ART HISTORY FESTIVAL 2025
15-19 September 2025
| This year, the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths is taking part in the Association for Art History’s annual festival. As part of the 2025 theme Art and Nature, Visual Cultures is hosting a series of lectures, workshops, and events from 15–19 September at Goldsmiths and beyond. The Art History Festival is a UK-wide, free, annual event for the public, organised and promoted by the Association for Art History. The festival consists of free public events staged by participating galleries, museums, arts organisations and individuals from all parts of the UK, as well as by the Association itself, over one week in September. The programme includes free talks, tours, workshops and family activities, including in-person, live online and recording events. |
| 'Landscaping' with Visual Cultures: Paradise Lost · Lecture, 15 Sep |
'Landscaping' with Visual Cultures: Demarcations · Lecture, 15 Sep
Learning Collaboration with Fungi – A Guided Walk · Workshop, 17 Sep
The Labyrinth as Recollective Landscape · Workshop, 17 Sep
River Logistics, Plantation Imaginaries: De-sedimenting Deptford · Event, 17 Sep
Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Ruins, 2010.
Who will remember us? Memoir from a more than human
13 July 2025
Art Research Garden
A workshop by The Hildegard von Bingen Society run by Chiara Dellerba
Artist and curator Chiara Dellerba led a gentle exploration of a meaningful encounter with a more-than-human species that has shaped your identity, sensorial memories, or habits. Through a mixed-media approach combining creative writing and visual, non-linear representation, we will journey back in time to reflect on the importance of multispecies relationships in shaping the self and consider how this process can inspire new ways of inhabiting shared ecosystems. To preserve these memories and spark imagination, a Hildegard’s famous Fire Cider Vinegar was created by the participants.
21 September 2015
The Cosmic egg and the journey through the more than human time
2-3:30 pm
Online
Join artist and curator Chiara Dellerba on a journey through time and space, reimagining the history of human and more-than-human relationships. Inspired by Hildegard von Bingen’s Cosmic Egg, we will craft our own visual time infographics to rethink and represent alternative worlds from a more-than-human perspective. To make the journey tastier and more soothing, we will also prepare Hildegard’s famous Parsley Wine together.
To join the online workshop, please email The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions to receive the event link.
HIDDEN THIRD PARTNER: IN THE COMPANY OF YEAST
23 June 2025
Art Research Garden
A workshop by Ayșe Köklü, Brandon LaBelle and Jol Thoms
A relaxed afternoon in the Art Research Garden in communion with "wild" local yeast with guests Ayşe Köklü, Brandon LaBelle and Jol Thoms. The space was held for this microscopic agent of flux in the form of a microbial meditation, a starter ceremony and ecological and speculative listening praxis, fermentation and other transformational processes such as gleaning, washing, kneading and baking.
A sourdough starter was initiated during the day to cultivate a listening praxis with the wild yeast to span up to the associated London Listening Biennial workshop in Autumn 2025.
20-21 March 2025
Art Research Garden and Art and Ecology Laboratory
The Singing Compost workshop was an occasion for hands-on experimentation in soil microbiology inspired by a citizen-science approach. The aim of such activity was to test and disseminate accessible tools and methods for soil health monitoring and improvement. The active, practice-based nature of the activity also created a different mindset for conversations.
The workshop was an opportunity for discussing priorities, intentions and directions following on the original Singing Compost project, aiming for further development towards a range of practice-based research activities such as workshops, trials, soil testing, publications, community and public-facing events.
It was anticipated that the workshop will yield clear starting points for further collaborative work around soil science and soil health, creative public engagement, and climate action.
Initial research questions included:
- How can an artistic, citizen science-based approach contribute to outputs in soil science and technology?
- How can a citizen science approach to soil microbiological processes allow the development of methods to be applied for art and science projects with an agenda of public engagement on climate action?
- How can the collaborative and relatively low-tech approach practically inform the development of useful tools based on soil health and monitoring for art and science applications?
27 February 2025
Goldsmiths, University of London
What might site-sensitivity rather than site-specificity mean as a political, ethical and aesthetic commitment? Sensitivity shifts emphasis from the objects or sites of attention to the practices of engagement, to perceptiveness rather than perception, to responsiveness and sensibilities. It encourages sensing the way before any attempts at making sense, so as to safeguard the un-predefined space-time of encounters. Sensing implies figuring out how to request permission, what guidance to look for, who makes meaning and has stories to tell, how the senses of the place can be shared, and what might the impacts of my landing on a site be. It is not up to a human individual alone to determine these specificities and their timelines, means or ends. Rather, site-sensitivity calls for attentiveness to all the human and more-than-human communities, who were already on-site and who will bear the consequences of our actions. It demands acknowledgement that sites also affect us, and when becoming sensitised our practices need to be adjusted and realigned accordingly.
Seminar on site-sensitivity gathers together to reflect on what might this mean in and through practice in the expanded field of contemporary art. It addresses site-sensitivity neither as an alternative to the notion of site-specificity nor as a particular applicable methodology as such, but rather as an emergent approach that can only arise out of processes and practices of entanglement with specific sites. To begin the conversation, curator Taru Elfving and artist Lotta Petronella share their collaborative practices, which are deeply indebted to and informed by the island of Seili in the Baltic Sea, where they have been working for years together with scientists and artists. From this situated perspective Elfving and Petronella continue to address the intricately interwoven ecological and biopolitical histories as they manifest in the present and gesture towards possible futures, across various temporal and geographical scales.
The participants are invited to bring to the seminar experiences and examples on how we might understand site-sensitivity from a range of partial perspectives. The discussion sets out to explore how site-sensitive practices might also hold significant potential in nurturing inter/transdisciplinary collaborations that are urgently required in response to the web of escalating socio-ecological crises. Site-sensitive approaches might even guide us towards undisciplinarity, to critically reflect on how the hierarchical structures of knowledge discipline our practices and encounters.
Towards Site-Sensitivity is organised by the Centre for Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths, University of London in partnership with CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago and it contributes to the development of a future collaborative research project. The seminar is part of the launch activities of the Undisciplinary Institute for Art and Ecology, a new initiative by CAA.
CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago is a curatorial collective founded by Elfving and Petronella. CAA has been initiating longterm enquiries in Turku Archipelago, off the southwest coast of Finland since 2009 in collaboration with artists, diverse scientific organisations, and other actors across the Baltic Sea region. https://contemporaryartarchipelago.org/
Taru Elfving is a curator and writer focused on nurturing undisciplinary and site-sensitive enquiries at the intersections of ecological, feminist and decolonial practices. As artistic director of CAA, she leads a research residency programme on the island of Seili in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute (University of Turku, FI). She is also a curatorial researcher at the newly launched Centre for Sustainable Ocean Science SOS at Åbo Akademi University (FI). She has a PhD from Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London.
Lotta Petronella is a filmmaker, artist and writer based on an island in Finland. She has worked with and on islands for nearly two decades. Since her internationally awarded film Själö - Island of Souls (2020), she has been leading a multidisciplinary collaborative research Själö Poeisis on the island of Seili. Her latest work Materia Medica of Islands was previewed at Vallisaari, Helsinki Biennial in 2023. In addition to her filmmaking and art practice, Petronella is a devoted medicine and flower essence maker and tarot scholar. She also writes poems, makes soundscapes and runs a podcast called Little Screams.
Lotta Petronella, Själö Poeisis, 2022. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
17 December 2024
Telegraph Hill Tennis Courts and Goldsmiths, University of London
Organised by the Centre for Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths, and the RCA Sites and Situations and Health and Care Research Clusters
On 17 December 2024, Centre for Art and Ecology member Dr Jess Potter convened Language and Landscape, conversations in the company of artworks. The gathering began at the Telegraph Hill Upper Park Tennis Courts before moving to the Goldsmiths Curating Seminar Room for conversations between Dr Jesse Ash and Dr Jess Potter and Sara Trillo, Claire Baily and Dr Anna Colin.
This event was designed to support and facilitate thinking about ecologies of care and acts of restoration in the form of conversations alongside art works. It aimed to build connections across research activities, bringing together practitioners from Goldsmiths' Centre for Art and Ecology and the RCA Sites and Situations and Health and Care research clusters.
Image courtesy Anna Colin and Jess Potter.
27 September 2024
Art Research Garden
41-43 Lewisham Way, London SE14 6QD
This autumn marked the official launch of the Centre for Art and Ecology, a day filled with stimulating talks, discussions, and activities led by members of the Centre and collaborators who have influenced its development. Highlights included: moving at a mycelial pace with Lenka Vráblíková, listening to The Singing Compost with Harun Morrison and Paul Granjon, John Little and Benny Hawksbee on brownfield sites and chaos ecology, exploring the joys and challenges of working with biomaterials with Claire Baily, and a conversation between Dr Nirmal Puwar and Dr Ros Gray on Puwar's concept of space invaders, plant and human migration, belonging and possibilities for co-existence, not to mention tasting a soil ice cream made from compost with co-director of the Kitchen Research Unit Dr Michael Guggenheim.
Image courtesy Urte Janus and Jess Potter.