☾
Program Opening
Lunar
Imaginaries
for Ecologies, Technologies
with Louise Beer, Rachel Blackman, Laura Williams, Cassie Robinson and Kate Genevieve
Date: June 22nd, 2023
Place:
Care + Climate, Greenwich
This event marks the beginning of Cosmoimaginaries, in ssociation with Ecologies, Technologies an experimental practice and knowledge sharing programme focusing on ecological and cosmic imaginaries in relation to planetary activism.
This event is hosted by Ecologies, Technologies and Cassie Robinson at Care and Climate. Created through relations with Dr Mona Nasseri and the students of the Ecological Design Thinking MA at Schumacher College.
The launch event for Cosmoimaginaries, celebrating the moon and entangled questions of ecologies, technologies and culture in the Second Space age.
A new era of lunar exploration has arrived, and with it a new phase of activism. Numerous lunar missions are scheduled for the coming years and space agencies and private companies across the planet engage in the return of humans to the moon.
How do we tend a different approach to lunar ecologies? An approach that goes beyond industrial exploitation and extraction? And, how does this change our relations to our own damaged earth?
Meeting these questions entails cultural transformations, new kinds of work and storytelling, fresh lunar governance, future scenarios, communication and energy generation. The establishment of international human settlements on the moon entails a new phase of lunar feeling, sensing and perceiving.
The evening brings together a diverse community of creatives to reflect on the moon's connection to art, imagination, and activism. The speakers engage in a variety of creative practices and research endeavours that relate to the moon and her cycles, engaging with all that is processual, nocturnal, embodied and tidal.
We invite you to join us by the Thames and dream with the moon, as we convene at the projected site for Aluna London - a new building to track lunar time in the city, designed by Laura Williams - bringing together tide and time to explore the art, science and ecologies of the river.
PROGRAMME
Rachel Blackman will guide us through an embodied practice to start by opening an embodied connection with the moon and the watery tides of the body.
Louise Beer will show her art project Gathering Light and other works incorporating and reflecting on the moon, as well as her work convening the Creatures network, relating to the moon during the Pandemic.
Devon-based artist Laura Williams and artist, activist and Aluna trustee Lucy Neal—a Greenwich project: a monumental lunar-tidal clock and public space for ecological and cultural imagination. Aluna will be located where time meets tide, at at 0° longitude on the banks of the Thames just across from Canary Wharf.
Kate Genevieve will share performance work about the connection between life on earth and beyond the planet, relating to research planned for the far side of the moon.
BIOGRAPHIES
Louise Beer - Louise lived in Aotearoa New Zealand until 2002 before moving to the UK. Louise uses installation, moving image, photography and sound to explore humanity's evolving understanding of Earth’s environments and the cosmos. Louise’s experience of living under two types of night sky, the first with low levels of light pollution in Aotearoa, and the second with higher levels of light pollution in the UK, has deeply informed her practice. She explores how living under dark skies, or light polluted skies, can change our perception of grief, the climate crisis and Earth’s deep time history and future.
Rachel Blackman - is a Theatre Maker and performance artist, a masterful Improviser and Somatic Coach, trained as a Feldenkrais Practitioner and is currently training in Comprehensive Resource Model.Rachel trained and worked as an actor in Australia before relocating to England - you may remember her as Chara in The Matrix films. Since re-locating her work brings together theatre making and somatic education in many performances, workshops, events and offerings to her online community. Her areas of specialism include creativity, bodywork modalities and somatic movement, and she trains coaches to work with embodied intelligence at The Somatic School.
Kate Genevieve - London-born artist and researcher Kate Genevieve, now residing in Aotearoa New Zealand, entangles embodied and virtual realities, performance art, and dreaming technologies to deepen understanding of planetary and ecological communication. Currently collaborating with Schumacher College on Ecologies, Technologies, an experimental hybrid programme on creative technologies and the new commons. Her work is rooted in a sense that embodied, relational, creative life feeds activism and transformation in real ways.
Lucy Neal - Lucy is an artist, writer and co-director of Walking Forest, a ten-year public art work inspired by forest ecology and the undertold stories of women Earth-defenders. A theatre-maker at heart, she was co-founder director of the LIFT Festival (1981-2005) and enjoys creating space for stories that act as a catalyst for change. Co-author of The Turning World - Stories from the London International Festival of Theatre (Gulbenkian) and author of Zero Carbon Britain’s The Great Imagining, she is a founder ‘declarer’ of Culture Declares Emergency and a director of Forever Fishponds reclaiming flourishing green habitat in Tooting, South West London where she lives. She is a Trustee of the Aluna Foundation.
Laura Williams - Laura is an artist, musician and farmer working on a agro-ecological producer cooperative and regional food network in Devon. For over 25 years she has been developing Aluna with a multi-disciplinary team towards construction on the Thames, bringing together the arts, community engagement, lighting, ecology, science and engineering. The first capital element - a 554 panel solar array - was installed by South East London Community energy just as the country locked down in March 2020. Post-pandemic, Aluna now reawakens for its final development and construction phases.
References
Backhouse, Janet. The Illuminated Manuscript. Oxford: Phaidon, 1979, fig. 4.
Dekker, Elly. Illustrating the Phaenomena: Celestial Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Oxford: University Press, 2013, pp. 145-46, 148, 150, 159, 163, 167-68, 173, 175, 239.
Galileo. Images of the Universe from Antiquity to the Telescope. Edited by Paolo Galluzzi. Exhibition catalogue, Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 13 March-30 August 2009. Florence: Giunti, 2009, no. II.4.1.
Morrison, Elizabeth. Beasts: Factual & Fantastic. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007, p. 49.
Nordenfalk, Carl. Book Illumination: Early Middle Ages. Geneva: Editions d'art Albert Skira, 1995; originally printed as Early Medieval Painting. New York: Skira, 1957, pl. on p. 9.
Ottley, W.Y. "On a Manuscript of Cicero's Translation of Aratus, Supposed to be of the 2d or 3d Century." Archaeologia: Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity 26 (1836), pp. 47-214.
The Cosmography of Aethicus Ister. Edited by Michael W. Herren. Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 8. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011, p. lxxii, n. 134.
Whitfield, Peter. The Mapping of the Heavens. London: British Library, 1995, pl. on p. 35.
🗓️
June Solstice 23
Lunar Imaginaries 🌙
Thu, 22 Jun 2023 18:00 - 21:00 BST
Venue:
Care & Climate
Peyton Place Greenwich
SE10 8RS
United Kingdom
at being told that it is a fragment
awaiting perfection.
A special solstice launch event for Cosmoimaginaries, celebrating the moon and entangled questions of ecologies, technologies and culture in the Second Space age.
A new era of lunar exploration has arrived, and with it a new phase of activism. Numerous lunar missions are scheduled for the coming years and space agencies and private companies across the planet engage in the return of humans to the moon.
How do we tend a different approach to lunar ecologies? An approach that goes beyond industrial exploitation and extraction? And, how does this change our relations to our own damaged earth?
Meeting these questions entails cultural transformations, new kinds of work and storytelling, fresh lunar governance, future scenarios, communication and energy generation. The establishment of international human settlements on the moon entails a new phase of lunar feeling, sensing and perceiving.
The evening brings together a diverse community of creatives to reflect on the moon's connection to art, imagination, and activism. The speakers engage in a variety of creative practices and research endeavours that relate to the moon and her cycles, engaging with all that is processual, nocturnal, embodied and tidal.
We invite you to join us by the Thames and dream with the moon, as we convene at the projected site for Aluna London - a new building to track lunar time in the city, designed by Laura Williams - bringing together tide and time to explore the art, science and ecologies of the river.