Reimagining Barbican as a site of cohabitation, symbiosis, and climate resilience. The world of the superorganism reframed the Barbican through the lens of visionary more-than-human societies. An afternoon of free, drop-in activities and installations with ODO Collective to consider how the superorganism could help think differently about our relationship with nature and our roles within the climate emergency.
Programme
Blast Studio (@blast.studio) showcase The Blue Tree, a 2-metre 3D print made from discarded single-use coffee cups. Blast Studio – Finalists for the Loewe Craft Prize and winners of the Prix d’Encouragement in Architecture – explore how nature and technology can be placed in dialogue to transform cities’ discarded material.
Marie-Louise Jones (@marie_louise_jones_) presents an installation that explores material practices and responds to the Barbican site using emerging technologies and sustainable materials to reimagine its iconic brutalist architecture. Marie-Louise Jones is an artist merging art, architecture, and ecology. She has recently returned from a residency in the Amazon rainforest after being awarded a scholarship at Labverde.
Look out for a series of visual tools and micro-provocations for communication and exchange in the Conservatory by Yasmin Lennon-Chong (@ylennonchong). Yasmin is a multi-disciplinary designer exploring the intersections of art, design, and environment. Previous projects include site-specific work at Domaine de Boisbuchet and 3D printed products for Atelier100.
Enter the dystopian world of a beehive under attack in a participatory performance by visual artist and composer Lily Hunter Green (@lilyhuntergreen). Immersed in a virtual virus environment, experience the catastrophic spread of a musical virus, and beyond that the heroic collective mechanisms utilised by honeybees to repel it. Lily makes multi-component, immersive works on pollinators and the science of the hive that communicate rapidly changing ecologies and humans’ role in that process. Nominated for the STARTS Prize, Lily is currently the Wellcome Trust funded Artist-in-Residence in the Maori Lab, University of Cambridge.
Consider what fungi can teach us about mutual aid and collective care with Maymana Arefin (@fungi.futures), an artist, writer and community gardener whose work focuses on deep rest, healing and restoring communion with non-human kin. In 2020, Maymana founded @fungi.futures, a space to map radical alternative futures, drawing on her award-winning research on mycelial networks as a metaphor for mutual aid.
