Earth Divinations: Collective Enquiry

Part of a series of “divinations” that will inform the creation of the Brent Biennial 2025. A one-day programme structured around earth, featuring talks, walks, workshops and collective imagining.

Why Earth?

Everything returns to the earth. The minerals in us, after we pass, return to the earth. Earth represents fertility, sowing and harvests; composting is regeneration and rebirth. Indigenous ways of living closely with the earth and the seasons, offer a new (old) way to live that is more harmonious, sustainable, and just. We are temporary custodians of this earth, a footnote in geological time.

We are temporary custodians of this earth, a footnote in geological time.

The four elements: the foundations of our collective enquiry

(Re)building requires the four elements. Earth, water, fire and air form the basis of many ancient philosophical systems; they are the essential ingredients in the alchemical processes of creation and transformation. Each element symbolises and energises a deeper understanding of different facets of existence. When combined, these essential elements have the potential to reconfigure our understanding of structures and knowledge, and help us to remake our world.

The venue

Thank you to the Barham Park and ACAVA who are generously hosting the second of our collective enquiries.

Barham Park is a pretty landscape garden dating from the 18th century. The park was named for George Barham, founder of Express Dairies. The foundations of Sudbury Lodge, Barham’s former home, still stand amidst the walled gardens.

Also in the park is a mock-Tudor Georgian building, known as Crabb’s House. The house has been transformed into ACAVA Studios, offering artists residencies.

The programme

9.00am I feel it in my bones, it composts in my gut – Becky Lyon
(120 min)

11.00am – Morning tea/coffee

11.30am – Grounding Exercises  – performingborders

performingborders invites you to join an exploration of borders, boundaries, and our daily crossings of their many intersections through a series of performative explorations offered as a free resource by artists working at the Mexico/US border, as well as by other international border artists. Participants will be dancing like monkeys, walking while listening to rituals in sonic migration, performing a map with no end, and gathering to share knowledge about resources and strategies for grounding while constantly shifting across borders. (120 min)

Please bring your mobile phone and a pair of headphones.

1.30pm Lunch

Lunch will be provided

2.45pm Voicing Landscapes – Marged Siôn 

Join Marged Siôn for a workshop that explores voice practice and somatic consciousness as creative tools for personal and social transformation. Together through different exercises, the group will call upon their own alignment, breath, resonance and imagination as resources for vocal liberation. The workshop will also focus on voice practices that explore landscape, memory and the four elements. (120 min)

Please wear comfortable clothing and come with layers. Our body temperature will change throughout the session as we move from gentle movement-based exercises to stationary voice and mindfulness practices.

This workshop has been developed in collaboration with Elizabeth Graham.

4.45pm Afternoon tea and coffee

5.00pm Reflections – Elizabeth Graham and Annie Jael Kwan

Reflecting on the movement of water and what it means to get dirt under our fingernails, Annie and Elizabeth will lead a reflection about the hopes, challenges and tools involved in the process of collective reimagining and making. (90 mins)

6.30pm End

About the Artists:

Becky Lyon

Becky Lyon is a London-born and based English-Jamaican artist and researcher. Her art practice explores methods for coming into relationship with and eliciting insights from ecology, particularly within ‘urban’ spaces, to unearth how our socio-political worlds are and could be shaped. Recurring themes in her work are sensing bodies, tactile processes and the touchy-feely; earthly curriculums and counter-currents; power relations and possibling; softness, oozing and slippery edges; intimacy and quiet resistance. Her work manifests as installations, rituals, photographic objects, handmade moving images and text. She is interested in alternative forms of ecological stewardship and founded Grounded Ground Provisions – an artist-led, schooled-by-the-forest for grown ups and the the Squishy Sessions research collective. She is a volunteer ranger for London National Park City active across Barnet, Brent and Harrow. She has an MA Art & Science from Central Saint Martins, an MA Art & Ecology from Goldsmiths University of London and will soon start a PhD under The Centre of Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths with the topic ‘Touch as strategy for ecological stewardship: feeling-for other environmentalisms in London’. She side-hustles as a consultant and trends researcher for global brands.

elasticfiction.co groundprovisions.org instagram.com/elastic_fiction

performingborders

performingborders is a collectively run platform for artistic research and creation, focused on notions and lived experiences of intersectional borders through international live art and performance practices. Drawing from the knowledge shared by the contributors of the platform, performingborders has over the years created a digital and live tapestry of interconnected, transnational experiments through interviews, artist commissions, open calls, publications, residencies, workshops, conversations, events, newsletters, and performingbordersLIVE. All their work is freely accessible online. Co-run by Alessandra Cianetti, Xavier de Sousa and Anahí Saravia Herrera, in collaboration with guest curators, thinkers, artists, activists and researchers.

Marged Siôn

Marged Siôn is an artist and Voice practitioner from Cardiff, Wales. Her work engages in voice as a transformative practice by utilising its healing purposes to experience vocal liberation. Her practice explores survivorship, recovery, transformative healing and the importance of embracing imperfection through process. Siôn works and dreams up spaces with those whose voices have been historically silenced to resound collectively for a liberated future. Recent projects include; Radio Ballads, RAFTS and pink & green (Rory Pilgrim), Alter Altar (Jasleen Kaur), Atlantic Railton (Ain Bailey), BBC Proms. She recently co-authored We Rise: Voice and Survivorship.  

Divinations: a collective enquiry

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