FutureEverything is working with the Rocky Climates collective to co-produce and promote Rocky Futures, a collaboration between the Rocky Climates collective and the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University (Cemore), which is celebrating its 20th year.

Rocky Climates is an artists’ network formed by Rebecca Birch, Sarah Casey, and Jen Southern. FutureEverything has previously collaborated with Jen Southern on our Unintended Consequences exhibition. Rocky Climates brings together artists and researchers who are concerned with mobilities and instabilities (temporal, spatial, cultural, environmental) of rocky landscapes in uncertain times.

Rocky Futures will be presenting the work of 14 artists in a series of 9 live Zoom events at the 2023 Global Humanities Conference (GMHC) and the Annual Conference of the International Association of The History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M) in Seoul, Korea on October 26th and 27th.

The live Zoom conversations will be hosted by the artists, from the field, on laptops and mobiles. Each artist draws on a deep knowledge of materiality learnt from their art practice to devise ways to make the rock more ‘present’ at a distance, through strategies such as story-telling, touch, lens, sound and speculation.

Artists will engage a global audience in conversations about their local and mobile rocky environments. Each of the artists and artist collectives has devised methods to explore the physical, social, cultural, historical, environmental or political aspects of geological landscapes.

The conversations are provoked by the idea that rocks are on the move: from tectonic plates and volcanic lava to glacial erratics, fossil fuels, stolen marbles, slippery gravel and sand stuck between your toes. This rocky mobility shapes our worlds, and is inextricably connected to climate, from its formation on geological timescales to the extraction practices that exploit both human labour and natural resource. Rocks are often characterised as being stable and solid ground, but they are active and shape-shifting agents in our rocky futures.

The conversations will be available live online and screened at Konkuk University, Seoul.

To join the conversations live on Zoom, please sign up via Eventbrite for free. Please note there are three sessions and separate bookings are required for each session.

(Times all BST)

LINE UP

Thursday October 26th

Rocky Futures Session 1   6.00am – 8.00am  BOOK HERE (FREE)

6.00am Kaya Tatjana Barry – Deep Weathering at the Rest Area (or, making jam in the “nation’s food bowl”)

6.45am Clare McCracken – Wild Country

7.30am Perdita Phillips – They are breathing: living rocks and multispecies consensus

Friday October 27th

Rocky Futures Session 2   11.00am – 12.15pm BOOK HERE (FREE)

11.00am Fay Stevens – Quiddity: The Sarsen Stones of Avebury

11.45am Brass Art – terrain erratique

Rocky Futures Session 3    2.00pm – 4.30pm  BOOK HERE (FREE)

2.00pm Rona Lee, Jean Boyd, Louise K Wilson – Conversations in the Sedgwick

2.45pm Holly Veselka – Karst: A Landscape of Mineral and Water

3.30pm Sarah Fuller – Erratic Conversations

4.15pm Fritha Jenkins – Aggregate: Glittery stumbles around Blackhill Quarry with Edna Lumb in hand.

Rocky Climates is supported by Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA) and the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University.