Ama Josephine Budge: Water Bodies

During her residency, Ama Josephine Budge is taking time to walk beside the River Thames. Ama is motivated by questions of belonging and memory, who and what is discarded. She is interested in how our lives and those of our more-than-human kin might be documented and passed on.  

Throughout the residency, Ama invites a number of collaborators to walk beside the Thames with her as she collects debris and flotsam from its banks. She will be gathering these words and ephemera for an “anti-monument”, a sculpture to be gifted back to the river, and a film artwork documenting the process.  

Inspired by adrienne maree brown’s suggestion that we need to ‘re-earn our right to be on this planet’, Ama considers not only how we can renew our relationship with nature, but on what terms that relationship might flourish and unfurl, over more-than-human temporalities, flowing in time with the river.  

About Ama Josephine Budge 

Ama Josephine Budge is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, curator and pleasure activist. Her praxis navigates queer explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism. Ama’s installation, written and video art works have been commissioned, exhibited and published internationally.  

Ama is an Associate Lecturer in Culture, Criticism & Curation at Central Saint Martins UAL. She is currently completing her PhD on Intimate Ecologies: Queer Speculations on Pleasure, Blackness and Decolonial Aesthetics at Birkbeck University of London. Ama has written more short stories than she’s ever actually counted, was nominated for the 2021 Arts Foundation Environmental Writing Award, and is working on her first novel. This novel, a speculative meditation on sentient trees, queer erotics and isolation, was shortlisted for the 2023 Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy & Science Fiction Writers of Colour.

Find out more about Cultural Reforesting, our series of artist-led, multi-disciplinary projects that address the question: How can we renew our relationship with nature?