What role can cultural spaces that are custodians of land, like Wysing, play in fostering a sense of ownership in public space? How can the resources that the culture sector currently holds contribute better to grassroots justice work? What are the imaginative possibilities of divestment?

Catch up with the final archived part of our event 'From the Ground Up: The Gathering', July 2022, an event which takes Wysing’s rural context, abundant land and neighbouring Fenland (at risk due to climate change, and rich in histories of land-based struggle) as a rich context for thought and action about topics including land rights, ownership and access, sustainability, environmental time and crip time, growing, wildness and racial justice.

For a PDF transcript of the podcast, please click here.

Jo Capper is Grand Union (Birmingham)’s Collaborative Programme Curator. Capper is an artist educator with a strong desire to heal, restore and do good in the world, creating alternative cultural and living practices that start with simple acts of growing or sharing food - embodying the cultural specifics of human conviviality.

Akil Scafe-Smith is part of RESOLVE Collective, an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. Much of their work aims to provide platforms for celebrating local knowledge as well as organising and collaborating in communities.

Lucy Shipp was Wysing's Education Manager.

Khairani Barokka and Bella Milroy in-conversation, chaired by Hannah Wallis

In this second archived event from our event 'From the Ground Up: The Gathering', join Khairani Barokka and Bella Milroy with Hannah Wallis for readings, an in-conversation and an audience Q and A. You can find out more about 'From the Ground Up' by clicking here.

A full transcript is available to read by clicking here.

—————

If ‘normative time’ can be understood as artificial and possible to change, what can we learn from ‘crip time’ as a new way of understanding time that acknowledges different lived realities? Join Bella Milroy and Khairani Barokka in thinking through and with crip time in relation to rural contexts and anti-colonial praxis.

Khairani Barokka is an Indonesian writer and artist in London, whose work centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, and has presented widely internationally. Okka is the new Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Her latest book is Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.

Bella Milroy is an artist and writer who lives in her hometown of Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She works responsively through mediums of sculpture, drawings, photography, writing and text. She makes work about making work (and being disabled) and not being able to make work (and being disabled).

Revisit our very special celebration event for Dr Uma Breakdown's show at Wysing 'Earth A.D.'

Uma has invited researcher, curator and artist Angela YT Chan and Dr Tom Dillon to discuss systems of archiving, collapse and repair and counter-culture science fiction.

Angela YT Chan discusses how self-archiving current climate experiences resists future data gaps in our inherently political climate histories, and Tom Dillon presents a short presentation on the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, focusing on his relationship with 60s counterculture and queerness, before a conversation following the overlaps of these ideas with the research behind Uma's show.

Please follow this link for a transcript and video of the conversation: https://wysingbroadcasts.art/discover/uma-breakdown-in-conversation-event

From the Ground Up: The Gathering ArchiveJames Boyce & Elsa Noterman in-conversation

Revisit some highlights from our mini-festival 'From the Ground Up: The Gathering', which took place on 16 July 2022.

Fenland communities fought to keep their common land for over a hundred years. Strategies to quash these lively resistance movements in the 17th century became a blueprint for Britain’s Imperial project. Access to space in Cambridgeshire remains contested; the countryside and parts of the City are inaccessible to many. How can we learn from the past, change structures of ownership and control, to re-shape access to public space and the land? Join James Boyce, award-winning author of Imperial Mud: the Fight for the Fens, 2020, in conversation with Dr Elsa Noterman, Junior Research Fellow and Director of Studies for Geography at Queens' College Cambridge. The conversation is chaired by Rosie Cooper, Wysing's Director.

You can find the talk as a video on our Wysing Broadcasts site by clicking here.

Please click here for a PDF transcript of the talk.

Catch up with a very special Desktop Studio Visit to celebrate our gallery exhibition ‘A Tender Ascent’.

Maëva Berthelot and Coby Sey were joined by Wysing’s Senior Curator of Programmes, John Eng Kiet Bloomfield, to discuss their exhibition ‘A Tender Ascent’ and the research and influences behind the collaboration. Using a number of references from the project as a framework for an informal chat, they touched on topics including the role of chance, role reversal and collaborating during Covid-19.

The in-conversation event was followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience.

Click here to download a transcript of the event as a PDF.

Click here to download a transcript of the event as a Word document.

To find out more about ‘A Tender Ascent’, visit the exhibition website page here.

To watch the Desktop Studio Visit back, please click here.

Biographies

Maëva Berthelot is a choreographer, performer and teacher whose mode of working unfolds along the threshold between experimental, performative and collaborative approaches. After graduating in 2003 from the Paris Superior Conservatoire of Music and Dance, she has collaborated with artists and companies such as Emanuel Gat, Ohad Naharin, Clod Ensemble, Sharon Eyal, Rambert and spent six years as a senior member with Hofesh Shechter Company, contributing creatively as an original cast member in numerous pieces and as a teacher. Her work intends to instil a dialogue between material and immaterial realms, drawing attention to the tension between visible/invisible, conscious/unconscious and rehearsed/improvised. Whilst her research is rooted in a movement practice which is an ongoing inquiry into the themes of consciousness, transformation, healing, death and rebirth, her interest lies in creating cathartic spaces in which the emotional and sensational states related to loss, grief and change can be explored, processed and assimilated into conscious experience.

Coby Sey is a vocalist, musician and DJ, who, after years spent buzzing around the DIY artist circuitry of South East London, has developed a distinctive presence as a performer and producer offering a shifting, disorienting vision of club music.

A long-time collaborator with Mica Levi, Tirzah, Babyfather, Klein and Kwes, Coby’s recorded work– as best evidenced on the Whities 010: Transport for Lewisham 10′′ – spans the realms of live instrumentation, sample-based productions and experimental music, melding recognisable motifs of hip hop, drone, jazz, grime and more into a dubbed-out anaesthesia. Live, these dreamlike compositions are imbued with a heavy, uneasy dancefloor energy, often abetted by live vocals as well as saxophone interjections c/o regular cohorts Ben Vince and Calderwood.

Coby’s open-door approach to sharing and making music stretches to his work with London collective Curl, who release records and host events with a collaborative, improvisatory approach, as well as a regular slot on NTS which offers a portal into his appealingly murky musical world.

Listen to an audio tour of Linda Stupart, Carl Gent, and Kelechi Anucha's exhibition 'and then, a harrowing' at Wysing. The tour features a described walkthrough of the exhibition given by Linda Stupart and Carl Gent, and explores some of the research and process that went into the making of the show and the artists' residencies at Wysing over 2020/2021.

Click here to find a transcript of this podcast: https://wysingbroadcasts.art/discover/and-then-a-harrowing-audio-tour

A harrow breaks up the surface of the earth or the skin, an agitation of soil that has been left dormant too long where the harrow can excavate whatever ghosts, traditions, memories, viruses, melodies and gestures have been buried. The gallery reverts to barn; the barn disintegrates back to soil.

Installed across Wysing’s grounds, gallery and Amphis building, the exhibition includes recent film, sculptural, and video work by Gent and Stupart and sound work by Anucha and Gent.

Revisit sound artist and DJ Ain Bailey in conversation with curator Hannah Wallis for the third in our series of Desktop Studio Visits. Desktop Studio Visits are a new strand in our online events programme aimed at highlighting research from recent artists-in-residence and platforming new works in progress.

Discussion focused on the development of Version, Ain Bailey’s current exhibition at Wysing Arts Centre, curated by Hannah Wallis as DASH Curator-in-Residence. The in-conversation event was followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience.

The artists Ain Bailey mentioned at the end are: Phoebe Collings-James, Adam Farah, Jimmy Robert, Jasleen Kaur, Rehana Zaman, Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Helen Cammock, Remi Graves, and Junior Boakye-Yiadom.

Please click here to read a transcript of this podcast as a PDF in 14pt 1.5 spacing: https://wysingbroadcasts.art/discover/desktop-studio-visit-ain-bailey-and-hannah-wallis/DSV%20Ain%20Bailey%20Hannah%20Wallis%20Transcript.pdf

Please click here to read a transcript of the podcast as a .docx file: https://wysingbroadcasts.art/discover/desktop-studio-visit-ain-bailey-and-hannah-wallis/DSV%20Ain%20Bailey%20Hannah%20Wallis%20Transcript.docx

To watch this conversation and to find out more, visit our Broadcasts site here: https://wysingbroadcasts.art/discover/desktop-studio-visit-ain-bailey-and-hannah-wallis

Caroline Wendling presents Hypoteinousa, a Test Space commission for Wysing Arts Centre. Taking its title from the Greek word meaning ‘stretching under’, Hypoteinousa is a sound walk through Wysing’s rural landscape. In dialogue with the nineteenth-century science fiction novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Jules Verne), Hypoteinousa draws on Wysing's topography: a landscape shaped by its wildlife, ancient geologies, and the many voices of Wysing’s artists and their interventions at the site.

Click here for a PDF transcript: https://wysingbroadcasts.art/discover/hypoteinousa/Text%20version%20(1).pdf

Click here for a large-text PDF transcript: https://wysingbroadcasts.art/discover/hypoteinousa/Large%20text%20version%20(1).pdf

Caroline Wendling is an Associate Artist and studio holder at Wysing Arts Centre.

Caroline was born in France and moved to Britain after completing her art studies at ESAD, Strasbourg and Edinburgh College of Art. Caroline's work explores ideas of place and belonging through layered projects that draw on history and explore local myths, inviting re-imaging of sites. Daily rural walks from home to studio, at Wysing Arts Centre, feed her multidisciplinary practice. She creates artworks that are fragile and transient in the form of sensory walks/performances and events, blurring notions of audiences and performers. She also makes drawings, prints, objects and, more recently, moving images. She often works with collaborators, specialists in their fields such as children, chefs, musicians, foresters, and perfumers.

Commissioners include Kettle’s Yard, 2019, Whitechapel Ga