Myths for a Wetlands Imaginary
- Submitting institution
-
University of Derby
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 783292-2
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Multi-Component Body of Work
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This; a place of their own (artist duo Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy) project explores the potential of art to create resistant wetland imaginaries as alternate to dominant carbon and capitalist ones. Commissioned by Arts Catalyst for Waltham Forest Borough Council’s Art Assembly, it was developed through a 5-month residency at Walthamstow Wetlands Centre (WWC) and included participatory workshops (on maps, stories and myths), a site responsive performance walk and multi-media gallery installation. Wetlands are one of the earth’s most important ecologies, yet also one of the most threatened. This project situated wetland loss as part of global colonialism (Gómez-Barris, 2018), and attended to a paradoxical condition of wetlands which has immense potential: while their global destruction is due to dominant carbon/capitalist imaginaries they can yet open up new imaginaries through their unique ecologies, biological processes, entanglements of human/nonhuman, local/global relevance, and in enabling different knowledges. The inquiry asks how a transdisciplinary art practice working with the sciences and indigenous knowledges opens up alternate ways for disparate communities to think about climate change, biodiversity and colonialism, and what the role of art can be in producing resistant counter-imaginaries to capitalist and carbon imaginaries.
The transdisciplinary method involved collective inquiry, working with different specialist knowledges: environmental scientists (e.g Dr. Ian Crump), indigenous artists (e.g Rod Garlett, Noongar people, W. Australia), London Wildlife Trust, writer Season Butler and sound artist Gary Young, and situated knowledges from the Waltham Forest community. The residency made visible intimate relationships between personal, local, experiences of wetlands and their planetary dimension. The performance and public installation articulated complex biological, ecological and political ideas of new multiple relational possibilities. These activities started to reveal a ‘global wetlands imaginary’ as an ecological imaginative space for human and nonhuman co-existence, as a metaphor for new forms of multispecies solidarity.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
