Subterranean Cosmic Dreaming Part 2: Creating a Museum of Futurology

Thursday 17th June 2021 to
Saturday 19th June 2021

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

Book your place

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.

When

Thursday 17th June 2021 to
Saturday 19th June 2021
12:00 - 15:00

Where

Details will be advised when confirmed via registering through Eventbrite

SS39SG

Travel

Nearest train station: Shoeburyness

Website

Link

Previous Live Programme
A Refracted View

Estuary 2021 is made possible by

Principal Partners

Creative_Estuary_New_1   ace

Major Partners

ecc uok thurrock thames_gateway selep medway  thames estuary   ebbsfleet    Ebbsfleet mayor locatekent kentcc gravesham uoe bas_coun   south_coun Here for Culture

Commissioning Partners

book_fest community_fund heritage_fund creative_coast bexleysalford fpg lesnes Essex2020Logo The Old Waterworks Logo UCA1

Festival Partners

arts_human uni_south uni_oxford uni_glas send_pier pla opp_se henley Flowers Gallery logoc2c roh southeastern Thamesmead2 Peabody2 BowArts3 raddison uber arriva Canterbury Dartford Faversham Swale1 Thanet Visit c2c1 Chat

Festival Supporters

essex_diversity SouthEssex1 UniversityCentre1 Churches International Exeter Wales Ramm Artist Grand