Join author and Professor of Colonialism & Heritage Corinne Fowler alongside visual artist and researcher Ingrid Pollard for a conversation with Invasion Ecology co-curator Jelena Sofronijevic about the British countryside’s relationship to Empire.
This event is part of Invasion Ecology: online conversations - a series of discussions with artists and writers around the themes of the group exhibition Invasion Ecology. The exhibition, presented by Radical Ecology and Southcombe Barn, questions what we mean by ‘native’ and what it means to belong - reimagining more empathic connections between humans, plants, animals and landscapes.
Corinne Fowler is Professor of Colonialism and Heritage at The University of Leicester. She specialises in colonial history, decolonisation and the British countryside’s relationship to Empire. Her most recent books include Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections (Peepal Tree Press, 2020) and her latest book is: Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain (Penguin Allen Lane, 2024).
Ingrid Pollard is a British artist and photographer. Her work uses portraiture photography and traditional landscape imagery to explore social constructs such as Britishness or racial difference. Pollard is associated with Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers. She lives and works in London. In the 1980s, Pollard produced a series of photographs of black people in rural landscapes, entitled Pastoral Interludes. The works challenge the way that English culture places black people in cities.
Jelena Sofronijevic is a producer, curator, writer, and researcher, who makes content at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts. They are the Contemporary Art Curator at The Box in Plymouth and co-curator of Invasion Ecology (2024), and they produce EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art. They also produce historicity, a new series of audio walking tours exploring how cities got to be the way they are, recorded on location in London (2022) and Tokyo (2023), and works in print. Jelena’s full portfolio is available on their website, Instagram, and Twitter.