Tending Waste, Cultivating Life: Creative Climate ‘Night School’
Sunlight Liberation Network x Arts Catalyst Online, 6-8pm 19th February
Dani Admiss, Maya Chowdhry, Manual Labours (Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards), Angela YT Chan x Bóxī Wú, 18:00 - 20:00 19/2/2025 #Online #Workshop
Join us for an evening of online participatory learning and sharing hosted by Arts Catalyst and Dani Admiss and led by artists Maya Chowdhry, Manual Labours (Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards) and Angela YT Chan x Bóxī Wú.
In an online ‘night school’, we are inviting others to share in our learning and participate in our programme in experiential ways.
Audience members will have the choice of whether to join Angela YT Chan x Bóxī Wú explore low-tech solutions to sustain life and community against big tech; create a musical score with Maya Chowdhry and learn how to nudge our community whilst letting people go their own way; and hear from Manual Labours with their perspectival shifting experiment ‘Toilet Breaks’ helping us to reimagine and reorganising rest and work in the arts.
Following this, we will all come together for a reflective discussion, and to learn about three imaginative learning resources that have been designed by Public Tactics (flematu sessay) who will share their process and tips.
We will finish the evening with a special guest performance.
The event is free and open to all. No experience or knowledge is needed—the event is a generative and open ‘thinking space’
Please reserve a place so you can receive the zoom link. If you can no longer make it, please cancel your ticket so your place can be reallocated.
Please book your ticket via Eventbrite.
Check out Arts Catalyst Event Webpage for more details.
ACCESS: The event takes place online over 2 hours, with a 10-minute break built in away from screens. It will be captioned, and key instructions typed into the chat.
For more information please email: admin@artscatalyst.org or call Arts Catalyst on 07871 358337
This programme supports creative climate justice, please consider donating to the Atmos Trusts Climate Justice Appeal if you are attending the event Atmos Trust Palestine Justice.
December to January
As part of our programme Tending Waste, Cultivating Life, we held workshops with artists and Sheffield-based organisations exploring ways to sustain life against enduring forms of waste and disposability.
Maya Chowdhry worked with local food business and social enterprise Roshni’s Kitchen to reduce their cafe’s food waste. Responding to Roshni’s need for better take-away containers, Chowdhry worked with cooks and volunteers to try to understand how to help steer their cafe community in a greener direction. Focusing on the ‘toilet break’ as a site of refusal and escape from waged labor, Manual Labours held space for the Arts Catalyst team to reimagine art ‘work’ and relations in relation to rest. Responding to planetary consumption and e-waste, Angela YT Chan x Bóxī Wú began to build a community of people interested in low-tech and self-hosted technologies and practices that challenge the scale, centralisation and extractivism of contemporary digital technologies.
Sunlight Liberation Network
Sunlight Liberation Network is a creative climate justice learning lab learning. We bring artists, carers, growers, healers, and engineers together with local communities and businesses to develop deep, relational learning and protocols for learning to live well with others within limits. We are committed to creative and cooperative learning that unfolds through mutual, and reciprocal relationships between each other and the natural world. This relationship involves all dimensions of one’s being. In its very essence, SLN is about learning about life through participation and relationship to our varied and diverse communities, including not only people, but plants, animals, and the whole of nature. Our work is a wayfinding journey as a holistic model, a way of moving in uncertainty, noticing the things we can see as much as the ones we can’t. Access, justice and fairness are fundamental to moving through our times. Our destination is total liberation.
This edition of SLN is supported by the Culture of Solidarity Fund, as part of the European Cultural Foundation, and Arts Catalyst. It was developed with a year-long residency ‘Making Time’ by Artangel, and originates from a Stanley Picker Fellowship project ‘Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline’ funded by Stanley Picker Trust, Kingstone University and Arts Council England.
Dani Admiss is a creative climate leader, independent curator, artist and educator. Her work is a journey of learning to live well with others within limits. Dani believes that a green and socially just society relies on understanding our role in, and consequences of, the ‘great turning’. She champions community-based learning and uses her role of ‘curator’ as a shared space for collective inquiry, story building and meaning making, often working with a coalition of agitators, dream weavers, growers and caregivers. She founded Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline, an art and climate justice network for art workers, and is currently collaborating with Luiza Prado on a bean and community cooking project The World is a Mill.
Angela YT Chan is an independent researcher, data engineer and artist specialising in climate change. Her work explores power, narrative framings and technology in the colonial and ongoing history of the climate crisis. Angela works with a variety of media and processes, and her projects often include extensive collaborations in arts, technology, policy and activism (recently Public Data Lab, The Policy Institute). Angela has produced curatorial projects and workshops, collaborating with artists, activists and youth groups (formerly under the name Worm: art + ecology, 2014-2020), residencies (Arts Catalyst, FACT/Jerwood, Sonic Acts, Primary, Abandon Normal Devices, and Tactical Tech), is a research consultant (Julie’s Bicycle), and co-directs the London Science Fiction Research Community.
Maya Chowdhry is an interdisciplinary artist and activist. She uses art to enable audiences to participate in artworks in a way that activates them to question the world around them. Her artworks are often interactive and democratic experiences which lean into past work in radio, audiowalks and live art. Her practice interrogates themes such as world water scarcity, food sovereignty, and climate justice. Currently she is creating sound experiences utilising biodata sonification; turning brainwaves into melodies and plant waves into soundwaves – seeking to find a shared language between the human and the more-than-human.
Manual Labours is a practice-based research body exploring physical and emotional relationships to work. Since 2013 Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards have carried out research with workers in different sectors, including UK based call centre workers, people working with complaints, commuters and cultural workers. Their methods include workshops, performances, reading groups, film screenings, writing collaging, and artists commissions. Each phase of the research culminates in a published manual, which you can download from their website. Their current stage of research is entitled The Global Staffroom (2019-ongoing), which develops conversations around experiences of rest and care at work. Through a series of podcasts, a manual and ongoing workshops the research asks: what it feels like to care, be cared for, and not be able to care at work?
flematu sessay (she/her) is a British-Sierra Leonean creative and cultural producer based in Manchester, UK. She set up the creative studio Public Tactics. to collaborate with other practitioners and communities on projects that amplify creativity occurring at the intersections of race, gender and identity. flematu’s creative praxis is research-driven and rooted in collaboration, working to explore the spaces we occupy and the everyday routines and rituals performed within them. She aspires to work with community and for community, producing a reflection of our collectives and working towards reparative representation.
Bóxī Wú (they/them) is London-based researcher, educator and community organiser. Their research draws from decolonial, geopolitical and climate justice frameworks to question the ethical and political implications of AI and its underlying material infrastructure. As a doctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute Boxi has published in academic journals such as Philosophy & Technology, and Big Data & Society, and has delivered lectures and workshops on critical AI studies for design, media and data science students (CSM, LSE, Sheffield and Melbourne Universities).