What if ecology were less a thing to be studied and more a way of being and making meaning in this world?
A warm hello from all of us here at Radical Ecology. Once again, the clocks have turned - jumping backwards as we move forwards, reminding us that time cycles and so do we…
In this spirit, when we talk about ecology, we think of it less as something out there to be studied than as a way of seeing ourselves and our connection to one another and to the world. We think of ecology as a method, first and foremost, of creativity through which we can constellate meaning and cultivate newness in the world.
Launching on the 18th of November, we will be opening the doors of our studio at Webbers Yard, Dartington, for a series of free programming that shares some of our learning around this way of working and being. Our activities will include a fortnightly night school, a weekly after-school club, monthly resource Saturdays and our ongoing research networks. Emerging from these, a studio exhibition, configured not as something static but as ever evolving, growing and decaying. Our aim, to build a creative community here in South Devon around how we can resource ourselves in the context of this crisis-ridden decade.
IN THEORY: PLANETARITY AND RELATION NIGHT SCHOOL Alternate Tuesdays, 6:30-8pm
As a way of opening up dialogue on critical race theory from here in South Devon, we’ve developed a free fortnightly night school, Ecology as Method: Planetarity and Relation - a 9-part reading and discussion series exploring how ecological thought emerges through relation: between people, histories and the living world.
Across these sessions, we’re engaging with writers and thinkers who have reimagined what it means to live and think on a shared planet - poets, philosophers, teachers and revolutionaries such as James Baldwin, Sylvia Wynter, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, Gayatri Spivak, Edouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, Jamaica Kincaid, Sun Ra, Rabindranath Tagore and W.E.B. Du Bois. Together, our readings trace an evolving conversation - from Black feminist classrooms to Caribbean poetics, from planetary philosophy to cosmic jazz - setting the tone for the programme by asking what becomes possible when we understand ecology not as a thing, but as a way of being and making meaning in the world.
Each 90-minute gathering invites both conversation and creation: including both collective discussion and creative writing activities. The sessions are open to artists, activists and all kinds of humans - no academic background required. This is a space for imperfection, community and learning. Our first session on Tuesday opened the series with a rich, full classroom engaging with questions inspired by the work of bell hooks - asking when did we first become aware of race - who were we and who are we now?
For those unable to make it to our in-person sessions, you can still be part of the conversation. All the syllabus materials can be found here - and we warmly invite you to creatively respond to the syllabus at home, through writing, image, sound, or movement.
Sign up here to take part, in-person or remotely!
IN PRACTICE: ANTI/MONUMENTALITY AFTER SCHOOL CLUB Every Thursday, 4-5pm
On Thursday afternoons, we’ll be offering an After-School Club from 4-5pm, where everyone is welcome, including adults and accompanied children. In these sessions we’ll be thinking about what an art class can look like as a reflection of our commitment to environmental justice. Activities will draw on a wide range of materials and processes, including playing with clay, anthotype printing and even sound!
These experimental sessions revolve around a core, iterative theme:anti/monumentality, asking what if we reorientated art from thinking about the marks we make on landscapes to the process of land making its mark on us.
Our first week will be co-facilitated by Mawadah Nofal. Mawadah is an Egyptian writer, researcher and collaborative arts facilitator who explores DIY practices, space-making, and alternative forms of knowledge production.
No sign up necessary, we’ll meet outside the Radical Ecology studio every Thursday at 4pm. We’ll be posting updates on planned activities on our social media and on a dedicated page on our website.
Please note the sessions may involve walking/take place in our studio which is unfortunately only accessible via stairs. If you have any accessibility requirements, please email us on the Monday in advance of the session studio@radicalecology.earth.
RESOURCE SATURDAYS Final Saturday of the Month (usually!)
Once a month, our studio will hold a space where our community can share work. We’ll be bringing together guest speakers whose own practices shed light and inspire action and learning around questions of what ecology as method is in practice, elaborating on concepts including “participation”, “improvisation” and “transcendence”. These sessions aim to be in dialogue with the other happenings of the studio, a responsive space in which those happenings emerge into gathering.
For our first session, on the 22nd of November, Writing the Self, we will explore and lean into Ecology as a way of seeing ourselves, and our connection to one another and to the world. We will be interrogating human methods of self preservation and healing, and intergenerational communication through writing, research and archives. Through the lens of ecology as a method, archives become alive - embodied, evolving, decaying - a space that reaches across time in both acts of remembering and forgetting.
This session will be led by Riham Isaac and Davina Quinlivan. Riham Isaac is a performance artist from Palestine, weaving together a range of artistic practices – acting, singing, dancing, and video – to explore new mediums of live performance and multidisciplinary arts. Davina Quinlivan is an experimental author, researcher and teacher whose work explores themes of place, migration, and transformation.
Keep an eye on our social media and our website for details of future sessions.
RESEARCH NETWORKS: DREAM ECOLOGIES AND ARCHIPELAGO Monthly / Every Other Month
Our Dream Ecologies network continues, holding our regular, monthly experimental public space where we aim to explore the place of imagination within our waking lives. Reaching one year old this month (happy birthday!), the sessions explore the space between individual and collective consciousness, bringing together dreaming, movement and the commons. After two sessions at Merrivale Stone Row, Dartmoor, this month we returned to our studio, for a cosy, stripped back session. Intrigued? Come along! These sessions are open for anyone to attend.
At the end of September, we facilitated the first of our Archipelago gatherings, a space held every other month for racialised artists and practitioners in the South-West. As the name suggests, in these sessions we aim to think through constellations of relations that bridge defined borders and enclosures, while foregrounding broader questions around race, inequality and place-based belonging. How do our bodies, actions and practices live with and move through the entangled (hi)stories of excavated lands? What might liberation look like here, with this community and in this landscape?
Our first session brought together deep listening with fluid discussions on in-betweenness, diasporic consciousness and reorientation. We spoke about belonging not only to the South-West landscape, but also to an artistic practice, moving beyond questions of self-identification to consider how structural forces shape conditions of legitimacy within the art world.
The next session, on the 23rd of November, will continue these conversations, building a rhythm of co-facilitation that may take the form of artist-crits, walks, workshops, or other (combinations of) processes that emerge along the way.
WATCH THIS SPACE: GROWING OUR MIGRANT FUTURIST GARDEN:
Recently, Radical Ecology and our sister downstairs Luna’s Bakehouse invited proposals for the design and creation of a Migrant Futurist Garden - a living artwork that imagines displacement and diasporic experience not as loss, but as a source of creativity, innovation and renewal. We’re seeking visions of regenerative green space that honour how plants, soils and people reshape landscapes, cultures and technologies through movement and adaptation.
The garden will take root at Webbers Yard, Dartington, overlooking Luna’s Bakehouse and the Radical Ecology studio. Designed to be nomadic, the selected proposal will explore mobility through temporary or adaptive forms - from portable beds and vertical gardens to structures that offer rest or gathering space. The commissioned artist will collaborate with volunteers and staff to realise the garden, planting the seeds for a community gardening club as a space of memory, exchange and shared futures. We’ve had some amazing proposals submitted and we’re currently in the selection process - it’s going to be a tough one!
No two days are the same, nor two faces of the clock, yet the world is bound with secret knots that connect us all. Consider this an invitation and a welcome. To both Radical Ecology and to Ecology as Method.
Stay up to date with our programme by following us on social media or by keeping an eye on our website.
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