Due to unforeseen circumstances, Mojisola Adebayo and Nicole Wolf's public online lecture in the 'What Can a Garden Be?' series that was scheduled for Tuesday 23 March at 18.30 has been postponed until the Summer term. An announcement of the confirmed schedule for the Summer term will follow shortly.
Join Zoom meeting: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/92204023107?pwd=bWJRMEduck5sVFZieFpkeGdlaXlnUT09
What could anti-colonial cultivation practices and anti-racist environmentalisms be in an urban context? How might they work from and with the many different relations and kinds of access to soil, to grounds, to commons, to urban infrastructures and to past and present structural racism and violence? What methodologies, what forms of inquiry, what collective and collaborative processes might we need to develop, to create the conditions to explore such practices? What embodied ways of thinking and being together on the ground could support the work towards repair without redemption, without diversion of toxicity to an elsewhere, without appropriation and forgetful solutions.
Mojisola Adebayo and Nicole Wolf will reflect on and further develop the “Agri/cultural Practice” workshop that was part of the “Growing from the ruins of modernity” (2019), a project by Marco Clausen and Åsa Sonjasdotter (for Neighbourhood Academy, at Prinzessinengarten, a community garden in Berlin). The workshop was part of an ongoing research process which explores permaculture ethics and principles and environmental racism through embodied and playful pedagogical methods of agri-cultural practice. Methods might lead to an assemblage of articulations along different forms of address in diverse registers including designs for accessible gardens, building up soil on concrete debris, growing food, reading groups, reflective writing and a theatre play.
Mojisola Adebayo (Berlin / London) is a playwright, performer, director, producer, workshop facilitator and lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. She holds a BA in Drama and Theatre Arts, an MA in Physical Theatre and a PhD in black queer theatre (Goldsmiths, Royal Holloway and Queen Mary, University of London). Mojisola trained extensively with Augusto Boal and is a specialist in Theatre of the Oppressed, working particularly in locations of conflict and crisis. She has worked in theatre, radio and television, on four continents, over the past 25 years, performing in over 50 productions, writing, devising and directing over 30 plays, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. Her own plays are concerned with climate change, racism, slavery, occupation, homophobia, Islamaphobia, gender-based violence, state crime and the Black Lives Matter movement. Publications include Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One and Plays Two (Oberon Books), 48 Minutes for Palestine in Theatre in Pieces (Methuen), and The Theatre for Development Handbook (co-written with John Martin and Manisha Mehta). Afriquia Theatre: Black Queer British Plays and Practitioners, co-edited with Lynette Goddard, is out in 2021 (Bloomsbury Methuen). Her latest play exploring the politics of sexual pleasure, STARS, opens in London in 2021. Mojisola was commissioned by the National Theatre to write Wind / Rush Generation(s), opening in 2021. She is currently writing Family Tree, which investigates gynaecology and gardening, historical medical experiments on Black women and soil extraction today. Family Tree is commissioned by Young Vic and ATC.
Nicole Wolf (Berlin/ London) is Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research, writing, pedagogical and curatorial projects have concentrated on political cinemas in South Asia and anti-colonial struggles, the co-constitutive processes and poetics of artistic, activist and movement narratives and more recently on agri/cultural practices and a Cinématics of the Soil. Her participation in ‘Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic Practice’ and ‘Archive ausser sich’ (both projects by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin) included research and writing for the restoration of film works by Yugantar, the first feminist film collective in India (1980-83) as well as the development of “Soil – City- Solidarity”, an interdisciplinary urban permaculture design course, and the symposium “’Tell me what matter was the ground’ – Repair beyond redemption”. Recent publications are “Is this just a story? Friendships and fictions for speculative alliances. The Yugantar film collective (1980-83)”, in MIRAJ 7.2. “Fugitive Remains: Soil, Celluloid and Resistant Collectivities”, with Sheikh, Shela; Ros Gray; Filipa César; Raphaël Grisey, and Bouba Touré. In: Cooking Sections, ed. The Empire Remains Shop. New York: Columbia Books, 2018. “In the Wake of Gujarat: The Social Relations of Translation and Futurity”. Critical Studies, 4, 2019. pp. 97-113. She is editor of the first book on the audio-visual and literary works of Merle Kroeger and Philip Scheffner, commissioned by Deutsche Dokumentarfilm Initiative, forthcoming 2021.