SPARK #52: Possitopias - Navigating the Earth Crisis

SPARK #52: Navigating the Earth Crisis with Bridget McKenzie

A participatory workshop with Climate Museum co-founder Bridget McKenzie to help you navigate the future as impacts of the Earth Crisis unfold.

The Earth Crisis is more than just Climate - it’s the combination of ecological overshoot and social shortfall. Working with four lenses - Global, Ecological, Local, and Social – we’ll use props and prompts to help us visualise future scenarios. The approach to imagining the future will be Possitopian: expanding our imagination to the widest range of possibilities and facing the trouble we’re in while finding energy for activation. You will be guided to visualise a direction of travel for your life and work, supported by a compass tool offering new regenerative practices.

Looking back to the port we set out from, the present day, we will create personal talismans using scrap and natural materials while discussing how we might grow capacities in areas such as collaboration, place-based resilience or ecological kinship.

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Bridget McKenzie is an artist and regenerative thought leader working to engage people with the Earth Crisis. Her career includes being Tate’s Education Manager and the British Library’s Head of Learning. In 2006, she founded Flow Associates, a research consultancy in cultural learning. In the past decade, she has focused on the intersection of culture and environment, and has developed training, collectives and campaigns pushing at the radical edges of this field. This includes founding Climate Museum UK, a creative collective putting the Earth Crisis in context, and Earth Talk, a community of practice for Earth Literacy. She co-founded Culture Declares, a movement of cultural workers declaring a planetary emergency. She experiments with creative activism in her city of Norwich.

https://bridgetmckenzie.uk/

https://www.instagram.com/bridget.mck/
https://www.instagram.com/climatemuseumuk/

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Image:  Be Possitopian

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Access Info
The session will take place in the top floor classroom at Manchester Museum. This space is wheelchair accessible.
Please see https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/accessibility for further access info. 

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SPARK

The SPARK network was set up by Castlefield Gallery in 2022 to facilitate a Greater Manchester/North West-based network of artists wanting to intervene in the climate crisis. The gallery initiated SPARK in response to the high demand for places on the 2021/22 SUSTAIN programme focussed on low carbon artmaking. 

SPARK #52 follows SPARK sessions at Manchester Art Gallery, Rogue, The Birley (Preston), Eccles Friends Meeting House, Manchester Museum, AIR Gallery, Paradise Works, Editional Studio, Cadishead and Little Woolden Moss, Gallery Oldham, the John Rylands Library, Dunham Massey, Lindow Moss, Castlefield Viaduct, Gallery Oldham, The Atkinson, Castlefield Gallery, Northern Roots, Salford Museum and Art Gallery; Hulme Commjnity Garfden Centre, Venture Arts and a group exhibition and events programme at Rogue Studios.

Castlefield Gallery continues to provide admin and co-ordination support via its Artist Environmental Lead, Jane Lawson, as well as promotional support. 

https://www.instagram.com/sparkartistsnetwork/