Description
Laura Harrington & Meredith Root-Bernstein
Cleambering (River Dart)
Wednesday June 29 • 09:30 – 11:00
OUTDOORS/by River Dart
About the Workshop
The flows, cycles and patterns of water in landscapes condition urgent problems of survival for living things, but also tell us about long historical processes of transformation. Rocks, river valleys, watersheds, mountains, plains, estuaries,—whole geographies—are formed by water, as are grasslands, shrublands, forests, deserts and all their ecologies. Where water goes, grasses, grazing animals, humans and their infrastructures cluster. Our “Cleambering Manifesto” (2018) proposes a practice of somatic attention to rocks to understand and enter into a physical dialogue with them about the processes of water, wind, soil formation, and so on, that have shaped them. “Cleambering” combines the words “clambering” and “meandering” to point to a kinaesthetic and reflective practice. For this workshop, we draw on our manifesto and invite participants to enter into a dialogue with the river Dart and the processes and forces that shape it. In doing so we will ask how our attention to and interaction with the behaviour of the water itself, the rocks it forms and the living things it moves among in the riverbed, can bring a richness of observation and add depth to our understanding of multiple networks. When we cleamber with the water and its rocks, we aim to understand its particular force, the contingency of its behaviour, and its local desires.
About Laura & Meredith:
Laura Harrington is an artist, researcher and creative producer living and working in the North East of England. Her work explores the complex relations between humans and
unstable/overlooked landscapes, often through cross-disciplinary research and co-production. Situated between art, science and philosophy her practice of film-making, installation, drawing, fieldwork and listening seeks to create works that center on an idea of ‘upstream consciousness’, an ethos for engaging with the source as opposed to the results, that draws on upland ecologies to think about various relations and connections. Recent exhibitions and residencies include EKO8 (Slovenia), MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK), Projections (Tyneside Cinema, UK), UNIDEE/Cittadellarte, (Biella, Italy), Hangmen Projects (Stockholm), HIAP (Helsinki International Arts Programme, Finland), Durham University (Leverhulme), Invisible Dust, UK & BALTIC 39, UK. She is a current practice-based PhD candidate with BxNU at Northumbria University.
Meredith Root-Bernstein is an ethnobiologist, translational ecologist and conservationist, with an interest in degradation and restoration ecology, ethnography of human-environment relationships, governance and policy. Her research focuses on anthropogenic and marginal habitats, mediterranean-climate and semi-arid areas. She is the co-founder of the Chilean rewilding NGO Kintu which works to reestablish a connected socio-ecological system through reintroducing guanacos and other species in central Chile. In addition she has a diploma in experimentation and research in art from ENDA, and teaches embodied cognition for the Thinking About Thinking diploma at the Free University of Brussels, and nonhuman design for the GEO-Design masters course at Eindhoven Design Academy.
PLACES ARE LIMITED TO 10
