ACT Symposium London

On the 28th/29th June 2023 Artsadmin and Art, Climate, Transition (ACT) co-hosted an international symposium exploring the intersections between contemporary performance, democratic participation, and environmental justice. The two-day symposium was based at Toynbee Studios in London and sat alongside What Shall We Build Here festival.  

The symposium took an expanded understanding of political discourse and knowledge dissemination. To get to grips with the big themes we are looking at, and to move the conversation forwards, we need many modes of communication. Therefore the two days of the symposium included an eclectic mix of panel discussions, workshops, walks, performances, talks, keynote lectures, meals & meditations.  

people’s palace of possibility

Mallon Gardens, the public plaza in front of Toynbee Studio’s was the location of the temporary structure of The People’s Palace of Possibility. The Palace is an outdoor installation that asks how we find energy for change, despite our fear and anger about the future. It is rooted in utopias. The mystery of the utopias which have gone before, become misplaced, or gone wrong. And in the impulse for escape; for doing something radically different from life as we know it. The Palace is nomadic and always growing. Right now it has a radio station, a kitchen, a pantry, and an escape hatch. The Palace is added to and animated by people wherever it goes. In Mallon Gardens it hosted weaving with Shelia Ghelani, clay modelling with Becky Lyon, poetry readings, and audio artworks from Land Body Ecologies and Farmarama.

tentacular panels

The invitation for the symposium invited people to present their work as participant in a panel, clustering around themes of Language & Ecology; Speculative Futures & Environmental Justice; and Democracy & Environmentalism. The panels included not only formats of talking and listening, they also included card games, sensing and connecting with the (inner) landscape, performative walks and creative writing and ‘legislative theatre’. The encounters and exchanges in the panels were deepened and sustained by shared meals and continued conversations, for example in the Impact Radio corner which Jacco van Uden and Arie Lengkeek hosted in the People’s Palace of Possibility. Listen to their conversations with dramaturg Mathieu Charles, activist-artist Ellie Harrison, artist-psychologist Aidan Moesby and ACT coordinator Carolina Mano Marques here.

a network of networks

Part of the programme was a very topical panel in which ACT invited fellow artistic networks and collaboration projects to exchange with us on European Collaborations and Environmental Justice. How do we maintain connection internationally whilst acknowledging the environmental impact of travel? How can we ensure a more equitable mobility alongside our sustainability goals? This panel discussion explored these questions through a showcase of initiatives and projects that are addressing them from across Europe (and beyond). It included presentations from Ása Richardsdóttir from IETM, Yohann Floch from On the Move – on their reports on artistic and cultural mobility, Carolina Mano Marques from ACT – Art, Climate Transition, Kris Nelson from LIFT on ‘concept touring’ – a commissioning programme for artists to develop concepts for international touring projects with little or no human travel, Farah Ahmed from Julie’s Bicycle on their mobilizing efforts including the climate justice perspective, and Mariachiara Esposito from the European Commission, who reflected on the new Green Deal and the Creative Europe programme.

Persons weaving patterns

In London for quite some artists and participants in the conference, there was a previous moment when they were invited in other formats of the ACT project.
Mathieu Négathe-Charles, based in Brussels, collaborates with Theater Rotterdam and participated in the Ljubljana Summer Lab (2021). In London, he addressed the keynote lecture for the symposium, ‘stages of survival: scorched earth, melting ice, rising tides’- a deep exploration of the ecological challenges- and how these find their echo in arts, affecting creative expressions and demanding innovative responses. Mathieu featured also in one of the Impact-Radio sessions.
Zoë Laureen Palmer, an artist, co-creator and human ecologists, working at the intersections of arts, health and ecology. Working from London, she participated in the Riga Summer Lab (2022) and contributed with some of her installations on dreaming, care, reciprocity and future rituals to the symposium.
Tery Žeželj started in 2020 with ‘the archive of self-sufficiency’ commission in Ljubljana, which led to a two-year research project ‘multispecies landscapes’. She also participated in the Ljubljana Summer Lab in 2021 and the Skopje Summer Lab in 2023. Bunker and Theater Rotterdam invited her to provide their Relay Lecture, which resulted in a performative walk in Rotterdam and Ljubljana.
And last, but certainly a cornerstone of this ACT symposium, there was Malaika Cunningham, co-founder of The Bare Project, and collaborating with Artsadmin since 2021 as a practice-based researcher. She participated at the Ljubljana Summer Lab in 2021, on Urban Ecologies. In 2023, Malaika invested all her heart, brightness and expertise in curating and preparing the ACT Symposium, in London. All the world fell silent as she read a story for us in the closing ceremony: 

‘My words must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark–branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.’

 (Ursula K. LeGuin, She Unnames Them, The New Yorker, 21 January 1985)