The Digital Hub launch Radicle Lab to explore Dublin 8 community art and ecology
The Digital Hub is set to host a unique creative ecologies project focusing on environmental sustainability, curated by current Artist-in-Resident Seoidín O’Sullivan. The Radicle Lab will bring local communities, artists and researchers together to connect, celebrate and develop ecologically sustainable projects in the surrounding Dublin 8 area.
This Creative Laboratory will launch on Tuesday, May 31st and run until Friday, June 10th at iD8 Studio at The Gatelodge on The Digital Hub campus, in Dublin’s Liberties. Directions to the venue at: https://goo.gl/maps/sNaiH2rvjxDe9DZ56
The Radicle Lab will bring local communities, artists and academic researchers into a shared, open space where sustainable ideas can evolve and grow to create an impact on the Dublin 8 area. It is also hoped the Lab will drive conversations around the next phase of Dublin 8’s development.
The Lab will host community ecology projects from the Dublin 8 area through a series of lunchtime walks and talks, including visits to the Oliver Bond Community Garden with Ezak Abderrezak Meddar, a tour of the NCAD Field project with NCAD lecturer Gareth Kennedy, and a walk and talk session along the Camac River and Turvey Park.
Additionally, daily workshops will be held including; the Propagating Urban Futures workshop with award-winning gardener Joan Mallon, and the Social Justice Greening toolkit workshop, delivered by BCNUEJ (Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability) – http://www.bcnuej.org/. These will intertwine the topics of socio-ecologies, contemporary critical ecological art practices and the rights of nature.
Schedule of events:
Monday 30 May:
Opening of Creative Ecologies Lab
10am-3pm:
Building a Soil Library: Collecting soil from various public lands for the Radicle Soil Library.
1pm-2pm
What makes this place? Researching material culture in Dublin 8 with Dr Lisa Godson
This session will present key methods for researching place with a focus on Dublin 8. Those methods include a consideration of how knowledge is produced by different agents including planning authorities, plants and people, how global and local forces intersect, understanding different registers of use and how the physical characteristics of place are produced and disrupted. It will include reference to specific case studies on Dublin 8 by MA researchers, encompassing work on gentrification, markets, legacies of making, Traveller accommodation and street furniture.
Tuesday 31st May:
10am-12.30pm:
Propagating Urban Futures: A plant swop and propagation workshop with Joan Mallon
A community workshop where participants will learn how to propagate plants from cuttings. Bring your own plants to swop
https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/radicle-propagating-urban-futures-workshop-tickets-347307755847
About: Joan Mallon is a gardener who won a gold medal for her Goal Garden in Bloom Festival 2015. She is passionate about gardening and has worked with communities and private clients in creating spaces of ecological and mental wellbeing through her planting design that celebrates biodiversity and life.
1pm -2.30pm:
Oliver Bond Community Garden walk and talk with Ezak Abderrezak Meddar
https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/radicle-oliver-bond-st-community-garden-walk-talk-tickets-347441766677
About: Ezak Abderrezak Meddar started his community garden just outside the window of his Oliver Bond apartment during Covid lockdown when he couldn’t get to his allotment. Other neighbours soon requested garden plots and joined in and they now have carved out an oasis space of wellbeing. Most recently Pocket Forests have also worked with Ezak in introducing a small urban forest.
Wednesday 1st June
10am -12.30pm:
It’s always about the LAND: Collecting soil from various public lands for the Radicle soil library.
1pm-2.30pm:
Bee 8 walk and talk with Anthony Freeman O’Brien and Robert Emmet
About: The Bee8 Urban Beekeeping initiative, run by the Robert Emmet Community Development Project since 2014, is a socially and environmentally sustainable programme designed to create educational and employment opportunities in Dublin 8. It aims to support the endangered native Irish honey bee, with hives equipped with sensors to monitor environmental performance. The project currently employs two people, who manage 12 hives in the area and offer free beekeeping courses and educational resources to the local community and schools. methodologies; and radical ecologies and multi-species well-being.
3pm-4pm
Walk and Talk in the NCAD FIELD with Gareth Kennedy NCAD Fine Art lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practice & course leader of NCAD FIELD
Since 2020, Gareth has been charged with running Studio+ NCAD FIELD module in a derelict brownfield site beside the college. Students reckon with the layered history and potential futures of this site through experimental, experiential and environmental pedagogy combining cognitive, intellectual learning with hands-on processes. Gareth will speak to this evolving and dynamic course work that tasks students with developing new ‘Naturecultures’.
Thursday 2nd June
11.30am-1pm:
Feminist Counter-Topographies reading group: Pollution is Colonialism Max Liboiron and Braiding Sweet Grass Robin Wall Kimmerer
The ‘Feminist Counter-Topographies’ international online reading group began in 2021 with a focus on feminist ways of knowing and pedagogies. It has grown to create a nurturing space for artists and geographers (loosely defined) to share readings and practice that inspire and/or raise questions related to their work, to share work in progress, to engage in reflexive writing exercises, and to advance eco-social communities that are more respectful, just and empowering. Emergent themes include: feminist mapping and translation practices; feminist and indigenous forms of storytelling, listening, and giving gratitude; feminist, indigenous and Black critiques of colonialism; anti-colonial and anti-extractivist research
1pm-2.30pm
Walk and talk to Turvey park, Inchicore along Camac river way with Dublin 8 Green Bridge Forum
The D8 Green Bridge forum is an active forum that values and supports the access to and development of quality public green and blue spaces, in order to progress connectivity and community well-being across the area. The D8 Green Bridge forum, previously called the Greening Forum, emerged out of the recommendations of Mapping Green Dublin (2019 – 2021) a collaborative action research project led by UCD’s School of Geography in collaboration with arts organisation Common Ground, artist Seoidín O’Sullivan and Connect the Dots.
D8 Green Bridge forum projects include improving access amenities and environmental initiatives to the Grand Canal Tow Path, the development of social and cultural initiatives in Turvey Park and its development as a quality greenspace with biodiversity and green space development specific to public housing for Emmet Road and Dolphin House. The forum is also researching and monitoring DCC’s and Waterways Ireland’s key green and blue developments for the area.
For more information or to get involved contact Common Ground via email at: info@commonground.ie.
Mapping Green Dublin – Mapping Green Spaces in Dublin
Friday 3rd June
10am-12.30pm:
NCAD Masters students from Art in Contemporary World developing Critical Ecology Art Projects
12pm-1.30pm:
Novel Ecologies with Doctor Melissa Pineda Pinto and Novel Eco team
The urban ecology research group studies urban ecosystems from multiple angles including how species adapt and survive in rapidly-changing cities; what new and novel ecosystems exist in urban areas; how urban habitats are interact and connect to non-urban habitats; what functions and services urban ecosystems may have; what values urban nature may have for societies; and whether nature can offer solutions to address climate and other environmental issues.
Tuesday 7th June
10.30am-12.30pm
It’s always about the Land Artists discussion on studio spaces, high rents and critical ecologies with Kate O’Shea, Seoidín O’Sullivan and Pallas Studios.
1.15pm-2.15pm
A local Flax growing and weaving Project in the D8 neighbourhood with Marja Almqvist and The Yarn School http://theyarnschool.ie/about/
Discussion on a local flax growing and weaving project with the yarn school.
At The Yarn School good conversation and sharing a ‘good yarn’ is at the heart of personal and community well-being. Through the medium of textiles participants creatively explore personal and collective history and meaning. Committed to equality, social justice and sustainable development Marja uses the medium of textiles to explore what these principles mean in practice.
3pm-4pm
Visit to Taplins Field Bridgefoot Street Community Garden: Taplin’s Fields is a purpose built community garden in the new Bridgefoot Street Park which opened on 14th May. The garden is maintained and run by volunteers and provides a welcoming green space for individuals, groups and families.
Wednesday 8th June
10am-3pm:
Critical Design prototyping workshop with community greening projects aimed at supporting people who are interested in taking action to enhance green spaces and/or biodiversity in their local area. Led by Dr Anne Schiffer (Leeds University), practical exercises to support ‘design thinking’ for idea development will be discussed.
Dr Anne Schiffer explores how design thinking can help tackle local and global real world challenges, including in the areas of sustainable energy transitions, energy and water access. She is the author of Reframing Energy Access: Insights from The Gambia. The interdisciplinary nature of her research brings together participatory/ co-design practice, urbanism, feminist development theory and design anthropology. She holds a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast that critiques the role of designers in international development.
Thursday 9th June
10am-3pm:
Social Justice Greening toolkit workshop with URBANA (Barcelona) led by Panagiota Kotsila
About: Panagiota Kotsila of URBANA lab (the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability) examines the structural and systemic drivers of social inequalities, exclusion, oppression, and neo-colonization in cities. Building on the theory and methods from urban planning, public policy, urban and environmental sociology, urban geography and public health, the Lab analyses the extent to which urban plans and policy decisions can contribute to more just, resilient, healthy, and sustainable cities, and how community groups in distressed neighbourhoods contest environmental inequities as a result of urban (re)development processes and policies. Kotsila and her colleagues believe in putting the needs of socially vulnerable groups at the centre of sustainable urban land use practices and planning decisions, and prioritising justice-driven responses to environmental and climate-related challenges. Our emphasis is on understanding the role that community, public, and private institutions can play in creating prosperous, welcoming and supportive cities for all.
Friday 10th June
10am-1pm:
NCAD Art in Contemporary World Masters Students developing creative critical ecology projects.
1pm-2.30pm:
Screening of Rights of Nature Film and talk a new conversation on law and ecology with Dr Peter Doran
About: Rights of Nature is a way of re-thinking our relationship with nature – from one of dominance to one of sharing, caring, respect and interdependency. It can also act as a catalyst to shift our thinking from an extractive economy towards a regenerative economy. The idea of nature having rights is not new. Nature has rights. What is new is how we can intervene using a rights of nature lens to protect nature and to recognise the intrinsic rights of ecosystems and species to evolve, flourish, and regenerate.
Affording Rights to Nature is now vital because our laws, policies and environmental systems were never really designed to protect the environment. They were designed merely to reduce the rate of loss not to halt the loss in the first place or restore long term damage. EJNI’s Rights of Nature project will support and provide a platform for collaborations between activists, NGOs, lawyers, and academics who aim to develop the rights of nature conversation on the island of Ireland.
AuthorDigital Hub Team