Like seeds beneath the soil, we’ve been working away through the winter. Now green shoots are beginning to sprout. Here’s a little run-down of what we’ve been working on and how you can get involved…
A FRAMEWORK FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Last month, we launched A Framework for Environmental Justice with an online discussion hosted by the Museums Association. This is the outcome of what has been a flagship project for us since our inception in 2021. It responds to a fundamental question that we ask: how do we develop agency in response to the interconnected crises of climate breakdown and racial inequality?
The report, written by lead author Katie Natanel and originally published in November 2024, in the wake of Donald Trump’s second presidential election victory, reflects two years of conversations with practitioners from some of the UK’s leading cultural and heritage organisations including the National Trust, Southbank Centre and Plymouth Culture, held under the banner of the Black Atlantic Innovation Network (BAIN). BAIN has been co-convened by Radical Ecology and UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the study of Racism and Racialisation.
Within and across these organisations, we’ve explored developments taking place in siloed strands of work including equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), sustainability and decolonisation, identifying common objectives and challenges as well as best practices that shine through across the UK’s cultural and heritage sectors. We have further considered that when seen not as separate siloes but as a unified whole, this work begins to reveal what we call environmental justice - a joined up strategy for facing the future from the heart of our cultural institutions.
SENSING THE PLANET at Thelma Hulbert Gallery
All our activity at Radical Ecology is underpinned by the belief that it’s only through art and culture that we can ever really create a new world. Sensing the Planet, Ashish Ghadiali’s debut solo exhibition, opens tomorrow at Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton, East Devon, and brings together three film installations - Can you tell the time of a running river? (2024), Invasion Ecology (2024), and Planetary Imagination (2023), a new sound piece - This Part of World Contains a Complete World (2025), and new photographic series including Where do we go when we realise that we can’t go back to nature? (2025), and That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire (2025) that have all emerged in dialogue with the wider conversations we’ve been fielding during the past three years.
Curated by Gemma Girvan, the exhibition blends deeply personal narratives with vast ecological theories and documentation of major historical events to examine the relationship between colonial violence and ecological breakdown, exploring how racial justice serves as a prism for better understanding our planet in crisis.
A public programme day will be held on Saturday April 12, including a keynote presentation by decolonial feminist scholar Françoise Vergès, a conversation between Ashish and Joy Sleeman, Director of Research at the Slade School of Fine Art UCL, and a participatory session from the Dream Ecologies collective, which we have been convening through monthly meetings since October last year. Tickets for the events are specific to each session and limited. They are available here. Please book early to avoid disappointment.
Unlimited, is access to tomorrow’s opening event: Saturday 22 March, 3-5pm at Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton. We’d love to see you there! The exhibition continues until 26 April.
TIME OF THE RIVERS
In other news, we’re so thrilled to be working with our friends at Borneo Bengkel on a collaboration with the British Council to deliver TIME OF THE RIVERS, an artist fellowship which aims to deepen decolonial approaches to art and ecology. The project builds on our shared and ongoing research into the ecological and social impact of big dam projects including Bengoh (Sarawak, 2010s) and Burrator (Dartmoor, 1890s), centering the lives of displaced communities and historic legacies of dispossession, raising questions around how far extractivist dynamics of economic development are also reflected in dominant approaches to heritage and culture that connect the UK and Borneo to this day.
In the face of such dynamics and projected impacts of global warming, the project also considers the reparative and emancipatory potential of artistic strategies that reconnect us with the time and flow of our river ecologies. The fellowship will be supported with sessions from mentors including Celine Lim (Managing Director of SAVE Rivers), Emma Nicolson Head of Visual Arts at Creative Scotland), Françoise Vergès (Senior Research Fellow at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation) and June Rubis (indigenous scholar, decolonial thinker and conservationist). Keep a look out for the announcement of the selected fellows and read more about the project.
NATURAL ENGLAND: A 100 YEAR CARE PLAN
We’re in the final stages of developing a long-term ecological care plan for post-plantation woodlands, led by Iman Datoo and focused on Dartington’s North Woods. The project, which has been funded by Natural England, reimagines forestry through local ownership and care, exploring a way beyond the binary of capitalist value systems and deep ecology to think about how we can meaningfully live in relationship, as co-creators, with the earth. We’ll be sharing the final report soon, so stay tuned.
DEVONPORT 200: HOME
Finally, a big shout out to the young people of Devonport’s Mount Wise Neighbourhood Centre Youth Club. We had such a great time with you, making the film, Home, which was commissioned by Real Ideas Organisation and created by Radical Ecology in collaboration with Zebra Collective. Through the project, participants were able to explore 360 filmmaking and showcase their own relationship to home and place across a variety of locations in Devonport - including the waterfront, parks and their own front rooms. The film was shown in Plymouth Market Hall’s immersive 360 dome as part of Dazzle - a free festival celebrating Devonport’s 200-year anniversary. We had a lot of fun and look forward to working on more participatory film and immersive media projects in Devonport and beyond in the months and years to come.
RADICAL ECOLOGY RECCOMMENDS:
In case you are looking for more reading material, here are some texts that are helping us to delve deeper into geology, water and liberation in the landscape:
**Françoise Vergès - Making the World Clean: **In Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism, Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies, and resources and the organised deprivation of clean water, shelter, and access to health services—in other words, the structural denial, along racial lines, of vital needs. Through 38 short sections, she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into drudgery and into a racialized, gendered, poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or, simply put, of “decolonial cleaning.”
A Year of Deep Listening: 365 Text Scores for Pauline Oliveros, edited by Stephanie Loveless: A Year of Deep Listening is a publication of 365 scores for listening gathered by the Center for Deep Listening in celebration of the legacy of ground-breaking composer Pauline Oliveros. Originally begun online, in honour of what would have been Oliveros’ 90th birthday (May 30, 2022), the project shared one score per day across social media for 365 days. The book version of A Year of Deep Listening brings these scores together into one beautiful and historic volume. An expression of the Deep Listening community, the scores were created by over 300 artists–ranging from prize winning composers to ear-minded grocery store clerks, from those who worked closely with Oliveros for decades to those who never met her.
Rasheedah Phillips - Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time: A radical new treatise on time, quantum physics, and racial justice from world-renowned artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism. Why do some processes - like aging, birth, and car crashes - occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.
Subscribe to our Newsletter here.