Delfina Foundation, Politics of Food Programme
Date: Tuesday, 4 June 2019
Workshop exploring possible futures of cultivation with artist Nick Laessing.
Join our Politics of Food UK Associate Nick Laessing and Dr Ros Gray for a workshop of planting and conversations around technology, food production and usership.
During the workshop participants will have the opportunity to engage in a range of activities preparing the latest version of Laessing’s Plant Orbiter. With its origins in NASA’s investigations the possibility of growing plant food in extra-terrestrial environments, the Plant Orbiter is an automated rotating system for food production.
This workshop is part of a series of public events in Delfina Foundation’s fourth season of the thematic programme The Politics of Food. Subtitled Adapting, this latest iteration will investigate ideas responding to the changing environment of food production.
Biographies:
Ros Gray is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Critical Studies, in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research on the trajectories of militant filmmaking in contexts of anti-colonial and revolutionary struggles has involved exploring the use of film and video in rural development, the setting up of cooperatives, and the denunciation of colonial exploitation of natural resources, as well as the representation of radical social change. She is currently finalising a monograph entitled Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution (Boydell and Brewer, 2020). Her research interests in environmental violence and the politics of the soil were recently explored through a special issue of Third Text (Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture), co-edited with Shela Sheikh, titled The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions (January 2018). Her writing has also analysed the ecological and planetary resonances of work by artists including Renée Green, Antonio Ole and Kiluanji Kia Henda. Ros is the Coordinator of the Goldsmiths Allotment, which, as well as providing a space for plant cultivation for staff and students, is a platform for various seasonal cultural events, workshops on aspects of sustainable gardening and plant breeding, and a space for meditation and developing thinking around forms of ‘care’ in the context of an educational institution.
Photo credit: Ollie Harrop