REFUGIA Part 3
17-18 September 2022Refugia is a long term Walking Art Project exploring the intersection between theory and practice. Refugia Part 3 will comprise a pop-up exhibition, walks and talks inspired by research and events undertaken during Parts 1 and 2
Esi Eshun, Catherine Harrington, Nathania Hartley,
Ilga Leimanis & Andra Kalnins, Esther Planas........................................................................
Refugia are isolated locations in which multiple, interdependent species
flourish in the midst of a general hostile environment. Acting as sites of
resurgence following ecological devastation, they enable eventual biological
and cultural rejuvenation to occur, once plants, animals, humans
and other species have dispersed from their places of refuge.Influential anthropologist, Anna Tsing, considers one of the key markers
of the so-called Anthropocene epoch to lie in the destruction wrought to
these once abundant refugia. And as philosopher Donna Haraway
writes: “The earth is full of refugees, human, non human, without
refuge”. As a result, the aim for future epochs must be to cultivate with
each other - in every imaginable way - places and times in which to replenish
refuges and create liveable worlds.Acknowledging that this is a situation that requires mourning as well as acts of creative recuperation, the Refugia project invites us to consider how the practice of walking might contribute to such means of recreation and renewal. Encompassing a series of walks taking place in dispersed locations over several months, it will enable us to seek out, encounter, circumnavigate, retread or contribute to potential sites of communion with other human and more-than-human assemblies, allowing us, in the process, to become collective agents of change.
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Refugia Part 3: 17-18 September 2022
Exhibition - 17-18 September - 12pm - 6 pm
Please note, the gallery will be closed during the walks.
Refugia # 3:
By considering the notion of Refugia from differing perspectives, the
project aims to map overlapping terrains corresponding to ideas of safe
space, sanctuary, vulnerability and precarity, in which the act of walking
enables exploration of ambiguously-charged states of communion with
human and more than human others. Much of the work presented will
be drawn from documentation and materials relating to walks planned
for Parts 1 and 2.
Events
Walk/Installation :
Sat 17 September - 2pm - 3:30pm
Catherine Harrington- Walking through a Workhouse / Walking through a ParkMeet at: Caxton House Community Centre - front entrance
129 Saint John's Way, London, N19 3RQ
Join us on this guided walk as we uncover the ruins of a demolished
workhouse that formerly inhabited the meadows of nearby Hillside Park
in Archway. Catherine’s site installations will lead the way as we excavate
the rooms of the workhouse and unearth stories of their past lives.
We will commemorate the lives of the workhouse’s inmates whose harsh
conditions have been largely erased from history, as we explore the social
values underpinning the workhouse and how these shape the landscape
of London today.Please book your place on the walk via the Eventbrite link below.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/walking-through-a-workhouse-walkingthrough-
a-park-tickets-409802970717.
Audio Walk:
Sat 17 September 4pm - 5pm
Nathania Hartley - Mapping Our Way
Meet at: Five Years
Following Nathania Hartley's last walk for the Refugia series - Finding Our Way - her new walk, Mapping Our Way, will take influence from previous encounters with the Archway area, melding past and present, imaginings and realities. We will walk as a group, silently, following old paths and finding new ways. A recorded voice will be the sonic map to guide us, as we come together to listen to the city and uncover the many layers that make up our urban space and our place within it.Please note - this walk includes recorded audio. Please book via Eventbrite. You will be sent a link in advance of the event to download/ stream the audio on your own device - please bring this to the walk, as well as your own earphones. If you do not have the facilities to do this, do get in touch with (Nathania Hartley) and she will try to accommodate.......
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/mapping-our-way-a-group-audio-walktickets-
411193860907
Talk/Reading:
Sun 18 September - 1pm - 1:45pm
Esther Planas - London East End Walks E2
Inside Five YearsFor Refugia, Esther Planas has produced a series of recorded readings of short excerpts from her diary (East End Walks), and on Sunday 18 at 1pm, she will introduce her work, offering food and drinks, followed by a live reading of some of those fragments.
Since 2010, Esther has been working on a series of projects that she defines as Urban (Encounters) Interactions which include site specific walks-derives around the East End of London where she lives. For Refugia, she reads extracts from a text originally written in the summer of 2014 and published in Blauer Hase’s Journal Paessagio, in which she assembles cut-up texts from a variety of sources, including the novels of J.G Ballard.
In the selected passages, the narrator figure observes how London’s East End is made to suffer from its highly alienating and toxic gentrification processes, and during ritualistic walks around the area, she notes the appearance of a world in which rain and heat have accelerated a regression to primal states of nature. New scents of cooking and other natural smells and sounds connect in a subterranean language, while the oversized migrant birds, massive colourful flowers, lush huge plants, and great insects have joined the remaining humans of the East End to radically overturn the depredating process of gentrification.
Walking/Talking/Reading:
Sun 18 September - 2pm- 3:30pm
Esi Eshun - To Wonder
Meet at Five YearsFor To Wonder, Esi Eshun will lead a walking/reading group event in
which participants will be invited to enter into free and open ended conversation,
inspired by live readings of selected short texts. As the group
processes through streets and lingers in squares and green spaces,
shared recollections, reflections and observations will help to shape multifaceted
responses to several of the themes underlying the wider concept
of refugia. Taking off from the ideas of thinkers such as Hannah
Arendt, Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, the walk will emerge as a
gentle enquiry into experiences of human and non-human precarities,
while offering an opportunity to enact limited forms of redress. No prior
knowledge of the texts is needed. All welcome!Please contact Esi Eshun for further details.
Synchronous Walk:
Sun 18 September 2022 - see time zones below
Ilga Leimanis & Andra Kalnins - Walk With Us8am Los Angeles
10am Chicago
11am Montreal
4pm London
6pm Riga
9.30pm Mumbai
12am Beijing (19th September)Let’s walk together at the same time. All welcome. Choose your time
zone and join us in action to generate hope.Walk With Us was inItiated by sisters living in London and Chicago who
worked together for over a year in a collaboration centred around conversation,
sharing daily life and taking small actions. Last February, we invited you, wherever you were in the world, to join together for a synchronous walk.We proposed this action to generate hope. Let’s do it again now, in Andra’s
memory – let’s get up, take steps, and go. The duration of our walk
will be 30 minutes (more or less) on Sunday 18th September 2022 at
your own time zone. You can walk anywhere, indoors around the home,
or open the door and follow your feet wherever they take you, alone or
in groups, urban or rural. Set your alarm and join us.In February 2022, over 165 people Walked With Us. In April, Andra and
Ilga prepared for Walk 2, at Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (2004) in Chicago’s
Millennium Park. Walk With Us will now become an annual event,
beyond the end of the Refugia Project.In memory of Andra Kalnins, her energy and resilience which she captured
so eloquently in her poem Begin Again: "[…] Our days and weeks
are filled with so many new beginnings, and opportunities to let go, and
just begin again." Hope moves to action; let us all find strength to take
action and begin again.Share your experiences on social media – what you find, do, see, write
or draw! @ilgaleimanis @fiveyearsarchwayFeel alive, experience connectedness, wholeness. Wake up, make
notes with your feet, into the flow with curiosity. Step into wonder.** Data poem inspired by Snowber, C. (2019) 'Living, Moving, and Dancing:
Embodied Ways of Inquiry', in Leavy, P. (ed.) Handbook of Arts-
Based Research. New York: Guilford Press, pp 247-266.
........................................................................ARTIST PROFILES
Esi Eshun
Esi Eshun is an artist and independent researcher, who works primarily
with text, sound, performance and moving image, in order, in part, to explore
some of the under acknowledged legacies of Empire and its multiple
social, psychological and environmental implications. Her solo and
collaborative projects have been presented across a range of platforms
in the UK and internationally, including at The Listening Biennial (2022),
Tate Britain (2022), the Estuary Festival, UK (2021), the Berlin Berlinale
(2020). She is a member of Five Years, and the initiator of the Refugia
Project.
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.
Nathania 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. Similarly, 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.
twitter and instagram: @natteronyeah
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. 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 and is author of Sketching Perspective (2021).
Ilga is a member of the Academic Support team at University of the Arts
London and her current research continues investigation of ‘untethered
learning’, through flow and hope, inspired by her collaboration with her
sister Andra Kalnins. Ilga is a member and contributes to the programme
at Five Years.
Andra Kalnins (1976-2022)
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. Originally from Montreal,
Canada she lived in Chicago with her husband and 6-year-old son until
her death in July 2022.Andra was 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
included peer support with a focus on quality of life and psychosocial
coping.Andra strived 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.
www.chasingthelightwithandra.com
Esther Planas was born in Barcelona, 1960. Her work focuses on self-instituting
practices during hostile times and spaces, engaging in situationist derives from which to encounter the multiple dimensions of the urban space, its components, and inhabitants for deciphering the tensions generated in and by the spatio-temporal reverberations of the capitalist policies of the city. Her installations, film, lectures, performances, and sound interventions, have been presented internationally, including at South London Gallery, Beaconsfield, and Tate Britain Clore Auditorium, London, MACRO Museo, Rome, Matadero Madrid, BCNProducció\10, Barcelona, and at various independent spaces such as Proyectos Ultravioleta Guatemala, Helena Producciones, Cali Colombia, Aformal Academy -digital dialogues Hong Kong-Shenzen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, eme3 International Architectural Festival, Barcelona, Artlicks Festival, London, INCA Detroit, USA.
