What would we create if we put the same time, energy, resources and unfettered believe into building ecosystems as we do on ourselves? What structures and systems would we imagine and how could they bridge the gap between ourselves and the other 8.7 million inhabitants of the planet?
We once lived as part of nature’s systems, and now nature is failing to live in ours. The Manuals is a radical blueprint that, through our daily routines, re-interprets megacities, industrial farms and epic infrastructure, testing ideas as to how through land art, we can actively build and re-animate ecosystems.
Come and sketch out your ideas for our plan for the future - hopefully some may become reality.
This is solution art - socially driven, action-based projects that don’t stand by but step up. Come and join the arts group Something & Son alongside scientists, anthropologists, engineers, curators and more, and share your ideas, hopes and actions as to how to interrupt the current systems.
The Manuals is full of hopeful, experimental, ideas, open to mistakes and is ready to become a failed master plan for the 21st Century and beyond – each page is there to be challenged, tested, ripped apart and stuck back together again. As such it will be forever changing and expanding, both as instruction and philosophy. Part scrapbook, repair manual, encyclopaedia, bible, Talmud and open source programming code, it is the manual that will outline our return to nature.
Experts for the session include:
- Dr Erinma Ochu and Caroline Ward - Squirrel Nation Studio, neuroscientist, environmentalists and artists
- Bill Hampton - Engineer, Inventor, Urban Design Consultant
- Dr Kay E. Lewis-Jones - Anthropologist and botanist
- Illtud Dunsford - Farmer and Future of Food expert
- Andy Franzkowiak - Curator of art and science projects with Shrinking Space
- Karishma Rafferty - Curator and environmental public arts expert
- Jane Withers - Design and environmental curator
- Tom Mansfield - Poet and builder
- and others TBC
About Something & Son
Something & Son is a group formed by Andy Merritt and Paul Smyth in 2010. Through permanent installations, functional sculptures and public performance their work explores social and environmental issues via everyday scenarios criss-crossing the boundaries between the visual arts, architecture and activism.