In Conversation with Ackroyd & Harvey

“What if we could fashion a restoration plan that grew from multiple meanings of land?  Land as sustainer.  Land as identity.  Land as grocery store and pharmacy.  Land as connection to ancestors.  Land as moral obligation. Land as sacred.  Land as self.”  Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013

Inspired by Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s exquisitely framed question, artists Ackroyd & Harvey will be in conversation with invited guests Sarah Edwards, Zena Edwards and Raffael Jovine to ask where do we begin?  Where and how do we plant seeds of renewal and whose voice and vision will be heard and shared in the process of restoring land and relationship to land?  Biocultural or reciprocal restoration is an emerging exemplar of a new holistic approach, rooted in indigenous legacy that reveals land as a community of more-than-human species to whom humans have a responsibility.  How may we draw on cultural imaginings to renew and revitalise and act on behalf of life to bring about transformation?

Sarah is an ethnobotanist with an interdisciplinary background straddling the life and social sciences. Her career has included working as a freelance consultant and as an employee of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, UCL and Oxford University – where she currently teaches ethnobiology and biological conservation. Much of Sarah’s teaching is based on insights gleaned from working on collaborative ethnobiology projects with Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. Outside of academia, Sarah sits on the Board of the British Herbal Medicine Association and is a Trustee of the charity London Gypsies and Travellers.

Zena is a poet, performer and climate activist who uses song, movement and global influences as a jump-off for her words. Edwards’ fuses traditional African-instrumentation (the Kalimba and Kora) and new technology to create soundtracks for her poems and stories, producing a body of work that reaches culturally and generationally diverse audiences on an international level.  As a multidisciplinary collaborator, Zena has collaborated with The Last Poets, Hugh Masekela, choreographer and dancer Akram Khan (Xenos), Visual Artist – Theaster Gates (Soul Manufacturing Company) and radical filmmaker Fahim Alam, (Riots Reframed). Zena is radical arts educator and creative director of Verse in Dialog – an arts, culture and public engagement production house dedicated to championing the arts for positive change

Raffael has worked on algal photosynthesis since before his undergraduate studies.  He has grown algae under Antarctic pack-ice and in the Omani deserts.  He is the inventor of an algal growth platform to produce new food from Sun Sea and Wind (Susewi).  He actively supports the development of the healthy, new foods, is the co-founder of Susewi and author of ‘Light to Life: The Miracle of Photosynthesis and How it can save the Planet’.

Artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey are exhibiting in Remember the Future at Orleans House Gallery and are currently artist in residence.

This session is hosted on Zoom.