REFUGIA
Part 1. 6-12 February 2022
Part 3. 17-18 September 2022A Walking Art Project exploring the intersection between theory and practice through walks, talks, a reading group and research library.
REFUGIA
Part 1
6 - 12 February 2022WALKS
Nathania Hartley - Finding Our Way
6 February - 2:00pmNathania Hartley invites participants on a group walk intended to help us find our way to reconnect with the city. Uncovering the many layers that make up our urban space and our place within it, the walk will assist us to find new paths and ways of coming together again as we move from silence to sounding in a meditative and playful walking experiment.
Ilga Leimanis & Andra Kalnins - Walk With Us
6 February - 4pm (London)/10am (Chicago)Living in London and Chicago, Ilga and Andra are sisters who have been collaborating for nearly one year. They “invite you to join us, wherever you are in the world – for a walk together – let’s get up, take steps, and go. The duration of our walk will be 30-minutes (more or less) on Sunday 6th February according to your time zone.
We propose this action to generate hope. You can walk anywhere, indoors around the home, or open the door and follow your feet where they take you, alone or in groups, urban or rural. Share your experiences on social media: let us know what you find, do, see, write or draw!
@ilgaleimanis @andrakalnins @fiveyearsarchway
Esi Eshun - Majuscule
7 February - then ongoingEsi Eshun will tread and retread similar paths, attempting to defamiliarise
them by seeking expanded ways of understanding and communicating with
the surrounding terrain and its inhabitants. By consulting with an eclectic
range of experts, both human and non-human, she will aim to widen her perceptual fields, rendering the minuscule larger scale, and the unconnected connected, allowing, in the process, for novel and necessarily fragmented forms of narrative to emerge.
Bettina Fung & Catherine Harrington - Walk N19
12 February - 2:30pmBettina and Catherine’s search for sites of refugia in the neighbourhood surrounding Five Years has led to unexpected and astonishing encounters. On Sunday, they will present a narrative of human and non-human “voices” inhabiting local sites, as participants are taken on a journey that traverses time and contemplates intersections between migrating peoples, new and former communities, spaces for healing, derelict and vacant sites, colonies of plant species, leftover “open” spaces.
----------------------------------------------------
Artist Profiles:
Nathania HartleyNathania creates tiny acts of disruption... using people and place to playfully make us reconsider our everyday, and spoken and written word to hit a little harder. Often the art is a walk together - aiming to get us to simply look again at what exists all around us. Nathania explores the increasing privatisation of our streets and commons, and how our sense of togetherness and belonging is affected by the impact of the spaces and places that surround us.
Ilga Leimanis
Ilga Leimanis is a visual artist, educator, researcher, and author based in London. In addition to her art practice and collaborative work, she has facilitated workshops in sketching and idea generation developing a functional method for creative practice. For 15 years, Ilga’s practice-led pedagogy has brought her into contact with many diverse groups of students, both in the UK and internationally. Ilga founded Drawn in London, an urban sketching group in 2007, is author of Sketching Perspective (2021), and co-author of “Drawing as an Inclusive Practice” in Inclusion and Intersectionality in Visual Arts Education (2019). This year, she completed the PgCert Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication, at University of the Arts London and awarded Associate Fellowship (AFHEA). Her current research investigates ‘untethered learning’, through flow and hope, in collaboration with her sister Andra Kalnins. Ilga is a member and contributes to the programme at Five Years.
Andra Kalnins
Andra Kalnins, a former nurse, and family nurse practitioner graduate was diagnosed with early-stage triple negative breast cancer in 2016, with a metastatic stage IV recurrence in 2020. She lives in Chicago with her husband and 5-year-old son. Originally from Montreal, Canada.
Andra is active in the virtual metastatic breast cancer (MBC) community as a peer mentor and patient advocate. She participated in Living Beyond Breast Cancer’s (LBBC) 2021 Hear My Voice Advocacy Outreach program, and completed mentorship training with Project Life MBC, a virtual wellness house for those touched by MBC. Advocacy interests include peer support with a focus on quality of life and psychosocial coping.
Andra is striving to live as fully as possible with a diagnosis that is treatable but cannot be cured: making memories with loved ones; exploring spiritual, emotional, and physical healing through self-expression, creativity, movement, and authentic connection. Always seeking hope.
Esi Eshun
Esi Eshun is an artist and independent researcher, who works, primarily, with text, sound and performance, in order to explore some of the under acknowledged legacies of colonialism and its multiple, associated, environmental consequences. Her solo and collaborative projects have been presented across a range of platforms in the UK and internationally, more recently at the Estuary Festival, UK, and at Tate Britain. She is a member of Five Years, and the initiator of the Refugia Project.
Bettina Fung
Bettina Fung is a Hong Kong born British-Chinese artist who creates two-dimensional, performative and site-specific works; her practice centres on the immediate and performative nature of drawing that she often incorporates into live art.
Catherine Harrington
Catherine Harrington is a multi-media research-based artist born in Canada, whose practice engages participants in urban walks, to consider how societal structures interact with their urban context.
