From the Ground Up 16 July | 11am – 6pm
Join us here for live-streamed highlights from our event 'From the Ground Up: The Gathering'. All live-streamed talks will be live-captioned. Please click here to see the Captions with adjustable formatting
Online Schedule
11: Introduction from Rosie Cooper, Wysing Director
11.10: James Boyce and Elsa Noterman in conversation, chaired by Rosie Cooper Fenland communities fought to keep their common land for over a hundred years. Strategies to quash these lively resistance movements in the 17th century became a blueprint for Britain’s Imperial project. Access to space in Cambridgeshire remains contested; the countryside and parts of the City are inaccessible to many. How can we learn from the past, change structures of ownership and control, to re-shape access to public space and the land?
Join James Boyce, award-winning author of Imperial Mud: the Fight for the Fens, 2020, in conversation with Dr Elsa Noterman, Junior Research Fellow and Director of Studies for Geography at Queens' College Cambridge.
12.10: Khairani Barokka and Bella Milroy in-conversation, chaired by Hannah Wallis If ‘normative time’ can be understood as artificial and possible to change, what can we learn from ‘crip time’ as a new way of understanding time that acknowledges different lived realities? Join Bella Milroy and Khairani Barokka in thinking through and with crip time in relation to rural contexts and anti-colonial praxis.
Khairani Barokka is an Indonesian writer and artist in London, whose work centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, and has presented widely internationally. Okka is the new Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Her latest book is Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.
Bella Milroy is an artist and writer who lives in her hometown of Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She works responsively through mediums of sculpture, drawings, photography, writing and text. She makes work about making work (and being disabled) and not being able to make work (and being disabled).
2.30: (Im)possible Projects – Olivier Castel and John Eng Kiet Bloomfield Artist Olivier Castel is joined by Wysing Senior Programme Curator John Eng Kiet Bloomfield for a discussion of a series of works originally proposed during his residency at Wysing in 2014. These included a waterway linking the two ponds on Wysing’s site and transplanting a largescale screen from New York’s Times Square to Wysing’s site. Conceived as interventions to the site, their ambition, scale and cost has prevented them from ever being realised.
Olivier Castel usually presents work under heteronyms and has created over thirty different identities since 2001. Often using ephemeral or temporal forms he works primarily with projections, reflective surfaces, light, text and audio. His work functions as a set of propositions, employing the imaginary and exploring the process by which something is made visible.
4.30: Jo Capper and Akil Scafe-Smith, RESOLVE Collective, in conversation, chaired by Lucy Shipp What role can cultural spaces that are custodians of land, like Wysing, play in fostering a sense of ownership in public space? How can the resources that the culture sector currently holds contribute better to grassroots justice work? What are the imaginative possibilities of divestment?
Jo Capper is Grand Union (Birmingham)’s Collaborative Programme Curator. Capper is an artist educator with a strong desire to heal, restore and do good in the world, creating alternative cultural and living practices that start with simple acts of growing or sharing food - embodying the cultural specifics of human conviviality.
Akil Scafe-Smith is part of RESOLVE Collective, an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. Much of their work aims to provide platforms for celebrating local knowledge as well as organising and collaborating in communities.
About 'From the Ground Up: The Gathering'
'From the Ground Up' takes Wysing’s rural context, abundant land and neighbouring Fenland (at risk due to climate change, and rich in histories of land-based struggle) as a rich context for thought and action about topics including land rights, ownership and access, sustainability, environmental time and crip time, growing, wildness and racial justice.
The day will bring together a range of practitioners and thinkers for a mini-festival of talks, walks, workshops, screenings, informal conversations over lunch, readings and tastings. There will also be an expanded digital programme unfolding in the weeks before and after the event. Selected highlights will be presented live on this page throughout the day.