AbstractThis session asks how art as process—visual, listening practices, collective making—can interrupt hegemonic discourse and open more-than-verbal ways of knowing. We focus on the spaces and framings artists create: encounters that disrupt, inspire, reorganise attention, and help imagine other powers and futures.
Presenters include:
Helen Edling (artist/curator; Lokalen Kulturverkstad, Sweden) will present play as a method of creativity and a strategy of political resistance. Through examples from her practice, she examines how a play aesthetic can carve out temporary, in-between spaces that resist dominant socio-political narratives, creating experimental sites of co-creation, unsettling hierarchies and expanding the horizon of what can be collectively imagined, articulated and enacted.
Alan McFetridge (artist; founder, Centre for Ecological Philosophy) will present projects where image-making functions as inquiry—combining photography, field notes and dialogic exercises to unsettle extractive ways of seeing and cultivate ecological imaginaries. He will share practice examples that move thinking beyond the logocentric toward felt, embodied understanding.
Kate Maclean (UCL) will facilitate a conversation on the entanglements of art, space and political economy—probing how arts-based processes make-with human and more-than-human others; what forms of value and exchange they bring into being; and the publics and powers they create or disrupt.
Dr Neelambari Phalkey (artist, researcher) explores the climate crisis through painting, photography, film, and sound as forms of inquiry. With a background in human geography and environmental Science, she uses artistic process as a way of listening—attuning to ecological rhythms, silences, and entanglements that data alone cannot convey. Her work invites more-than-verbal ways of knowing and reorganises how we pay attention. Working collaboratively with scientists and communities, she reimagines power as relational and distributed—cultivating art as a process of reciprocity, care, and shared imagination toward other futures.
