A RESIDENCY AND AN INVITATION!

Back in 2020, as we emerged on and off from lockdown, I started a new collaboration, Utopias Bach - revolution in miniature. It wanted to see if we could, in the midst of a pandemic, rethink Utopia as rooted in place, while growing connections across the world. Working alongside Wanda Zyborska, Lisa Hudson, Samina Ali and Julie Upmeyer and a growing community of others, we started inviting people to imagine and try out little things that might in some way help create a better place for people of all kinds (human and more-than-human), especially those who are most badly affected by the state of the world.

Utopias Bach has now become a ‘strawberry plant’ of a collective, with several hundred members and a thriving set of ‘experiments’ in the form of a series of creative invitations to explore personal and communal relationships to the human and more-than-human world. Although our focus is working in community, outside formal institutions, we are this year exploring how we might bring our community into contact with galleries and arts centres. And the first of our ‘residencies’ this year is at Pontio Arts and Innovation Centre in Bangor (3 March - 27 May 2023).

We would like invite you – human people and tree people of all ages - to join us in becoming a symbiotic participants in a co-enquiry with trees. We’ll be finding out: “How can we ‘dod yn ôl at ein coed’ through human-tree collaborations?”. The Welsh idiom ‘dod yn ôl at fy nghoed’ literally translates as ‘coming back to my trees’, meaning returning to your roots/senses/a balanced state of mind.

Using art, photography, poetry, mapping, costume making, performance, storytelling and collaborative enquiry, we will create a forest-like interconnected community of movement, senses, sound, growth and connection.

During the Experimental School you will be invited to take part in a series of six Cylchoedd. Each one will be a creative enquiry, lasting two weeks, and shaped around a different question. There will be opportunities to take part at home, online and at Pontio in Bangor. So you don’t have to be in North Wales to take part!

At the end of the 12 weeks you will be invited to the graduation and to take part in our final dramatic ending as ‘The Forest comes to Pontio’.

If you’d like to join us, I’d be so delighted!