In the lead up to Od Arts festival 2023, OSR Projects are excited to announce a one-day seminar, Into another intensity, taking place on Saturday 22 April 2023. This event will bring artists, curators and cultural producers together in rural Somerset to consider how art can open up new encounters with, and ways of thinking about rural places in the context of an ever more interconnected world.
As part of the Od Arts Festival 2023 – Still and Still Moving this seminar is relevant to all creative practitioners with an interest in the opportunities as well as the challenges of making, participating and experiencing art in rural contexts. The event will provide presentations by inspiring speakers, as well as a chance to meet future collaborators, share food and explore new perspectives through creative provocations and conversations.
Into another intensity features a programme of invited speakers and provocateurs from around the UK including:
Dr Rosemary Shirley Associate Professor in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research centres on cultural representations of rural places and she has published widely on this subject including her monograph Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture. She co-curated the critical landscape exhibition Creating the Countryside at Compton Verney and her writing was included in Documents in Contemporary Art: The Rural (Whitechapel/MIT Press 2019).
Dan Guthrie artist-filmmaker, film programmer and writer whose practice often explores representations and mis-representations of Black Britishness with an interest in examining how they manifest themselves in rural areas. Recent presentations of his work include Whitstable Biennale, Berlinale Forum Expanded and the Independent Cinema Office and LUX’s Right of Way screening tour. He was an awardee of the 2022 Michael O’Pray Prize for new writing on the moving image and part of the programming team for the 18th edition of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival.
Kate Genever artist and farmer. Her traditional mixed family farm is in a small village in South Lincolnshire. As an artist she tries to make sense of the world through drawing. She takes drawing to be more than a technique – rather a disposition that reveals our connections with the world of materials and each other. A drawing from, with and together. In places, over extended periods, she considers how we improvise and imagine in response to our immediate problems. Be it in villages, refuges, caravan parks, lockdown…she builds deep connections with people in the celebration and support of site-specific responses, DIY architectures and community actions.
Still Moving artist collective. Through collaboration and embedded research, they seek new knowledge and reminders of what they may have forgotten. They are intrigued by how interactions with other epistemologies infect and influence one another and offer up new possibilities and ways of being that nurture forms of living. Founded by three artists, Laura Hopes, Martin Hampton and Léonie Hampton, who met when they were 13, and all live in Devon, UK. Inspired by the artist Louise Bourgeois who said ‘It is not about the medium, it is about what you are trying to say’, their work emerges in diverse forms.
Laura Eldret artist and organiser. Laura makes installations, posters, drawings, textiles, videos, and events. She is interested in the commonalities that bring diverse groups of people together and the productive tensions of social encounters. Her art offers a gentle nudge to communal consciousness and action, bringing alternative voices to the fore. Her projects have involved working locally and transnationally, in both metropolitan and rural areas around the world. Drawing on methodologies of anthropology, ethnography, and sociology, she is exploring ways to contest art’s autonomy and affirm the value of conversation and social encounters. Recently, she has become interested in combining commoning, social ecological and growing practices. She is also founder/director of More Than Ponies, an ambitious though occasional artist-led programme of contemporary art for/about the New Forest and surrounding areas.
Into another intensity is part of Od Arts Festival 2023- Still and Still Moving (26-28 May 2023) organised by OSR Projects and supported by Arts Council England.
