12 years LAB – a call to action in response to climate change
Metal believe that artists can affect change in society. In light of the United Nations’ assertion that we have only 12 years to act against climate change in order to avoid global disaster, we will investigate how artists can positively affect society in response to this universal challenge.
This four-day intensive LAB, hosted and facilitated by Metal in Liverpool, will create a forum for discussion and experimentation; a supportive and open space to think, get angry, make mess and mistakes, and explore strategies for new artworks and interventions in society. Specifically, the LAB will provide:
- Input from invited guest speakers
Support and input from the Metal, and connection to wider networks - Time and space to develop new work relating to climate change
- Working and social time with peers for discussion and exchange of ideas and practice
- The opportunity to further develop new work in partnership with Metal
THE ARTISTS
Dimitri’s projects as Artist Gardener offer a gentle provocation to an apocalyptic view of urban ecological sustainability. His work often explores the liminal issues between public and private use of space, aspiring towards transformative urban propagation.
“Dimitri Launder is an ‘Artist Gardener’ who knows the political power of plants and isn’t afraid to use it”
The Times, 2011.
His ideas cross-pollinate between commercial and private gardens, public commissions and emergent ideas in his art practice. His experience in this grafted practice over 20 years has developed his expertise as a garden designer and as an artist with inherent interests in ecology & socially engaged practices. He also co-directs Arbonauts a site-specific performance company with his wife Helen Galliano. They were recently commissioned by Inside Out Dorset Festival to create ‘The Soaring Sky’, an immersive landscape sound installation.
Blooming Ludus is a participatory theatre company that makes interactive performances and playgrounds exploring our connection to the planet. Co-founded by Haeweon Yi and Francine Dulong, their work seeks to hack popular narratives, connect international and local communities and physicalize climate issues that seem too large to change. For the residency at Metal they find themselves asking: what is our responsibility as artists within the 12 year window to stabilize the climate crisis? What is the potential range of social change and what structures and locations can participatory theatre take advantage of or invent to initiate that change? Their first theatre game Power Story tackled renewable energy amid the UK fracking debate with valuable insight from the community at the Kirby Misperton Protection Camp (Roundhouse and Camden People’s Theatre 2016, Brighton Fringe 2017).
Gavin Porter
Gavin is a filmmaker and theatre maker from Butetown, Cardiff. He currently works with National Theatre Wales as project coordinator on a project called The Agency, where they work with young people from Cardiff to develop and test ideas for social businesses. He studied film at university and stumbled into theatre about 7 years ago. He created a participatory project called The Big Democracy Project with National Theatre Wales. He is fortunate to have taken part in the Clore Cultural Leadership programme and he has won a BAFTA Cymru for a short film he directed. His number one concern is the climate crisis and he often asks himself what can he do to address this issue, as an artist his imagination is his strongest tool and he has pledged to try and make work that helps him and others imagine a better world.
Hector Dyer
Hector is a visual and performance artist who explores our individual and collective legacy towards the natural world. He works across a broad medium, including text, spoken word, movement, processional performance and moving image. With the intention to question what it means to pass on danger and how can we intervene, his work always has a public-facing element to it and frequently involves participatory elements.
Solo work includes You are Warmly Invited to the Death of the Turtle (2019), Cyborg Dream (2018) and In Your Own Time (2017) at the Barbican. He is currently re-developing Thank You For Your Patience (2018) with Hackney Showroom, which has played at Theatre De Mentilmontant in Paris, Inkonst in Malmo and Future Fest in London. He has also been a member of the radical performance collective Ponyboy Curtis, directed by Chris Goode, and an artistic associate of Waterbodies and Bellow Theatre.
Hwa Young Jung
Hwa Young Jung is an award winning multidisciplinary artist working in the field of arts and science, facilitating collaborative workshops and projects. Based in the North West she has been involved in producing projects with grassroots led community spaces, makers and artists in the North and internationally for over ten years. She is ¼ Re-Dock, an artist collective working with people and technology based in Liverpool and Manchester. She is ⅓ of Domestic Science, a collective of artists using interactive non-fiction to explore narratives around science and data that surrounds us everyday. She has run projects with Universities (MMU, Lancaster, LJMU), festivals (FutureEverything, AND, Heritage Open Days) and cultural institutions (Manchester Museum, Castlefield Gallery, National Trust, FACT Liverpool) to create a mixing ground for diverse disciplines and divergent communities to come together and make something new.
Jon Baker
Working with KlangHaus, Jon strives to make work that engages the public (participants and audiences) on a profound, lasting and ‘immersive’ level. They believe that this mode of engagement is most suitable to present the urgent need to clarify minds and focus attention on climate ‘derangement’ (Charles Eisenstein) and ecological sustainability using immersive delivery and close proximity to audiences.
‘One show that truly delivers the shock of the new, KlangHaus is the most innovative presentation of live music I’ve ever seen –a total game-changer’
Alex Needham, The Guardian
The KlangHaus company have made bespoke shows for Southbank Centre including Concrete Dreams in 2018, 800 breaths in 2017, On Air in 2016, St Georges Works, Norwich 2016, Colchester Arts Centre 2016 and Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2014 amongst many others totalling 300 + performances.
Kay Michael
Kay Michael is a freelance theatre-maker and director as well as environmental activist. She trained at Drama Centre London and Paines Plough, and credits include Resident Assistant Director at Theatre Royal Plymouth, Associate Director at Arcola on the OffWestEnd Award winning production Clarion and Director of critically acclaimed comedic post-punk play Hear Me Howl, developed with the support of Soho Theatre Young Company. She has been a finalist for directing awards with the JMK Trust and Old Vic Theatre. Kay has also been developing and directing new writing and creating community performances in response to climate change. Her research began in 2014 when she worked with Katie Mitchell as assistant director on 2071, a performance at the Royal Court co-written by award-winning Duncan MacMillan and Climate Scientist Dr Chris Rapley. With Empty Deck, her Peter Brook Award nominated theatre company, Kay develops international collaborations on multi-disciplinary and often research-led new performance. She is currently developing Sequel, thanks to the MGCfutures Bursary, the Tipping Point & HOUSE seed commission ‘Doing Nothing Is Not An Option’ and support from Coombe Farm Studios and Theatre Royal Plymouth. This is a performance event exploring our relationship to ecological and societal collapse. Kay is actively involved in Extinction Rebellion.
Mike Faulkner
Michael Faulkner is founder of D-Fuse, a London-based digital art collective. Originally a graphic designer, his work has evolved to combine film, data and sound in immersive installation, experimental documentary and live performance, collaborating with sound-artists such as Steve Reich, Beck and Scanner. Currently he uses VR content to explore socio-environmental themes. This has been central to his practice since 2007 when he created a series of short animations for Al Gore’s Live Earth project. A key example of his immersive design is Small Global, an interactive installation addressing global consumption, with imagery projected onto multiple transparent screens around the exhibition space and onto the audience, who become part of the show. He has exhibited at the Prix Ars Electronica, the Onedotzero Festival, Eyebeam Center, MU Galleries, SFMOMA, Sonar, TriBeCa Film Festival and the Moscow Architectural Biennale.
Selina Nwulu
Selina Nwulu is a writer, poet and essayist based in London. She writes for a number of outlets such as the Guardian, New Humanist and Red Pepper and has toured her work nationally and internationally. She has also been featured in Vogue, ES Magazine, i-D and Blavity amongst others. Her first chapbook collection, The Secrets I Let Slip was published by Burning Eye Books and is a Poetry Book Society (PBS) recommendation. She was Young Poet Laureate for London 2015-6, a prestigious award that recognizes talent and potential in the capital. She was recently ‘Writer and Creator in Residence’ at the Free Word centre and Wellcome Trust, looking creatively at food and how it connects to our health and matters of social and environmental justice. She is currently working with Somerset House on a project around loneliness and climate change.
Stephen Rudder
Born in London to Caribbean parents, Stephen Rudder is an award-winning multimedia artist and founder of Quiet Voice productions. His practice combines diverse and often unheard voices with multimedia to bring a quality of deep insight to his work. Rudder’s past work includes: This is Your History, the opening feature of the permanent and internationally recognised ‘London, Sugar and Slavery’ gallery at the Museum of London, Docklands; Body Beyond Death, a film commissioned by Wellcome Collection and the Museum of London; Stories of the World, a digital film promoting the collective London Museums’ contribution to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad; Ethiopian Renaissance a commission by UNESCO to document contemporary artists working in Ethiopia and promote the UNESCO 2005 International Convention; and Mission to the Land of Misplaced Memories, an experimental documentation of a week-long Afro-futurist project at Tate Britain in collaboration with WriteTalkListen and Dubmorphology.
THE GUEST SPEAKERS
Professor Geoffrey Beattie
Professor Geoffrey Beattie is professor of psychology at Edge Hill University, with a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has published over one hundred academic articles in a range of journals including Nature, Nature Climate Change and Semiotica. His latest book was on The Psychology of Climate Change (Routledge) with Dr. Laura McGuire.
Dr Laura McGuire
Dr. Laura McGuire is a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Education at Edge Hill University. Her PhD research focussed on tackling an issue of global importance, namely why consumers are not doing more to change their behaviour in the face of the threat posed by climate change.
Professor Beattie and Dr. McGuire have presented their research on why we need to target implicit, automatic associations in the fight against climate change at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, in July 2015 as well as at other major international conferences across the globe. They were recently selected to be contributing authors of the United Nations International Commission on Education for Sustainable-Development-Practice Report. This UN report is issued every ten years to ‘define priorities in sustainable development education for the coming decade’. The commission is based in the Earth Institute, Columbia University, and is considered world-leading for its work on sustainable development. There are 40 contributing authors, both academics and practitioners, from the U.S., Australia, Europe, Nigeria, Sweden, South Africa, Canada, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. selected to contribute to the final report.
Sarah Toplis
Sarah is a Senior Producer working across a range of arts, digital, interactive and immersive projects. Sarah specialises in developing projects that lie at the intersection between art, design and technology. Her experience spans over ten years of producing ambitious interactive content, experiences, installations and large-scale public arts content across spaces and platforms. Formerly Executive Producer for The Space, Digital Producer for Southbank Centre and Tate. She has also worked with a range of Arts & Cultural organisations like Tate, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, FACT, Abandon Normal Devices and Metal. She has also worked across different areas of digital production, starting her career in Photography and working independently as a Producer, and with a range of different partners including Google, Open Data Institute and Nissan. She continues to be intrigued by how people engage and interact with arts, media and technologies and loves working on projects that bring different artists, creative disciplines and technologies together.
Erinma Ochu
Erinma Ochu is a filmmaker, curator and activist, trained originally in neuroscience and film. She is guest curator and critical friend to several festivals and cultural initiatives including Sheffield International Documentary Festival, Creative Scene and The Sick of The Fringe. She is co-founder of Squirrel Nation Studio, which last year was resident artists in The Stuart Hall Library/ INIVA. She queers science communication and future media, teaching at The University of Salford and is a Trustee of Invisible Dust.
