“In the space between the past and future, having and losing, knowing and not knowing, lies an opportunity for awakening” (Prideaux 2021)
Our next Republic of Learning event will be on Thursday June 24th at 3pm London time. We will be hosting it online – using zoom.us. It will explore our past and present impacts on the Earth's atmosphere – personally, locally and globally. We then seek to imagine whatever comes next… making artistic/craft based responses that combine scientific data with our own questions and stories about the future.
All Welcome, please book a free place via Eventbrite
Theme : Atmospheric Commons
We consider the atmosphere as a nebulous commons, transformed by extractivist acts of enclosure that dissipates and reforms as a material record of our politics, behaviours and histories. This collision of the sensory and the political occurs across huge scales, connecting geo-chemical processes; fossil necro-deposits; carbon industries; petroleum-states; infrastructures; service companies; governance; and energy and futures markets.
Using speculative mappings; animations, physical models and public workshops we chart the processes of planetary energy exchange that compose the atmosphere alongside the socio-technical assemblages refiguring it.
We seek to examine our personal connections to energy, distribution and consumption and develop figures, expressions and situations that ask, "Who owns the air?"
From "Political Atmospherics" by T Corby et al, in Freeport: Anatomy of a Black Box (Matadero, forthcoming 2021)
You are invited to do a simple activity before the workshop that maps your energy interactions and relationships to the complex carbon system we live within. These maps will inform what happens in the workshop as a starting off point for our dialogues and discussions. Download a PDF of instructions here:
Materials to have at hand:
For the workshop itself, we also suggest that some of the following materials would be helpful to have in place for the workshop, if you can get hold of them:
2-3 metal coat hangers
Scrap textile material (e.g. old clothes, pillow cases)
Old magazines, newspapers, birthday cards
Cardboard, products/cereal boxes
Blue tack, plasticine, glue, tape
String or wool
Other found objects (stones, shells, flowers, leaves, strange plastic things, rubbish etc…)
A pen or sharp pencil
Scissors
Please get in contact as soon as possible if any of this is going to be an issue and we will try and help out, or if you have any other questions about the activities or accessibility.
Documentation
We have created a booklet documenting the workshop, which can be viewed online or downloaded, printed out and made up into a paper booklet.