BODY-Forest summer school 2022

In July 2022, working with artist and writer Jack Young, we co-devised and facilitated a week-long summer school in Leigh Woods (Bristol) with a group of young people from Hartcliffe Club for Young People. The project was hosted by Spike Island and produced in partnership with Heart of BS13’s Climate Action Lead, Kirsty Hammond.

Through games, walks, drawing, foraging, building, body mapping, sound recording and more, we explored our relationship to nature, and connections between the histories of Hartcliffe and the histories of Leigh Woods. We also explored relationships with the more-than-human and developed speculative fiction as a way to think about the future. The week-long programme involved the creation of a zine and a podcast, which will shared digitally across Spike Island and Heart of BS13’s online channels.

The summer school was part of The Body-Forest programme – a series of engagement activities and public events devised by Jack Young, recipient of the 2022 Spike Island Engagement Fellowship for South West-based Curators. The zine and podcast are being shared as part of The Body-Forest closing event in December 2022.

THE BODY-FOREST

“The Body-Forest is a programme of engagement activities and public events devised by Jack Young, recipient of the 2022 Spike Island Engagement Fellowship for South West-based Curators. The programme explores how thinking of the body as an interconnected ecosystem rather than as a machine – a metaphor developed under capitalism – might shift the way we think about our human connection to the world. Drawing on the work of biologists Pierre Sonigo and Shrese, among others, The Body-Forest will include participatory workshops, discussions, radical history walks, reading groups and more. The programme will interrogate how the concept of the Body-Forest might de-centre the human, and change the way we think about time, language, desire and community in an age of overlapping social and ecological crises.”
- Jack Young / Spike Island

See www.spikeisland.org.uk for details.