Staying with the trouble: event programme

On Friday 6 December 2019, we held our annual Symposium in Friends House, London, entitled Staying with the trouble: Critical and creative approaches to the climate and biodiversity crises. This is one of the key themes in our Research Strategy, and Donna Haraway very kindly lent her book title to the event.

The Symposium took the form of three conversations with our event collaborators below. The event programme attached also includes a short blog series by landscape architect Vanessa Lastrucci, who works at the intersection of landscape architecture, urbanism and environmental practices.

We welcomed a sell-out audience and collaborators from a broad range of creative backgrounds for a series of conversations, facilitated by performance ecologist Ruth Little. Our event collaborators were:

• Amanda Thomson, Lecturer, Glasgow School of Art
• Andrew Patrizio, Chair of Scottish Visual Culture, Edinburgh College of Art
• Anupama Ranawana, Visiting Researcher, Oxford Brookes University
• George Revill, Senior Lecturer, Open University
• Lisa Garforth, Senior Lecturer, University of Newcastle
• Ruth Little (facilitator), performance ecologist/dramaturg
• sensingsite, a practice-based research group at Central Saint Martins, who performed an audio piece, ‘Landfill’, created as a direct response to the Symposium themes

Recognising there are contested understandings of ‘landscape,’ we believe arts and creative practice has core value to research, asking key questions, and challenging received wisdom and current thinking to develop new visions for just and sustainable relationships between people and landscapes.

In early 2018, we part-funded a workshop in partnership with Valuing Nature at the National Gallery in London entitled “Arts and the artist in landscape and environmental research today.” This led to a report produced by Valuing Nature, on “Valuing arts and arts research,” and laid the groundwork for this Symposium.