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JANUARY 2024
Field Office Research and Knowledge Exchange Workshops go to India
The Field Office Workshops explore new landscape practices that are needed to address challenges, from community action to climate justice. They are biannual workshops – hybrid between in-person and online – in partnership with local organisations, residents, and specialists. They experiment with alternative methods, investigate original approaches, and establish new models of practice.
After the first workshop last year in London, the second workshop will be in a hybrid mode during 16-17 March 2024 in Ahmedabad, India. Before the main workshop in March, two pre-workshop sessions will be conducted on 25 January and 15 February.
NOVEMBER 2023
Landscape Architecture lecturer exhibits artwork at This is a FOREST
This is a FOREST tells the story of 50 sites from across the city of Leeds that have the potential to be forests. These lands currently exist as in-between spaces, seemingly dormant, many locked in bureaucratic loopholes and murky ownership structures, some fenced-off for over 20 years, others waiting until they reach their desired financial value. The exhibition documents the journey to understand these sites, articulating the complexities of our place-based value relations with land, and offering, where possible, new possibilities for the spaces of Leeds and the communities that share them.
A series of interventions by artists including Invisible Flock, Anushka Athique, Vandria Borari, Nwando Ebizie, Outi Pieski and Jenni Laiti take place in the gallery and on a selection of sites which have formed part of the search. These works range from text-based banners visible from train lines, large ceramic sculptures placing alternative value systems onto brownfield sites and acts of collective ritual and mourning.
Forest Bodies – We Are Forest and A Walk with The Forest are two pieces by Anushka Athique, a researcher in the Centre for Spatial and Digital Ecologies, commissioned specifically for the exhibition. They build on some of the projects central questions to do with value and ownership whilst also unravelling new ones. The two pieces present a visual-poetic exploration of the transgression between body and land. Conceived of in three voices Forest Bodies explores non-cognitive relationships and combines both artistic and academic methodologies. Forest Bodies invites the viewer to consider how we might make a forest, how we experience the forest and asks what if we held the forest within our bodies?
Forest Bodies by Anushka Athique was commissioned as part of This is a FOREST by Invisible Flock Co-produced by Leeds 2023 and Invisible Flock. Made possible with National Lottery Heritage Fun Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
JULY 2023
Architect leads workshop at 2023 Venice Biennale
For the first time, the Venice Biennale included the Biennale College Architettura, which ran from June 25 to July 22, 2023. Fifteen renowned international tutors - Samia Henni, Marina Otero, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Thireshen Govender, Lorenzo Romito, Jacopo Galli, Philippa Tumubweinee, Ngillan Gbadebo Faal, Rahesh Ram, Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, Urtzi Grau, Samir Pandya, Alice Clancy, Sarah de Villiers, and Manijeh Verghese - worked with fifty students, early career practitioners, and academics from around the world on the theme of decolonisation and decarbonisation.
Rahesh Ram, from the Centre for Spatial and Digital Ecologies, co-wrote a brief called Radical Empathy: Human Vessels & Fabulous Outpourings that asked precipitants to look at other forms of knowledge (knowledge that has previously been marginalised), such as indigenous knowledge and use it a creative and working methodology. This knowledge was used to create a film that asks the viewers to empathise with Monsters, a symbol of human and non-human condition.
AHRC research project brings together NHS Foundation trust with National Gallery and others
The AHRC-funded p_ART_icipate project investigates the effect of participatory arts on social connectedness and best practices in the design and facilitation for participatory online interfaces. Led by Dr Oliver Gingrich at the University of Greenwich, with research partners Claire Grant, Trust Head of Arts Psychotherapies at Central North West London NHS Foundation Trust, Prof. Dominik Havsteen-Franklin at Brunel University and collaborators National Gallery, Royal National Institute for the Blind, Analema Group, NeuroCreate, Queen Mary University and the Noise Abatement Society.
The project asks important questions regarding the facilitation of participatory arts online with a focus on vulnerable groups. Can online-facilitated, participatory art contribute to perceived social connectedness? What are best practices in participatory art facilitation in online, collaborative conditions? What are specific challenges experienced by vulnerable groups during online facilitation of participatory art, and how are they best addressed?
The p_ART_icipate research project has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Research standard grant.
26 APRIL 2022
PhD Student Wins 3MT Faculty Heat
Aquaponics: Earth to Mars
The University of Greenwich has taken part in the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition over the past few years, celebrating the exciting research conducted by our PhD students. Congratulations to Lorenzo Fruscella in winning the Faculty heat! Lorenzo successfully explained his exciting research in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.
On May 17th the University competition will take place, where the winners from each faculty will compete with one another; the winner will go on to the nationals.