Orionids Workshop, 2024
cosmoimaginaries art science workshop
Date: September 23 - 28, 2024
Place: Chartres, France
Cosmoimaginaries brings together a range of creatives - artists, poets, designers - with researchers, scientists, anthropologists, and early-career researchers to explore ecological approaches to inner and outer space.
The Cosmoimaginaries Orionids Sessions 2024 will take place when Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is visible in the predawn sky in the ancient town of Chartres in France - a place with a rich history of learning about relations between inner and outer space.
Across the period, we come together as a creative community to work on, devise and develop creative projects.
By engaging in dialogue across differences with 'rigour and imagination’, as ecologist Gregory Bateson suggests, we meet in creative community in times of grave conflict and climate disaster, to feel and sense new paths and relational connections in the 2nd space age.
Timetable
Online/hybrid sessions week of the 23rd September - 27th September
Getting there
For those coming to walk the labyrinth in remembrance for the ecologist Stephan Harding on Friday 27th, Chartres is one hour from Paris by train. Please arrive by 11am, so we have good time to make the walk.
* Stephan’s obituary in The Guardian
Staying in Chartres overnight? Let’s organise an evening meal. Get in touch
This event is scheduled in relation to celestial events. A week during the Orionids meteor shower to explore the origins of life, language, and cultural knowledge through warm, creative community.
Following on from 2023’s theme of Lunar Imaginaries, the 2024 focus is ‘Starry Migrations and the new space age’ - an opportunity to learn about relations across place and migrating birds, the planetary, and beyond -inspired by the paths of migrating birds who traverse the land not limited by national borders, and the avian myths that feature in many constellations across cultures. The birds are the mediators of the heavens. This theme opens up thinking about the langauge of the birds—‘la langue des oiseaux’— and the flows of life and communication connecting earth and cosmos.
The Orionids Workshop, in its combination of art, science and embodied approaches, is shaped together with attendees: daily sessions for creative practice, presentations on animal studies and space science, and special sessions feeling and sensing with the night sky and Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.
In light connection with the Emerging Practices Working Group at the Post Detection Hub St Andrews, the week emphasises process-based and creative research in connection with the discovery of life beyond earth and the field of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), learning with material practices and cultural ways of understanding our place in the Universe.
As well as studio time and attending workshops, there will be social events and dialogues, growing connections with each other and the ancient hill of Chartres.
This art sceince programme is for making and creating with plural process-based approaches in relation to emerging understandings of the cosmos and comparative theoretical work on the foundations of communication and life. These include cultural ethnographies, creative practice, myth and dream, storytelling of the stars, embodied and planetary creative technologies, science fiction and futures, playful improvisation and scenario-building. The time together takes focus on creative projects and mutual learning seriously, welcoming all as both teachers and students.
Theme for 2024: Starry Migrations and the new space age
The broad themes of this meeting are:
STS - more-than-human relations in the new space age
Continuing learning around bird migrations and time, the workshop encourages learning about the birds of the region. Whether it is the wood pigeon, the swifts or the black-tailed godwit that will be leaving the Atlantic coast, from Brittany to Bordeaux, during the meeting. How have artists worked with birds, for example artist Trudy Lane’s dedicated work with the godwit in Aotearoa New Zealand, and how might we use creative practice to learn about the birds local to France, or the African-Eurasian migratory shorebirds who make the journey northwards from West Africa, stopping along the way in Spain, Portugal and France, pausing in the Wadden Sea and breeding in the Netherlands and Iceland. Creatively, we trace tangled histories of migration of beings and knowledge along pathways that run across borders, and explore how bird populations, migration patterns and the life cycles of migratory birds are shifting with climate change and conflicts.
Creative Practice - working with cosmic senses
The meeting occurs during the convergence of different space events - the annual Meteor Shower Orionids meteor shower, and the return of Tsuchinshan-ATLAS after 80,000 years. We will explore feeling and sensing, dreaming and painting to invite relations with the meteor, and experiment with playful creative modes of not only observing but relating to the stars. We will explore the labyrinth journey as an ancient embodied technique, tracing transcultural histories of the “journey of the soul” - in European traditions like Cicero’s The Dream of Scipio and Dante's Divine Comedy.
Emerging Practice - ecological apporaches to communication and flux
What fresh approaches and hydrated theories can we grow through the entanglement of themes of animal language, cosmograms, the flows of beings and wisdom across land and sea, pilgrimage and forced migration seeking safe passage? How can we grow creative, pragmatic, historical, useful understandings of bodies and cultures in connection to cosmic bodies, celestial events and wild weather systems. Creative work and feeling and sensing techniques are enriched by readings with the philosophers of hydrofeminism, vital materialities and deep time, political ecologies and the Environmental Humanities, to encourage varied and grounded approaches to the search for life in the Universe into dialogue with shifting, changing ecologies in motion.
More info, please get in contact
References
Backhouse, Janet. The Illuminated Manuscript. Oxford: Phaidon, 1979, fig. 4.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, and Pearman, Wd. Somnium Scipionis, the Dream of Scipio Africanus Minor, Being the Epilogue of Cicero's Treatise on Polity. N.p., Creative Media Partners, LLC, 2022.
Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Paradise. A new translation by J. G. Nichols. Pp. 541. Richmond, Surrey: Alma Classics, 2012.
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.
Russell, Charlie J.G. et al. Active European warzone impacts raptor migration. Current Biology, Volume 34, Issue 10, 2272 - 2277.e2
Whitfield, Peter. The Mapping of the Heavens. London: British Library, 1995, pl. on p. 35.