Subterranean Cosmic Dreaming Part 2: Creating a Museum of Futurology

Over 3 days Lesley and Jill will create a temporary workshop towards curating a wild ‘Museum of Futurology’ about and within the vicinity of Gunners Park and Shoeburyness East Beach. People are invited to participate in a kind of subterranean cosmic dreaming of pre-historic-futurology by contributing objects they have found on the beach that can be examined, imagined into, and transformed through art processes. The aim is to unfold understanding of the significance of these materials and the materiality of this particular time and place. Exploring questions such as what kind of ancestors we will be? What histories will be of things to come, and what might be future fossils?

Shoeburyness East Beach and Gunners Park is the furthest point from the source of the river Thames as it opens out into the North Sea. It is historically a place of fortress, defences, encampment, and of old refuse sites. Archeological artefacts provide evidence of settlements from Neolithic times, Iron Age, late Bronze Age and from Roman, Saxon and Danish origins. These artefacts indicate relational domestic activities such as spinning, weaving, salt manufacture, butchery, cereal processing and include pottery vessels dating back to 400-200 BC, as well as fragments of decorated porcelain and clay-pipes from the Victorian age. Anthropologist Margaret Mead proposed that a healed femur is evidence of the first sign of civilisation in ancient culture; in that one person had taken time to carry another to safety and to bind their wounds and tend to their recovery. From a futurology perspective - what will be the signs of our civilisation to the unborn inhabitants of the world-to-be? As the landscapes we make sink into the strata, what will we have left behind?

Friday & Saturday 18 / 19 June – Collecting, Exploring, Making
Sunday 20 June – Museum Assemblage and Group Ritual

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About the artists
Lesley and Jill are artists, art psychotherapists and educators. They have developed a collaboration over the past 10 years through the experience of living and working along the shores of the river Thames. Guided by a new materialist perspective they have come to trust and use art as a process of inquiry, to unfold understanding of the significance of materiality, space and place; leading them deeper into connections and entanglements with others and each other in space-time-mattering. New materialism invites the process of diffraction as another form of critical consciousness. As artists they take this approach to respond to the call of the wild and a desire to be earthed closer in/to the cosmic unknown.