Saturday 16 July, 11am to 7pm
Onsite and on WysingBroadcasts.Art (selected highlights and digital programme)

'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.

Book tickets on our Eventbrite by clicking here.

Join the online stream by clicking here.

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 via the Wysing Broadcasts website throughout the day.

The expanded programme for ‘From The Ground Up’ will include contributions from writer and artist Khairani Barokka; historian James Boyce; poet, writer and artist Victoria Adukwei Bulley; Wysing co-founder Terry Brooks; artist, educator and community developer, Jo Capper; Artist Olivier Castel; Director of Studies for Geography at Queens College, Cambridge, Elsa Noterman; artist Rosanna Greaves; curator and writer, Taylor Le Melle; artist and writer, Bella Milroy; historian, writer, printmaker and founder of CAMP books, Brooke Palmieri; organic food grower and writer, Claire Ratinon; RESOLVE Collective; broadcaster, writer and DJ Zakia Sewell; artist Caroline Wendling; and more to be announced...

Ticket Options

• Event Ticket - £22 or pay-what-you-can
• Event Ticket With Cambridge Transport - £30 or pay-what-you-can
• Companion Ticket - free
• Online Ticket - free

The event is open to all with transport available from Cambridge provided if needed.

Tickets are available with pay-what-you-can options (minimum is £1). Pay-what-you-can tickets gives you the option to pay as little or as much as you can. If you are able to pay more, this allows us to continue offering cheaper tickets for those who need them.

Please note: to book more than 1 x pay-what-you-can option for the same ticket, please place separate orders for each ticket. Unfortunately it is not possible to book multiple pay-what-you-can tickets for the same ticket on Eventbrite.

The online ticket gives you access to the digital programme for ‘From The Ground Up’. The digital programme will consist of selected highlights from the onsite programme streamed on 16 July and an expanded programme taking place in the weeks before and after the onsite event.

Onsite event tickets also include access to the digital programme.

Refreshments

All tickets for the onsite event include lunch and refreshments throughout the day. Vegetarian, vegan and gluten free options will be available.

Covid Safety

Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site.

Toilets will be available in our buildings with antibacterial wipes and spray.

If the event is cancelled, tickets will be fully refunded.

We kindly ask guests to test before travelling to Wysing and not to attend if you test positive or display symptoms.

Transport Information

Transport for the event will depart Cambridge train station at 10.15am; arrive Wysing 10.45am; depart Wysing 7pm; arrive back in Cambridge at 7.30pm.

We will send an email prior to the event with details on travel, Covid safety and what to expect on the day.

Ticket sales for transport tickets close at 12 midday on Wednesday 13 July.

Access Information

The onsite programme for ‘From The Ground Up’ will include moments where the audience can choose between different activities. These activities will take place in a number of locations across Wysing’s site, but there will always be a wheelchair accessible option and an option with live-captions.

Selected highlights from the Onsite programme will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts site and will include opportunities to ask questions. Streamed highlights will be live-captioned. Wheelchair accessible transport - we can offer wheelchair accessible transport from Cambridge. If you require wheelchair accessible transport, please tick the box on the ticket checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. Please let us know by 12 midday on Monday 11 July so we can make arrangements.

A calm decompression space is available onsite.

Accessible parking and toilets are available.

Free Companion Tickets are available for anyone who needs them.

If you have access requirements that you would like to check with us before visiting, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Deputy Director, at ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.

Schedule

Before 16 July
Keep an eye on your inbox and wysingbroadcasts.art for an online programme from Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Zakia Sewell and Taylor Le Melle.

16 July: Online
The online programme will include livestreams of onsite events over the day. For an online schedule of the day, please click here.

16 July: Onsite
The day’s programme will take place across Wysing’s site. Click here for a site map.

The following key relates to access.
CC= Live-captions provided
W= Wheelchair accessible

All day — Rosanna Greaves — The Flaming Rage of The Sea (2018) (Amphis) CC
The Flaming Rage Of The Sea explores the constructed and ever-changing landscape of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands, a region below sea level. It features choreographed stilt performers as apparitions of past farming practices done on stilts and was filmed at various locations in the Fens including Whittlesey Strawbear festival, The Great Fen and the Rothschild Bungalow.

Rosanna Greaves is an artist, researcher and senior lecturer in fine art at Cambridge School of Art, ARU. Rosanna’s art practice is multidisciplinary, working with sound, text, sculpture and moving image; often working in a site-specific context, exploring place as material.

All Day — Taylor Le Melle
A new text from Taylor Le Melle is fragmented and installed around the site. Look out for printed cards staked into the ground.

Taylor Le Melle wonders if claiming polymath would be preferable to constructing a string of slashes: writer/publisher/infrastructuralist/herbalist/designer/curator/..../..../. Le Melle holds a research fellowship in the Design Department at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, and is a Deviant Practice researcher at VanAbbe Museum, Eindhoven. Their group exhibition Swimmers Limb opens at Somerset House Gallery 31 July 2022.

All day — Decompression/Quiet Space (Media Suite) W

All Day — Tea and Coffee (Reception) W
Refreshments are available in Reception throughout the day.

10:45 — Arrivals 11 — Introduction from Rosie Cooper, Wysing Director (Wysing Gallery) CC & W

11.10 — James Boyce and Elsa Noterman in conversation, chaired by Rosie Cooper (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
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 (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
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).

1 — Lunch (Window Room) W
Lunch will be made from ingredients grown at CoFarm Cambridge, an agroecological community farm. Founder Gavin Shelton aims to roll out their community farming model to 250,000 acres across the UK by 2030, building towards sustainably produced food and better ecosystems for all. Gavin Shelton and Dominic Walsh will introduce lunch. Vegetarian, vegan and gluten free options will be available. Lunch is included in the ticket price.

2.30 (Im)possible Projects

Option 1: Olivier Castel and John Eng Kiet Bloomfield (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
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.

Option 2: Terry Brooks and Ceri Littlechild (Site walk: meet in Window Room)
Join Wysing founder Terry Brooks and Wysing Deputy Director Ceri Littlechild for a site walk and discussion-as-excavation, focusing on forgotten site interventions and the possible futures offered by unrealised projects. Terry Brooks was one of four founding directors of Wysing in 1989. He served as its chair from 1994 to June 2002.

Option 3: Jack Wilson and Rosie Cooper (Site walk: meet outside Media Suite)
Join Wysing’s Site and Technical Manager Jack Wilson and Wysing Director Rosie Cooper for a site walk and discussion of your own (Im)possible projects. If you have an intervention to the site that you would like to suggest, pin it to the noticeboard in reception in the morning or share it on our Instagram @wysing.arts.centre or twitter @wysingartscentr

3

Option 1: Claire Ratinon (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
Join Claire Ratinon, acclaimed author of Unearthed: on Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught me I Belong, 2022, for an informal session. Like many diasporic people of colour, Claire grew up feeling cut off from the natural world. Unearthed is the story of how, after years of a troubled relationship with the land of her birth, Claire Ratinon found belonging through falling in love with growing, and reconnecting with nature. Claire Ratinon is an organic food grower and writer. Claire has shared her growing journey in talks for organisations including The Garden Museum and Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh, as well as on Radio 4. She co-wrote the pamphlet, ‘Horticultural Appropriation’ for Rough Trade Books with artist, Sam Ayre and her new book, ‘Unearthed’ is out now.

Option 2: Caroline Wendling (Site walk: meet in Window Room)
Artist Caroline Wendling will lead an intimate and meditative performance-walk through some of the less commonly visited areas of Wysing’s site. Participants will be asked to engage in deep listening practices and some simple actions. Caroline Wendling is a studio artist at Wysing. Her work explores ideas of place and belonging through layered projects that draw on history and explore local myths, inviting re-imagings of sites. She attempts to give material form to the complex interconnectedness of our mental landscapes and the actual space we inhabit.

Option 3: Brooke Palmieri (Workshop: meet outside Window Room)
Learn and test out natural printing techniques with artist Brooke Palmieri. To consider nature, and our mimicry of it, requires us to completely change our view of technologies, and reconsider the ecology of media in terms of the natural materials that comprise them, a consideration that is queer, feminist, and decolonial. Working with historic examples and foraging for materials, we will discuss the history of nature printing, and try our hands at making our own. Brooke Palmieri is a historian, writer, and printer, if printing can also be considered as a form of sculpture and performance. In 2018 they founded CAMP BOOKS, a platform for making the history of gender non-conforming people more accessible through teaching, cheap printing, and building archives and libraries. Brooke will be in residence at Wysing later in 2022.

4 — Break (Reception) W
Refreshments are available in Reception.

4.30

Option 1 Jo Capper and Akil Scafe-Smith, RESOLVE Collective, in conversation (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
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.

Option 2 Brooke Palmieri (Workshop: meet outside Window Room)
Learn and test out natural printing techniques with artist Brooke Palmieri. To consider nature, and our mimicry of it, requires us to completely change our view of technologies, and reconsider the ecology of media in terms of the natural materials that comprise them, a consideration that is queer, feminist, and decolonial. Working with historic examples and foraging for materials, we will discuss the history of nature printing, and try our hands at making nature prints. Brooke Palmieri is a historian, writer, and printer, if printing can also be considered as a form of sculpture and performance. In 2018 they founded CAMP BOOKS, a platform for making the history of gender non-conforming people more accessible through teaching, cheap printing, and building archives and libraries. Brooke will be in residence at Wysing later in 2022.

5.30 — Snacks and Drinks (Window Room) W
Join us for snacks and a drink. Vegetarian, vegan and gluten free options will be available. Snack and drinks are included in the ticket price.

6.15 — Victoria Adukwei Bulley reading (Window Room) CC & W
As the day comes to a close, poet and artist Victoria Adukwei Bulley will share a reading from her new book of poetry ‘Quiet’ along with other texts, reflecting on the themes explored through the days events. Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. Her debut poetry collection, Quiet, was released by Faber in the UK this year, and is set for North American release in January 2023 with Knopf.