PROGRAMME

Land and Water after the Collapse Part 2

Panel: Ingrid Pollard, Tracey Warr, Rob La Frenais, Harriet Bell

Friday 15 November 2019, 7PM

Studio 3, SPACE, Dartington Hall

SPEAKERS

Ingrid Pollard is a widely-exhibited photographer, media artist, and researcher who has developed a photographic practice concerned with representation, history, and landscape with reference to race, difference, and the materiality of lens-based media. Her work is included in numerous collections including the UK Arts Council and the Victoria & Albert Museum. In her ‘tidealectic’ work The Boy Who Watches Ships Go By, made on the Lancashire coast, ‘the viewer enters into a world of imagination, memory, and narrative created by images of land and sea.

Tracey Warr is a fiction and non-fiction writer who often writes in the vicinity of art. Her future fictions have revolved around the behaviours and properties of water. The Water Age is a series of three small books she developed during her participation in the Frontiers in Retreat art and ecology research project—all focused on the idea that we may be living with more water in the future. She participated in the Zooetics project with Jutempus. She was an artist/writer in the Exoplanet Lot exhibition organised by Maison des Arts Georges et Claude Pompidou and installed extracts from her future fiction Meanda alongside the River Lot. She worked with Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas and Giacomo Castagnola on River Runs at Modern Art Oxford and on the River Thames, where she organised an entire conference taking place in the water, entitled The Wet Symposium, and supported by the Canal and River Trust and the Outdoor Swimming Society.

Rob La Frenais is an independent contemporary art curator, working internationally and creatively with artists entirely on original commissions. He believes in being directly engaged with the artist’s working process as far as possible, while actively widening the context within which the artist can work. His recent exhibitions and events include Aerosolar with Tomas Saraceno in White Sands Desert, New Mexico; No Such Thing as Gravity at FACT and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art; Exoplanet Lot at the Maison Des Arts Georges et Claude Pompidou, Cajarc, France; Earthlab at Westminster University; and Continuum in collaboration with Allenheads Contemporary Arts. He has been curator in residence at Helsinki International Art Programme and is about to be a fellow at the Saari Residency, Turku, Finland. 

Harriet Bell will speak about the River Dart Charter, one of the first ‘declarations of interdependence’ by a river in the world. ‘We are living in an era of global, systemic (start anywhere and it goes everywhere) and wicked (hard to solve) problems. It is beyond the capacity of governments, state agencies, research labs and experts of all kind to solve these issues alone—especially when part of the solution lies in large-scale, behavioural change across society. The imperative now is to work together. How do we do that? In the context of the Dart Charter, the Bio-Regional Learning Centre is inviting many stakeholders to find common ground; prototyping the roles that citizens can step into; opening up a conversation about sharing responsibility; imagining a generative process for holding to account; building trust; and valuing community-sourced innovation in solving many of the big issues around water.

CHAIRS: Tracey Warr, Alan Boldon, and  Rob La Frenais

RSVP: boxoffice@dartington.org

SPONSORS:

LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Talks is Leonardo's international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations. LASER Talks were founded in 2008 by Bay Area LASER Chair Piero Scaruffi and are in over 30 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. 

The mission of the LASERs is to provide the general public with a snapshot of the cultural environment of a region and to foster interdisciplinary networking.