und and moved our plants around and reshaped our natural world and reshaped our landscapes. What I'm trying to do is encourage people to maybe look at the ways in which these oppressive systems created create yeah have created the natural world in someone's vision and and have made it such that there are that we have. So many of us, you know, we deeply have such a deep and profound disconnection from the natural world and what it might look like to. And so I think a decolonised garden is one that that that interrogates those erased histories and interrogates those in erased indigenous wisdoms and knowledge systems and maybe looks at all of the forces that create the world around us and create our understanding of what a garden looks like and what grows in that garden and then look at that through and then expand that prism out and look at all of the other ways in which knowledge is created and languages used and the ways in which our reality is structured such that we can't imagine ourselves outside of them and and so yes, I think that that brings us to a point of justice and and that sort of. I think that's where Jill sort of ended up to I think that our job is to understand history in order that we don't repeat the same. We don't replicate those same models we don't make those gardens in the same way again in in that they are deeply and profoundly connected to the land justice issues the climate crisis by diversity crisis issues that now we have no idea how to fix that we understand our histories in order that we don't re embed them into the paths in which we that the ways in which we seek to create a path into the future and I think that that's not only about not re re creating our mistakes but it's all re embedding our mistakes it's also about creating a justice adjust future that has a vision for us all as opposed to. Taking those ways of being and seeing and understanding and only creating a landscape for those who have the power to influence them and say yes. So. I think that's that's probably where I will probably leave off. I think what I would say is encouraged I would encourage you all if you haven't ever tried before to grow your own food. It is a humble and powerful and miraculous thing it's probably the only thing I can think of that I do that leaves the world more thriving and. Gives more than it takes. And so, yes, might I just encourage you all to maybe so a seed especially in these times are so hard and I often get asked also about what I do with hopeless feelings, and I have many of them, but the my answer is always to grow something. So yeah, great something. So much. I'm going to try this one and then pass pass it around to the moment. Yeah, just to say thank you so much to both of you for really fantastic talks. I have a question and I think maybe while I wait for all of you in the audience to kind of formulate questions and comments and thoughts to both these wonderful papers. I can sort of start. Yeah, I think one of the things many things really touched me about both your, both your talks and one of the things that I kept coming back to is this the question of contamination and purity. And especially with, you know, the ballast and the seeds and so on. Kind of where where it goes and this conversation, not just of transplanting but also sort of accidental movement invasive species you know is it who brought the invasive species. So sort of where does the agency lies and those questions, but then actually going back to the panel this morning and thinking about sort of constructions of nation and race and things like that so that through archaeology through art, and these sort of various constructions, both in the biological world and also in a sort of historical, art historical sphere. So I was wondering if you could say something about in your work, Jill, about contamination and what that means and also this quest for purity and play as well. And also just where do we go from here because everything is everything is contaminated you know there is no purity, and we want to accept that and sort of move forward and how do you think about that in your work. So you can hear me with the mask on. Yes, that's. Okay, beautiful. Thank you. So perhaps the mask maybe helps us a moment right I am ongoingly fascinated by the ways that you know when is immediately given a wipe when entering into a space but but not a mask, you know with this idea that that somehow you know that the tangible what we touch is the site of contamination but not, you know, the air that we breathe. So, to actually breathe with think with the extent to which we are not just ongoing dangers to each other, but how to both let's say, for example, live with more than one viral agent that are arguably the results of the deforestation and loss of the wild that brings species and contact with one another that and not just intimate contact but dangerous contact. I think then helps us perhaps to think about the extent to which and start to practice with something besides striving for purity. That is that we have, for example, practices that can mitigate risk, and sometimes very small things that can mitigate risk if we're willing to think with and in the place of the most vulnerable. And while I realized that this is perhaps a very, you know, tiny example, but I have found it so important to think with compost and composting and what gets produced out of decay and strange forms of germination as a way to figure out what can happen in a site that of what would otherwise understood to be waste but that's also then not to. As you were also saying so beautifully and powerfully clear that if we are willing to acknowledge and practice with everything that comes with a site right so it's not that the capacity to. Feed yourself and feed those that you love erases a history of trauma it's another way of telling that story but telling that story and creating the conditions within which we can then together practice forms of purity that are not based on this idea of erasure and the sense of the sense of creating as if the only way to produce something is to start anew from some kind of clearing gesture because of course, you know, we know so well, being the places where we know that, you know, you create a space of purity and whatever it is that you're taking out goes somewhere and those of us who are made to carry various forms of objection whether that's because we're understood to be, you know, brown or black or not the or queer or trans, I'm not reproductive somehow in the right way I mean that the production of purity is a particular technology that puts those waste products somewhere, and so those of us made to carry it I think have a sense of how to practice in ways that don't further that kind of displacement but I want to hear from you instead of just thank you so much for that generative questions for you. Yes, I mean I have a lot to say about that but but you're right purity purity is a construction especially in relation to the natural world right. I think that much like what I was saying about this idea of kind of interrogating and possibly deconstructing these like dominant systems of thinking that binary thinking in that there is the that which belongs and that which doesn't belong is an a human assignment right it's it's it's borders are man made those designations are man made, then the native and the non native wouldn't exist if we hadn't compartmentalize the world in such a way that we then have decided that that a border exists in one place and that which naturally jumps from one side to the other is is is problematic. And then, and I, you know, I think that there's one part of my book where I sort of expand on this piece that I wrote about the language around native and non native, and and how on a personal level I find it really objectionable because I'm somebody who would in this land be considered non native. And then when I look at it through and and so when I started started to encounter that term in the halls cultural world and you know and environmental world delivered as though it was this benign and objective truth. And I'm very rarely interrogated as to whether it was a cultural creation and it was it was an ecological truth not a cultural creation. And you know kept it kept landing really poorly with me and I was what's happening here you know I was really frustrated with it and the reason for that is that I don't think it actually describes what we're trying to describe. And, and, and, and, and what I mean by that is that when we just what what people were trying to describe as the the behavior of the plant right and we're talking about plants that were but weren't behaving but behaving in ways that we wanted them to. And yet to somehow they've managed to create this this kind of connection between the non native and the invasive that became. You know, so it made non native synonymous with problematic and what it did was then erase the history of how a that plant came to be there and hey and be how a lot of non native plants are here and welcome and grown purposefully. I'm not described as such because it's it's not relevant right it's and so that that sort of inconvenient the inconvenience of that truth was really was really problematic for me because if I pointed it out I was you know, sort of accused of being sort of pedantic around language and that actually it would undermine the ecological you know endeavours to control certain species and which is not what I'm trying to do I'm just I'm actually probably being pedantic to the point of actually watching truthfulness in the language that we use and, and so when you look at that as a way as a reflection of like an instinct towards wanting purity in the natural world I think there's a there's a whole conversation to be had around the kind of rewilding movement, which I think very doesn't interrogate necessarily that what are you trying to create what are you trying to recreate at what point in history you're trying to go back to where you know people were not participating in the landscape. You know, if I if only there was a way that we could you know remediate all of this this influence, but I mean, but I don't know whether I want that because if you were to do that to this landscape then I imagine it would mean removing me to you know and, and then we can have larger conversations about eco fascism and how that is a huge part of the thing that we need to be resisting in the environmental space in particular because when we assign this this notions of purity and ideas of contamination to dialogues around plants and, and other species. It's a very shortly before we start talking about people like that and and actually I say that as if it's not happening it's happening. And so, and so I consistently push back against any, any, any dialogue that that seems to think there was a point in the past, but we could somehow reverse time if we only just save this part of the only just get rid of this part of the only just. And, and yeah, and I, and I, so I find I find that really tricky. And I also think that it also limits our imagination when it comes to dealing with them. You know the kind of pressing crises of the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis if, if we demonize them on native and we don't necessarily see it as part of our, our ongoing ecological landscape, we don't necessarily necessarily see the virtues that we that they might bring because you know I often see you know which we're planting this meadow up with native species and it's like, well, great, but there's also other species that create you provide early and late forage for pollinators and with the changing weather that might be what exactly what we need and so if we just consistently just use these reductive ideas of what belongs and what doesn't belong them and not necessarily looking at the landscape and its complexity. And I argue that we need to be doing that in order to actually address the issues that I'm so pressing. Yeah. Sorry. I think we have to have a share too much between three of us. Question. Yeah, it doesn't work. Thank you. Questions from the audience. Thank you. Thank you very much. It seems that the link with archaeology continues. The, and I discovered recently that archaeologists have found seeds going back much longer from like Roman era and longer that also can be made to grow. Thank you about that, and I really appreciate what you're saying and I've just done my potatoes and, you know, I think I wondered if you looked at the allotment movement that's another side question allotment, particularly in London. There are all kinds of knowledges there and all kinds of expertise and wisdom, which is just something else. The question now really is about the planetary. So can we get beyond the sort of British colonial sort of matrix way of thinking about how the world was divided or other European colonies and think forward to a sort of how do we pool our knowledge of how plants drew people into different parts of the planet at different times, or prevented them from going to certain places. That's sort of one sense about the point of pooling our knowledge about what happens next because the climate catastrophe is upon us so that the emergency is extreme in terms of how we produce food. I'm thinking about the reason I'm rambling a bit is I'm thinking about about what I learned about weeds. So if weeds are plants that came from the Arctic and followed humans in this part of the world, as they started to do forms of arable farming and agriculture with livestock. Do you mean a specific weed? Sorry, I'm just weeds, actually. The thing we think of as weed is again another country of designation. What we think of as weeds, which of course changes over history because people, you know, have lost their sense of what has made medical properties. So the plants have sort of accompanied humans. So, for example, I found this very striking. So a field is really a receptacle for sunlight that you want the maximum sunlight. You don't want trees around it or things that are called shade. You want maximum sunlight to grow your crops. Well, a lot of things we call weeds, they like that too, that they grow in fields along with the thing we were trying to grow to make food to eat. So I'm really thinking about how we tell alternative histories of plants that are more on a sort of planetary scale or in a relationship with human beings, rather than stopping at the, as important as that is, and as surprising as that is, for people to understand colonial botany. And it's a fantastic intervention, I think, in terms of thinking about the English garden. Then that's that's the question really about thinking on a planetary scale because the question of ballast, as you showed from the maps, is about bits of the earth being moved around, and what we can learn from that. So can we apply some of that sense of thinking on a global scale about the about the movement of plants, not necessarily in relation to people thinking well that would look nice in my garden I'll bring it here or collectors going and you know there's obviously a huge history of people sharing ideas about plants and what in China, for example. So I'm not really rambling because I absolutely love this subject and I was learning things about it all the time, but I do think, in terms of the emergency of thinking ecologically about what we do and how we collaborate, how we think about this planet, how we think about the future, what we're going to eat, etc. Then we need to slightly widen the scales and think differently about the history of plants and their relationship to humans. Oh, is this, is that working? Yes, that is enormous question. And lots of statements. Thank you. Yeah, I think my my instinct is to say that. I think the thing that we we ought to be figuring out how to do is to uphold indigenous wisdoms and in indigenous knowledge systems, those which have been kind of co-opted into into Western European thought but also those that are sort of marginalised and aren't centralised in the way that we kind of understand our relationships in the natural world and figure out what we do. And I say that because like I said about the rewilding thing, you know these conversations often happen at this kind of either very kind of heady level or a level of privilege. You have to have an excessive amount of land privilege to be somebody who can engage in this act of rewilding, so called rewilding. And, and I think that a lot of why we've ended up in the position that we're in is is a lot to do with what what Jill was sharing is a, you know around America being a perfect example of, you know, kind of disrupting indigenous relationship to plants and land. And so, I don't know, I don't know whether that's the answer that you'll, you know, I don't know whether that's the answer I think it's a answer amongst the many, many, many that we need. But yes, I think that there is. I think that's possibly what I was trying to kind of allude to is like not replicating the mistakes of our past and a huge, a huge mistake of our collective history is another disruption of indigenous connection to land and indigenous indigenous stewardship of land. And, and so I think if those, I don't know how we won executes this, but, but I think that that is something that we need to be centralising in these kinds of conversations. I think there are people who have ongoing relationship to land that is depthful and powerful and beyond our comprehension and understanding beyond the capacity of our language to describe honestly, that we ought to be putting in positions of honestly control and power. I think we, we have a system of governance and a system of systems of power that privilege certain knowledge systems over others and that I think is our greatest mistake. Can I just say that I fully agree. And I think also just this question of systems of power is really crucial because thinking about, you know, indigenous practices as being. Okay, that's the one we coopt now can get us into a really kind of a longer of going back and repurposing colonial histories all over again. Absolutely. I think it looks more like more reparative and justice, you know you need a justice framework around that so it doesn't just end up being another extended arm of capitalism. When I just add a quick note to say that that's why I started with a tactical renaming of the Anthropocene is the necrocene which planetary scale, I think matters a great deal and there's not a planetary scale of any climate emergency that to me would justify going beyond colonialism. That is that the climate crisis has to, as I understand it, also foreground, for example, of the apartheid regime of our time in Palestine that is that what I had hoped we had set up already today was a deeply intersecting and enmeshed conversation in which the climate would also necessarily include our discussion of, for example, land-back reparations, feminist articulations around control of reproduction. And thus I would argue that I'll do respect to Chakravarti, that the climate emergency cannot possibly trump what it is that we might do in the meantime and even if it means that we're all doomed. In fact, as we are dying on a dying planet, there is a lot that we can do in the meanwhile to create thriving for those we've unhomed. And thus, yeah, I would really argue very strongly that of the planetary scale that should be concerning us as one that foregrounds land-back reparations and rights of return. I know Emma has a question. Now we have many mics. Hi. Thank you so much for this presentation. I apologize I missed the beginning of yours. But I'm familiar with your amazing work. I'm going to ask a little bit of a kind of more personal question. My research thinks about blackness, black communities, and the more than human and pleasure and sensuality in the ways that pleasurable relationships have been kind of forcibly removed through religious missionary projects and the colonial encounter in black spaces, both completely, but really detrimentally, and that those kind of more sensual embodied rituals that are found in other indigenous cultures are very difficult to articulate in black spaces because of the particular relationship between black bodies and land under the colonial regime. So I would love to hear both of you speak about, I suppose, the space that the sensual pleasurable body takes up in the work. And obviously I feel there's resonating Jill in your writing about the kind of potential for resistance within the gardens of enslaved people, but then somehow resistance doesn't always lead into pleasure or thriving or beyond beyond more than survival. It's really, really essential, as well as centering these decolonial movements against violence. We have to centre movements against more than survival, so we're not still recreating these systems of suffering. And very, very quickly I just wanted to recommend on contamination. There's a wonderful, I mean, I have to be really far away from this. All of the Metis theorist Michelle Murphy's work is really incredible, but that's a particular essay on where she's exploring the concept of alter life. And she uses the phrase non innocent entanglement, the ways that we are complicit and entangled and contaminated and non innocent, as well as oppressed and need to remain kind of stay with the trouble of the issues. And that paper by Michelle Murphy on Alter Life to think through contamination in generative ways. Thank you both so much, all three of you. Do you now need this back. I just like to say it was a beautiful question, just really enlivening, and of course just self anyway I'm going to let you. I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much. You did. I think you're going to listen to this voice for nine hours. Good luck with that. Oh, you're so fresh. Sorry. Oh, I see. Okay. I was starting to come up with a bit of a rave. I didn't get it. I was like, okay, we're going to start dancing. Oh, this one is now working. And then we can sign and take in between. I mean, I was just going to say that that sort of gorgeous pulsing hot pink that you said you thought successfully for already says a lot about the sensual pleasures of what it might mean to sit and be with these questions and I think one of the many things that I took from your absolutely. Yes, I agree. Gorgeous gorgeous question. You know, bam, there we go. Was that mean if we are to be with that unsettlement of a non innocent entanglement and that refusal of the move to innocence has been so important. Also in indigenous justice work right to say that what the settler colonial subjects wants most is to be assured of their innocence and you know immediately run for the exit but and I know your question though is about all black spaces but that if one can figure out ways to in the meanwhile and I feel that there's something about a slowness and an insistence on not trying to find the exit door or the planting a flag on the future and insist that we're post anything that makes some space to have all the complexity of a feeling and it seems to me that that's an aspect of sensuous pleasure would be the capacity to feel something like joy that isn't contingent on speaking of purity, not also feeling the bad feelings that the guilt feelings the complicit feelings that, and that is, you know, in addition to compost there's also the complicated space of ambivalence and actually allowing for and making it a practice to do the things that we can to help ourselves support, provide pleasure in care in in a version of what I keep calling the meanwhile but I would love to hear more from Claire as well but I so appreciate the opportunity to and really I would mark here also I have a colleague I adore Sammy shulk who's been doing really important work around black film disability justice work in fact you know her work already yet okay pleasure activism yes but just want to tag that. Yeah, I mean that was what I was going to bring up to. But as, and as you will see find out when you read my book, I was brought up Catholic and so I've got a lot of unlearning to do and and and one of the things and I say unlearning is somebody I'm not practicing Catholic at all just trying to unlearn the kind of embedded shame honestly that comes that comes with having being taught to worship their God. You know, and so that is part of part of one of the things that that came about to this kind of writing process of this book was was and it's something I've known instinctively but like truly understanding what it looked like to have a kind of colonial system bed like imposed upon my understanding of what the divine is, you know, and and and what sacred looks like and having to kind of re to cultivate a new relationship with what divine and sacred is and thankfully the work of food growing has brought me to the temple of the natural world and that is my religion and that and growing is my prayer but but pleasure is an ongoing in challenge for me and it's and it's funny because I didn't hadn't actually it was during the writing process that I attended a workshop about pleasure and I realized how in kind of in tandem with me becoming a food grower and becoming more concerned, you know, feeling implicated in the in in the in the kind of climate crisis. I don't really know what the right word to use as you know, the engaging in the fact that the climate crisis unfolding as we speak, and realizing that I had, I had parked pleasure, they almost felt disrespectful or something around that I'm not quite sure what the word I want to assign to it but there was something that I felt like it was almost wrong for me to experience pleasure at a point when there's so much that we should be so concerned about. And it was only in doing this workshop that I realized how much I had put that on the shelf and said that's not for now, there's too much work to do. And then only then engaging with the work of Adrian Murray Brown is like that's the urgent the urgency is is to experience life in its the fullness of its vibrancy and actually arguably when you are in when you experience that the immediacy of that that crisis of that danger that like that that is when. As the as bio acumilife says this it's the slowing down and it's not the literal doing of things in a slower way it's the slowing down as in the complete re re imagining of how we can be and I do. Yes, so what you tapped into there is a very ongoing dialogue in my mind and I have not necessarily a place of landing, but a place of real recognition that it is something that when we are in crisis we put to the one side and I think that there's just. I had a Buddhist teacher say that you know you cannot selectively numb you numb the good you numb the bad you numb the good right. And so I think that there is something in there about like being able to yes dance with the bad the bad feeling the shame the pain that all of the fear in order for you to also be able to experience the good stuff to and I think that's all part of the that is all part of what is necessary in order for us to figure out how we are deeply connected and how we can figure out a path forward. So, yeah, I'm not sure if that's the landing space, but it is a very, very live in a dialogue. Can you imagine in this like Catholic brain that I've got a really good friend who brought up Catholic whenever I do something that's like what I put like hyper productivity or really shame myself about something she was like, oh, that's your inner Catholic. She's like abolish your inner Catholic and I'm trying I'm trying. So yeah, there's those colonial systems they run deep. But yeah, working on it. Thank you. Thank you for the mic and the session. So really just to say that we're going to take a quick break. So if you have questions, we're all around so come and ask things talk to us. And will we convene in 20 minutes. Yeah, we can be an outside for a performance. Normally, but yeah, kind of conversation with installation outside and then we come back in for more. Thank you. Hopefully the audio. You don't have to do it. Oh, there's an echo. Okay, thanks. It's really an honour to be in this creative, pleasurable dialogue with bones and who I've known for many years and been in Orof for as long. And I wrote a very short response to the work that we just saw. I'm watching a child. I'm watching an oracle. Words meet bone. They crunch disquieting against one another. Friction leads to openness fears discomfort transformation. A small, old, young, wise, green, brown hand in mine leading the way. The smell of singing fingerprints instances, the path, the camera jerky, eager, unpretentious.  No escaping the truths ourselves knew they had to document less the world succeeded in erasing our existence. A queerly quiet urgency, a slow motion rush through greens and browns and greens. A dirt path to the revolution. This may not be pleasant, but it will be. It might be important. And you know I really wanted to create the connection, be it digitally or real life. And what's the difference really these days. Old days. As Oracle bone has shown us technology is just one of the latest languages our ancestors are using in order to seek transcendence. And we do not have the words yet to say what we desire. So if you would all like to join us in moving back into the main space we're going to have a discussion and then a discussion with all of you. A pleasurable chat. Okay, communication. Thank you for that. I'm not technical waiting moment of waiting and integration absorption of the brilliance of bones this work. So I have a few kind of prompts evocations for you. Bones is going to make me talk about my work at some point as well, and then we'll open it up to thoughts and feelings from this beautiful congregation of humans. So I was really kind of moved by the relationship between the jinx and you. And so I'm wondering if you can kind of begin by talking about when the jinx came to you and what she has taught you. She has she has taught you. Thank you. I think the jinx and I do have a very interesting relationship. Una came into being actually while I was still at art school, Saint Martins, and we were talking about this over lunch. It was in response to I created a film that was very much like about myself and like what I was going through at the time, and I presented it to my class, and there was a critique. I felt critiqued, obviously, and this work was really deeply personal to me. And then I felt like all these people that didn't know me were critiquing essentially like my diary because it was like diary based work. And I left that script being like I am never making art about myself ever again. Like this is just putting yourself through a lot of trauma having to put your trauma. You're trying to use your artist therapy and then someone's coming along and being like, well, why did you use that color palette? Or like, why does it look like a pop song? Because it was like a video and it looked like a music video and apparently that wasn't, you know, high art. So after that, I was like, okay, I think I need to find another channel for me to work through these emotions. And I was looking at various artists were using at the time like kind of cam girl work and like work of using internet personas or just personas in general to exist within. And so that's how Unagingx was born. And I wanted her, I also at the time was during it was like Tumblr era, which is like an internet blogging site. And at that time there was a lot of like internet witchcraft and internet new age spirituality like cyber spirituality. And I found it really farcical and like quite like weird that because I felt deeply like wanting to connect to my spirituality. But I found the kind of the the the strange like oxymoron and finding out through the internet and how a lot of that spirituality was whitewashed. And it was cultures like especially eastern cultures that were being taken whitewashed and kind of pixel pixelated like pixelated on symbols and stuff like that. Turned into gifts and process through blogs. And that was how it was being reached to the people. And so I wanted to kind of make a comment on that by creating my own character who was a mystic blogger. And it was at the time I was like, not that deeply rooted in my witchcraft practice or my spiritual practice, because I was embarrassed to do that because I was younger. I didn't have the tools, didn't have the guidance, but I found doing it through Una was more like tongue in cheek. And I was able to kind of do it with confidence because I was behind a mask. And it was through Una that she opened up into my own spirituality and because through her I was like researching how to do spell crafting. But in my head I was like, oh, this is an artist research, but actually I was learning how to make a spell. And so yeah. And then when I initially began working with her as well, I had a series of films that are still available somewhere on Vimeo where we would talk. So it would be Una on Skype because it was before Zoom, it was before FaceTime so it was like Skype. I would Skype with Una and it was just an edited video. Oh no, no, that's giving away the magic. It was literally me and Una on Skype. And we would talk about our relationship to spirituality on the internet. And it was quite funny because people would come into uni because I basically made a Facebook profile for her, but I didn't add her as a friend. But I had a few moles in my year who started tagging her and stuff. So it is as if she just appeared online and then other people would come to me at uni and be like, oh my God, there's this really cool girl on the internet and she looks just like you. She's like your twin. And I'd be like, oh my God, what? Send me her link. And then at least two weeks one of my friends genuinely didn't know it was me until a Crip. And then she came into Crich the whole time. That was quite funny. This is like, I'm talking years ago, Una was my first character. And then from then I've worked with character building and world building in my practice. And Una still exists in my current work. She comes through certain stories that I create, but she's still 16, which I don't know. I don't work on like the kind of like safeguarding of that, but like in my head she's a 16 year old blogger and she'll always be perpetually 16 because there's a naivety there because I created her when I was 18. So it was only two years ago for me then, but now it was like 12 years ago. Oh my God. Yeah, I mean I really so I definitely believe the fiction of it being I thought it was a video from when you were 16. And then it was in your like personal internet. My brother's been on YouTube. He's 11 years younger than me and he's been on YouTube since he was 11, 12, and he's now 20.  So I was like, oh, it's like a it's a throwback. You know, and so I really believed into the fiction of the 16 year old and I and I then enjoyed being right and wrong at the same time. And I think also that I'm going to bring up my work now. So I think also this this kind of mechanism or tool of working speculatively and using world building to really navigate these assimilatory spaces is really useful. So in both my science fiction work and my kind of research, I craft speculative worlds to think through potential scenarios of relations.  And so it creates this kind of world in which play is possible, in which I can critique academia whilst also somehow being in academia and so this is really interesting kind of critique of the creative, like the craft white girl which movement was at the same time being kind of potentially like engaging healing practices within it engaging community within it, engaging aesthetics and reclaiming some of those things that have been assimilated and also those aesthetics that recur all over the world, right those symbols that keep coming up and up and don't really belong to all of us. So I think there's just a really beautiful kind of invitation to play that is very difficult to encounter when you're thinking about borders colonialism identity gender ecology religion right these kind of topics that force us into being very careful about our language and politically correct and clear and and also to which we want to bring care to not redo harm onto communities who are consistently experiencing harm of which we are both also members right. So, kind of leading on from that, I want to ask you a question and I was going to be I really appreciate it Claire. Are you here Claire. Hey, I really appreciate your point earlier about, you know, don't ask me how to colonize the garden. So I get the question of like how do we find hope in climate change as a pleasure activist, right. So I'm not going to ask you the question, how do we find hope. But I do want you to kind of speak about the ways that you, in fact, I'm just going to read why I wrote so I think it's more eloquent than me rambling on. So, um, can you share something about your relationship with someone we might call optimism we might call hope we might call you topic thinking in dystopic times. These past three weeks, these past few weeks, I found myself truly drenched in a sense of apathy to spare overwhelm. And I always think of your practice as one that never remains in constant dialogue with linear cycles of death, life, wisdom, foolery ritual play. So how does collapsing the binaries between these dystopic and utopic approaches fuel and sustain your practice. That question. And thank you for wording it in a way that isn't like what's your relationship to hopefulness. But so I talk about this in my work a lot, and it's a term that I use to make sense of my practice for myself, and it's optimistic dystopia. That is spelt in the mystic in mystic in optimistic is that with a why to kind of like pay homage to the reconnection back to kind of ancestral wisdom or occult wisdom or the invisible stuff that cannot be explained. And I kind of came to this thinking because I was really goes around the UNE Jinx birth time as well. And UNE really wanted to live in a utopia. I really was like striving for some form of utopia. I didn't know what it was yet, but everyone I spoke to had different views of what that utopia would be. And of course, because all very different people are very different needs. And even to have one unified utopia would be needing some form of dictatorship or like leadership and hierarchy. And so I was just like, oh, like, yes, yeah, no utopia, then I just think this like I just found it impossible to have a unified utopia. And then I was like, wait, if that's the case, then a dystopia is something I'm going to have to get comfortable with because we're living in a perpetual dystopia. And we can't deny that we have very strong facts and evidence that we are, like you say, living on a dying planet. So how do we find ways to find care, community, strength and like modes of survival that feel like relevant to us and our needs and kind of connect us back to spirit and connect us back to our relationship with the land. And so that's where like optimistic dystopia came into being and it is like you say, like breaking down the binary because they're too like dystopia doesn't really sound that optimistic, but I just wanted that kind of contradiction. And now I really just feel like all my practice exists within this framework of optimistic dystopia. So I'll give an example. Lara mentioned earlier that I co-founded a fight club called shadow sisters fight club soon to renamed soon to be renamed to shadow siblings.  And we've been running since 2017. And we teach mainly Brazilian jiu jitsu karate and a bit of Qigong and also medicinal and magical herbalism and our spaces. I run it with my best friend Monique or Venus and Venus has been studying martial arts and she was nine years old. So it's in her blood like her family and martial artists and she's also very deeply connected to her ancestry and her land connection. And so when we met we were like we have to do this thing, but we met in response to the fact that in 2017 where we were both living in North London there was a lot of violence, street violence and there still is. But it was in the community that I lived in there was like three attacks in one week to people walking home at night. So it was a really visceral like response. It was like an emergency response that we wanted to start this thing. But the fact that we started it was in response to a dystopian situation, but the fight club that we create and the spaces that we create when we come together is so. It feels like caring and it feels like a space of where optimism can flourish or could flourish and they're nurturing spaces. It's not macho like, like going to the boxing gym like trying to be bigger and better and stronger than everyone. It's always an invitation you're invited into the space you're invited to connect with your body in this way and learn these techniques to protect yourself if you so wish. And if it's triggering or if it's it feels taxing on your body for your needs and your access needs, it's you can sit out, have a biscuit, have a cup of tea. And that's what we wanted to create and it was a response. And so that's optimistic dystopia for me and then all my world building practice. So the kind of stories that I write with my speculative fiction opera. I've got multiple operas on the go and the films are also within that framework that creating visions of dystopia, but the storyline and the thread that runs through them are these stories of someone trying to find connection and community and care through survival. If that makes sense. Makes all the sense. How are we, how are we for time? How much time do you have? Okay, great. Great. Just over to us. I just wanted to say something before we open up about this beautiful optimistic dystopia as an as an idea because I think I think there are a few similar frameworks kind of moving around, especially if you are in the kind of eco or eco art space right the most frequently quoted one would be Donna highway staying with the trouble right like how do we stay with. And I just wanted to kind of point out and you can tell me if you disagree here, a distinction between that kind of model of thinking and what I'm hearing in this optimistic dystopia which is about. I suppose the time in which we come to dystopia. And what it means to think through this framework as descendants of and members of communities who've been living in these enforced dystopias for generations. And come into being through optimistic dreaming right through perseverance through. Through ecstasy in the face of impossibility right and and the difference between that and coming to the kind of exile model of coming to catastrophe. Oh, suddenly it's here right now we need to figure out how to stay with it. And I just wanted to draw attention to distinction because I think that things that get collapsed all the time and I think these distinctions are. It's important to kind of maintain them and how we are sharing community and how we're sharing dialogue and co building movements right because. Because they're we're bringing different histories in the ages of knowledges and that means that we have strength of knowledges, but those knowledges are also distinct. Yeah, thank you for speaking to that because that is really important and I think when you come from different places and have different experiences. And different privileges obviously we don't see the perpetual and like ongoing destruction of land. Or a place or of being that so many different communities all across the world have suffered from colonialism or from like climate catastrophe, because they're a greater risk in different areas. And, you know, yeah, I do come from when my mother came over here and was to find new, a new life in a different country that is an ecstatic optimistic dreaming and finding. You're completely displacing your existence and coming to a new place you came to Liverpool from Malaysia. So this is my birth town so I'm really grateful to be here by the way. And, yeah, and also being on the Albedocs, it feels really important to me, but we can talk about that later maybe, but. And, yeah, this like, like you said the XR narrative of like, there is an endpoint and we were all self destruct at that point, and we need to stop it now, whereas, you know, and we know and like indigenous communities have been, you know, sharing and trying to make this obvious for many years that we are. Going to get to this point and we've been, you know, ignoring that and ignoring that knowledge and ignoring that wisdom. And it's, yeah, it's coming from a place of privilege to think that that that is the way that that is like the outcome. But what was your question in terms of that? It wasn't really a question. It was a statement. Well, it was just a sharing. Yeah, and like to shed light on that. Yeah. I think I wanted to shed light on that. Yeah. And just my appreciation is of the way you're thinking that. And I think also something really beautiful about like the different ancestral knowledges that run through us. And that's what I love about sharing and creating and co-creating space with people, especially specifically for our community, which I know we both kind of identify within the cutie BIPOC community. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is cool. I like the label on there. Yeah, all the labels love it. But yeah, the cutie BIPOC community is definitely a community that has felt like home to me since coming out and reconnecting more deeper to my heritage since moving to London from kind of near this area. But I didn't grow up in Liverpool. I grew up in Chester, which if you know it is very white town. And yeah, when we create spaces like similar to shadow sisters and other spaces that other amazing cutie BIPOC organisers create. It's the kind of, I feel like it's a cauldron that's created with the language and the sharing and we all come with, especially if we're talking about herbs or plants. When I kind of run herb workshops, I don't ever think I am the knowledge keeper of this herb. I feel like I like to just like introduce a herb to the space and share the knowledge that I know about this herb, which most of it has come from Google to be honest, because Google can be great for that. But also I know that so many people have stories and connections to these herbs that can't be written on the internet that are maybe their grandmother's recipe or their, like so for example, my mum used to. So my granddad in Malaysia was the village herbalist, but he was like a renegade village herbalist people would come to him paying my under the counter to do some, I don't know, some herbal experiments on them.   My mum was like five years old and watched the oozing of this black liquid come out this person's leg and it's a really visceral childhood memory for my mum. And then she didn't know what herb it was, but she remembered the smell. And then I took my mum foraging because I think I got really into foraging around 2016. And my mum wasn't that into it, even though she's very connected to nature. So I took her foraging, I was like mum, this is my favourite plant. It's called mugwort. It was actually it's also used in traditional Chinese medicine. I was like rifting off all the knowledge that I'd learnt off Google. And then I was like, you can burn it as well. And it's a really good Celtic or native, talking about native. But like also interesting about native in this context is that I use mugwort and rosemary and bay leaves to smudge or to smoke cleanse. And you see it in the film I'm using rosemary. And what I would say that's good about native in that context is that in terms of spiritually connected to that herb and using it in that spiritual context is really important rather than using like white sage and palo santo, which doesn't come from our land and is desecrating lands like indigenous lands on Turtle Island. But anyway, and so I had some I had some dried mugwort. I was like mum, this is what you can do. We can smudge the space cleans the energy. She smelt it. She was like, oh my gosh, I think this is this is the herb. I remember my dad taking me foraging in the jungle in Malaysia and picking mugwort. And I remember this is possibly the herb that my mum used to draw out this poison from this random person's leg. And it was just so beautiful to like weave it all together through these unconscious senses. And I've had it in Shadow Sisters where we'll be talking about the herb yarrow. And then someone was like, oh, my grandma used to do this with the arrow. And that's where the magic is in the oral histories and oral stories. So yeah, I just wanted to share that. And then that way is also the ways that these more than human collaborators and kin are telling us their histories, right, and our histories. And a big part of my research and my general work has been into the many, many absences in practice and indigenous knowledge that have the many, the many gaps, many forced erasias, the many, the many lost knowledges, and they may not be lost everywhere, but they're certainly lost to my family's lineage, for example. That then I'm finding in like pollination practices and I'm finding in foraging practices and there are ways that there are more than human memory keepers when when human lineages have not been safe places to keep knowledge because it's been stolen. Okay, on that note, I think we have. Oh yeah, okay, we've got like just under 10 minutes. So it'd be lovely to have some thoughts, questions, feelings from, from the floor. If anybody has me. Yes, in the back. Yeah, if you could just wait for the microphone. Thank you so much. No basic questions. I was in like there are no basic questions not please bring your question. I just love to know the location in the work that we've just seen because I feel like you've really nailed that kind of dystopia with the, especially that cliff scene I'm not sure if they were mattresses or like broken walls. I just would love to know yet the side of it. So the location of all those films of the footage was actually shot over like a three year period. I went initially to kind of like a kind of homecoming I went back to Malaysia to visit my family in 2019. On that trip, I managed to secure a gig because I'm also a performer. I played a gig in Hong Kong for the art basil. Very strange. Anyway, I did something at art basil. And then so I was in Hong Kong. So some of that shot in Hong Kong in like the mountains and then went to visit my friend in Thailand said the big cave with the kind of look like stalagmites, but it wasn't really. It's just like amazing cave structures was in was near Bangkok. And then some of the more jungle scenes is shot in Malaysia. And I remember my uncle taking me in his car. He's like, it's so nice for him to like engage with my art, but I'm just like running around dressed in a costume being like, I'll meet you at the car in like 10 minutes. So it was always shot very DIY. And then the scene with the mattress and that like sandstone cliff. So that sandstone cliff is is kind of where I grew up. It's on the border land between Wales and England in Chester. And my mum now has moved to a bungalow that is on the cliff. It's like a one bedroom bungalow in England. But when you look out the window, you're looking at Wales, which is incredible. And there's the River Dee, which is the border as the border market. And this sandstone cliff overlooks the River Dee when the River Dee banks, which it does every winter. The water goes right up to the sandstone cliffs and it becomes like really swampy. But where that mattress was this is like that whole patch of land is such an interest. I actually want to dowse it and see what the energy is saying there because I've heard oral histories of what that land was used for. So in the 90s it was 80s and 90s, but in the 90s it was like a free party space where travellers would go and be there for months on end having free parties by the river and like jumping into the river off the cliff and all of this. And so maybe that mattress was left over from them because it was so rusty. But now I went back recently to visit and it's been totally cleared out and it's loads of new houses being developed on it, obviously. But I'm just like, I know they had to build their house on stilts. So this house has been built on stilts because they know that the banks are going to break. And I just find that really interesting because the stilts didn't look that stable, but they've obviously done a good job. And that's interesting because I know that every year though that water level is rising, whereas like my mum in Malaysia. There's like Campos, which is like villages in Malaysia that were traditionally built on stilts anyway because there's just they were like river dwellers or water dwellers. Whereas these stilts, these houses being built on stilts are actually response to the ever rising tides. And that was all shot during lockdown that that's footage at my mum's house. And so it's quite like, yeah. The concept was like me being like, I'm Una Jinx and I'm in nature in the wilderness, living freely. But actually I was like being confined by this tiny village for eight weeks and I didn't really leave the village. I went to Wales and then they started putting police on the bridge being like English people can't come to Wales because we had two different laws, lockdown laws. So it was all very strange. She couldn't cross the bridge, but the best farm shop was in Wales. Really annoying. Anyway, so, yeah, it was there. Is your question. Yeah. I really love this idea of the optimistic dystopia and like becoming comfortable with that. And I was wondering if any of your characters ever interact or like if there's a point to their loneliness. Or maybe it's not loneliness, but how connection, how you envision connection in that dystopia. Yeah, thank you. So I have a film called Indigo Zoom, which I made in 2016, 17. And I'd already like put Una Jinx to bed at this point. Like I was kind of like done with her for a little bit. But when I made that film, the main character is Indigo Zoom, who's like non binary. So Indigo Zoom was my I hadn't come out yet as non binary. But I was like, well, I'm going to make a non binary character because again, it was me using a character to feel out whether this is something I feel comfortable within. So my next character, by the way, is like a martial artist because I'm trying to be a martial artist. But yeah, Indigo Zoom existed in this alternative universe where there was no safe oxygen left to breathe. And everyone had to wear masks, which was like 2016, 17. And the masks were molded to your face. They looked like you. So you were still being able to be facially recognised. And they were sold to you. You could only get it from this one company called Yonerville, which is the evil conglomerate. And once I created Yonerville, Yonerville now still exists in all of my work. So even the last film I made last year called The New Elementals and the opera that I'm writing, Yonerville is still the evil conglomerate in it. And yeah, Una Jinx makes a makes an appearance in the film through the internet. So three of the characters are trying to do a YouTube meditation video, a breathing exercise video, and they put Una Jinx on. And Una Jinx is like, hi, I'm the oracle of the internet, because that's like her catchphrase. Join me for some breathing exercises, but the video starts to glitch. And in the glitch, it starts getting bombarded with sponsored ads for Yonerville's masks. And then the people who are trying to do the breathing exercises very unzenzen like start smashing up the laptop. And then, yeah, I mean, it's available on Vimeo, if you watch it. But yeah, so she makes these cameos within the work. And I think that's just a nice way to like, there is conversation between the characters because I do think they all exist in the same like nonlinear universe. And I don't feel like like there's any timeline to it. It's just kind of like it's a cycle and there and even sometimes I step into that universe as well. But it gets a bit confusing sometimes. So I'm trying to write it all out and then figure it all out. But yeah. Yeah, there is conversation within the loneliness. Inside the minds of science fiction. Yeah, dark and mystical place. Right, we are out of time, but we continue to be around. So please do you come up and chat to bones. Yeah, throughout the day. Thank you so much. Sean and everyone, the whole team from inviting me in allowing this beautiful conversation to happen. Thank you. Thank you. Is the microphone on? Hello everyone, I'm Amelia and I was the project editor for the book company radical landscapes and I was very lucky to be able to work with them for melon centre. And Darren and his team on bringing all this together. And I have the really exciting part of bringing the whole day to a finale. So we've had some fantastic discussions already. And I have the pleasure of being able to introduce the final part of the day being in the landscape, which will be two performances from two exhibiting artists in the exhibition. Dylane Llebar, Divinya and Robinson. So hopefully you will see in their work earlier in the show. Rinceni Pani by Dylane and some intimacy by Divinya Ann, which you'll be drawing on later. If you haven't seen them, I urge you to go this weekend. They're both beautiful and powerful works about situating the human body in the landscape and what it means to be in the landscape. Both artists work deal with themes about the relationship between people and nature. Divinya's work in a very corporeal and tangible way issues materials such as clay, sand and soil. She intertwines them with casts of part of the human body and her own voice in an exploration of how she experiences landscape. Or she describes them as colonial nature environments. The earth itself is used as a living material and a medium along with sound and performance to enact her experience of being in the landscape. So today we'll be hearing her perform some intimacy live, which I'm really excited about. She also has a solo show in the San Mayor Gallery in London, so go visit that if you can. Dylane's work is similarly a mixture of installations and performance, some of which we will see shortly, but she also incorporates photography and draws on her background in fashion and textiles in St Martin's from when she studied at St Martin's School of Art, using clothing as a mean of subverting stereotypes as can be seen in the dress that we'll be seeing later and in the photograph upstairs as part of her work, where she is wearing an Elizabethan dress in Ryncenni Pani. So she draws on her experience of being part of the English, Romani, Gypsy community in her work, exploring issues of access and belonging, who's allowed in certain rural spaces and what the experience of the British rural landscape is like for people in her community, who are often forced to the edge lands, especially today with the new developments in the police bill, where we're finding people's rights and access being more and more limited. Traditionally, she talks about having connection with the natural worlds and an equitable custodian relationship with natural resources such as water and I feel like at the moment we've kind of come from looking at the landscape and we've really dug down and now getting to an elemental stage. So we're talking about sand, clay, water, natural resources and what it means to be a human who is part of that natural world and not distinct from it. So I want to say to the norms, thank you to you both for sharing your work with us today and I'll leave it over to you. Thank you for that really lovely introduction. Translucent permanence lays within. Comfortably seeping out from porous splash. Comfortably seeping in through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping out from within as this body concaves caused in and out of itself compressed and decompressed. Translucent permanence lays within. Comfortably seeping in through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping out through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping in through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping out through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping in from within as this body concaves caused in and out of itself compressed and decompressed. I've been thinking about composting. Imagining what it means for this body to compost. To sink back into the ground. To nourish what is beneath. To unravel and un-become. The un-becoming of Terranulla. To the becoming of rich black terror. Is this composting a means of presencing? Feeling or indeed being one with the ground which surrounds me. By moving beyond and within a body. This body. This black and brown and white body. This Nigerian body. This Beniz body. This Tongali's body. This Cameroonian body. This Tongali's body. This Western Bantu body. This Northern Indian body. This Irovian body. This Ghanaian body. This Welsh body. This Germanic body. This Northern Western European body. This Afro-Caribbean body. This South Central Afro-Jamaican body. This black British body. This Beniz gendered and un-gendered body bodies. This body, these bodies without these. Wrapped in multitudes of colonial pollutants and violence. Is composting a means of presencing? To move within a body body's carved by question presence? As I imagine, this body concavings spread and moving with other beings. How do the histories which form this body bodies dissipate into the ground? Nourishing. Nourishing. Concaves and folds. Flesh pressed into onto flesh. Flesh entangled in flesh. Flesh dissipates into flesh. Nourishing this landscape through positions of stress. This flesh lingers through. It is in a stress position. Flesh pressed into onto flesh. The body is always in a stress position. Everything is a position of stress. Concaves and decompressed. Detangled of a perfect flesh. This body in a position of stress. Flesh lined in a position of stress nestled on against in between. Flesh lined in a position of stress nestled on against in between. Joining entwined with old life, new life, decay. This body seeps and pulls delivering itself. Some intimacy. Translucent permanence lays within. Comfortably seeping in through porous flesh. Comfortably seeping out through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping in from within as this body contains both out and in of itself, compressed and decompressed. Translucent permanence lays within. Comfortably seeping in through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping out through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping in through this depleted ground. Comfortably seeping out through this depleted ground. Translucent permanence lays within. Comfortably seeping in from within as this body contains both out and in of itself, compressed and decompressed. I've been thinking about composting. Imagining what it means for this body to compost. To sink back into the ground. To nourish what is beneath. To unravel and become. To end the coming of tyrannolos. To the becoming of rich black terror. Is this composting the means of preffencing? Feeling or indeed being one with the ground which surrounds me. When moving beyond and within a body. This body, this black ground and white body. This Nigerian body. This Spanish body. This Congolese body. This Cameroonian body. This Congolese body. This Western Bantu body. This Northern Indian body. This Irobeian body. This Ghanaian body. This Welsh body. This Germanic body. This Northwestern European body. This Afro-Caribbean body. This South Central Afro-Jamaican body. This Black British body. This these gendered and ungendered body bodies. This body. These bodies. Without ease wrapped in multitudes of colonial pollutants in violence. Is composting the means of preffencing? To move within a body bodies carried by question presents. As I imagine this body,TMP. This body. This primordial body. This Black- exhibicionant. This spammers withternal究amיכ. This gray. Felly, dyna'r rhan o'r cyd-dredg. Fyllfa'r hyfawr gerais yn y gyrstedd. Mae angen'r cyd-dredg, yn yr hyfforddiadol. Mae'r hyfforddiadol, yn y cyd-dredg. Mae'r hyfforddiadol yn'r hwnnw ychydigion yw piwysig. Mae hyfforddiadol yn y gyrddur pysig, a hyfforddiadol yn yn y gyrddur. Mae hyfforddiadol yn yr hyfforddiadol yn yn y gyrddur. Cymru yn cael o'r rhai iawn o'r gyrhwyr. Mae'r bodi ei cwestiynau i'r lleol yn gweld yma yn rhaid. Yn ymgyrch, mae'n cefnodd nesaf. Mae'r ymgyrch yn ystod, mae'n cefnodd nesaf. Yn ymgyrch, mae'n cefnodd nesaf. Mae'n sefydlu i Egyffrin yna y nesaf, 2200. o'r cyffredinol yn ymgyrch. 7 oed o'r 2 yma, o'r 7 oed o'r 20 oed, oedol a'r prysgol, oedol o Egyptian, oedol o'r bwysig o'r canffair, a yna ymddai yma? Mae'r bwysig o'r ban. Mae'r bwysig o'r ban. Mae'r bwysig o'r blodd rydw i. Fygoed yn y boed. Fygoed yn y bwysig, o'r Egyphthys, o'r ddechrau o'r Pentecost. Nafodd, oedd o'r oedd, oedd o'r bron, oedd o'r llyfr. Fygoed yn ymwysig? Dhechau yn ymwysig, oedd o'r 1608. Fygoed yn ymwysig, oedd o'r miros. Mae'r herf yn ymwysig, fel y cwm yn cangarwm, Lincoln wneud. Mae'r llwyddoch yn fwy, dyn nhw'n gwybodaeth yma. Fyrwyr o'r llwyddoch yn fwy, mae'r llwyddoch. Mae'r llwyddoch yn fwy, a'r llwyddoch yn fwy. Roob i'r llwyddoch yn y clyw. Roob i'r llwyddoch yn y clyw. Fybdwyd, cyfnodd, a'r engeir, y maen nhw'n ymddiol, a roedd yn rhan iawn. Rwyf i ddim yn ymddiol. Rwyf i dim ym 1566, ydych yn ychydig defnyddio y gallwn eich bod yn gyfnodd, oedd yma'r mewn gyfnodd, oed yn ymddiol, y ddwy'r ymddiol, mewn cyfnodd, 24 01 22. Anciwns into which. O the 240 240 pressure. Which ruins. O that meaning. Can you see them for this ancient? 22 22 22. Egyptian. Anciwns and pressures. King's eyes hold on the sea, ring, blaze, mong, old, or S ring, blaze, mong, old. Mong, chaby mong. Precious, ancient, gathering, moonduff, universe, tiles, moon men in the mountains. It was crystal clear, like emerald's cwmpun, the wave catch the flesh, from sort to flesh, cleanse, the true value of it is unfathomable. Static yet moving, wonder at it, being in awe of it because without it we are nothing. Remember always ancient, you cannot contain it. Moonlight illuminates it, bulb is washed by it. It has knowledge, it has memory, we are made from it. Precious, well, well, hard and rotten, are they here? In our time, witches, physical markings, precious, ancient, hear her roar, and what we don't know won't hurt us. Wingshlytarnys, ancient, ancient, 1600s, birds in the bushes, ears in the eyes, in the sky, nann always tells us, eyes, tears, rain, 080322. The real, the unreal, 60% of the body is water. Sound systems, civil liberties, without the water we are nothing. It's the age of Aquarius. Universality, non-access to 92% of the land. Right to Row, Egypt's speech, 1547, can you see them? Timelines, old lines, 1608 deca, because the moon men have greatest domination, and I am like, am I like John Clare's Gypsy Wars? Identity of the Bible, transparant cases, odorless, 71% of the earth's earth, planet, planet, swear in, influenced by the universe. The air pushed into my nostrils, the power of the wind, I stare up at the light pink, and blurred, comes through the square. She is there in the form of ancient and precious, we hold it in our hands, existence, the nature or essence of person, chaos, melting glaciers, it stings my eyes, it shells round the flame, hung from iron, formed for this purpose. Voices, the smell of it, can we smell each other as pixelated digital beings? Am I a witch? Maybe I'm something else. The same questions, questioning, identity, belonging, maybe, maybe, universal Charles, other levels of being, and to be a Gypsy is something else. A vision of hell, or Clare's unprotected race, not fixated in this space, maybe not as suave as civil, multi-faceted, 1530 of Gypsy's past, 1404, 1914, in Collegiateville, Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, the 28th of June 2022, what's going on? 1707, Cloud of Eyes, can you see them? Cloud of Eyes, are they here? Precious, precious, dowsy, finding, rebirth, purity, waterhorse, water alchemy, kelby, water carries, precious, Egyptian, ancient, I was there then from the 1566 when I was a vagabond or an Egyptian. Precious, without the water, we aren't nothing. The universe is expanding, swell, swells, are the rackets, Gypsy's Cloud of Eyes, not a message in a bust of water, rincanipani, gelon, travel, ancient, precious, 1609, 1909, looking backwards, forwards, circular, collapsed, free, free, soft grass under leather shoes, the stone heart stitch, reds overlaid, cowery shells on the Sussex Towns in England's ungreen and unblevelled land, a patchwork ghost, flames down high, cacaraca is sweet, ink pink or blood red, gravellina crossleaves and orchestra of animals, avenues of trees, the apple, the temptation, a place of witches and devils, fenced in under a canopy of trees, a lone throne fries out, line divides the landscape, emerging from the cracks reflecting, torn, beckoning in the place between waking and sleeping like ghosts. Can you see them? Time travellers washed up on the shore, cast like moon dust, tasting like salt, water warm with an air, my shirt hangs there, which could be the edge of the world, maybe it is. And yes, the world is on fire, cracks in the landscape, fragments, flags, Ingerland, Angerland, Ingerland, silver moons, red gloss, ancient things this land, itinom, nomadic, transparent, disappearing down a rabbit hole, breathing like Boreas, a beginning and end, not a mirror for fantasy, feeling the grass between my toes, I'm here and now always forever, I ask myself always, stew drop flowers, my John Clairs Gypsy, precious, precious and ancient, a universal child, they are here. I was there, I was there, Nicomus 1566, I was there when you couldn't decide if I was a vagabond, or an Egyptian. Deco wrote about me in 1608, dressed in calico as a moon man. I was there, I was there, 15th of March, 1613, in Chelmsford, committed for being a Gypsy. I was there, I was there, I was there on the banks of the Thames, getting into a river taxi when Turner drew me in the sketchbook. I was in the Vale of Dedham when Constable painted that day. I was holding my head in my hands for mummings, campfire and caravan. I stared out, not looking at Augustus John's face, ahead of the Gypsy. I was named and unnamed, but I was always a Gypsy. I was then, I am now, I know the history. My art materials are weapons and I am well trained. So let's rise like trumps of gold, because my tears have stopped. With my tears, I'll pray for Rama, because my tears have come with me to Gypsy land. Llywodraeth Pw Llywodraeth Cymru. It's amazing to be sitting here after two amazing performances as well. So I think it's difficult to end after this because it took us to a different place and really thinking about being in the landscape and what it means to be in the landscape for different bodies, different communities who have access to what, as well as different temporalities. I think that came across so vividly in both performances and also throughout the day today. I think maybe just we don't want to take up too long closing and we want to hear from you as well in terms of your thoughts and your questions to sort of sum up the day. I think one question I had for Darren actually and for something to get us really thinking together is around all the things that we've heard today in terms of speculative thinking, in terms of organising, in terms of thinking back into colonial histories. What is this? Is this the Anthropocene, the Necrocene? We have so many constructed histories as well and relating that back to the exhibition. It feels very much like we're working towards solutions. We don't really have a solution. We're thinking also on many different levels, very local levels, just growing stuff but also inviting each other to think on a planetary scale because quite a few artworks in the exhibition, the super flux one for instance, that takes us into a sort of apocalyptic future and sort of optimism as well. How do you live with optimism setting? Really sort of relating all of these themes back to the show and thinking about what what it really means in terms of how we can think with. I think it's really broad and again thank you so much for staying with us proud of today. I think just thinking about the symposium. I mean I think I never claim to be a landscape historian or an expert. I'm a sort of exhibition maker and a curator of tape and I think one of the sort of aims and sort of missions of tape is to create new knowledge around the collection and as I said the outset essentially the show is a quietly or even an explicitly political landscape exhibition which I hope expands our notion of land and landscape art and I also sort of hope it's somehow sort of consciousness raising. I think it's sort of at a time of institutional change but where institutions like tape are needed to decolonize and expand and you know sort of maybe move away or sort of rethink and receive our history. I think this exhibition I think is maybe sort of part of this sort of a zeitgeist landscape show. I was quite nervous about this show as a civil servant of sorts and I curated but I think just thinking about Brexit at the outset and about the right to belong to the land and how the land at various times is being used as propaganda you think about. I mean that was sort of the beginning with Ron and Frederica talking about the land having this sort of soft power. You know it's encompassing so many histories of the Enclosures Act, the militarization of land, contemporary protests and campaigns which are I sort of see as a continuum. I mean obviously it's a very ancient story but I think the show starts in the turn of the century but I think the continuum between the sort of campaigns to access land and how artists you know have created work in the landscape. It's not a constructed escape, it's something which is active used on which we rely for resources. We need to sort of coexist and you know sort of depend, there's a dependency and I need to respect land and I think many of the works in the show I think speak of this and also I mean hopefully I think one of the things which I think is really pleasing is the way in which historic works speak in the present tense to in an age of activism. So I think I mean I think that this is one of the hopefully expressed in publications, certainly expressed in many of the of the presentations in the symposium. I said I was nervous about the show in the sense that it takes something that we think of as being a very conservative sort of heritage trope which is very strong represented in the Take collection but also taking audiences with us on this on this on this on this journey and I think today's been a real vindication of that in terms of you know the sort of the convergence of different ideas and responses to the show. You know Tate would not exist without audience I think and so that sort of you know that sort of commoning and sort of that sort of dispersal of knowledge through responses to land and landscape art is quite important. We're just thinking about also bones and bones presentation going back to the you know this notion of technology and how aerial photography and technology somehow creates new perspectives on land through out of micro and macro level and I was just thinking about that that sort of use of technology could also it connects a sort of a local to you know a local grassroots you know notion of land and land use to something quite global and international and I think that's I think that's the sort of you know that sort of that convergence of these two things that are sort of very specific local notion of land and just something you know that links to international global movements I think is going to be sort of key learnings I have. I mean I think I have to say I've learned I've learned a lot from this kind of show I've become a sort of short-term expert and the response to all this has been really fantastic. Yeah thank you I think just really speaking to that one of the things that strikes me even when we were thinking about aerial photography and so on and we were talking about it a little bit overlawn actually in terms of how so many of the things that have been in some sense a colonising technology was also used as tools of emancipation and that brings me to think also about Jill's talk and this idea of dormant seeds waiting for decades or sub centuries to flourish and I think that this question of the kind of long long term waiting and then flourishing and sort of moving against things as well as I think quite something that comes through in the show and things we've been talking about and I think I'm quite interested to hear from the audience as well in terms of sort of individual and collective action was the kind of spaces that we're creating at the moment how that relates to sort of some of the historical visual spaces, non-visual spaces and things like that as well or about anything else. Just a short reflection that I've been really struck by the relationship of landscape, the visual to text and to words and I think that's come through obviously in people's papers and the performances we've seen and in the works in the show and I'm just also reflecting on it as a space in which a lot of cultural historians, art historians and writers have used landscape as a space to think and it just made me think of things I read as a student like WJT Mitchell's essay about landscape and power and landscape is not an object to be seen or a text to be read but you know he's a process where kind of social and subjective identities are formed and landscape is cultural practice and I just think that idea of landscape is something always in process because your show and the symposium today has spoken across many different registers and many different chronological periods so I think that's sort of always in process of making landscape and thinking through with land is just a reflection for me that that processness of it has really come out. Thank you, it's just a comment and you know it was a very inspiring conference and it's sort of a I think what the class presentation really spoke to me because I'm originally from Cameroon but I was born in France, I grew up in France and a couple of years ago I sort of reconnected with my father with whom I didn't grow up and he and we were communicating by WhatsApp and he was talking about his garden and planting his 80 years old now and for me I'm thinking of I basically decided to develop a project on his land connecting with a traditional culture also as a way to connect with our traditional culture but from a personal history as well personal perspective and I'm thinking of it as him coming to France in the late 60s and having children in France and us as a member of diaspora you know coming back as seeds trying to re-root ourselves you know in our land where my grandfather and grandmother are buried so I think this project for me was very inspiring because so but how do we negotiate as members of the diaspora being here in the west but also having our roots in Africa and other countries in the south so I just wanted to thank you, it's very inspiring. Is there any other questions or thoughts or comments? Thanks, I just wanted to ask some of the artists who performed today, Bones and our two performers now about whether they've had a chance to see the show and then about the ways in which they think their own practice or their own performances today engage with the themes of the show on some of the work you may have seen in it. Yeah I hadn't seen the show I didn't even know about the show sorry I did but I live in London so I'd like need to reconnect more to stuff that's going on up in Liverpool but honestly when I saw I walked in this morning I got here very early set up the the soil had a bit of time to go check out the the top floor just here and I was just like whoa because I don't we didn't talk about this but I've just come back from a pilgrimage I walked from London to Stonehenge um like for solstice so very very recently and all the works on that top floor is so interweaved with the themes and the confrontations I came up against also being on the pilgrimage like private land, private property, trying to hold and pay reverence to the sacred but being stopped at most points and being told you're a trespasser and also doing it all by foot and walking these like ancient leilines and ancient roads and then there's like there's like someone who did a six-day pilgrimage in there and I hadn't known about that work so I was just walking around like whoa like I feel like I'm still on the pilgrimage right now because it's also interlinked so I'm really grateful to have been brought into the space in some way right now so thank you. So yeah so this reading is like an iteration of what is in the show so yeah it's like a direct a direct piece which is just expanded in this room but I suppose yeah the work speaks to this exhibition and it's exploring sort of colonial landscapes but landscape colonial landscapes which have impressed upon like my body of colour and other bodies of colour which find ourselves situated in England or in colonial spaces basically so yeah it speaks to past present and future relationships of coloniality and power displacement movement migration and then also we've been speaking of like rooting what is it to root your body in the space so it's speaking of that through the idea through examining composting or to concave and to fold and to physically place your body into the land yeah so I think that's having a quick little thing that's how this piece is related to this exhibition really yeah. Sorry um yeah I mean being included in the exhibition made me look at my own work I suppose and realise that I've been dealing with being in the landscape for many of the work that's why I put the films together because the first film was from 2009 that I made so it made me realise how much I'm dealing with the landscape all the time that's the first thing and then the second thing is is looking at the other artists work and especially what bones has just said actually because I was at Glastonbury this year we were asked to go there and we we had a atchintan a stop in place actually in Glastonbury and it was about the the bill that came in on 28th June 2022 and again with what bones has just said it's the fact that these things especially the protest and everything that's included in the show you know affects all of us it's all right thinking oh it's just those people over there and that's been my position for a very long time oh it's you know it's just the gypsies no one cares but you know what happens over there comes back here and it's on all of us in the end so I think it's uh for me it's been really um a reflective time for me as well looking at my own work and my own practice but also the work that other people do but how it's it's also in the it's out there in the public domain it's not just in the gallery space as well that's the other thing so yeah thank you thank you Darren for asking me um I've just found it really interesting today just to think in kind of basic terms about the physicality of landscape having worked on the book I literally work in 2d images and on paper by myself behind a desk and then seeing how artists respond to a physical living breathing world around them and how they embody that landscape as also living breathing beings I just found I don't know I hadn't even really thought about that sort of like tangibility of landscape and how landscape is quite interesting to be able to view it within an exhibition sort of space when really you go out and you're experiencing it you're smelling it you're touching it you're feeling the wind it's just more it's more than just looking at an image or escape and I think that's come through today with all the different sort of um voices that we've heard and like perspectives on how they experience the land and I just found that very enjoyable so yeah thank you to everyone for speaking yeah I think I I did a quick whiz around the exhibition I really want to go and spend some more time in that I really I really enjoyed how it felt radical which is which is not a word that I usually put together with exhibitions on landscape or ecology generally um it felt radical and it felt like many voices who I would want to be in the room were in the room which is also not an experience that I have very often when I'm in the UK in ecological spaces and I think there's just a feeling of I certainly feel like I often operate in isolation I'm often the only person I'm either the only black person in the room or I'm the only black queer person in the room or I'm the only person who's bringing a decolonial approach or I'm one of two or three you know and and and and or and we don't live in the same places or we don't work work in the same circles and I think there's a feeling of yeah there's a feeling of being together and not having to go over the basics which is just so desperately needed and I cannot express in words how destroying is to have to consistently go over the basics and not be able to have a conversation about anything really because you're just going over the basics which is consistently still the case in many spaces you know in the world and certainly in the UK so I really enjoyed feeling challenged engaged inspired pleasurable um and I think particularly in the show I was really moved by Glock's piece I didn't know about Glock and having Cornwall's also in my in my bones and having this like queer Cornish moment was like oh my god you know really like I had a little moment and it was it felt like this it felt like like the way it does when you find ancestors that you didn't know that I was just saying I had enjoyed my visit um yeah like it feels when you find ancestors that you know are there because you know they were there but you don't get to know their names or where they were buried or how they lived or who they loved or what they believed in um and like yeah I just it was quite emotional and I think I'd put on a lot of armor when I come into spaces like Tate anywhere spaces like art galleries spaces like conferences I prepare myself to be triggered and violated and all those things and yeah it's been a semi trigger free day which is a win by my standards so I just wanted to yeah to kind of like say that that really means something to bring these voices into this space both in the exhibition and in the symposium and I'm really grateful I feel very fed and grateful um eloquent yeah this works great um a little bit of feedback but I can we swap okay yeah no it's fine um if it's okay um I just wanted to end by asking all of you to join us tomorrow if you're around because we're hoping to extend some of these conversations in a very different way and in a very different landscape as well um but we're meeting at 11 o'clock correct me if I'm wrong at 11 11 o'clock at Birkenhead Park which is not very far and we'll start with a sort of communal picnic and and then we'll be led on a walk by Ruth Colton who's going to be giving us really picking some particular points in Birkenhead Park to talk about the ways in which land has been used and subverted and kind of links to colonialism an empire and just being in Liverpool so yeah please join us and thank you so much for being here today


It's kind of the reason why the wedding vows were created. I mean, at the end of the day, what is the wedding vows all about? It's all in. Now, nobody's gonna reach all in on the first, second, or third date, and certainly no one's gonna reach all in at the 90-day mark, although some do. Certainly that has happened throughout history. Men and women have known each other for a few days or weeks, and they got married. So there was certainly an all-in component there. And yet most of that was driven by the desire to be physically intimate with one another because in the past, physical intimacy was reserved for people who were in a marriage. So there's an all-in component to it.