Workshop: Writing a Crow
Apr
7
5:30 PM17:30

Workshop: Writing a Crow

Join Rebecca Beinart and Wallace Heim for a series of creative writing workshops to explore Crow Park from multiple points of view. This workshop will take you from writing about characteristics of the landscape, relations with other entities (such as weather or other living beings) through to connections with the future; and distil those ideas into a ‘Crow’. The Crow is an invented form of writing that references conjuring and spells as a way of paying attention.

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Workshop: Eating the Landscape
Mar
24
5:30 PM17:30

Workshop: Eating the Landscape

Join Rebecca Beinart and Wallace Heim for a series of creative writing workshops to explore Crow Park from multiple points of view. In this session, we’ll explore the idea of ‘portals’ into other ways of seeing. We’ll play with creating recipes for Crow Park, and the idea of ingesting elements of the landscape to alter your perspective.

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Discussion: Slippery time and other-than-human perspectives
Mar
4
5:30 PM17:30

Discussion: Slippery time and other-than-human perspectives

Does viewing the natural world through human eyes limit our understanding? How can we imagine beyond linear time, and human viewpoints? And what could we learn from these different perspectives? Join Rebecca Beinart for a conversation with Maya Chowdhry and Wallace Heim to hear about their work and their responses to these questions.

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Crow Park Workshop: Movement
Aug
22
2:00 PM14:00

Crow Park Workshop: Movement

A workshop with Rebecca Beinart and Simone Kenyon, to learn more about Crow Park through sensory experience and movement. We will meet for an introductory workshop via Zoom, where we will talk through the project and share a 'menu' of actions to be carried out on site – from very subtle invitations to notice your environment, to more visible actions. Participants will be invited to carry out their chosen action on Crow Park, with the option to come back together to reflect on the experience afterwards.

This free event will take place remotely via Zoom. Limited numbers, booking essential.

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Crow Park Workshop: Creative Writing
Aug
15
2:00 PM14:00

Crow Park Workshop: Creative Writing

A creative writing workshop with Rebecca Beinart and Wallace Heim exploring Crow Park. We will begin the workshop with a series of objects selected by participants. Through a series of writing exercises we will explore the site from different perspectives, and play with the relationship between different objects, stories and inhabitants.

This free event will take place remotely via Zoom. Limited numbers, booking Essential.

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Urban Antibodies and Ecologies of Reproduction
Mar
4
6:00 PM18:00

Urban Antibodies and Ecologies of Reproduction

This event forms part of Arts Catalyt’s Recentring Attention programme.

What do we mean by reproductive rights and reproductive (in)justice? Why and how has knowledge around reproductive health changed through different points in history and across different geographies? Join this workshop to collectively explore issues around reproduction from social, ecological and historical perspectives.

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Herbal histories & reproductive rights
May
23
6:00 PM18:00

Herbal histories & reproductive rights

Join artist Rebecca Beinart and herbalist Rasheeqa Ahmad to make a collaborative collage of plants historically used for birth control and hormonal health. As we create this visual map we'll discuss how this knowledge travelled across different geographies and why it was shared or suppressed at different points in history. 

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Ergot, Midwives & St Anthony’s Fire
Apr
18
3:00 PM15:00

Ergot, Midwives & St Anthony’s Fire

In the 1950s, the Wellcome Foundation  was still cultivating Ergot – a parasitic fungus – for use in making pharmaceutical drugs. The story of this fungus connects fascinating themes including the edge between poison and medicine; witchcraft; midwifery, gendered knowledge and reproductive rights. During this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to work with visual material from the archive, and create models based on the parasitic fungus. Whilst making together we will explore the themes brought up by the story of ergot.

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Yams, hormones and bioprospecting
Mar
21
3:00 PM15:00

Yams, hormones and bioprospecting

Join Rebecca Beinart for a drop-in workshop to sift through images and get intimate with the Elephant's Foot Yam. We will make drawings of the plant from dried samples, herbarium copies and a rich array of archival material. Whilst we draw we will piece together the story of the wild yam, indigenous uses and knowledge, colonial plant-hunting and taxonomy, its use in pharmaceutical drug manufacture, and issues around contemporary conservation.

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From Plants to Pills: Elephants Foot to Cortisone
Jun
9
2:00 PM14:00

From Plants to Pills: Elephants Foot to Cortisone

This workshop will delve into the development of Cortisone in the 1950s, when Boots established a purpose-built factory in Beeston to produce the drug from Elephants Foot, a South African yam. During these early years of steroid drug development, Cortisone was hailed as a miracle cure. During the workshop we’ll cook and eat yam together and trace the story of Boots bioprospecting for steroid-rich plants in South Africa, and the impact of Cortisone on the development of medicine.

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From Plants to Pills: Gin, Tonic and Biopiracy
Jun
6
6:00 PM18:00

From Plants to Pills: Gin, Tonic and Biopiracy

A workshop to make your own tonic water using Cinchona bark, the quinine-rich plant that gives tonic its bitter flavour. We’ll try out recipes together, share a gin and tonic, and trace the story of quinine. Originally utilised by the indigenous Quechua people of South America, the bark of the Cinchona tree connects the invasion of these lands to expanding European colonialism, disease, biopiracy and pharmaceuticals.

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