges presented by the commitment of thinking ecologically not least connecting deep and recorded histories with a time of human history and experience mindful of how humanity came to dominate the biosphere lithosphere and atmosphere of this planet so I don't want to start with the stones I want to start with a road the a 303 which makes its own contribution to this argument as indeed is featured in the exhibition so this is a thread in in my book as well because it used to pass through the town of Andover which was the town local to the area in the area that I write about today there's a bypass that takes drivers from the m3 south of Andover towards Wiltshire Somerset and Devon it ends at the a 30 which continues into Cornwall hence the ironic nickname highway to the sun it is actually indeed the the road you take if you're going on holidays in the southwest unless you're coming from Liverpool in which case you'd go straight down they actually built a motorway m4 m5 for just that reason to carry the traffic along you know through England down to the southwest the location of this long arterial road single and dual carriageway alternately has determined the economic and commercial life of many of the towns and districts it passes through attracting businesses that require freight not least the distribution centres or as we required to say fulfillment centres that now line the route the Stonehenge presents a problem because at that point the road narrows to a single carriageway and at the wrong time if it's inevitably clogged with traffic and I should add that a section that bypasses Andover just it's about 10 15 miles away was identified as the the road in in Trumpshire with the highest number of deaths over the last 10 years and a frequent accidents on that stretch reported in the local media often caused by speeding so there's already a problem with people going too fast a bit further up the road however the a 303 as well as providing opportunity business is also the cause of much annoyance and frustration due to this traffic build up at Stonehenge the road actually pulses within 165 meters at its closest and it remains a huge logistical problem for the motoring and haulage sector there's one of several villages blighted by the highway just a couple of miles away has also been demanding some kind of remedial action for decades so in 1980s a tunnel was proposed and to cut a long story short this idea came and went over the intervening decades and the most recent plan which costs the numbers vary 1.7 billion pounds led by highways england last year was declared unlawful by the high court on the grounds of damage to heritage landscape and culture so there's the root of the tunnel and what you need to know is that the dotted line is the tunnel the pale pink is the world heritage area world heritage area and then the the double red lines is where the dual carriageway goes into the tunnel and comes out and then goes on and bypasses the village that I mentioned so at the moment the department of transport is considering its options whether to redo the plan again um sorry the campaign has include archaeologists environmental groups and obviously druids meanwhile the contracts have been awarded for the work as they sort of think about whether or not they should tinker with the plan and come back again but one of the did I say the grounds for um declaring it unlawful is that they they were seen not to have um looked enough at other alternatives I thought this this looks interesting next to Jeremy Della's artwork actually in the stage of brexit but no you know please note the landscape please note the green grass so actually if you want to know more about this the the website stonehenge alliance is the place to go also um what's it called new civil engineering has all the upstate information the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson who's been working on that site for for decades he's one of the leading voices and opposing the um the tunnel he says it's a very outdated out of date scheme some of the protesters here I was there at english heritage in the late 1980s when it was dreamt up and here we are 50 years later or it will be 50 years later when it actually becomes operational and I'm afraid the world has changed in so many ways that we're all aware of actually you can read his arguments the argument is basically that um most of the archaeological excavation that they need to do is in the top soil and that what the tunnel will do by the entrance and the exit to the tunnel will mean removing the top soil which they say will be looked at archaeologically by wessex archaeology who supported the project but the fact is they they haven't got the resources you'd need actually a lot of people and they're not willing to pay wessex archaeology to provide that number of people to dig up what's on in the top soil top soil will then be removed and put in the bypass around the other place so that will be that that'll be gone as world heritage gone and they're still finding out incredible things as we speak um in the area and they're not yet ready to give it up so that's part of the reasoning behind the opposition however options to build a bypass above ground like a route around that will soon be blocked for a host of different reasons one thing that is never ever mentioned never mentioned is that stonehenge is adjacent to the largest military training area in the united kingdom measuring approximately 38 hectares which is 94 000 acres which is roughly equivalent to the isle of white one ninth of the county of wilcher it stretches from westminster and warm westminster warmminster sorry and westbury in the west to peremdown and tidworth in the east and a road linking the garrison towns of lark hill bulford and tidworth skirts the world heritage site in fact lark hill which is the closest is about a couple of miles away but it's literally on the edge of of that site that was in pink on the other side of the road is raf boscom down now leased to a multinational defence contractor called kinetic and portman down of course is not far away i want to draw your attention to pick these pictures by melanie friend who has a photograph of the green common protest camp she's on an incredible book called the plane which has about 20 pictures taken on source green plane over the course of a year in different light and they're absolutely stunning images of this particular area which we never get to see so the presence of the british army is not obvious at first even somewhere like this which is military training area when you're entitled to go unless there's an actual sign telling you not to is the odd car key vehicle or helicopter you're more likely to be distracted by the view the paths the white chalk old paths and not if not the stones themselves actually in this image there is a clue to how the mo d has has been able to be left alone to manage the plane without interference so how and when did they manage to get so much territory well this is both a long story and a short one the land was purchased much of it forcibly from 1897 and provided a space for artillery practice because of course new weapons machine gun maxim gun they needed more space to be able to do firing practice military maneuvers changing methods of warfare in southern africa preparation for the next war in europe the training area provided the location for hundreds of troops from the dominions in 1914 for training prior to going to france and again in world war two the indelible traces of britain's involvement in war fighting over more than a century can be read off these built up areas these garrison towns the sedimentation of 120 years of military history so this reveals a very different story about national heritage than the one offered by stonehenge a few miles to the south this is a brand new housing estate so this is a form of what we might call colonial countryside that provides the material evidence of imperialism and military conquest in bricks and cement as well as tank trucks and abandoned villages used for firing practice but it would be a mistake to see it as simply historic conveniently tucked away on britain's only step as joneson meads called it recently today designated as one of one of four super garrisons in the country this area encompasses a sprawling conglomeration of camps and training facilities that suggest significant investment in defence infrastructure as well as a highly securitised environment typical of military bases it certainly puts the tunnel in a different perspective so the mod is one of the largest landowners in the country it owns some 240 hectares of land in fact they're said to be the second biggest landowner after the forestry commission that's another of melony friends images so here you get a sense of that big chunk of saltry play in the middle of sort of southern england bits of the estate are scattered all over the country and of course they make a claim as to the economic benefits that their presence brings to counties and to the region as a whole and there's a lot to say about that but how do they justify occupying so many places particularly this large expanse of open country in saltry plain and how is it that we don't see them so it turns out that the protests against military encroachment of the plain in the 1960s and 70s actually did have an effect they forced the ministry of defence to change tack and i wonder maybe whether or not they were alerted by the marches the aldermassen marches and the possibility of larger mobilisations against military installations that were taking place in that era but also there were arguments about questions of access to rights of way and the closure of public land for the last three decades of the 20th century saw the emergence of a phenomenon known as military environmentalism something documented by patrick right is a very important voice in this discussion in his book the village that died for england which just been just been re published by repeater that's really about what happened in dorset a parallel story that happened in dorset the fact that prohibited land used for shooting and firing and tank tank practice was uncultivated not plowed for many years and that therefore created inadvertent nature reserves this came to be recognised as a huge environmental asset and saltry plain became an important locus for this argument by the early 1980s and one of the clues can be found in the puddles of tank tracks it turns out that these puddles these these depressions in the ground contain a microscopic creature that produced helped to produce the first discourse of something called accidental environmentalism what it is is a kind of um it's a thing like a shrimp a tiny shrimp that thrives in the in the in these routes because it can survive for many years the eggs can survive for up to 15 years um they can survive droughts and warm temperatures so when these dry out um the eggs don't perish they can sort of hang on in there and they hatch when the water returns and they were found on the plain um in the 19 until the 19th century and then cultivation the constant cultivation of the plain put an end to them so they became a protected species in 1981 so when they were discovered it then was then proof that the military occupation was actually doing a good thing for the environment this form of military environmentalism involved a readiness to work with conservationists and it managed to diffuse a lot of the anger as they made it a virtue uh in the 1980s they launched a special magazine called Sanctuary which details conservation efforts and successes on the plain this led to what Rachel Woodward a military geographer has called carkey conservation a phenomenon that's allowed successive UK governments to claim that they're taking an active part in creating and protecting wildlife areas not just in the UK but in other parts of the world like Belize they own a huge amount of land both training and Kenya and I don't know if any of you followed the what's been happening on Kenya with fires and the possible use of white phosphorus as well on their training areas and this refers to to what you said in the catalogue about geopolitical structures that delineate more sophisticated forms of global power rooted in accessing the land the emphasis on conservation now and sustainability the language changes provide what we call what I would call camo washing actually it helps to conceal what the UK military is actually being asked to do what forms of organised violence are being prepared a stone throw from the salsias parties so I want to end by returning to the duplicity of landscape the connections between the ontological and the ideological the point is to question what we think we already know about the meanings of particular places or landmarks the importance of not falling back on modes of thought which seem able to create the permanence without the history the importance of the politics of location being accountable to where we are speaking from so let's consider the fact that disused defences state of the military in our midst is used increasingly for housing and containing asylum seekers often the fleeing from results of wars in which our government is implicated we only hear often when there's a scandal for example at the disused Napier barracks in Folkstone where you know during the pandemic poor ventilation run down buildings filthy facilities and a decrepit isolation block not fit for habitation so on and so forth came to light 2020 there was a proposal to create a holding centre on empty mod land alongside the a 303 actually near the village of Barton Stacey on the other side of Andover as you come off the M3 the locals were concerned that not only was there nothing to do for these young men but also the road was extremely dangerous so they would have this huge area of empty land and then there was the highway and then there was a couple of garages garages petrol stations and then there was the village so of course local people had a say and then Nigel Farage tipped up he made a point of visiting filming himself talking to villagers about the likely problems of so many men from waterborne countries preying on locals the destruction of Little Barton Stacey he said that its ancient church and parish council is village shock and local honey well the proposal was dropped it wasn't clear what had happened but they're just testing the water more recently the home office announced the decision to create an asylum seeker holding centre at RAF linton on news in north Yorkshire plan was to open the centre with health and welfare services so as not to cause a drain on local resources which of course made the locals complain first complain of so many men coming then to complain that that they couldn't go to the doctor so why should these people have their own special health facilities and this was to be opened at the same time as the first flight to Rwanda so this would have created a positive story to preempt further opposition and to date no one has moved in note the red phone box and as you know the deportation failed because of last minute to Rwanda failed because of last minute legal challenges however the plane was spotted sitting on the tarmac at RAF boscom down less than five miles from Stonehenge as the crow flies but we know there'll be another one so finally this brings us to the question of belonging citizenship and even the right to trespass and the urgency of thinking across different scales all over the world people are on the move whether relocating by choice and realigning life goals or forcibly displaced through persecution hunger disease war famine drought heat and other forms of catastrophe caused by human activity who gets to live let alone die in a place they can call home thank you thank you for inviting me hi everyone is this one clicker so hi my talk today looks back to the middle of the last century and as examples of trying to think about land as in country and homeland and identity as through a shift in perspectives i was happy that Ron started with this image of looking from above or from from the land because this is about I mean is quite literally the shift in perspective to not think of our place in the landscape horizontally but rather vertically so thinking about identity in this case British identity through geology and archaeology and this is itself quite uncontroversial archaeology has always fed on being connected of finding finds that can say something about heritage or identity or supposed to be able to say something what is interesting about this movement or what I want to talk about is how it activates a kind of archaeological identity of thinking in this case of British identity as stratified as modeled as mixed as being laid up of different elements both hiding and preserving as what has gone before and moreover what I'm interested in is how this archaeological thinking was both politicized and gendered and that's central to this idea was that by digging even deeper into the British past you could access an older past that was feminine matriarchal and that had been covered up but could be a guide in shaping a post-war future. My main example who there's a vitrine dedicated to in the show is the archaeologist Jaquetta Hawkes. She's not very well known today but she was a very prolific and successful career that hits its stride around the middle of the last century. She was an acknowledged specialist on prehistoric Britain but her passion was really in popularizing history and science not least by utilizing media and different experimental forms of museum display. She was the first editor-in-chief of the film unit of the Ministry of Education during the Second World War and it was interesting Ron said about the intersection between aerial photography and archaeology so she actually used a lot in her in her films about prehistory aerial photography from the military and she would make films about the beginning of the alphabet or prehistoric Britain for example that she said she only got away with because there was a war to distract from what she was actually up to. David Attenborough recalls a seminal moment for his career when as a young boy he was complimented on his fossil collection by Jaquetta Hawkes and it's a sweet anecdote but it also says something about her as an inspiration for as a popularizer of science that also has a social or political agenda so she was also involved in the foundation of UNESCO and in the nuclear disarmament movement. However she really got to spread her wings as a popularizer when she was asked to be the archaeological convener for the 1951 festival of Britain so there's some information about the festival in the exhibition and it was supposed to celebrate Britain, its history, its people, its industry, a kind of a one country world's fair but also to delight and lift spirits during post-war austerity famously the conveners described it as a tonic for the nation and it had events all over the country but the main site was here at the London South Bank which was renovated for this purpose and here you could enter the festival you could go through it in two ways at upstream and downstream you see there's these little and the middle these little blue and red half moons and one of them is called the land and the other the people and both of them would lead you to the big circle and you see at the top on the Thames which was the dome of discovery so how they conceptualized the show is to on the one hand seeing how the land and on the other the history of the people had both shaped in their words the British race as this people of discovery in the world and in the land so it was really an exploration of the British characters and one of the conveners said what is it that gives the British character and British achievements such diversity what is the link between the past and the present that gives us such faith in the future the answer seemed to lie in the great variety and diverse natural resources of the island of Britain a mixed race of people and an innate curiosity within these people so that's the word of the festival conveners and and their concept of Britishness was really this geological one that's multi-layered and it could be called up in different aspects and as a side note of course they exploited what they mean by this what is actually meant to make up of this British is very limited and it's it's telling what they include in this mixture and what they what they have left out and and there's a lot to be said and there's a lot that has been said about the history of this event and especially how it posits Britain's place in the world especially how it's rather conspicuous silence on the British empire which only figures as this this shadow or a ghost in it and it's a little outside the purview of this talk but it's something that I'm very happy about talking more about later Hawks was invited and to to lay out the the the route the people and the display was itself is deliberately life on on explanation signs and text but we get an insight on how she figured us both from the exhibition catalogue and well from her book a land which she completed as she was working on the festival so you see here you're supposed to walk roughly a chronology of the British people but it's also supposed to be a very sensual experience where you are yourself an archaeologist peeking into holes and seeing these these different finds and it ends there with the romance and then you go out to to the next display so she wrote this book a land at the same time as she was working on the festival and the geographer Hayden Lorimer had called a land an experimental earth writing with a twist of domestic psychodrama which is as good as any way to describe it it's a wonderful book with a wonderful disregard for conventional disciplinary boundaries and mixes geology archaeology with her own very personal in talking about the Henry board art of Henry more as well as comparisons between stegosaurus and old professors it is a it's roughly chronological and these are some of the very eclectic illustrations from the book and there's a rough chronology in it but in a land talks describe landscape and land as both ancient and present so when she talks about Henry more sculptures he talks about the fossils that the ancient creatures that she can see in his in his artworks she also talks about the stones that have been used for government buildings and in which throughout which era so you really get the sense that that the land and the geology the very stone of britain shapes and gives form almost in an animistic sense to what to culture and life today she starts it with a quote I see modern men enjoying a unity with trilobites of a nature more deeply significant than anything presently understood in the process of biological evolution it should be said at the hawks she never lost her authority as a scientist or as an archaeologist but she could get away with these things this also became a bestseller in the late 50s so landscape and land as both this ancient and present as both ancient but also present in modern society and this co-contemporality of the very deep past and what is today is often accessed through the body and the individual memory so it's a it's an archaeology that is both sensual and embodied in the personal and and Jeremy Deller who is featured in the show has made much the same point this in fewer words today it's also this it's also this access through the own body and through the own sensations it's also an access through personal memory so hawks often mixes geological descriptions and archaeology with her own personal memory and she talks very much how she sees her own memory as access to this something beyond herself to this deep deep history and in another quote she says that if enjoying a son a child leans against the cliff at Folkstone his small figure will spend accumulation of 120 000 years so you see this this old the physical the body the personal that the child is both encapsulating all of this deep history of Britain so the personal is maybe not that political for hawks but it is historical and this mixture of the personal memory personal biography and deep time history also extends when she talks about the British the British and their history so the British can almost be imagined as this child's body encapsulating all these different strata of of time she described the catalog in opens with assertion that British were one of the most mixed people of the world so again there's this idea of Britain is being made up by different different layers and I think there's also a contrast also a post-war contrast with German language or rhetoric of racial purity so really emphasising the mixness of Britishness and as a side note it's again it's telling of what is mixed so her her narrative kind of leaves off at 1066 with a Norman invasion and so this it's on the one hand a very English centric account there's very little about Irish or Scotland and secondly the immigration narrative is then left off as a certain point this the scene has done so there's very little talk about more recent in her own time immigration from the former colonies what she then tried in the book what she describes in the book and what she tried to display as the festival is then this character just made up of sedimented layers but like stone layers that can jut out and come out in different places that are both present and ancient and significantly one of these oldest stratum is a matriarchal heritage that she describes as being brought to the island in the Mediterranean from the Mediterranean during the Neolithic that she characterises peaceful and centred on worship on of a mother goddess and this is contrast that would have more martial patriarchal heritage coming from the alpine regions in the Bronze Age so she contrasts these two matriarchal and patriarchal heritage that are both remains and are coming to conflict at different periods and she says the patriarchal have dominated since the industrial revolution but the matriarchal the rears it has sometimes as for example she says during the reign of queen Anne what she describes as the best time to be alive in this country so all histories present as one in one in hawks but this contrast is then really picked out at the end of her narrative so she says the patriarch is dominated in the recent centuries but it stood it stood its last stance when the guards were cut down at Calais and what happens next nobody can know so there's an invitation to think about this deeper matriarchal British heritage as maybe a guide to post war future now hawks was was unique in her vision and use of of archaeology and popularizing accounts but but she was not so alone in this idea of a deeper matriarchal past lingering in the British heritage and prehistoric archaeology had grown as a discipline in the first century in the first decades of the 1900s and especially in 1930s was very a very productive time in Britain and especially on the continent it had started to yield these finds of female figurines that seem to point to a very different European past a deeper heritage that was different especially from the Greek or Roman antiquity that Europe had often chosen as its ancestry as its heritage and this this idea of an alternative past of Europe a past that was deeper and different was felt particularly urgently after the first war when it seemed like the idea of modernity as progress from this antiquity was was then if not sooner definitely put to rest so someone who was another friend and correspondent of hawks was the poet Robert Graves who wrote about his idea of matriarchy and the goddess and also lived it very personally and as a part also of his processing his own experience from the first world war and this and many with him many artists with him was inspired by this deeper past both in its form and and its supposed context so anachronistically maybe prehistory became very modern and I also mentioned Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth so we're also associates and sometimes collaborators with hawks were also featured at the at the festival of Britain here's two pieces who also drew were interested in this older this prehistoric aesthetic and also its celebration of the different female forms of motherhoods and softness and this is a side note but this is kind of a thought in in process that I'm working on but I'm interested in a bit of the aesthetics about Moore and Hepworth and how they became almost the representative of British very become utilized in British soft powers they become often used for public artworks and also representing Britain in international exhibitions so I'm also interesting of this your thoughts on this what if hawks can maybe help us think about what is seem fitting with this aesthetic at this time to become representative of Britain or preferred for Britain so seek me out if you have any suggestion so the theme of prehistoric matriarchy might be latent in Moore and Hepworth but it's more outspoken in for example Ethel Calkwyn whose beautiful painting is also part of the exhibition where you see the attributes of the moon where she has a kind of reinvented Britannia a geological mythological earth goddess and she was also someone who read graves I was very interested in his theories in the exhibition catalogue Amy Hale has written about how the seeds of prehistoric goddess aesthetic blossomed in 1980s ecofeminist when which prehistoric rituals and nature protectors often merged and presented women as maybe a particular fit or uniquely linked to the land and to care about it as a religious imperative so a little bit what Ron showed us the images of and we see it's represented in the show you see here in her painting similar as in hawks you see this conflation between the man-made archaeological artifacts and the geological features of the land and also this contemporaryness of all the different eras at the same time. As Amy Hale points out this aesthetic of goddess archaeology petered out often it seems sometimes ill-fitting with more contemporary queer feminism that doesn't rely so much as an essentializing notion of womanhood and especially a womanhood that is very focused on motherhood and nurturing and also because the ideas of positing women as intuitively connected to land and landscape and religion rather than science is also the same argument that often have kept women out of discussions and have posited them as unfit for science or civilization and hawks writings too in a land while still beautiful and inspiring it also seems very wanting for direct political purposes today. As Hayden Lorimer points out her narrative as I mentioned relies on a kind of sci-science or kind of psychoanalysis of psychology of accessing the past but it relies also on a past that is entirely untraumatic so it's her reconnecting with her childhood the deep time through her childhood is always something positive and inspiring and it's also seems it's a very solipsistic ignorance to write a history that it's about writes the history of England of Britain through immigration and through geology but completely ignores how this history is completely reliant on displacement of other people and extractive geology elsewhere so this is something that and of course that's only that myopic ignorance it can only be possible if you insist on a land and one land in particular an island so also her narrative as the narrative of the festival begins with Britain breaking away and becoming an island and and so it's a very it can have this insistence on an insular perspective which which is just frankly stupid which is so wrong but and so the excavation into the matriarchal past have petered out for perhaps many good reasons however I just want to conclude with some thought about how this esoteric archaeological inheritance is perhaps still with us or could be in productive ways the urgency of action in face of global warming and climate change and land ingested has been scientifically argued beyond any uh beyond any critique and I think if there maybe is an interest in this aesthetic again because it talks also beyond science also to um to sensation and to uh spiritualism which which also is important for these arguments then hawks starts a land with saying that she uses geology and archaeologies for purposes altogether unscientific for to access something that is just beyond the threshold of intellectual comprehension and I think that's also something that we are interested in now too and I think that's beautifully shown in this exhibition um as we see in an interest in maybe this matriarchal aesthetic as an appeal to scientific as well as emotional spiritual and sensual care for for nature and it is having something of a rebond so Monica Hurra is having a big exhibition right now in Beaconsfield in London at the tape modern they're retelling the story of surrealism that allows more space for artists such as Colcun and also the wider um interactive broader world and art Biennale in Venice took its inspiration from Leonora Carrington who is also not getting a new museum in Mexico City so another reader of Robert Graves and here's more subtle her also her matriarchal pre-story themes are present here through the the goddess minotaur which emerges into one and I think I just want to end with thanking Darren and your colleagues for putting on this show which I think very beautifully exemplifies um how these different modes of thinking both the vertical and the horizontal the emotional as well as scientifics must not be opposite but can be part of one investigation of our place in landscape thank you okay can we take some questions uh thank you so much uh Ron and Federica for those really great papers I'm sure we have lots of questions I'm going to put over to the audience does anybody have any immediate response or questions to ask yeah hi um well first firstly I wanted to say thank you to both of you for such brilliant papers and they were very different but they really also spoke to each other um and I think my question is to Federica but I think we can look back as well into some of the things that um everyone was talking about the kind of an ecological way of thinking about the landscape and Federica you showed the last image that's also in the show of the earth goddess and the earth mother I think and it was translated as Gaia as well and I think that's just a translation but I was curious about whether this is being done in the 1980s whether they're they're also reading things around the Gaia hypothesis James Lovelock and Lin Margules because that's another kind of way into sort of science but a kind of very relational a different approach to science as well so I think I'm just curious about how or and even whether um these worlds overlapped um in the 80s in Britain or whether that was quite separate and maybe Ron um you might have some insight into this um as well just because that's that's a kind of American perspective uh in a sense so yeah I don't I mean I put in for us painting here and I don't know so much about but I I I would think so I mean she has a very intersectional thinking about landscape feminism colonialism so I would assume that she she has to think it's not so simplistic as she I mean it seems I hope I don't anything but maybe one knows this so y cwnghwmpu yn mynd i gydig yn ffaith, a dwi'n gog dwyblyrwch a gafodd, y cwnghwmpu cwnghwmpu'n mawr. Mae'r cydweithio'r cydweithwyr. Mae'r cydweithwyr oedd y cwnghwmpu cwnghwmpu mawr yn defnyddwyr. Mae'r cydweithwyr yn holl o'n meddwl, mae'r cydweithwyr i'r cydweithwyr. a what was in that sign, it was chemical, it was a process known as the chemical fertilisation. At the same time as it was done, it was not wrong. It was a very interesting question. That was a very interesting question. Have a go at it. OK. Yes. If you have to point it out here. There you go. Anyway, so at the same time, in terms of an environmental critique of farming, it was completely overlaid by this idea that we have to then get into the 20th century, we have to produce enough food for export as well as our own people. But we are now going to poison the land, which of course didn't think that necessarily was what was going to happen. That is what happened. That is the moment when, in the 1940s, when farming began to change, reducing the situation, the crisis that we have today. So I don't know how that fits with what you're saying, because that discourse was happening in the pavilions of the festival in Britain. Yes. That's the land that she didn't have part in, the hawks. It's ironic when a book was called The Land. Yes, exactly. I mean, I think she was thinking if I may go back, I had some backup photos. But this is the Grand Sutherland was commissioned to make this painting that would open a land. This was also criticised for being the two bleak. So it's now in a tape collection, but here you see also, I think it brings up these ideas of extraction and you see the fossils that also makes the fossil fuels in these, yeah, ancient creatures. It's interesting that also in the 1940s, women were brought into the planning process. And so, for example, the women's institutes, which incidentally had had to abide by their founding ideology that they were not a religious organisation. So they had to represent all their members and because some of their members were Quakers, they couldn't be involved in the war effort. So they were very involved in housing refugees and doing other kinds of support work in towns and villages all over the country. Some of the women who ran the women's institute, of course, were titled and very well connected, were brought into the planning process to try and visualise forms of rural community that were more sustainable and more workable, really. After the sort of neglect of these areas in the area between the wars. So there was a kind of women's voice in the conceptualisation of what rural life should be like in the post war period. Obviously that doesn't touch on these more imaginative ideas that come from the archaeological. The most interesting is how the amazing things you've been saying, you know, where that came in at the level of what this country is about and what its past is and what its future might be. And where the archaeological informed the political and the way people felt. So after all, nationalism is about how people feel about where they live and what's going to happen to this country in the next part of this post war period. I think it's interesting. I'm trying to create a sense of a psyche, like a psychology of country, of the country through archaeology. I think that's quite interesting in relation to the best of what Britain feels like a very emotional, an emotional need to celebrate. You know, to sort of end this notion of tonic to the nation. I think it's been interesting. I think it's been interesting. I think it's also also interesting you saying, Federica, about the notion of the Empire being the shadow at the end of Empire really at the time. I wondered if you could talk a bit more about how you think how that might be expanded upon. Yeah, I mean, one place it does, because Hock says that these excavations occur archaeology is all about the archaeology of Britain, of England really. Where non British archaeology features is in the dome of discovery so then, then you have these excavations that Britain was carrying out in, in the Indus Valley and in Palestine and on Crete so all places that were British protectorates or part of the British Empire is is then positive not as as part of a common past or part of a heritage but as as a discovery as a British reaching out so just the same as the scientific or agricultural discovery although it was especially the excavations on Crete as I shown in the last Carrington piece and with Robert graves were incredibly important for these ideas of matriarchy and prehistoric past. We have any questions from the audience. Great. I was just wondering if you could expand a bit. There's like a seems to be a link in terms of militarization when you mentioned, for example, Henry more and Barbara Hepworth and and push. I mean, you, of course there's like the forms. Specific push like, I don't know, like the cut, for example, the CIA Congress of cultural freedom if there was something similar in Britain that was linked maybe to real life and how there is huge land masses under this kind of power. Thank you. One of the reasons I ended with a book by Philip sands who as you know is a does legal work support people who've been displaced by war and particularly the sort of what we think of as the end of empire but actually is the ongoing forms of colonialism and displacement. So his that book is about the Chagall silence, and it begins with an account of the that the Americans and in fact the global attempt to try and bring colonialism to an end the kind of colonialism that grew out of occupying countries and running their countries from say London, or other European capital so there's a sort of structural argument at the beginning about how law was able to, you know if you agree that people should be allowed to choose their own governments if you fought the war for democracy, then you should give those rights to everybody in the world. But that brings you up against the forms of imperial governance that existed at that time. So yes, there were things Britain signed up to rather reluctantly knowing that it meant the end of empire. But that book is really about how this continues to this day the fight for the Chagall silence, the Chagallians to return to their, their lands that were taken by as a result of military bases in the Indian Ocean. So that's, that's really what that book was about and that's why the emphasis on on land and belonging. So I think it's quite difficult to talk about all these things at once this promote this festival being the promotion of a new era of Britain in the face of that realization. If you look the other day I was walking along and I saw it was a map framed in a window, and what it was was a map of the Commonwealth. I forget exactly when it was I think it was from the 1950s at the bottom it had all the countries in the Commonwealth, and all the imports and exports was absolutely astonishing. There's so many little pictures of cows and sheep and pigs and like so much stuff to do with agriculture, going coming from the dominions into this country in the middle of the 20th century, absolutely astonishing. I think of this country sort of having its own agricultural system and sort of grow food and stuff. They were importing wheat from India in the 1880s when there was huge famine in India because of the climatic event that affected the global south. This country was importing wheat from India having sort of destroyed sustainable farming in many parts of that of the continent. I think that the educated history and what exists at the level of promotion and and a sort of showcase of Britain to the world isn't necessarily anything to do with what actually is going on and what what happened subsequently. But I think that the cultural level. I mean, would you say from your investigations that this sort of sense of this archaeological treasures which existed in a time before countries. I mean, this is a very wide spread idea and it becomes this express very different than different thinker but I think often it examples I show. It seems often to be a very European idea I mean even to pass it these as I say Robert Graves is very inspired by the excavations on Crete but even at that point and which was excavated between 1900 and 1920 even to pass it Crete as European is not at all. It's not at all so obvious then that it was still under the Ottoman Empire and it's Crete was always closer to to Africa and to to the Middle East in many ways than to northern Europe so it was claimed and very much also consciously by Sir Arthur Evans the excavator as a European heritage she called it when he excavated a so called throne that this was the seat of Europe's first king, which he is how he introduced it so it becomes this. Yeah, I think a European past to juxtaposed against the Greco Roman past and then I think and by others it's been reclaimed with more as a as a deeper almost non historical. It's interesting with prehistory that it becomes this diffuse that because it doesn't have any written sources it can kind of be everywhere and anywhere at once I think there's also more interested like like Carrington, maybe have a different perspective or, or also I didn't show but the image of Aubrey Williams who isn't interested in maybe a major archipersay but also thinks up of prehistory and as I ended with the trauma so not just the trauma of argue yeah exploring trauma historical trauma trauma through geology and archeology I think he also doesn't his art but in his case it's not this recent trauma of the world wars in Europe but it's a much deeper trauma and a much more ongoing trauma of the colonisation of the Americas so I think yes I think the other artists that play with a slightly more or less interestingly. I think also. So for the Festival of Britain, there were these books published commissioned with by from artists and writers to showcase England. Different parts of the country for the exhibition in in in London, but also to sort of showcase the world. So one of the volumes of this book is about Wessex, and Wessex isn't really a place but it's sort of an idea. And kind of links you to Anglo Saxons and ancient times and King of, you know, you know, you can fill it in yourself but this was a book, which was really about sort of Hampshire Wiltshire, that sort of area. And it was written by a poet called Jeffrey Riggson, and there are books all over the country about different regions of the country one of the things they did was they. They created tours you could go on a drive so they were encouraging driving, encouraging people to go out into the countryside and drive around and look at certain things that was sort of handpicked for them to look at. I think that was also going on so that was really about the sort of specialness of the English countryside English rural landscape, or look at what we've got all these sort of historic monuments and relics and landscapes and so on so there was a claim to be this sort of special country and that helps to, you know, inform the tourist industry and so on so forth so we're partly dealing with the dealing with the remnants of that. I should say how this goes on. I was going to subject you to a two and a half minute video put out by the by highways England about the tunnel. It's completely unbelievable because it asks you to. So you see the imagine tunnel and that picture there with a sort of grassland and you know Salisbury plain is known for its short grasslands is one of the biggest areas of grasslands in Europe I think. So you see the tunnel road goes under the road is banished. Banished no more the notes the sound of traffic which is apparently very annoying if you are at Stonehenge you can't concentrate on the stones because you can hear the traffic. You're going for the drivers because they can go much faster. The emphasis on speed is phenomenal. Everyone can go much faster despite the litter of accidents and dead bodies further up the road. And all these lorries can go, you know, interviews about 50 different kinds of people lorry drivers school children villages, people, all kinds of people. But the aim of the thing is that you go underground you go much faster. It's quiet. You can imagine you're living in the age when they built Stonehenge. So you can live in the stone age, the traffic going underneath. It's completely bizarre. I've took more than two minutes to tell you about it but it's worth watching. I just want to add it from the question about the, yeah, this is a military idea but also that the festival you should also think of it as a, as a Cold War event. I think it is also an important time to pass it Britain also as an intermediary as a place between the US and the Soviet Union. So I think that's also a part of it of promoting maybe this independence and insularity as, as being a unique place that can also work as in as a mediator. So that sense I think these in a strange way this archaeology and agriculture and landscape romanticism feeds into that idea for that reason too. Thank you for those papers that are so rich. I'm not sure I've got a neat question formed in my mind, but the papers and Darren your comments made me think about the sort of pressures and the challenges of exhibiting landscape. I think at the most bringing at the most basic level of bringing what is outside inside. And I think I was thinking about the dome of discovery and the ways in which Hawkes was sort of reckoning with those problems and those techniques of display. And then thinking about the sort of critical relationship which photography and film enter into perhaps particularly around that moment as well of the mid 20th century onwards in thinking about representing land. But this act of kind of dislocation is what I was thinking about when I was looking at the Constable and the River Stour thinking of bringing Suffolk in Constable's case into the Royal Academy and into London and into the sort of exhibition cultures of the display and then thinking about, you know, how that plays out in an exhibition today as well that sort of bringing it into a room and that sort of run what you said about working across scales. And I think exhibitions do make us think about that. Don't they the kind of politics of your own body in a space and the interaction you have on the scale of yourself in relationship to these other objects. But I thought exhibitions are, you know, again, thinking, thinking grounds or these these common grounds in which to think about the relationship of bodies to land. But it do it through a very sort of, you know, sort of challenging mode of bringing us in internally into a space but I was just maybe more specifically thinking about the dome of discovery as this sort of circular space where there's a kind of root around and where the hawks have been influenced in particular by any other techniques of display to kind of create a new form of body emotion through the exhibition. But sorry, it's very rambling because I've got so many thoughts coming out of this. I recommend reading her. She wrote for us a small UNESCO publication called Museum where she wrote about the exhibition and she's written about a few other places too. No it is I think she she was a very creative curator and it's actually very interesting to read about, but also that was not her part but the entrance to the land for example they had built it so that you would enter it through a cave mount and they would have taken stones from I can't actually remember where they are but they would have built like an artificial hill and actually luggage stones from other parts of England to put there and and then he was very happy with it architects because people would have picnics on it so it became like an artificial rural landscape on the south bank which was this very industrial place but also in the people route that hawks played a lot of that was under the railroad was in the cherry cross railroad so she also had to deal with that so she works very much with this. Yeah the sensory experience of it that you should go in and it shouldn't be so much explaining to you but you should be part of discovering this so you will see a little bit of the. The Sutton who ship like just jutting up but it isn't a display as it is in a British Museum now that tells you what is before but it's used to be this this discovery of you see something glimpsing in the dark or at the first bridge when you go there was. They're actually built a little mouth so you walk over water into it and then you walk over all so this mound what has little little holes that you can look into archaeological artifacts and I think yeah it's it's actually very. Her way of thinking of both new media at the time of this place and images and color it's actually very inspiring I think she was very good at those things. Yeah I actually reminds me of an exhibition I went to once went along the lay line between old serum. Stonehenge and Salisbury plain and it's incredible to think there was a line that connected them, and you pat my headset with only an earpiece in one ear. As you walked along, you follow these sort of crystals, these crystals that could be in the could be anywhere in the land in in my membership in his stream and you have to look them you had a map, you walked is quite a long. You had small kids who didn't walk that far but you walk over fields and woods and things following this line, sort of in spite of the map in spite of the rights of way you could just walk straight, much as you could obviously you have to go a bit like that. And then, at certain points there were. A sound speakers that were kind of hidden that were connected to these crystals, where you could hear voices of people who'd been there before or sounds as well that evoked certain histories of the landscape it was really cool. But you need it you know you need quite a lot of time to devote yourself to it but it was very much the opposite was making the gallery outside. It was really incredible. Something you said, so when I see what I call Monica's Jew, I'm sorry, because only ever saw it written down, and you said it in a way I. Yes, she was a big thing in the 80s, early 80s for feminists. But it was kind of divisive. It was divisive because it made femininity into something quite sort of essentialised as the final and which I think it's what makes it feel rather data today because it's very centered on one way. Rachel's got an exhibition because at the time it was postcards, I think it was a few posters. And a lot of people felt sort of alienated from that form of feminist iconography. And actually, you know, a lot of feminists were ambivalent about Greenham Common as well. I mean yes to the action and to going there and sort of doing things, you know, crazy things with superglue and bicycle locks and all that kind of stuff. But I think, I mean I worked in an environmental design group in the late 80s, early 90s. And there was definitely a sense that when I tried to write about sort of the environment as it was known at that time, and sort of women and the environment, it was like, no, no, that's all like women saying, oh, I'm so right about my children's future. It locks us into a particular way of being women and maternity and stuff. So, you know, as you say, people were quite ambivalent about that kind of art. So it's interesting you position it in a lineage. Yeah, I think it's a lineage. I'm also interesting and I rewrote the question of why it's having a resurgence now. And first, I wanted to write so feel like, oh, I think it's maybe taking these questions about future and about care and sure all of those and the sensuality but maybe ungendering them but but I crossed that out because I'm not sure that's true at all when I looked at the example that the biannual, I think it is very woman. I think it is a little going back to an idea of connecting these particular about womanhood and I'm very happy to hear other people's impressions of that if you have also an impression that this is coming back and if it is still connected to an idea of essentializing womanhood or if it can be if it can be done in a more queer feminist feminist way. And about seven minutes. A quick question, really, I think for you as the curator is, I was really struck serves already mentioned the console landscape that you have in the show. I think the earliest painting you've got. And is, are you put, have you put that in the show as a, as an example of radical landscape, or it is as an example of the conservative landscape against which the rest of the artists in the show define themselves to I don't think it's a radical landscape. I think I think it's used in a way as a scene setter for one of the motivations exhibition and we're kind of used. It's a fantastic landscape painting. I think it looks really great in the gallery, but it's also the notion of the notion in which the land can be used as a kind of form of soft power or a form of propaganda. And I think that console painting is working general has been used in this way as images of stonehenge becomes a kind of a conduit, a kind of a shorthand of identity. It's also, you know, it's a, it's a fantastic concoction. So I think it's using, you know, it's honoring the tradition of landscape art, you know, to an artist creating an emotional connection to land using oil paint, but it's also used as a place marker for the starting point of the exhibition. I don't undermine that, you know, I think it's a fantastic work in the take collection, but it's a, you know, it's a, it's a jumping off point for a more expansive and inclusive image of community through land art. Is that working now? Yeah. I wonder if, just as something haunting the show or the possibilities of the show is that you could reread console entirely against the familiar grain as a radical landscape artist. And you can say that's a painting, which is all about resisting the notion of artificial urban representations of local landscape. But it's a, it's a resistance to industrialization, all the dangers and the anxieties around industrialization and chain and the impact of industrialization on the landscape. And it's, and it's promoting the benefits of local knowledge of an artist working actually in the landscape, who knows the landscape rather than the kind of the traveling urban artist who simply records a kind of a cliche of it. Yeah, so the time when it was produced, it was seen as a very radical form of landscape. I suppose my only worry is that the dangers in making that image a kind of an embodiment of the conservative actually ends up undermining its own radical status at time in which it was producing to kind of, it kind of reinforces a sense of, oh there's a certain kind of conservative landscape painting against which all of this. I mean, when we install in the show, I had it for a time as a Carol Rhodes in the show, which I think is, you know, from the 1990s, but I think it does seem quite similar, although that's obviously a completely different timeline, but it shows the impact of human behaviour on the landscape and the edge of it. I think, and I think that's, I mean that was probably a more generous dialogue than presenting it next to the Tina Keane. Common work, which is quite a polemical way to stop the show. But yes, I could see that it's also there's a concern there's a, there's a, there's a positive sense of conserving nature present in the constable as well. I was just wondering about this question of the so-called return to the figure of the goddess, and as with so many re installations of work from various paths, when, you know, does reinstalling constable reinforce a particular intention or does it open it to any number of other ways of reading. We can also think about the resituating of what you want to argue that it's feminist work or not at this moment, particularly of, for example, all kinds of agitation around control over bodily autonomy, generation and reproduction, not least a resurgence of interest in work like Sylvia Federici's around another figure whether you want to call it matriarchal or not, the which and the crone investments in various capacities of plants and plant branches, including abortifations that are also part of the natural so-called natural world, that there's no reason to insist that every so-called goddess figure is a fertile woman who is doing some kind of reproductive duty. It's just as easily be understood as, you know, well, any number of other feminine figures that have to do with particular, let's say, knowledges of what minerals and plants can do. I was also thinking about, you know, the fact that someone like Donna Haraway was writing also in the 80s, you know, I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess, but her cyborg, of course, is also one that's not the metal put into the body, but all kinds of fantastic hybridities that are much deeper and not necessarily seen on the surface. So that was a long riff just to say that one of the things that I, excitingly I took from both of your presentations was a need to question what it is that we think we're seeing. When we look at a landscape and that just to return to that insistence on understanding a certain duplicity, I also took that to be a real insistence that was not assumed that what we need to see is given to see, and that various figurations can be taken in a number of ways. So that's an invitation to, you know, riff more if you like, but I understand that we're limited for time, but I guess I just wanted to make sure that the goddess wasn't closed down at this moment in which one might need a very expansive feminism to combat what's happening. So do you want to respond to this quickly and then to have the last question. And I think you're absolutely true as I from a historic perspective what annoys me most is, is this reduce is that it's almost always the goddess instead of the richness of ancient pantheons of goddesses where they had all kinds of realms and and you're right that every goddess doesn't have to be the goddess the mothered earth goddess but they often are in these artworks so that's almost I would love to see proliferation of goddesses and I hope I think that could be a very productive. I love thinking with goddesses will never close the door. Yeah. This morning I also has painting. Hi, last question. So fabricating the rule. I noticed that in is a question for Darren really. I noticed that in the amazing exhibition. I don't see the people who who are working the land. I'm from the countryside. And to me, it is not only a place that it is assumed I cannot possibly be from as a dual heritage Indian. The quarry man, the farmers, the women who make their money from eggs. The milk marketing boards, the delivery people, the people who work in the petrol stations. The whole array of people that are in the rural that are not in the artwork. So it's been on my mind to worry or to wonder if those works exist. I grew up at a particularly tragic difficult time in North Lostisha where pig men were committing suicide because the control of chemical. The chemical companies came to control the land and what what what could be fed to animals and what our food could be and people fought lonely battles on their own and taught themselves. And I don't see it in or here I don't read it or see it in culture. So now I'm concerned that our production is perhaps an entirely urban and entire an entire project of the city and that we are invisibilised within it. The people who are actually making the food or making the countryside work. So there's a cornfield, but there's no farmer. The toll problem out of there, but it's been sort of creepingly worrying me. So I wondered if the work exists and I don't know about it. So that's the question. Can you know, I think it's just, I mean, I think you can see this. The show is quite sprawling and essentially I see when I think about displacement of rural workers and the sort of the other work that the other workers in the landscape. On which we all depend and so depend. I think it was, it wasn't, it wasn't not thinking about it, but I think it was, it was a sense of trying to somehow. I think that I had a real awareness sense of the history of the enclosure of the Closures Act actually and the sort of displacement of workers and rural communities from common land. As part of the creation of modern agriculture and capitalism. And that was, that's the kind of almost like the weight of history, which predates the beginning of the show. The show starts around the turn of the century with the Kinder Scout trespasses and those sort of protests to reach, to reclaim access to land. But I think the thing about enclosures, which essentially is the economy of the landscape, is present as a shadow. I'd say, I think the works exist, I can see, I take it with that they're not honoured in a direct way in the exhibition. I mean, I think the Chris Killip images do sort of perform, you know, you can't encompass every single aspect in such a complex sprawling show. I do think the roof UN installation also has something of a, is a sort of a signature work in the show to show a work that was really in response to the French Revolution. So thinking about that moment of the time when two thirds of the workers in France were rural workers in the fields at the end of the end of the monarchy and the feudalism, a symbolic sort of sort of return of the land to the people to the workers. And then, at the same time, being an honouring of nature and seasons, for those who haven't seen the installation, it's essentially a calendar, a tangible calendar told using plants and vegetables and animals and farming tools, minerals, but you're able to place yourself in revolutionary time in an installation. So this is, it's a bit obtuse and probably a conceptual approach to what you're talking about. But I think it's a good point. But I think I wasn't not thinking, but I was just also trying to encompass the entire history of displacement in a Tate show, and I think it's almost impossible to encompass this. I think it's a fantastic question even partly. Okay, that's fantastic. Thank you so much for, for being here this morning, it's time for lunch, and we'll be reconvening at one o'clock. And I look forward to seeing you then. Thank you so much. In London, and yeah. I'm going to introduce this, the next panel, which I'm very excited about. And the panel explores themes around the politics of growing, thinking both about the violent colonial histories of landscaping and, and how the legacy of colonialism permeates through sort of horticulture and agriculture. Especially in the second talk, we will hear about diasporic being belonging and organizing in rural spaces. So I'll introduce both speakers, and then we'll have the two talks and then we'll do like we did in the first panel have a Q&A with with the audience and a sort of panel discussion. Jill Cassett is a theorist, historian and practicing artist, and holds the appointment of professor of visual studies in the departments of art history and gender and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Jill's book, Sewing Empire, Landscape and Colonization, which was published in 2005. And has actually been formative in my thinking around the politics of botany agriculture and colonialism. She has other books as well, she's the author of scenes of projection, recasting the Enlightenment subject published in 2015, and is currently completing necro landscaping, the first part of a two book project on form at the edges of life. Cassett's artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Their film, Untitled, Melancholy as Medium, will be part of Documenter 15. And now it's my great pleasure to introduce Claire Ratinam, who is an organic food grower and writer based in East Sussex. Claire has grown edible plants in a variety of roles and has been involved, invited actually to share her growing journey in talks for organizations including the Garden Museum, Charleston House and the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh, and is presenting features for Radio 4's Gardeners Question Time. Her writing has been featured in the new statesman, Bloom magazine, Waitress Food magazine, so really varied places. She co-read the pamphlet Horticultural Appropriation for Rough Trade Books with artist Sam Iyer, and her first book, How to Grow Your Dinner Without Leaving the House, was published in August 2020. Her new book, Unearthed, on Race and Roots and How the Soil Tought Me to Belong, is out now and I believe we'll hear some things that relate to it. So over to Jill. So how is sound? Can you hear me okay? Wonderful. So it's such a gift to be here at the Tate Liverpool on the side of this colonial port to have this conversation. I'm really thrilled to be here with Claire, Retin on the Sria Chatterjee, and also want to give a shout out to Shawna for many, many things including the wrangling of this PowerPoint into the right dimensional format. I am so pleased to have this chance to share my work as part of today's call for radicalizing the landscape in relation to the exhibition by Darren P. I announce, by the way, are she they? And as a professor of visual studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison, it's important that I acknowledge that I am here from a land grab institution that occupies the unseated territory of the Ho-Chunk nation. I am also live streaming via Zoom. I want to thank my colleague Chi-Ming Yong for the acknowledgement that Zoom is not outside settler colonial occupation. The Zoom corporate technology that brings us together virtually is headquartered in San Jose, California on unseated Moekma alone land. Let's remember that virtual space to has a material basis and participates in the ongoing legacies of land theft. The material consideration of land back, the right of return, reparations and abolition acknowledgement of course is never enough. Let's then not just acknowledge but also hold open the possible portal that holding this event on the site of the colonial slave trading port of Liverpool presents as a chance however momentary to send the reverberations of a transversal note to selective solidarity, white supremacy and Euro exceptionalism as the channel for a binding anti-imperialist bond among the uncounted across the many forced diasporas of empire and neocolonisation. And the condition of a worldlessness that in my own work I've been calling the necrocene to bring close a reckoning with the catastrophe that's already occurred. And yet within this worldlessness a palpable sense that there are still ways of doing things with being undone to insist on the supports for livable life for queer and trans life for a transversal commons. So this talk going to seed in the necrocene is going to proceed in four scenes. So scene one in the necrocene. Miss here the scene in Anthropocene, a tactical renaming of the current epic of the geologic era of the Cenozoic Latinized form of the Greek Kinos for new. And we're not beholders of an epic or witnesses to a prospect of distancing projection onto a deep past or lost future, but rather in the scene of our undoing. To confront Anthropocene crisis is not to cast a prospect of distancing projection onto a deep past or lost future, but rather to work from within the scene in which we're enmeshed. With what they call the Orbus Hypothesis climate scientist Simon L Lewis and Mark a Maslin propose 1610 CE is the golden spike origin point for the Anthropocene. Now of course we could point to many origin points, but this one I think is especially useful to think with in that working from the proposition that the effects of genocide are registered as declining levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measurable by traces and Arctic ice cores. The Orbus Hypothesis positions colonial encounter, the transatlantic slave trade specifically and its lethal effects on indigenous plants animals and peoples as pivotal. The Orbus Hypothesis gives us the Anthropocene not as abstract deep geological time, or as the cost of industrialization, but as the fatal transformation of world into Orbus, or territorialized globe by techniques of colonial landscaping. That is, as they put it exposure to diseases carried by Europeans plus war, enslavement and famine, along with the transfer of plant and animal species between Europe and the Americas, leading to a significant loss in biodiversity and acceleration of species extinction rates. This global capitalist scene of settler colonial dispossession extractivism might rather, as I'm pushing, be named the necrocene to perform the scene altering turn of foregrounding the agencies and power producing effects of making die. The colonists to attend the everyday ways in which the looming hyper object of climate crisis is right here in the carceral situation of global racial capitalism and protracted war with its differentially forced precarisation and exposure. So seed to scenes of change necrocene is the obscene landscape of what exceeds the containerized embalmed version of the matter of dying takes us to the unsettlements of ballast. That dead weight of transported waste enabling globalizing commerce by keeping afloat ships not charged with monetized cargo. Demanding technically and by an extractive system economically ballast persists largely unremarked at the edges and in the gaps of perceptibility. I mean it's arguably precisely what we can't see but is the ground beneath us. The extractive waste process by which ballast having traversed the oceans to be dumped in trading ports and move to fill in land claimed from the sea spawned in turn landscapes born of displaced materials from far flung lands. But ballast agency lies not in rock or dirt alone. It's the unwitting seed deposit so often carried along that most vividly demonstrate the insurgent implications of ballast latency. Quote when we're walking in New York we don't know if we're stepping on New York or Bristol. Kingston in Jamaica, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro or Oslo. Many chunks of Europe ended up in New York and many chunks of New York ended up in Europe, especially during the early colonial years. That image is quite shocking the displanting of New York. With this provocative scene of territorial unsettlement that mobilizes a call for botanical decolonization, based in a reformulation of colonization is not merely extraction, but also precisely displanting. Brazilian artist and founding member of Brazil's Green Party, Maria Teresa Alves, set the stage for seeds of change New York. A botany of colonization and exhibition in 2017 that forms part of Alves is ongoing project on what are called ballast flora and have been since at least the early 19th century and this is one page from a list of ballast plants included in that exhibition by Alves ballast flora those seeds lying dormant in the mud. That filled the cargo holds to balance the weight and float those ships that made the return voyage from the Caribbean to the major slave trading ports of Europe ballast irrevocably shifts the apprehension of the calculus of colonial racial capitalism. Alves specifically mobilizes text to frame the ballast flora as evidence of and botanical witness to stolen life and racial capitalism as a constitutive waste process. One of the key texts in the installation reads quote, enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas and we've been told exchanged for colonial goods. But up to the second half of the 18th century, there was not yet sufficient colonial goods produced. Therefore it was more profitable to return in ballast as the phrase went to the home port in England than wait for sugar rum cotton etc. As this freed up the ships to sail to Africa more quickly and pick up more enslaved Africans as the prophet of this cargo with the equivalent of four to six ships of colonial goods. Now this gives the lie to the story, for example, told in the slavery museum across the way here in Liverpool, for example, although it's a story I'm told elsewhere as well. My research in sewing empire from 2005 examined techniques of hybridization as technologies of empire and established how transplantation between Europe, Africa, the Americas and the sugar plantations the Caribbean functioned as a dynamic force of transculturation. That not only created what we now take to be tropical landscape. So for example, the palm so distinctive that the Caribbean was brought from Southeast Asia, but also shaped what we understand as the quote unquote heartlands of Europe. So the specific provocation of the countryside by the transplantation of plants. A latent but no less powerful agency of stow away seeds that made the return voyage offers strange evidence on a delay of the disposed and disposable carried along to fill the holds of racial capitalism that calls on us to reckon with the altering force of contacts in both directions and unintended outgrowth of discarded waste ballast flora recast the innocence of what in fighting words is called the Colombian exchange and begins to undo the hold of the binding triumph of trophy stories of extracted seeds, such as the one in which Christopher Columbus is credited with introducing major elements of what became the Mediterranean diet. At the center of which is the itinerary of that marrow vegetable native to the Americas and still constituting a key role in food sovereignty in the global south. That forms part of the botanical family that includes boards and pumpkins, but is more generally now invoked by the name of squash derived from the Algonquin a scooter squash for green things eaten green or raw. As I laid out in sewing empire landscaping serves as a central technique of empire not merely alongside the violence of extraction resource depletion and expropriation, but rather as a central tool of view making in which the image as representation is not at a second order to remove, but rather embedded as the materialization of an aesthetic anti empire empire, specifically the colonial picturesque formulated already in the 18th century that we can see on view for example, in the work I would argue by constable that offers flourishing not merely as alibi but also as appropriate to ground for the material manifestation of the claim that lands belong to those whose cultivation not labor makes them verdant. Balanced flora as unruly defiant evidence of waste dispersal offers resurgent testimony to a necessary reckoning with the other side of that urgency with the necropolitics of displanting with the incalculable loss and unresolved trauma of histories of dispossession that are far from over, as they're still transacted in our carceral racial capitalist and settler colonial present. Taking its central animating necrotactic for speaking the unspeakable and racial capitalism's constitutive practice of laying and distributing waste. All this is seeds of change necessarily takes the form of a multi cited, protracted and ongoing investigation that began in 1995 and spans the port cities of Marseh 1999 2000. Repasari Finland 2001, Exeter Topsham 2004, Liverpool also 2004, Dunkirk 2005, Bristol 2007, and New York 2017. As always narrates the genesis of seeds of change is tactical activation of the latency of ballast seeds. She attended a conference of artists and scientists at which she learned of the work of Finnish botanist Dr Hailey Tila, who in 1996 published the results of a landmark study on seed bank and emergent vascular flora of ballast areas in Repasari Finland, in which she observed that beneath the surface layer of observable vegetation, ballast soil may contain below ground banks of dormant seeds, concluding that quote, although seeds seem to be dead, they are in fact alive and can remain vital in soil for decades and even hundreds of years in a state of dormancy. An exercise in unfurled latency seeds of change presents itself in the perspective terms of a proposal for a garden, which would be planted with hundreds of samples collected from historical ballast sites. Thus far, a version has been realized in Bristol in the form of a permanent floating ballast seed garden, cited in a reclaimed barge docked in Bristol Harbor and temporary gardens at the Weeksville Heritage Center on the High Line as part of the exhibition Agra at Pioneerworks in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York, and in Antwerp in 2019. The Bristol Permanent Garden and the New York installation, as well as the Antwerp installation, focused on plants cultivated from seeds found in soil taken from historical ballast sites, but the gathering force of the project lies in its rousing of the dormant. The efflorescence of the germinated seeds palpably reminds us as Alves writes of how others, given the right conditions, still retain the potential to germinate. Latency stirs the unseen imminent embedded in the not yet. Borderless history is Alves's term for the decolonial challenge of an active latency that respects neither primaridians nor mapped boundaries in its fluxing of imperial directionalities of agency. But the decolonial practice of borderless history is not merely a challenge to geopolitics in a spatial sense. It's also crucially a challenge to the hegemony of the linear drive of colonial time. For it is in the lag of deferred action. This temporal gap opened up in so-called natural botanical time that ballast flora's unruly agency exercises its potential for retributive retroaction and resurgent materialisation. In Alves's seeds of change, we begin to sense how this activated latency, this eruptive germination is also an aesthetic agency, not in the sense of the picturesque or the beautiful but in the sense of redistributing the sensible. Laid across the horizontal landscape plane of framed white boards, the assembled and numbered maps, photographs and other so-called documents with their corresponding captions, repeat and at the same time disturb the conventions of the colonial diagram of the plantation machine. The white space in between that is at once the terra nulius of colonial dispossession and the tabula rasa of colonial displanting and comparative measurement is here perforated by the active latency of ballast seed. Alves's panel for seeds of change, Exeter Topsham, sets a map of the port across from a landscape photograph coloured here of a foregrounded rookenfigur who's raised arm and pointing finger, direct our attention to the horizon. The port map bears the caption Exeter Topsham at one time was the fourth largest port in England. The keys along the river X served as entry points for seeds that came along with cargo and ballast. What began as an investigation of ballast flora developed to include cargo and trade routes as a result of the mention of the importation of human bones rendered into fertilizer for gardens. While the figure who points back is identified as Tupae Garani, Marcel de Souza, indigenous leader, organising for the recognition of tribal lands, stands on the limit of officially demarcated indigenous lands and points toward a mountain where tribal lands originally extended. Tupae was anxious that the local white landowner who'd stolen tribal lands and whose property began a few steps from his feet would kill him before he was able to accomplish recognition of the lands. Tupae was killed before he was able to accomplish this. Scene three, the Atlantic is a sea of bones. Per day without art, December 1, 2017, in observance of the international day of action and mourning in response to a global AIDS crisis that's not ceased in our moment of living now with more than one virus, HIV AIDS and the coronavirus. Visual AIDS commissioned trans artists and activists tourmalines, the Atlantic is a sea of bones. This short film follows New York City trans femme performer Egypt Labesia and performer filmmaker Fatima Jamal Lewis in a reclamation of the ground of the present location of the Whitney Museum of American Art for the resilience of black trans life as excavating remembrance of the dispossession but also roving potential of the temporary fabulous temporary autonomous zones of the sites of the peers. The cruising ground is sustaining life world for black queer and trans life situated where the Hudson River flows to the Atlantic Ocean as more than the network political archive of the dispossessions of settler colonial occupation and slavery. The film takes its title in its animating gesture from Alexis Pauline gums' 2010 online performance of Lucille Clifton's 1989 poem, The Atlantic is a Sea of Bones. As part of gums' Lucille Clifton shapeshifter survival school, which you can find online and I highly recommend. Activating the amplification of participatory sharing out across the borders of life and death of a queer trans methexis, the phrasing of Jose Esteban Munoz. Atlantic is a sea of bones refuses the rws of the Atlantic Ocean as empty site of subtle disappearance by an altering attunement to the landscape of the seabed of the black Atlantic floor with the materializing device of resurgent bone becoming maternal army. It's call of transversal connection calls to be read aloud. So, if you'll bear with me a quick reading of Lucille Clifton's crucial lines from the Atlantic is a sea of bones. Then bones, then bones will rise again. Then bones, then bones will walk again. Then bones, then bones will talk again. Now hear the word of the Lord. Atlantic is a sea of bones. My bones, my elegant africans connecting Wita in New York, a bridge of ivory, seabed they call it. In its arms my early mother's sleep. Some women lept with babies in their arms. Some women wept and threw the babies in. Maternal armies paste the Atlantic floor. I call my name in the roar of surf and something awful answers. In the opening sequence of the film, Egypt, La Beja looks out to the Atlantic Ocean to issue the transiting call and response note of the imperative of critical imagination. And joining us, the memories. People should never forget where they come from. With that the camera work does an ecstatic rise over the Hudson River, deep plunge into and charged resurgence from the bath. These radical shifts in aspect ratio and perspective produce what Tavia Nyong'o describes as radical anamorphic effects on the appearance of historically unhomed and violently ungendered flesh that refuses the rws of assimilation, which is theorized as the trap door of trans visibility to pose the border edge of the cruising pierce is the estimate ground, the inside out and outside in of abandonment to liberty, on which stolen and disposable life finds new dispositions for itself and others to forge creative kinship. The estimate grounds call up what Christina sharp theorizes is the residence time of black still life. She writes if something or someone is thrown in or jumped overboard or if someone drowns in their body is not recovered. That body won't last long in the water, and you'll most likely not recover the bones. A colleague who teaches fluid dynamics told me about residence time, which is the amount of time that the nutrients exist in the water. So I've been thinking about residence time. Those Africans thrown, those Africans jumped overboard. Who is their bodies broken down into various components like sodium from their blood are with us still in residence time. The films remembering wake work of visual and sonic waves of pulsing liveliness that Che gossip describes as tourmalines trans in aesthetics of abolition, unless diverse entangled agencies that include the unspeakable. The seemingly impossible agency of the active mattering of the dead to contest the network political terms of the death that cannot die for material transfigurations of the still possible. Scene for going to seed sowing empire observed that the founding maternal gestures of dispossession and possession, take the form of the scene of displacement of making diasporic that is scenes of scattered seed. So in semi sowing empire argued with the materializing metaphor of planting scattered seed. That is the practices of agriculture and landscaping is heterosexual reproduction to plant was to produce colonies and to generate subjects to sustain them. However such ostensibly founding scenes of dissemination is devices of bio and necropower set the stage for other possibilities for there's arguably nothing predictable about the effects of transplantation production and reproduction or the kinds of latent germination composting and decay that turned death in life into emergent forms. Take the migratory declaration carved into the wooden sign at the entrance to the transgender Memorial Garden in St. Louis, Missouri, planted by members of the metro trans umbrella group and dedicated October 18 2015 to those lives lost worldwide to anti trans violence. They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds. A digital diaspor moving across t shirts for the transgender day of remembrance. Banners carried at marches in Mexico City in the name of the iron at Sapa 43 posters and banners in defense of DACA. The activist meme popularized by the Zapatistas in the 1990s was adapted from a 1978 couplet by Greek writer of homo erotic verse. Dinos Christianopolis, the pen name of Constantino Dimitriades, who adapted the ancient story of Cadmus who sowed an army of warriors from the magical seeds of dragons teeth to mine the metamorphic necro erotics of classical myth to raise an army of the dead against heteronormative claims to the natural. What didn't you do to bury me, but you forgot that I was a seed. The planting of a version of these words on the site of the transgender Memorial Garden in St. Louis, Missouri carries a particular charge from its proximity to Ferguson, where the protests surrounding the police murder of Michael Brown were pivotal in galvanizing what's become the black lives matter movement. And these murders continue, most recently with the June 27 shooting of Jalen Walker in Akron, Ohio. Just to name one. The promiscuous popularity of this clarion call of the discarded and buried that turns out to be seeds risks erasing important differences with blanket generalizations that were all mortal. While foreclosing any reckoning with loss as loss by covering over the space of loss with signs of life as the promise of resurgence and resurrection. At the same time, however, rather than a covering over of pain and loss or the segregation of loss into not just discreet and marginalized but also uncounted losses. The landscape of the discarded and buried as unanticipated seed renders the necrocene not an inert past or a foreclosed future, but a roiling compost of a present in which the landscape of the necrocene is mined, not just by the military, pharmaco and agro industrial complex, but also by the discarded, discounted and buried of stigmatic agitating difference that refuses assimilation and calls for justice and reparation. Thank you. Thank you, Jill. My goodness. Thank you everyone for being here. Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this incredible conversation. And I think, I mean, yeah, the first thing I feel like I want to say is firstly your work is just so incredibly powerful and has been so validating in my own journey. And that, you know, to be to be here in the context of radical landscapes is, is, yeah, is validating in itself but when I think about the word radical how, how it feels inherently radical to have somebody like me in this space which is so heavy with wonderful brains and academia, honestly, and because I am a humble practitioner, I'm a grower, you know, and I sometimes wonder how I've ended up in these spaces and how there is something inherently disruptive about the fact that as somebody who has self assigned myself as somebody who has an opinion and has started to vocalise it in certain ways and then have found my way into spaces where people want to hear what it is that I have discovered on this journey of growing of growing plants and putting myself in a space where I've sort of had to come to a point where I believe that I've got something worthwhile to contribute to these conversations. So, so thank you for having me and for yes. Oh, what am I? I don't know how to do that. Yes. Do I click it? Please. I'm so sorry. Oh, there we go. Thank you very much. Oh, I really appreciate that. Thank you so much. I don't know which button to press. So I don't have a slideshow so I thought you were just going to look at my new book cover the entire time and I'm really glad that I went. I'm really glad that I fought really hard for this like incredibly hot pink front cover. I hope it's not too jarring. Yes, so, so it's sort of unlike the wonderful gels presentation mine is going to be mine is far less academic in the kind of traditional sense and it's going to be a kind of story of my my growing journey and and how I've come to be in the position where I've been fortunate enough to be able to write this book. And so, so yes, I hope that that's okay with all of you. So, I used to work in television, I used to work in production media, and, and when I found my way to, to the work of growing plants and that is what I consider not only my job role but also the thing that I was put on this planet to do. I was working as a documentary producer in New York, and I suppose at that time I didn't really realize that I had quite such a profound disconnection with the natural world it was something that I think doesn't occur to you until you realize that. Until you chance upon something that unravels this world for you and that for me was, was walking down a street in New York looking for a flea market and seeing a sign on a door that said there's a rooftop farm. Come visit, and they have open days on Saturdays and we went up eight stories on this industrial building with, you know, traffic below and suddenly you step out of this metal box onto this echo of productive land and it was entirely transformative for the first time in my life. I'd seen this, this, this process that upholds us all that is so integral to our thriving and surviving unfolding against a cityscape and and realize that actually for, for I was, I was in my late 20s by that point that I'd never actually thought about what it takes to feed us and what it looks like for those plants to grow and be in spaces where it could, yeah, to thrive in spaces where it could feed people and and so when we talk about radical landscapes I suppose that's the first one I felt like I'd actually encountered myself and that took me out of what was a very insular and very kind of screen based technology based life and and sort of thrust me into this journey of re embedding myself into a sense of yes deep connection with a natural world and that for me came through food growing and so from that day onwards I spent as much time as I possibly could on this rooftop farm every Saturday with volunteer and I was desperately hungry trying to quite literally and figuratively trying to learn as much as I possibly could about this process that I'd felt that I had been invisible eyes to me for such a long time and I think it is invisible eyes for a lot of us I think even even now with somebody who participates in in this process regularly there is so much about the systems that feed us that remain obscured from off you and and that was the first moment where I had that realisation and I realised that that that prism then would be something that I would apply to the very same many other systems that that that feed us but also shape our reality that give us language and concepts and ways of understanding the world and and it sounds like a kind of sort of hyperbolic to say that through this very humble process of food growing and this prism was unfolding for me but but it is absolutely true and so it was this sort of hunger for growing for growing plant the plants that feed us that brought me back to London and it was there that I set about retraining and and learning about horticulture and learning about yes what it takes to grow the plants that feed us and it's and it's in a you know I think that it's such a humble process and it is so so so denigrated in our social consciousness this this idea of like this although essential work it's you know unscaled labour which it absolutely is not that that I was yes so I basically with one foot in my old old world and a foot trying to step into this new world started to retrain to become a food grower and and I was doing this under the under the cloud of the the conversations around the EU and around Brexit and so it was it was a very short leap between thinking about the kind of the joy of this process that I had discovered that was making me feel like I had a sense of purpose and sense of belonging in this world for the very first time really and then doing so into English soil that had for so long been ambivalent about my presence here and I know that's not universally true but my experience growing up in this country was very much one of unbelonging and uncertainty about whether I could call this place my home and so what I found that I felt called to do and the conversations that are permeating through this new burgeoning love for growing plants and this very deep wounding that was kind of being re wounded in this in during those conversations and watching the kind of debates and the question times and the newspaper headlines and the racist posters was that I didn't yes I didn't know whether it was I didn't know whether I had a place in this landscape whether I should be growing into this soil at all or whether I should be seeking to grow elsewhere and so and so I I felt that the one of the reasons that I felt so unsteady in this part is that I had no sense of my own ancestry had very little sense of what my family are from Mauritius and so I had a very very limited sense of whether my heritage had some whether there was a thread that could be pulled through from the sense of my ancestry that sense of my my heritage into the work that I was now devoting myself to and so my yes my family come from Mauritius is very particular very particular island if you were to believe the history books it's a it was a it was entirely unpeopled when it was discovered and discovered and then discovered and it changed hands a number of times and and so as a kind of case study of what a space that is quite literally magicked up from seemingly nothing in by imperialism by colonialism and by the forces of the kind of European domination what that looks like the island to this day is really testament to what that can look like without, you know with almost an adulterated to some extent. And and and so that kind of recognized recognition that I didn't really understand the history of my own ancestry was something that I felt might allow me to create some coherence between this journey that I was on and the unbelonging that I felt in the on the island of this this island island of my bear and a not the island of my heritage. And so I set about coming to understand the history of Mauritius and in so doing coming to understand what it looks like to to walk with the legacy of enslavement and indenture ship in my heritage. And then recognising that I had to find that history myself. My parents were born as British subjects and they came through their education system. Under a colonial colonial system, you know, and so they weren't taught anything about about Mauritius and about Mauritian history. And so and so in a sort of strange sort of turn about it was me that was telling them about the forces that had had bought them to the island and the forces that had created these kind of racial stratifications are very particular to the island as well. And and in doing so, I recognise that there was this very distinct mirroring between my own personal history and my you know the history of the island of my of my family and the way in which agriculture, horticulture, botany had evolved sort of in tandem, honestly, when when forces of empire were quite literally reshaping the natural world. And. And there was this, you know, this kind of moment of coalescence of recognising that the erasure of my own history, the erasure of their own, the stories of my own ancestry. It is the story of botany in this country is the story of horticulture in the West. And so. And that's what I think I felt that there was a kinship between me and the plants that I was growing and the kinship between me. And the land that I was trying to kind of root into and belong to, because they all carry this history of erasure of of whitewashing and of renaming of, you know, of reshaping and reforming and categorisation and designation and and displacement and the plants and the people that my people, I felt were were moving in tandem with each other. And so, yes, I and and it was and so and so at this point in my growing journey I'd spent a lot of time growing in in cities I was growing in small spaces and and it felt inherently radical there is something incredible about growing doing something so humble doing something that is so pushed out of city spaces in into land that is is an asset is something that is coveted and fought over and built on and accumulates wealth and to try and safeguard a little bit of that to feed the people on your doorstep is like an inherently radical thing it was incredible all the land, pretty much every piece of land that I had grown into grown on grown into belonged to someone else had was confined by you know someone else's imagination or confined by somebody else's expectation it was almost always under threat it was either going to be taken away or somebody who had more agency over it or had some sense of ownership over it was going to change its use. When I was growing, I was growing salad for a veg box scheme in hackney and I was growing literally the bottom of a vicarage garden. And the only reason why we were able to grow in that space was by virtue of the grace that vicar who just really liked having us there. And then he moved on. And at that point we suddenly realized that we were in jeopardy because they've been trying to sell that piece of land to developers for years. And it was only because that vicar had said I don't want to live in a building site and that we were able to keep growing salad and feeding the people on our doorstep. And I don't know what's happened to that piece of land now. My hope is it's still being cared for, but the likelihood is it's probably going to have hands on it at some point. But yes, and because I was so hungry to grow in a space that I had agency over that I could make decisions about, I ended up moving out of London and moving to the countryside and finally having a garden of my own. And this was in the end of 2019. And so by the time I was ready to sow my first seeds, I was more plunged into the pandemic, which I will not spend too much time talking about, because I'm not sick of that. But it was also that first year of growing and trying to negotiate what it looks like to grow in a space that I have always held to be quintessentially English. And it is predominantly our understanding of the English countryside is that it's a landscape of traditionally English, traditional Englishness. And so that forms the backbone of this book that I have written of finding the way of trying to come to understand what it looks like to belong to a landscape and to create belonging, to cultivate belonging in a landscape. And that for me, not to give away the ending, it's not a cliffhanger, but that for me looked like growing the plants that raised my family and the Mauritian plants into English soil. And through the kind of exploration of this book, this book tells, it has multiple strands and say yes, there is the one that is the present day that takes us through 2020, it takes us through my first steps into this space that I finally have the agency to cultivate on my own terms. But it also moves through that moment of kind of global racial reckoning that happened in June 2020. And that was the moment where I'd say, even though these conversations were things that conversations around colonialism and imperialism and what the shape, the way in which that had shaped the botanical and agricultural and horticultural landscape and the countryside landscape to what were happening in my life. And I'm validated with, you know, books like yours, Joe. That moment of racial reckoning made me truly see that the horticultural landscape and the horticultural community and agriculture as well, but horticultural in particular, I have no idea or choose not to know about the forces that creates the so-called British Garden. And it was, to the point where it was, I got argumentative that I felt that I was bringing into the horticultural space a necessary conversation around race, around colonialism, around imperialism, and was receiving pushback from those who would rather continue to participate in their gardens as a purely aesthetic practice, which I would also argue is a colonial byproduct. You know, and well, you know, while there is, you know, our British gardens are a manifestation of colonialism. There is almost no plants that grow in my garden, particularly that would have grown here of their own accord had they not been moved around by so-called plant hunters and bio prospectors and, you know, and co-opted for their most profitable attributes. And thus, again, mirroring the movement of my ancestors in both enslavement and indentureship to be co-opted, to be used in these oppressive systems in order to cultivate land and profit from land. Yes. And so there was, there were moments where, you know, I think I thought in moving towards the countryside in trying to pursue this and nurture this proximity to the natural world. My hope was that I would, I would feel in more kinship to this land, in more kinship with the natural world and only came to realise that actually vast swathes of this land are still completely inaccessible to the vast majority of us. The right to Rome is, is tiny if not negligible. And, and that actually this, these, these rolling landscapes which are, you know, so romanticised are, are cultivated landscapes to then denuded landscapes they are without much of the wildlife and much of the thriving that they might otherwise have had had they been much as the colonies landscapes, decimated, decimated, sorry, in order to, to, to be cultivated, to be, to, to, to be, to exist in the kind of romantic mindset of the colonial times. You know, these, these landscapes that I was then moving towards, what, as decimated and as denuded as the landscapes that were completely altered and reshaped by colonialism and by empire in the colonies where, you know, rainforests and burden forests were completely destroyed in order to create space for monoculture, which again another colonial hammy jam. And so, and so I suppose I get often asked this question, I asked a couple of questions quite often it's it's how, how do we do decolonise a garden what does a decolonised garden look like. And then also like what's the point of having these conversations. And, and whenever I have, whenever I'm asked what do you call a nice garden looks like. I just think it's possibly one of the most idiotic questions, but I think that people really want someone to write a book like yours. That's not a hammy, but had a little handy guide to not being to feeling like a garden isn't imbued in a kind of, you know, a racial politic and a colonial, you know. And that doesn't exist, you know, and I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to rewrite history I'm not trying to create a space where we can all, you know, it's not where we can pretend like there is a world that we could recreate. Before colonial colonialism moved us all around and moved our plants around and reshaped our natural world and reshaped our landscapes. What I'm trying to do is encourage people to maybe look at the ways in which these oppressive systems created create yeah have created the natural world in someone's vision and and have made it such that there are that we have. So many of us, you know, we deeply have such a deep and profound disconnection from the natural world and what it might look like to. And so I think a decolonised garden is one that that that interrogates those erased histories and interrogates those in erased indigenous wisdoms and knowledge systems and maybe looks at all of the forces that create the world around us and create our understanding of what a garden looks like and what grows in that garden and then look at that through and then expand that prism out and look at all of the other ways in which knowledge is created and languages used and the ways in which our reality is structured such that we can't imagine ourselves outside of them and and so yes, I think that that brings us to a point of justice and and that sort of. I think that's where Jill sort of ended up to I think that our job is to understand history in order that we don't repeat the same. We don't replicate those same models we don't make those gardens in the same way again in in that they are deeply and profoundly connected to the land justice issues the climate crisis by diversity crisis issues that now we have no idea how to fix that we understand our histories in order that we don't re embed them into the paths in which we that the ways in which we seek to create a path into the future and I think that that's not only about not re re creating our mistakes but it's all re embedding our mistakes it's also about creating a justice adjust future that has a vision for us all as opposed to. Taking those ways of being and seeing and understanding and only creating a landscape for those who have the power to influence them and say yes. So. I think that's that's probably where I will probably leave off. I think what I would say is encouraged I would encourage you all if you haven't ever tried before to grow your own food. It is a humble and powerful and miraculous thing it's probably the only thing I can think of that I do that leaves the world more thriving and. Gives more than it takes. And so, yes, might I just encourage you all to maybe so a seed especially in these times are so hard and I often get asked also about what I do with hopeless feelings, and I have many of them, but the my answer is always to grow something. So yeah, great something. So much. I'm going to try this one and then pass pass it around to the moment. Yeah, just to say thank you so much to both of you for really fantastic talks. I have a question and I think maybe while I wait for all of you in the audience to kind of formulate questions and comments and thoughts to both these wonderful papers. I can sort of start. Yeah, I think one of the things many things really touched me about both your, both your talks and one of the things that I kept coming back to is this the question of contamination and purity. And especially with, you know, the ballast and the seeds and so on. Kind of where where it goes and this conversation, not just of transplanting but also sort of accidental movement invasive species you know is it who brought the invasive species. So sort of where does the agency lies and those questions, but then actually going back to the panel this morning and thinking about sort of constructions of nation and race and things like that so that through archaeology through art, and these sort of various constructions, both in the biological world and also in a sort of historical, art historical sphere. So I was wondering if you could say something about in your work, Jill, about contamination and what that means and also this quest for purity and play as well. And also just where do we go from here because everything is everything is contaminated you know there is no purity, and we want to accept that and sort of move forward and how do you think about that in your work. So you can hear me with the mask on. Yes, that's. Okay, beautiful. Thank you. So perhaps the mask maybe helps us a moment right I am ongoingly fascinated by the ways that you know when is immediately given a wipe when entering into a space but but not a mask, you know with this idea that that somehow you know that the tangible what we touch is the site of contamination but not, you know, the air that we breathe. So, to actually breathe with think with the extent to which we are not just ongoing dangers to each other, but how to both let's say, for example, live with more than one viral agent that are arguably the results of the deforestation and loss of the wild that brings species and contact with one another that and not just intimate contact but dangerous contact. I think then helps us perhaps to think about the extent to which and start to practice with something besides striving for purity. That is that we have, for example, practices that can mitigate risk, and sometimes very small things that can mitigate risk if we're willing to think with and in the place of the most vulnerable. And while I realized that this is perhaps a very, you know, tiny example, but I have found it so important to think with compost and composting and what gets produced out of decay and strange forms of germination as a way to figure out what can happen in a site that of what would otherwise understood to be waste but that's also then not to. As you were also saying so beautifully and powerfully clear that if we are willing to acknowledge and practice with everything that comes with a site right so it's not that the capacity to. Feed yourself and feed those that you love erases a history of trauma it's another way of telling that story but telling that story and creating the conditions within which we can then together practice forms of purity that are not based on this idea of erasure and the sense of the sense of creating as if the only way to produce something is to start anew from some kind of clearing gesture because of course, you know, we know so well, being the places where we know that, you know, you create a space of purity and whatever it is that you're taking out goes somewhere and those of us who are made to carry various forms of objection whether that's because we're understood to be, you know, brown or black or not the or queer or trans, I'm not reproductive somehow in the right way I mean that the production of purity is a particular technology that puts those waste products somewhere, and so those of us made to carry it I think have a sense of how to practice in ways that don't further that kind of displacement but I want to hear from you instead of just thank you so much for that generative questions for you. Yes, I mean I have a lot to say about that but but you're right purity purity is a construction especially in relation to the natural world right. I think that much like what I was saying about this idea of kind of interrogating and possibly deconstructing these like dominant systems of thinking that binary thinking in that there is the that which belongs and that which doesn't belong is an a human assignment right it's it's it's borders are man made those designations are man made, then the native and the non native wouldn't exist if we hadn't compartmentalize the world in such a way that we then have decided that that a border exists in one place and that which naturally jumps from one side to the other is is is problematic. And then, and I, you know, I think that there's one part of my book where I sort of expand on this piece that I wrote about the language around native and non native, and and how on a personal level I find it really objectionable because I'm somebody who would in this land be considered non native. And then when I look at it through and and so when I started started to encounter that term in the halls cultural world and you know and environmental world delivered as though it was this benign and objective truth. And I'm very rarely interrogated as to whether it was a cultural creation and it was it was an ecological truth not a cultural creation. And you know kept it kept landing really poorly with me and I was what's happening here you know I was really frustrated with it and the reason for that is that I don't think it actually describes what we're trying to describe. And, and, and, and, and what I mean by that is that when we just what what people were trying to describe as the the behavior of the plant right and we're talking about plants that were but weren't behaving but behaving in ways that we wanted them to. And yet to somehow they've managed to create this this kind of connection between the non native and the invasive that became. You know, so it made non native synonymous with problematic and what it did was then erase the history of how a that plant came to be there and hey and be how a lot of non native plants are here and welcome and grown purposefully. I'm not described as such because it's it's not relevant right it's and so that that sort of inconvenient the inconvenience of that truth was really was really problematic for me because if I pointed it out I was you know, sort of accused of being sort of pedantic around language and that actually it would undermine the ecological you know endeavours to control certain species and which is not what I'm trying to do I'm just I'm actually probably being pedantic to the point of actually watching truthfulness in the language that we use and, and so when you look at that as a way as a reflection of like an instinct towards wanting purity in the natural world I think there's a there's a whole conversation to be had around the kind of rewilding movement, which I think very doesn't interrogate necessarily that what are you trying to create what are you trying to recreate at what point in history you're trying to go back to where you know people were not participating in the landscape. You know, if I if only there was a way that we could you know remediate all of this this influence, but I mean, but I don't know whether I want that because if you were to do that to this landscape then I imagine it would mean removing me to you know and, and then we can have larger conversations about eco fascism and how that is a huge part of the thing that we need to be resisting in the environmental space in particular because when we assign this this notions of purity and ideas of contamination to dialogues around plants and, and other species. It's a very shortly before we start talking about people like that and and actually I say that as if it's not happening it's happening. And so, and so I consistently push back against any, any, any dialogue that that seems to think there was a point in the past, but we could somehow reverse time if we only just save this part of the only just get rid of this part of the only just. And, and yeah, and I, and I, so I find I find that really tricky. And I also think that it also limits our imagination when it comes to dealing with them. You know the kind of pressing crises of the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis if, if we demonize them on native and we don't necessarily see it as part of our, our ongoing ecological landscape, we don't necessarily necessarily see the virtues that we that they might bring because you know I often see you know which we're planting this meadow up with native species and it's like, well, great, but there's also other species that create you provide early and late forage for pollinators and with the changing weather that might be what exactly what we need and so if we just consistently just use these reductive ideas of what belongs and what doesn't belong them and not necessarily looking at the landscape and its complexity. And I argue that we need to be doing that in order to actually address the issues that I'm so pressing. Yeah. Sorry. I think we have to have a share too much between three of us. Question. Yeah, it doesn't work. Thank you. Questions from the audience. Thank you. Thank you very much. It seems that the link with archaeology continues. The, and I discovered recently that archaeologists have found seeds going back much longer from like Roman era and longer that also can be made to grow. Thank you about that, and I really appreciate what you're saying and I've just done my potatoes and, you know, I think I wondered if you looked at the allotment movement that's another side question allotment, particularly in London. There are all kinds of knowledges there and all kinds of expertise and wisdom, which is just something else. The question now really is about the planetary. So can we get beyond the sort of British colonial sort of matrix way of thinking about how the world was divided or other European colonies and think forward to a sort of how do we pool our knowledge of how plants drew people into different parts of the planet at different times, or prevented them from going to certain places. That's sort of one sense about the point of pooling our knowledge about what happens next because the climate catastrophe is upon us so that the emergency is extreme in terms of how we produce food. I'm thinking about the reason I'm rambling a bit is I'm thinking about about what I learned about weeds. So if weeds are plants that came from the Arctic and followed humans in this part of the world, as they started to do forms of arable farming and agriculture with livestock. Do you mean a specific weed? Sorry, I'm just weeds, actually. The thing we think of as weed is again another country of designation. What we think of as weeds, which of course changes over history because people, you know, have lost their sense of what has made medical properties. So the plants have sort of accompanied humans. So, for example, I found this very striking. So a field is really a receptacle for sunlight that you want the maximum sunlight. You don't want trees around it or things that are called shade. You want maximum sunlight to grow your crops. Well, a lot of things we call weeds, they like that too, that they grow in fields along with the thing we were trying to grow to make food to eat. So I'm really thinking about how we tell alternative histories of plants that are more on a sort of planetary scale or in a relationship with human beings, rather than stopping at the, as important as that is, and as surprising as that is, for people to understand colonial botany. And it's a fantastic intervention, I think, in terms of thinking about the English garden. Then that's that's the question really about thinking on a planetary scale because the question of ballast, as you showed from the maps, is about bits of the earth being moved around, and what we can learn from that. So can we apply some of that sense of thinking on a global scale about the about the movement of plants, not necessarily in relation to people thinking well that would look nice in my garden I'll bring it here or collectors going and you know there's obviously a huge history of people sharing ideas about plants and what in China, for example. So I'm not really rambling because I absolutely love this subject and I was learning things about it all the time, but I do think, in terms of the emergency of thinking ecologically about what we do and how we collaborate, how we think about this planet, how we think about the future, what we're going to eat, etc. Then we need to slightly widen the scales and think differently about the history of plants and their relationship to humans. Oh, is this, is that working? Yes, that is enormous question. And lots of statements. Thank you. Yeah, I think my my instinct is to say that. I think the thing that we we ought to be figuring out how to do is to uphold indigenous wisdoms and in indigenous knowledge systems, those which have been kind of co-opted into into Western European thought but also those that are sort of marginalised and aren't centralised in the way that we kind of understand our relationships in the natural world and figure out what we do. And I say that because like I said about the rewilding thing, you know these conversations often happen at this kind of either very kind of heady level or a level of privilege. You have to have an excessive amount of land privilege to be somebody who can engage in this act of rewilding, so called rewilding. And, and I think that a lot of why we've ended up in the position that we're in is is a lot to do with what what Jill was sharing is a, you know around America being a perfect example of, you know, kind of disrupting indigenous relationship to plants and land. And so, I don't know, I don't know whether that's the answer that you'll, you know, I don't know whether that's the answer I think it's a answer amongst the many, many, many that we need. But yes, I think that there is. I think that's possibly what I was trying to kind of allude to is like not replicating the mistakes of our past and a huge, a huge mistake of our collective history is another disruption of indigenous connection to land and indigenous indigenous stewardship of land. And, and so I think if those, I don't know how we won executes this, but, but I think that that is something that we need to be centralising in these kinds of conversations. I think there are people who have ongoing relationship to land that is depthful and powerful and beyond our comprehension and understanding beyond the capacity of our language to describe honestly, that we ought to be putting in positions of honestly control and power. I think we, we have a system of governance and a system of systems of power that privilege certain knowledge systems over others and that I think is our greatest mistake. Can I just say that I fully agree. And I think also just this question of systems of power is really crucial because thinking about, you know, indigenous practices as being. Okay, that's the one we coopt now can get us into a really kind of a longer of going back and repurposing colonial histories all over again. Absolutely. I think it looks more like more reparative and justice, you know you need a justice framework around that so it doesn't just end up being another extended arm of capitalism. When I just add a quick note to say that that's why I started with a tactical renaming of the Anthropocene is the necrocene which planetary scale, I think matters a great deal and there's not a planetary scale of any climate emergency that to me would justify going beyond colonialism. That is that the climate crisis has to, as I understand it, also foreground, for example, of the apartheid regime of our time in Palestine that is that what I had hoped we had set up already today was a deeply intersecting and enmeshed conversation in which the climate would also necessarily include our discussion of, for example, land-back reparations, feminist articulations around control of reproduction. And thus I would argue that I'll do respect to Chakravarti, that the climate emergency cannot possibly trump what it is that we might do in the meantime and even if it means that we're all doomed. In fact, as we are dying on a dying planet, there is a lot that we can do in the meanwhile to create thriving for those we've unhomed. And thus, yeah, I would really argue very strongly that of the planetary scale that should be concerning us as one that foregrounds land-back reparations and rights of return. I know Emma has a question. Now we have many mics. Hi. Thank you so much for this presentation. I apologize I missed the beginning of yours. But I'm familiar with your amazing work. I'm going to ask a little bit of a kind of more personal question. My research thinks about blackness, black communities, and the more than human and pleasure and sensuality in the ways that pleasurable relationships have been kind of forcibly removed through religious missionary projects and the colonial encounter in black spaces, both completely, but really detrimentally, and that those kind of more sensual embodied rituals that are found in other indigenous cultures are very difficult to articulate in black spaces because of the particular relationship between black bodies and land under the colonial regime. So I would love to hear both of you speak about, I suppose, the space that the sensual pleasurable body takes up in the work. And obviously I feel there's resonating Jill in your writing about the kind of potential for resistance within the gardens of enslaved people, but then somehow resistance doesn't always lead into pleasure or thriving or beyond beyond more than survival. It's really, really essential, as well as centering these decolonial movements against violence. We have to centre movements against more than survival, so we're not still recreating these systems of suffering. And very, very quickly I just wanted to recommend on contamination. There's a wonderful, I mean, I have to be really far away from this. All of the Metis theorist Michelle Murphy's work is really incredible, but that's a particular essay on where she's exploring the concept of alter life. And she uses the phrase non innocent entanglement, the ways that we are complicit and entangled and contaminated and non innocent, as well as oppressed and need to remain kind of stay with the trouble of the issues. And that paper by Michelle Murphy on Alter Life to think through contamination in generative ways. Thank you both so much, all three of you. Do you now need this back. I just like to say it was a beautiful question, just really enlivening, and of course just self anyway I'm going to let you. I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much. You did. I think you're going to listen to this voice for nine hours. Good luck with that. Oh, you're so fresh. Sorry. Oh, I see. Okay. I was starting to come up with a bit of a rave. I didn't get it. I was like, okay, we're going to start dancing. Oh, this one is now working. And then we can sign and take in between. I mean, I was just going to say that that sort of gorgeous pulsing hot pink that you said you thought successfully for already says a lot about the sensual pleasures of what it might mean to sit and be with these questions and I think one of the many things that I took from your absolutely. Yes, I agree. Gorgeous gorgeous question. You know, bam, there we go. Was that mean if we are to be with that unsettlement of a non innocent entanglement and that refusal of the move to innocence has been so important. Also in indigenous justice work right to say that what the settler colonial subjects wants most is to be assured of their innocence and you know immediately run for the exit but and I know your question though is about all black spaces but that if one can figure out ways to in the meanwhile and I feel that there's something about a slowness and an insistence on not trying to find the exit door or the planting a flag on the future and insist that we're post anything that makes some space to have all the complexity of a feeling and it seems to me that that's an aspect of sensuous pleasure would be the capacity to feel something like joy that isn't contingent on speaking of purity, not also feeling the bad feelings that the guilt feelings the complicit feelings that, and that is, you know, in addition to compost there's also the complicated space of ambivalence and actually allowing for and making it a practice to do the things that we can to help ourselves support, provide pleasure in care in in a version of what I keep calling the meanwhile but I would love to hear more from Claire as well but I so appreciate the opportunity to and really I would mark here also I have a colleague I adore Sammy shulk who's been doing really important work around black film disability justice work in fact you know her work already yet okay pleasure activism yes but just want to tag that. Yeah, I mean that was what I was going to bring up to. But as, and as you will see find out when you read my book, I was brought up Catholic and so I've got a lot of unlearning to do and and and one of the things and I say unlearning is somebody I'm not practicing Catholic at all just trying to unlearn the kind of embedded shame honestly that comes that comes with having being taught to worship their God. You know, and so that is part of part of one of the things that that came about to this kind of writing process of this book was was and it's something I've known instinctively but like truly understanding what it looked like to have a kind of colonial system bed like imposed upon my understanding of what the divine is, you know, and and and what sacred looks like and having to kind of re to cultivate a new relationship with what divine and sacred is and thankfully the work of food growing has brought me to the temple of the natural world and that is my religion and that and growing is my prayer but but pleasure is an ongoing in challenge for me and it's and it's funny because I didn't hadn't actually it was during the writing process that I attended a workshop about pleasure and I realized how in kind of in tandem with me becoming a food grower and becoming more concerned, you know, feeling implicated in the in in the in the kind of climate crisis. I don't really know what the right word to use as you know, the engaging in the fact that the climate crisis unfolding as we speak, and realizing that I had, I had parked pleasure, they almost felt disrespectful or something around that I'm not quite sure what the word I want to assign to it but there was something that I felt like it was almost wrong for me to experience pleasure at a point when there's so much that we should be so concerned about. And it was only in doing this workshop that I realized how much I had put that on the shelf and said that's not for now, there's too much work to do. And then only then engaging with the work of Adrian Murray Brown is like that's the urgent the urgency is is to experience life in its the fullness of its vibrancy and actually arguably when you are in when you experience that the immediacy of that that crisis of that danger that like that that is when. As the as bio acumilife says this it's the slowing down and it's not the literal doing of things in a slower way it's the slowing down as in the complete re re imagining of how we can be and I do. Yes, so what you tapped into there is a very ongoing dialogue in my mind and I have not necessarily a place of landing, but a place of real recognition that it is something that when we are in crisis we put to the one side and I think that there's just. I had a Buddhist teacher say that you know you cannot selectively numb you numb the good you numb the bad you numb the good right. And so I think that there is something in there about like being able to yes dance with the bad the bad feeling the shame the pain that all of the fear in order for you to also be able to experience the good stuff to and I think that's all part of the that is all part of what is necessary in order for us to figure out how we are deeply connected and how we can figure out a path forward. So, yeah, I'm not sure if that's the landing space, but it is a very, very live in a dialogue. Can you imagine in this like Catholic brain that I've got a really good friend who brought up Catholic whenever I do something that's like what I put like hyper productivity or really shame myself about something she was like, oh, that's your inner Catholic. She's like abolish your inner Catholic and I'm trying I'm trying. So yeah, there's those colonial systems they run deep. But yeah, working on it. Thank you. Thank you for the mic and the session. So really just to say that we're going to take a quick break. So if you have questions, we're all around so come and ask things talk to us. And will we convene in 20 minutes. Yeah, we can be an outside for a performance. Normally, but yeah, kind of conversation with installation outside and then we come back in for more. Thank you. Hopefully the audio. You don't have to do it. Oh, there's an echo. Okay, thanks. It's really an honour to be in this creative, pleasurable dialogue with bones and who I've known for many years and been in Orof for as long. And I wrote a very short response to the work that we just saw. I'm watching a child. I'm watching an oracle. Words meet bone. They crunch disquieting against one another. Friction leads to openness fears discomfort transformation. A small, old, young, wise, green, brown hand in mine leading the way. The smell of singing fingerprints instances, the path, the camera jerky, eager, unpretentious. So you know when you lose something, you don't know you had visual archives evolution on the internet. No escaping the truths ourselves knew they had to document less the world succeeded in erasing our existence. A queerly quiet urgency, a slow motion rush through greens and browns and greens. A dirt path to the revolution. This may not be pleasant, but it will be. It might be important. And you know I really wanted to create the connection, be it digitally or real life. And what's the difference really these days. Old days. As Oracle bone has shown us technology is just one of the latest languages our ancestors are using in order to seek transcendence. And we do not have the words yet to say what we desire. So if you would all like to join us in moving back into the main space we're going to have a discussion and then a discussion with all of you. A pleasurable chat. Okay, communication. Thank you for that. I'm not technical waiting moment of waiting and integration absorption of the brilliance of bones this work. So I have a few kind of prompts evocations for you. Bones is going to make me talk about my work at some point as well, and then we'll open it up to thoughts and feelings from this beautiful congregation of humans. So I was really kind of moved by the relationship between the jinx and you. And so I'm wondering if you can kind of begin by talking about when the jinx came to you and what she has taught you. She has she has taught you. Thank you. I think the jinx and I do have a very interesting relationship. Una came into being actually while I was still at art school, Saint Martins, and we were talking about this over lunch. It was in response to I created a film that was very much like about myself and like what I was going through at the time, and I presented it to my class, and there was a critique. I felt critiqued, obviously, and this work was really deeply personal to me. And then I felt like all these people that didn't know me were critiquing essentially like my diary because it was like diary based work. And I left that script being like I am never making art about myself ever again. Like this is just putting yourself through a lot of trauma having to put your trauma. You're trying to use your artist therapy and then someone's coming along and being like, well, why did you use that color palette? Or like, why does it look like a pop song? Because it was like a video and it looked like a music video and apparently that wasn't, you know, high art. So after that, I was like, okay, I think I need to find another channel for me to work through these emotions. And I was looking at various artists were using at the time like kind of cam girl work and like work of using internet personas or just personas in general to exist within. And so that's how Unagingx was born. And I wanted her, I also at the time was during it was like Tumblr era, which is like an internet blogging site. And at that time there was a lot of like internet witchcraft and internet new age spirituality like cyber spirituality. And I found it really farcical and like quite like weird that because I felt deeply like wanting to connect to my spirituality. But I found the kind of the the the strange like oxymoron and finding out through the internet and how a lot of that spirituality was whitewashed. And it was cultures like especially eastern cultures that were being taken whitewashed and kind of pixel pixelated like pixelated on symbols and stuff like that. Turned into gifts and process through blogs. And that was how it was being reached to the people. And so I wanted to kind of make a comment on that by creating my own character who was a mystic blogger. And it was at the time I was like, not that deeply rooted in my witchcraft practice or my spiritual practice, because I was embarrassed to do that because I was younger. I didn't have the tools, didn't have the guidance, but I found doing it through Una was more like tongue in cheek. And I was able to kind of do it with confidence because I was behind a mask. And it was through Una that she opened up into my own spirituality and because through her I was like researching how to do spell crafting. But in my head I was like, oh, this is an artist research, but actually I was learning how to make a spell. And so yeah. And then when I initially began working with her as well, I had a series of films that are still available somewhere on Vimeo where we would talk. So it would be Una on Skype because it was before Zoom, it was before FaceTime so it was like Skype. I would Skype with Una and it was just an edited video. Oh no, no, that's giving away the magic. It was literally me and Una on Skype. And we would talk about our relationship to spirituality on the internet. And it was quite funny because people would come into uni because I basically made a Facebook profile for her, but I didn't add her as a friend. But I had a few moles in my year who started tagging her and stuff. So it is as if she just appeared online and then other people would come to me at uni and be like, oh my God, there's this really cool girl on the internet and she looks just like you. She's like your twin. And I'd be like, oh my God, what? Send me her link. And then at least two weeks one of my friends genuinely didn't know it was me until a Crip. And then she came into Crich the whole time. That was quite funny. This is like, I'm talking years ago, Una was my first character. And then from then I've worked with character building and world building in my practice. And Una still exists in my current work. She comes through certain stories that I create, but she's still 16, which I don't know. I don't work on like the kind of like safeguarding of that, but like in my head she's a 16 year old blogger and she'll always be perpetually 16 because there's a naivety there because I created her when I was 18. So it was only two years ago for me then, but now it was like 12 years ago. Oh my God. Yeah, I mean I really so I definitely believe the fiction of it being I thought it was a video from when you were 16. And then it was in your like personal internet. My brother's been on YouTube. He's 11 years younger than me and he's been on YouTube since he was 11, 12, and he's now 20. So there's nine years of his life on YouTube, like videos. So I was like, oh, it's like a it's a throwback. You know, and so I really believed into the fiction of the 16 year old and I and I then enjoyed being right and wrong at the same time. And I think also that I'm going to bring up my work now. So I think also this this kind of mechanism or tool of working speculatively and using world building to really navigate these assimilatory spaces is really useful. So in both my science fiction work and my kind of research, I craft speculative worlds to think through potential scenarios of relations. Sometimes rituals, sometimes pleasure practices, sometimes crazy queer poly families to, I suppose like think through modes of relation and for me that's about black queer people relating and black people relating to the more than human that aren't necessarily imposing on to or fetishizing or we kind of anthropologically observing black people in this reality. And so it creates this kind of world in which play is possible, in which I can critique academia whilst also somehow being in academia and so this is really interesting kind of critique of the creative, like the craft white girl which movement was at the same time being kind of potentially like engaging healing practices within it engaging community within it, engaging aesthetics and reclaiming some of those things that have been assimilated and also those aesthetics that recur all over the world, right those symbols that keep coming up and up and don't really belong to all of us. So I think there's just a really beautiful kind of invitation to play that is very difficult to encounter when you're thinking about borders colonialism identity gender ecology religion right these kind of topics that force us into being very careful about our language and politically correct and clear and and also to which we want to bring care to not redo harm onto communities who are consistently experiencing harm of which we are both also members right. So, kind of leading on from that, I want to ask you a question and I was going to be I really appreciate it Claire. Are you here Claire. Hey, I really appreciate your point earlier about, you know, don't ask me how to colonize the garden. So I get the question of like how do we find hope in climate change as a pleasure activist, right. So I'm not going to ask you the question, how do we find hope. But I do want you to kind of speak about the ways that you, in fact, I'm just going to read why I wrote so I think it's more eloquent than me rambling on. So, um, can you share something about your relationship with someone we might call optimism we might call hope we might call you topic thinking in dystopic times. These past three weeks, these past few weeks, I found myself truly drenched in a sense of apathy to spare overwhelm. And I always think of your practice as one that never remains in constant dialogue with linear cycles of death, life, wisdom, foolery ritual play. So how does collapsing the binaries between these dystopic and utopic approaches fuel and sustain your practice. That question. And thank you for wording it in a way that isn't like what's your relationship to hopefulness. But so I talk about this in my work a lot, and it's a term that I use to make sense of my practice for myself, and it's optimistic dystopia. That is spelt in the mystic in mystic in optimistic is that with a why to kind of like pay homage to the reconnection back to kind of ancestral wisdom or occult wisdom or the invisible stuff that cannot be explained. And I kind of came to this thinking because I was really goes around the UNE Jinx birth time as well. And UNE really wanted to live in a utopia. I really was like striving for some form of utopia. I didn't know what it was yet, but everyone I spoke to had different views of what that utopia would be. And of course, because all very different people are very different needs. And even to have one unified utopia would be needing some form of dictatorship or like leadership and hierarchy. And so I was just like, oh, like, yes, yeah, no utopia, then I just think this like I just found it impossible to have a unified utopia. And then I was like, wait, if that's the case, then a dystopia is something I'm going to have to get comfortable with because we're living in a perpetual dystopia. And we can't deny that we have very strong facts and evidence that we are, like you say, living on a dying planet. So how do we find ways to find care, community, strength and like modes of survival that feel like relevant to us and our needs and kind of connect us back to spirit and connect us back to our relationship with the land. And so that's where like optimistic dystopia came into being and it is like you say, like breaking down the binary because they're too like dystopia doesn't really sound that optimistic, but I just wanted that kind of contradiction. And now I really just feel like all my practice exists within this framework of optimistic dystopia. So I'll give an example. Lara mentioned earlier that I co-founded a fight club called shadow sisters fight club soon to renamed soon to be renamed to shadow siblings. But we are a fight club that we host and events and workshops for women non binary people, trans people and people of color, queer people of color. And we've been running since 2017. And we teach mainly Brazilian jiu jitsu karate and a bit of Qigong and also medicinal and magical herbalism and our spaces. I run it with my best friend Monique or Venus and Venus has been studying martial arts and she was nine years old. So it's in her blood like her family and martial artists and she's also very deeply connected to her ancestry and her land connection. And so when we met we were like we have to do this thing, but we met in response to the fact that in 2017 where we were both living in North London there was a lot of violence, street violence and there still is. But it was in the community that I lived in there was like three attacks in one week to people walking home at night. So it was a really visceral like response. It was like an emergency response that we wanted to start this thing. But the fact that we started it was in response to a dystopian situation, but the fight club that we create and the spaces that we create when we come together is so. It feels like caring and it feels like a space of where optimism can flourish or could flourish and they're nurturing spaces. It's not macho like, like going to the boxing gym like trying to be bigger and better and stronger than everyone. It's always an invitation you're invited into the space you're invited to connect with your body in this way and learn these techniques to protect yourself if you so wish. And if it's triggering or if it's it feels taxing on your body for your needs and your access needs, it's you can sit out, have a biscuit, have a cup of tea. And that's what we wanted to create and it was a response. And so that's optimistic dystopia for me and then all my world building practice. So the kind of stories that I write with my speculative fiction opera. I've got multiple operas on the go and the films are also within that framework that creating visions of dystopia, but the storyline and the thread that runs through them are these stories of someone trying to find connection and community and care through survival. If that makes sense. Makes all the sense. How are we, how are we for time? How much time do you have? Okay, great. Great. Just over to us. I just wanted to say something before we open up about this beautiful optimistic dystopia as an as an idea because I think I think there are a few similar frameworks kind of moving around, especially if you are in the kind of eco or eco art space right the most frequently quoted one would be Donna highway staying with the trouble right like how do we stay with. And I just wanted to kind of point out and you can tell me if you disagree here, a distinction between that kind of model of thinking and what I'm hearing in this optimistic dystopia which is about. I suppose the time in which we come to dystopia. And what it means to think through this framework as descendants of and members of communities who've been living in these enforced dystopias for generations. And come into being through optimistic dreaming right through perseverance through. Through ecstasy in the face of impossibility right and and the difference between that and coming to the kind of exile model of coming to catastrophe. Oh, suddenly it's here right now we need to figure out how to stay with it. And I just wanted to draw attention to distinction because I think that things that get collapsed all the time and I think these distinctions are. It's important to kind of maintain them and how we are sharing community and how we're sharing dialogue and co building movements right because. Because they're we're bringing different histories in the ages of knowledges and that means that we have strength of knowledges, but those knowledges are also distinct. Yeah, thank you for speaking to that because that is really important and I think when you come from different places and have different experiences. And different privileges obviously we don't see the perpetual and like ongoing destruction of land. Or a place or of being that so many different communities all across the world have suffered from colonialism or from like climate catastrophe, because they're a greater risk in different areas. And, you know, yeah, I do come from when my mother came over here and was to find new, a new life in a different country that is an ecstatic optimistic dreaming and finding. You're completely displacing your existence and coming to a new place you came to Liverpool from Malaysia. So this is my birth town so I'm really grateful to be here by the way. And, yeah, and also being on the Albedocs, it feels really important to me, but we can talk about that later maybe, but. And, yeah, this like, like you said the XR narrative of like, there is an endpoint and we were all self destruct at that point, and we need to stop it now, whereas, you know, and we know and like indigenous communities have been, you know, sharing and trying to make this obvious for many years that we are. Going to get to this point and we've been, you know, ignoring that and ignoring that knowledge and ignoring that wisdom. And it's, yeah, it's coming from a place of privilege to think that that that is the way that that is like the outcome. But what was your question in terms of that? It wasn't really a question. It was a statement. Well, it was just a sharing. Yeah, and like to shed light on that. Yeah. I think I wanted to shed light on that. Yeah. And just my appreciation is of the way you're thinking that. And I think also something really beautiful about like the different ancestral knowledges that run through us. And that's what I love about sharing and creating and co-creating space with people, especially specifically for our community, which I know we both kind of identify within the cutie BIPOC community. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is cool. I like the label on there. Yeah, all the labels love it. But yeah, the cutie BIPOC community is definitely a community that has felt like home to me since coming out and reconnecting more deeper to my heritage since moving to London from kind of near this area. But I didn't grow up in Liverpool. I grew up in Chester, which if you know it is very white town. And yeah, when we create spaces like similar to shadow sisters and other spaces that other amazing cutie BIPOC organisers create. It's the kind of, I feel like it's a cauldron that's created with the language and the sharing and we all come with, especially if we're talking about herbs or plants. When I kind of run herb workshops, I don't ever think I am the knowledge keeper of this herb. I feel like I like to just like introduce a herb to the space and share the knowledge that I know about this herb, which most of it has come from Google to be honest, because Google can be great for that. But also I know that so many people have stories and connections to these herbs that can't be written on the internet that are maybe their grandmother's recipe or their, like so for example, my mum used to. So my granddad in Malaysia was the village herbalist, but he was like a renegade village herbalist people would come to him paying my under the counter to do some, I don't know, some herbal experiments on them. And my mum recalls her mother, her mother who was his helper, you know, in the herbal medicine stuff. She was burning some herb over someone's boil on their leg. My mum was like five years old and watched the oozing of this black liquid come out this person's leg and it's a really visceral childhood memory for my mum. And then she didn't know what herb it was, but she remembered the smell. And then I took my mum foraging because I think I got really into foraging around 2016. And my mum wasn't that into it, even though she's very connected to nature. So I took her foraging, I was like mum, this is my favourite plant. It's called mugwort. It was actually it's also used in traditional Chinese medicine. I was like rifting off all the knowledge that I'd learnt off Google. And then I was like, you can burn it as well. And it's a really good Celtic or native, talking about native. But like also interesting about native in this context is that I use mugwort and rosemary and bay leaves to smudge or to smoke cleanse. And you see it in the film I'm using rosemary. And what I would say that's good about native in that context is that in terms of spiritually connected to that herb and using it in that spiritual context is really important rather than using like white sage and palo santo, which doesn't come from our land and is desecrating lands like indigenous lands on Turtle Island. But anyway, and so I had some I had some dried mugwort. I was like mum, this is what you can do. We can smudge the space cleans the energy. She smelt it. She was like, oh my gosh, I think this is this is the herb. I remember my dad taking me foraging in the jungle in Malaysia and picking mugwort. And I remember this is possibly the herb that my mum used to draw out this poison from this random person's leg. And it was just so beautiful to like weave it all together through these unconscious senses. And I've had it in Shadow Sisters where we'll be talking about the herb yarrow. And then someone was like, oh, my grandma used to do this with the arrow. And that's where the magic is in the oral histories and oral stories. So yeah, I just wanted to share that. And then that way is also the ways that these more than human collaborators and kin are telling us their histories, right, and our histories. And a big part of my research and my general work has been into the many, many absences in practice and indigenous knowledge that have the many, the many gaps, many forced erasias, the many, the many lost knowledges, and they may not be lost everywhere, but they're certainly lost to my family's lineage, for example. That then I'm finding in like pollination practices and I'm finding in foraging practices and there are ways that there are more than human memory keepers when when human lineages have not been safe places to keep knowledge because it's been stolen. Okay, on that note, I think we have. Oh yeah, okay, we've got like just under 10 minutes. So it'd be lovely to have some thoughts, questions, feelings from, from the floor. If anybody has me. Yes, in the back. Yeah, if you could just wait for the microphone. Thank you so much. No basic questions. I was in like there are no basic questions not please bring your question. I just love to know the location in the work that we've just seen because I feel like you've really nailed that kind of dystopia with the, especially that cliff scene I'm not sure if they were mattresses or like broken walls. I just would love to know yet the side of it. So the location of all those films of the footage was actually shot over like a three year period. I went initially to kind of like a kind of homecoming I went back to Malaysia to visit my family in 2019. On that trip, I managed to secure a gig because I'm also a performer. I played a gig in Hong Kong for the art basil. Very strange. Anyway, I did something at art basil. And then so I was in Hong Kong. So some of that shot in Hong Kong in like the mountains and then went to visit my friend in Thailand said the big cave with the kind of look like stalagmites, but it wasn't really. It's just like amazing cave structures was in was near Bangkok. And then some of the more jungle scenes is shot in Malaysia. And I remember my uncle taking me in his car. He's like, it's so nice for him to like engage with my art, but I'm just like running around dressed in a costume being like, I'll meet you at the car in like 10 minutes. So it was always shot very DIY. And then the scene with the mattress and that like sandstone cliff. So that sandstone cliff is is kind of where I grew up. It's on the border land between Wales and England in Chester. And my mum now has moved to a bungalow that is on the cliff. It's like a one bedroom bungalow in England. But when you look out the window, you're looking at Wales, which is incredible. And there's the River Dee, which is the border as the border market. And this sandstone cliff overlooks the River Dee when the River Dee banks, which it does every winter. The water goes right up to the sandstone cliffs and it becomes like really swampy. But where that mattress was this is like that whole patch of land is such an interest. I actually want to dowse it and see what the energy is saying there because I've heard oral histories of what that land was used for. So in the 90s it was 80s and 90s, but in the 90s it was like a free party space where travellers would go and be there for months on end having free parties by the river and like jumping into the river off the cliff and all of this. And so maybe that mattress was left over from them because it was so rusty. But now I went back recently to visit and it's been totally cleared out and it's loads of new houses being developed on it, obviously. But I'm just like, I know they had to build their house on stilts. So this house has been built on stilts because they know that the banks are going to break. And I just find that really interesting because the stilts didn't look that stable, but they've obviously done a good job. And that's interesting because I know that every year though that water level is rising, whereas like my mum in Malaysia. There's like Campos, which is like villages in Malaysia that were traditionally built on stilts anyway because there's just they were like river dwellers or water dwellers. Whereas these stilts, these houses being built on stilts are actually response to the ever rising tides. And that was all shot during lockdown that that's footage at my mum's house. And so it's quite like, yeah. The concept was like me being like, I'm Una Jinx and I'm in nature in the wilderness, living freely. But actually I was like being confined by this tiny village for eight weeks and I didn't really leave the village. I went to Wales and then they started putting police on the bridge being like English people can't come to Wales because we had two different laws, lockdown laws. So it was all very strange. She couldn't cross the bridge, but the best farm shop was in Wales. Really annoying. Anyway, so, yeah, it was there. Is your question. Yeah. I really love this idea of the optimistic dystopia and like becoming comfortable with that. And I was wondering if any of your characters ever interact or like if there's a point to their loneliness. Or maybe it's not loneliness, but how connection, how you envision connection in that dystopia. Yeah, thank you. So I have a film called Indigo Zoom, which I made in 2016, 17. And I'd already like put Una Jinx to bed at this point. Like I was kind of like done with her for a little bit. But when I made that film, the main character is Indigo Zoom, who's like non binary. So Indigo Zoom was my I hadn't come out yet as non binary. But I was like, well, I'm going to make a non binary character because again, it was me using a character to feel out whether this is something I feel comfortable within. So my next character, by the way, is like a martial artist because I'm trying to be a martial artist. But yeah, Indigo Zoom existed in this alternative universe where there was no safe oxygen left to breathe. And everyone had to wear masks, which was like 2016, 17. And the masks were molded to your face. They looked like you. So you were still being able to be facially recognised. And they were sold to you. You could only get it from this one company called Yonerville, which is the evil conglomerate. And once I created Yonerville, Yonerville now still exists in all of my work. So even the last film I made last year called The New Elementals and the opera that I'm writing, Yonerville is still the evil conglomerate in it. And yeah, Una Jinx makes a makes an appearance in the film through the internet. So three of the characters are trying to do a YouTube meditation video, a breathing exercise video, and they put Una Jinx on. And Una Jinx is like, hi, I'm the oracle of the internet, because that's like her catchphrase. Join me for some breathing exercises, but the video starts to glitch. And in the glitch, it starts getting bombarded with sponsored ads for Yonerville's masks. And then the people who are trying to do the breathing exercises very unzenzen like start smashing up the laptop. And then, yeah, I mean, it's available on Vimeo, if you watch it. But yeah, so she makes these cameos within the work. And I think that's just a nice way to like, there is conversation between the characters because I do think they all exist in the same like nonlinear universe. And I don't feel like like there's any timeline to it. It's just kind of like it's a cycle and there and even sometimes I step into that universe as well. But it gets a bit confusing sometimes. So I'm trying to write it all out and then figure it all out. But yeah. Yeah, there is conversation within the loneliness. Inside the minds of science fiction. Yeah, dark and mystical place. Right, we are out of time, but we continue to be around. So please do you come up and chat to bones. Yeah, throughout the day. Thank you so much. Sean and everyone, the whole team from inviting me in allowing this beautiful conversation to happen. Thank you. Thank you. Is the microphone on? Hello everyone, I'm Amelia and I was the project editor for the book company radical landscapes and I was very lucky to be able to work with them for melon centre. And Darren and his team on bringing all this together. And I have the really exciting part of bringing the whole day to a finale. So we've had some fantastic discussions already. And I have the pleasure of being able to introduce the final part of the day being in the landscape, which will be two performances from two exhibiting artists in the exhibition. Dylane Llebar, Divinya and Robinson. So hopefully you will see in their work earlier in the show. Rinceni Pani by Dylane and some intimacy by Divinya Ann, which you'll be drawing on later. If you haven't seen them, I urge you to go this weekend. They're both beautiful and powerful works about situating the human body in the landscape and what it means to be in the landscape. Both artists work deal with themes about the relationship between people and nature. Divinya's work in a very corporeal and tangible way issues materials such as clay, sand and soil. She intertwines them with casts of part of the human body and her own voice in an exploration of how she experiences landscape. Or she describes them as colonial nature environments. The earth itself is used as a living material and a medium along with sound and performance to enact her experience of being in the landscape. So today we'll be hearing her perform some intimacy live, which I'm really excited about. She also has a solo show in the San Mayor Gallery in London, so go visit that if you can. Dylane's work is similarly a mixture of installations and performance, some of which we will see shortly, but she also incorporates photography and draws on her background in fashion and textiles in St Martin's from when she studied at St Martin's School of Art, using clothing as a mean of subverting stereotypes as can be seen in the dress that we'll be seeing later and in the photograph upstairs as part of her work, where she is wearing an Elizabethan dress in Ryncenni Pani. So she draws on her experience of being part of the English, Romani, Gypsy community in her work, exploring issues of access and belonging, who's allowed in certain rural spaces and what the experience of the British rural landscape is like for people in her community, who are often forced to the edge lands, especially today with the new developments in the police bill, where we're finding people's rights and access being more and more limited. Traditionally, she talks about having connection with the natural worlds and an equitable custodian relationship with natural resources such as water and I feel like at the moment we've kind of come from looking at the landscape and we've really dug down and now getting to an elemental stage. So we're talking about sand, clay, water, natural resources and what it means to be a human who is part of that natural world and not distinct from it. So I want to say to the norms, thank you to you both for sharing your work with us today and I'll leave it over to you. Thank you for that really lovely introduction. Translucent permanence lays within. Comfortably seeping out from porous splash. Comfortably seeping in through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping out from within as this body concaves caused in and out of itself compressed and decompressed. Translucent permanence lays within. Comfortably seeping in through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping out through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping in through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping out through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping in from within as this body concaves caused in and out of itself compressed and decompressed. I've been thinking about composting. Imagining what it means for this body to compost. To sink back into the ground. To nourish what is beneath. To unravel and un-become. The un-becoming of Terranulla. To the becoming of rich black terror. Is this composting a means of presencing? Feeling or indeed being one with the ground which surrounds me. By moving beyond and within a body. This body. This black and brown and white body. This Nigerian body. This Beniz body. This Tongali's body. This Cameroonian body. This Tongali's body. This Western Bantu body. This Northern Indian body. This Irovian body. This Ghanaian body. This Welsh body. This Germanic body. This Northern Western European body. This Afro-Caribbean body. This South Central Afro-Jamaican body. This black British body. This Beniz gendered and un-gendered body bodies. This body, these bodies without these. Wrapped in multitudes of colonial pollutants and violence. Is composting a means of presencing? To move within a body body's carved by question presence? As I imagine, this body concavings spread and moving with other beings. How do the histories which form this body bodies dissipate into the ground? Nourishing. Nourishing. Concaves and folds. Flesh pressed into onto flesh. Flesh entangled in flesh. Flesh dissipates into flesh. Nourishing this landscape through positions of stress. This flesh lingers through. It is in a stress position. Flesh pressed into onto flesh. The body is always in a stress position. Everything is a position of stress. Concaves and decompressed. Detangled of a perfect flesh. This body in a position of stress. Flesh lined in a position of stress nestled on against in between. Flesh lined in a position of stress nestled on against in between. Joining entwined with old life, new life, decay. This body seeps and pulls delivering itself. Some intimacy. Translucent permanence lays within. Comfortably seeping in through porous flesh. Comfortably seeping out through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping in from within as this body contains both out and in of itself, compressed and decompressed. Translucent permanence lays within. Comfortably seeping in through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping out through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping in through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping out through this depleted ground. Translucent permanence lays within. Comfortably seeping in from within as this body contains both out and in of itself, compressed and decompressed. I've been thinking about composting. Imagining what it means for this body to compost. To sink back into the ground. To nourish what is beneath. To unravel and become. To end the coming of tyrannolos. To the becoming of rich black terror. Is this composting the means of preffencing? Feeling or indeed being one with the ground which surrounds me. When moving beyond and within a body. This body, this black ground and white body. This Nigerian body. This Spanish body. This Congolese body. This Cameroonian body. This Congolese body. This Western Bantu body. This Northern Indian body. This Irobeian body. This Ghanaian body. This Welsh body. This Germanic body. This Northwestern European body. This Afro-Caribbean body. This South Central Afro-Jamaican body. This Black British body. This these gendered and ungendered body bodies. This body. These bodies. Without ease wrapped in multitudes of colonial pollutants in violence. Is composting the means of preffencing? To move within a body bodies carried by question presents. As I imagine this body,TMP. This body. This primordial body. This Black- exhibicionant. This spammers withternal究amיכ. This gray. Felly, dyna'r rhan o'r cyd-dredg. Fyllfa'r hyfawr gerais yn y gyrstedd. Mae angen'r cyd-dredg, yn yr hyfforddiadol. Mae'r hyfforddiadol, yn y cyd-dredg. Mae'r hyfforddiadol yn'r hwnnw ychydigion yw piwysig. Mae hyfforddiadol yn y gyrddur pysig, a hyfforddiadol yn yn y gyrddur. Mae hyfforddiadol yn yr hyfforddiadol yn yn y gyrddur. Cymru yn cael o'r rhai iawn o'r gyrhwyr. Mae'r bodi ei cwestiynau i'r lleol yn gweld yma yn rhaid. Yn ymgyrch, mae'n cefnodd nesaf. Mae'r ymgyrch yn ystod, mae'n cefnodd nesaf. Yn ymgyrch, mae'n cefnodd nesaf. Mae'n sefydlu i Egyffrin yna y nesaf, 2200. o'r cyffredinol yn ymgyrch. 7 oed o'r 2 yma, o'r 7 oed o'r 20 oed, oedol a'r prysgol, oedol o Egyptian, oedol o'r bwysig o'r canffair, a yna ymddai yma? Mae'r bwysig o'r ban. Mae'r bwysig o'r ban. Mae'r bwysig o'r blodd rydw i. Fygoed yn y boed. Fygoed yn y bwysig, o'r Egyphthys, o'r ddechrau o'r Pentecost. Nafodd, oedd o'r oedd, oedd o'r bron, oedd o'r llyfr. Fygoed yn ymwysig? Dhechau yn ymwysig, oedd o'r 1608. Fygoed yn ymwysig, oedd o'r miros. Mae'r herf yn ymwysig, fel y cwm yn cangarwm, Lincoln wneud. Mae'r llwyddoch yn fwy, dyn nhw'n gwybodaeth yma. Fyrwyr o'r llwyddoch yn fwy, mae'r llwyddoch. Mae'r llwyddoch yn fwy, a'r llwyddoch yn fwy. Roob i'r llwyddoch yn y clyw. Roob i'r llwyddoch yn y clyw. Fybdwyd, cyfnodd, a'r engeir, y maen nhw'n ymddiol, a roedd yn rhan iawn. Rwyf i ddim yn ymddiol. Rwyf i dim ym 1566, ydych yn ychydig defnyddio y gallwn eich bod yn gyfnodd, oedd yma'r mewn gyfnodd, oed yn ymddiol, y ddwy'r ymddiol, mewn cyfnodd, 24 01 22. Anciwns into which. O the 240 240 pressure. Which ruins. O that meaning. Can you see them for this ancient? 22 22 22. Egyptian. Anciwns and pressures. King's eyes hold on the sea, ring, blaze, mong, old, or S ring, blaze, mong, old. Mong, chaby mong. Precious, ancient, gathering, moonduff, universe, tiles, moon men in the mountains. It was crystal clear, like emerald's cwmpun, the wave catch the flesh, from sort to flesh, cleanse, the true value of it is unfathomable. Static yet moving, wonder at it, being in awe of it because without it we are nothing. Remember always ancient, you cannot contain it. Moonlight illuminates it, bulb is washed by it. It has knowledge, it has memory, we are made from it. Precious, well, well, hard and rotten, are they here? In our time, witches, physical markings, precious, ancient, hear her roar, and what we don't know won't hurt us. Wingshlytarnys, ancient, ancient, 1600s, birds in the bushes, ears in the eyes, in the sky, nann always tells us, eyes, tears, rain, 080322. The real, the unreal, 60% of the body is water. Sound systems, civil liberties, without the water we are nothing. It's the age of Aquarius. Universality, non-access to 92% of the land. Right to Row, Egypt's speech, 1547, can you see them? Timelines, old lines, 1608 deca, because the moon men have greatest domination, and I am like, am I like John Clare's Gypsy Wars? Identity of the Bible, transparant cases, odorless, 71% of the earth's earth, planet, planet, swear in, influenced by the universe. The air pushed into my nostrils, the power of the wind, I stare up at the light pink, and blurred, comes through the square. She is there in the form of ancient and precious, we hold it in our hands, existence, the nature or essence of person, chaos, melting glaciers, it stings my eyes, it shells round the flame, hung from iron, formed for this purpose. Voices, the smell of it, can we smell each other as pixelated digital beings? Am I a witch? Maybe I'm something else. The same questions, questioning, identity, belonging, maybe, maybe, universal Charles, other levels of being, and to be a Gypsy is something else. A vision of hell, or Clare's unprotected race, not fixated in this space, maybe not as suave as civil, multi-faceted, 1530 of Gypsy's past, 1404, 1914, in Collegiateville, Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, the 28th of June 2022, what's going on? 1707, Cloud of Eyes, can you see them? Cloud of Eyes, are they here? Precious, precious, dowsy, finding, rebirth, purity, waterhorse, water alchemy, kelby, water carries, precious, Egyptian, ancient, I was there then from the 1566 when I was a vagabond or an Egyptian. Precious, without the water, we aren't nothing. The universe is expanding, swell, swells, are the rackets, Gypsy's Cloud of Eyes, not a message in a bust of water, rincanipani, gelon, travel, ancient, precious, 1609, 1909, looking backwards, forwards, circular, collapsed, free, free, soft grass under leather shoes, the stone heart stitch, reds overlaid, cowery shells on the Sussex Towns in England's ungreen and unblevelled land, a patchwork ghost, flames down high, cacaraca is sweet, ink pink or blood red, gravellina crossleaves and orchestra of animals, avenues of trees, the apple, the temptation, a place of witches and devils, fenced in under a canopy of trees, a lone throne fries out, line divides the landscape, emerging from the cracks reflecting, torn, beckoning in the place between waking and sleeping like ghosts. Can you see them? Time travellers washed up on the shore, cast like moon dust, tasting like salt, water warm with an air, my shirt hangs there, which could be the edge of the world, maybe it is. And yes, the world is on fire, cracks in the landscape, fragments, flags, Ingerland, Angerland, Ingerland, silver moons, red gloss, ancient things this land, itinom, nomadic, transparent, disappearing down a rabbit hole, breathing like Boreas, a beginning and end, not a mirror for fantasy, feeling the grass between my toes, I'm here and now always forever, I ask myself always, stew drop flowers, my John Clairs Gypsy, precious, precious and ancient, a universal child, they are here. I was there, I was there, Nicomus 1566, I was there when you couldn't decide if I was a vagabond, or an Egyptian. Deco wrote about me in 1608, dressed in calico as a moon man. I was there, I was there, 15th of March, 1613, in Chelmsford, committed for being a Gypsy. I was there, I was there, I was there on the banks of the Thames, getting into a river taxi when Turner drew me in the sketchbook. I was in the Vale of Dedham when Constable painted that day. I was holding my head in my hands for mummings, campfire and caravan. I stared out, not looking at Augustus John's face, ahead of the Gypsy. I was named and unnamed, but I was always a Gypsy. I was then, I am now, I know the history. My art materials are weapons and I am well trained. So let's rise like trumps of gold, because my tears have stopped. With my tears, I'll pray for Rama, because my tears have come with me to Gypsy land. Llywodraeth Pw Llywodraeth Cymru. It's amazing to be sitting here after two amazing performances as well. So I think it's difficult to end after this because it took us to a different place and really thinking about being in the landscape and what it means to be in the landscape for different bodies, different communities who have access to what, as well as different temporalities. I think that came across so vividly in both performances and also throughout the day today. I think maybe just we don't want to take up too long closing and we want to hear from you as well in terms of your thoughts and your questions to sort of sum up the day. I think one question I had for Darren actually and for something to get us really thinking together is around all the things that we've heard today in terms of speculative thinking, in terms of organising, in terms of thinking back into colonial histories. What is this? Is this the Anthropocene, the Necrocene? We have so many constructed histories as well and relating that back to the exhibition. It feels very much like we're working towards solutions. We don't really have a solution. We're thinking also on many different levels, very local levels, just growing stuff but also inviting each other to think on a planetary scale because quite a few artworks in the exhibition, the super flux one for instance, that takes us into a sort of apocalyptic future and sort of optimism as well. How do you live with optimism setting? Really sort of relating all of these themes back to the show and thinking about what what it really means in terms of how we can think with. I think it's really broad and again thank you so much for staying with us proud of today. I think just thinking about the symposium. I mean I think I never claim to be a landscape historian or an expert. I'm a sort of exhibition maker and a curator of tape and I think one of the sort of aims and sort of missions of tape is to create new knowledge around the collection and as I said the outset essentially the show is a quietly or even an explicitly political landscape exhibition which I hope expands our notion of land and landscape art and I also sort of hope it's somehow sort of consciousness raising. I think it's sort of at a time of institutional change but where institutions like tape are needed to decolonize and expand and you know sort of maybe move away or sort of rethink and receive our history. I think this exhibition I think is maybe sort of part of this sort of a zeitgeist landscape show. I was quite nervous about this show as a civil servant of sorts and I curated but I think just thinking about Brexit at the outset and about the right to belong to the land and how the land at various times is being used as propaganda you think about. I mean that was sort of the beginning with Ron and Frederica talking about the land having this sort of soft power. You know it's encompassing so many histories of the Enclosures Act, the militarization of land, contemporary protests and campaigns which are I sort of see as a continuum. I mean obviously it's a very ancient story but I think the show starts in the turn of the century but I think the continuum between the sort of campaigns to access land and how artists you know have created work in the landscape. It's not a constructed escape, it's something which is active used on which we rely for resources. We need to sort of coexist and you know sort of depend, there's a dependency and I need to respect land and I think many of the works in the show I think speak of this and also I mean hopefully I think one of the things which I think is really pleasing is the way in which historic works speak in the present tense to in an age of activism. So I think I mean I think that this is one of the hopefully expressed in publications, certainly expressed in many of the of the presentations in the symposium. I said I was nervous about the show in the sense that it takes something that we think of as being a very conservative sort of heritage trope which is very strong represented in the Take collection but also taking audiences with us on this on this on this on this journey and I think today's been a real vindication of that in terms of you know the sort of the convergence of different ideas and responses to the show. You know Tate would not exist without audience I think and so that sort of you know that sort of commoning and sort of that sort of dispersal of knowledge through responses to land and landscape art is quite important. We're just thinking about also bones and bones presentation going back to the you know this notion of technology and how aerial photography and technology somehow creates new perspectives on land through out of micro and macro level and I was just thinking about that that sort of use of technology could also it connects a sort of a local to you know a local grassroots you know notion of land and land use to something quite global and international and I think that's I think that's the sort of you know that sort of that convergence of these two things that are sort of very specific local notion of land and just something you know that links to international global movements I think is going to be sort of key learnings I have. I mean I think I have to say I've learned I've learned a lot from this kind of show I've become a sort of short-term expert and the response to all this has been really fantastic. Yeah thank you I think just really speaking to that one of the things that strikes me even when we were thinking about aerial photography and so on and we were talking about it a little bit overlawn actually in terms of how so many of the things that have been in some sense a colonising technology was also used as tools of emancipation and that brings me to think also about Jill's talk and this idea of dormant seeds waiting for decades or sub centuries to flourish and I think that this question of the kind of long long term waiting and then flourishing and sort of moving against things as well as I think quite something that comes through in the show and things we've been talking about and I think I'm quite interested to hear from the audience as well in terms of sort of individual and collective action was the kind of spaces that we're creating at the moment how that relates to sort of some of the historical visual spaces, non-visual spaces and things like that as well or about anything else. Just a short reflection that I've been really struck by the relationship of landscape, the visual to text and to words and I think that's come through obviously in people's papers and the performances we've seen and in the works in the show and I'm just also reflecting on it as a space in which a lot of cultural historians, art historians and writers have used landscape as a space to think and it just made me think of things I read as a student like WJT Mitchell's essay about landscape and power and landscape is not an object to be seen or a text to be read but you know he's a process where kind of social and subjective identities are formed and landscape is cultural practice and I just think that idea of landscape is something always in process because your show and the symposium today has spoken across many different registers and many different chronological periods so I think that's sort of always in process of making landscape and thinking through with land is just a reflection for me that that processness of it has really come out. Thank you, it's just a comment and you know it was a very inspiring conference and it's sort of a I think what the class presentation really spoke to me because I'm originally from Cameroon but I was born in France, I grew up in France and a couple of years ago I sort of reconnected with my father with whom I didn't grow up and he and we were communicating by WhatsApp and he was talking about his garden and planting his 80 years old now and for me I'm thinking of I basically decided to develop a project on his land connecting with a traditional culture also as a way to connect with our traditional culture but from a personal history as well personal perspective and I'm thinking of it as him coming to France in the late 60s and having children in France and us as a member of diaspora you know coming back as seeds trying to re-root ourselves you know in our land where my grandfather and grandmother are buried so I think this project for me was very inspiring because so but how do we negotiate as members of the diaspora being here in the west but also having our roots in Africa and other countries in the south so I just wanted to thank you, it's very inspiring. Is there any other questions or thoughts or comments? Thanks, I just wanted to ask some of the artists who performed today, Bones and our two performers now about whether they've had a chance to see the show and then about the ways in which they think their own practice or their own performances today engage with the themes of the show on some of the work you may have seen in it. Yeah I hadn't seen the show I didn't even know about the show sorry I did but I live in London so I'd like need to reconnect more to stuff that's going on up in Liverpool but honestly when I saw I walked in this morning I got here very early set up the the soil had a bit of time to go check out the the top floor just here and I was just like whoa because I don't we didn't talk about this but I've just come back from a pilgrimage I walked from London to Stonehenge um like for solstice so very very recently and all the works on that top floor is so interweaved with the themes and the confrontations I came up against also being on the pilgrimage like private land, private property, trying to hold and pay reverence to the sacred but being stopped at most points and being told you're a trespasser and also doing it all by foot and walking these like ancient leilines and ancient roads and then there's like there's like someone who did a six-day pilgrimage in there and I hadn't known about that work so I was just walking around like whoa like I feel like I'm still on the pilgrimage right now because it's also interlinked so I'm really grateful to have been brought into the space in some way right now so thank you. So yeah so this reading is like an iteration of what is in the show so yeah it's like a direct a direct piece which is just expanded in this room but I suppose yeah the work speaks to this exhibition and it's exploring sort of colonial landscapes but landscape colonial landscapes which have impressed upon like my body of colour and other bodies of colour which find ourselves situated in England or in colonial spaces basically so yeah it speaks to past present and future relationships of coloniality and power displacement movement migration and then also we've been speaking of like rooting what is it to root your body in the space so it's speaking of that through the idea through examining composting or to concave and to fold and to physically place your body into the land yeah so I think that's having a quick little thing that's how this piece is related to this exhibition really yeah. Sorry um yeah I mean being included in the exhibition made me look at my own work I suppose and realise that I've been dealing with being in the landscape for many of the work that's why I put the films together because the first film was from 2009 that I made so it made me realise how much I'm dealing with the landscape all the time that's the first thing and then the second thing is is looking at the other artists work and especially what bones has just said actually because I was at Glastonbury this year we were asked to go there and we we had a atchintan a stop in place actually in Glastonbury and it was about the the bill that came in on 28th June 2022 and again with what bones has just said it's the fact that these things especially the protest and everything that's included in the show you know affects all of us it's all right thinking oh it's just those people over there and that's been my position for a very long time oh it's you know it's just the gypsies no one cares but you know what happens over there comes back here and it's on all of us in the end so I think it's uh for me it's been really um a reflective time for me as well looking at my own work and my own practice but also the work that other people do but how it's it's also in the it's out there in the public domain it's not just in the gallery space as well that's the other thing so yeah thank you thank you Darren for asking me um I've just found it really interesting today just to think in kind of basic terms about the physicality of landscape having worked on the book I literally work in 2d images and on paper by myself behind a desk and then seeing how artists respond to a physical living breathing world around them and how they embody that landscape as also living breathing beings I just found I don't know I hadn't even really thought about that sort of like tangibility of landscape and how landscape is quite interesting to be able to view it within an exhibition sort of space when really you go out and you're experiencing it you're smelling it you're touching it you're feeling the wind it's just more it's more than just looking at an image or escape and I think that's come through today with all the different sort of um voices that we've heard and like perspectives on how they experience the land and I just found that very enjoyable so yeah thank you to everyone for speaking yeah I think I I did a quick whiz around the exhibition I really want to go and spend some more time in that I really I really enjoyed how it felt radical which is which is not a word that I usually put together with exhibitions on landscape or ecology generally um it felt radical and it felt like many voices who I would want to be in the room were in the room which is also not an experience that I have very often when I'm in the UK in ecological spaces and I think there's just a feeling of I certainly feel like I often operate in isolation I'm often the only person I'm either the only black person in the room or I'm the only black queer person in the room or I'm the only person who's bringing a decolonial approach or I'm one of two or three you know and and and and or and we don't live in the same places or we don't work work in the same circles and I think there's a feeling of yeah there's a feeling of being together and not having to go over the basics which is just so desperately needed and I cannot express in words how destroying is to have to consistently go over the basics and not be able to have a conversation about anything really because you're just going over the basics which is consistently still the case in many spaces you know in the world and certainly in the UK so I really enjoyed feeling challenged engaged inspired pleasurable um and I think particularly in the show I was really moved by Glock's piece I didn't know about Glock and having Cornwall's also in my in my bones and having this like queer Cornish moment was like oh my god you know really like I had a little moment and it was it felt like this it felt like like the way it does when you find ancestors that you didn't know that I was just saying I had enjoyed my visit um yeah like it feels when you find ancestors that you know are there because you know they were there but you don't get to know their names or where they were buried or how they lived or who they loved or what they believed in um and like yeah I just it was quite emotional and I think I'd put on a lot of armor when I come into spaces like Tate anywhere spaces like art galleries spaces like conferences I prepare myself to be triggered and violated and all those things and yeah it's been a semi trigger free day which is a win by my standards so I just wanted to yeah to kind of like say that that really means something to bring these voices into this space both in the exhibition and in the symposium and I'm really grateful I feel very fed and grateful um eloquent yeah this works great um a little bit of feedback but I can we swap okay yeah no it's fine um if it's okay um I just wanted to end by asking all of you to join us tomorrow if you're around because we're hoping to extend some of these conversations in a very different way and in a very different landscape as well um but we're meeting at 11 o'clock correct me if I'm wrong at 11 11 o'clock at Birkenhead Park which is not very far and we'll start with a sort of communal picnic and and then we'll be led on a walk by Ruth Colton who's going to be giving us really picking some particular points in Birkenhead Park to talk about the ways in which land has been used and subverted and kind of links to colonialism an empire and just being in Liverpool so yeah please join us and thank you so much for being here today