This week’s conversation connects across the oceans with Indonesia-based curator Ignatia Nilu, exploring ideas behind the presentation of Radio Ensemble at AND Festival. Radio Ensemble invites UK and Indonesian sound artists and composers to perform together as an ensemble across parallel time and space, broadcast in both Indonesia and the UK. The ensemble combines analogue and digital technologies to connect multiple players; musicians, sound artists, composers and programmers from the UK and Indonesia in a speculative performance. Each of the ensemble players are guided in the performance by an auditive score composed by Indonesian composer Gatot Danar.

The cultural shift required to address the climate crisis calls on the cultural sector to look closely at the sites of ecocide globally, to understand the relationship between white supremacy, colonialism and ecological degradation. Frontline communities resisting extraction have been at the forefront of challenging the current rate of exploitation and exposing the absence of monitoring and restoration of vital ecosystems that have brought us to this planetary tipping point. In this talk, Suzanne will explore how the climate crisis intersects with the ongoing colonial exploitation of crucial ecosystems such as the Athabasca Delta in the Canadian Tar Sands to the Niger Delta.  She will share her practice as a climate justice creative to expose the webs of corporate and financial power that have led to the current crisis. Through working in international, intergenerational solidarity, her work has sought to uplift those challenging the paradigm which has led to the devastation which characterizes the Anthropocene. Suzanne Dhaliwal was voted one of London’s most influential people in Environment in 2018 by the Evening Standard. In 2009 she co-founded the UK Tar Sands Network, which challenged BP and Shell investments in the Canadian tar sands in solidarity with frontline Indigenous communities, spurring the internationalisation of the fossil fuel divestment movement.  Her corporate and financial campaigning spans over a decade, including spearheading a European coalition to challenge the insurance industry on their underwriting of highly polluting coal and tar sands projects. Suzanne has led artistic interventions to challenge fossil fuel investments globally, and currently works as a creative practice tutor and freelance consultant.  This conversation is part of Resurface, our conversations programme looking at how we work together and reshape the future of art.

Coinciding with the launch of WetLab, a new commission situated at the National Waterways Museum in Ellesmere Port, Rhianon Morgan-Hatch and Carlotta Novella from public works, and Hannah Fincham and Ross Bennett from Assembly discuss floating experiments in design, civic space and the ideas informing their shared practice.  This talk is part of Deeper, a series of in-depth conversations with artists presenting work elsewhere within the festival, offering a weekly moment to delve beyond the surface of the AND Festival 2021 programme.

In the first of our weekly Deeper artist focus talks, editor, writer and Curator at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery Mariama Attah joined artists Hakeem Adam and Maxwell Mutanda to discuss their new work One-Fifth of the Earth’s Surface. The project offers multiple readings of the unpredictable transatlantic waters as an evolving structure that initiates change on its surrounding lands, rerouting power and reshaping the lives of all who depend on it. Together they explore new ideas of archive, ownership, collaborative production, mapping and knowledge forms.  This talk is part of Deeper, a series of in-depth conversations with artists presenting work elsewhere within the festival, offering a weekly moment to delve beyond the surface of the AND Festival 2021 programme.

Drawing from her curatorial research, Toxicity’s Reach curator Dani Admiss gave audiences a chemo-ethnographic tour of the show. Interweaving an online curators tour, stories from the exposure repository, and further research on the River Mersey, Admiss thinks about disruption, exposure and erasure at different scales. Dani was joined in conversation by artist Luiza Prado de. O Martins, whose work The Sea Collapsed Into the Pleasures of the Sand you can explore via the Toxicity’s Reach online exhibition.  This talk was part of Deeper, a series of in-depth conversations with artists presenting work elsewhere within the festival, offering a weekly moment to delve beyond the surface of the AND Festival 2021 programme.

In this edition of Deeper, radical Dutch collective New Emergences discuss their work amplifying voices underrepresented within digital media culture, electronic music and sound art. Curators Semay Wu and Mariëtte Groot (New Emergences) speak with Angeliki Diakrousi and mariëlle verdijk about their individual practices and coming together to reflect on shared storytelling and mythology as ways of organising to offer different perspectives on sea and ports.  The New Emergences Foundation is a Netherlands based platform for amplifying voices underrepresented within digital media culture, electronic music, and sound art. They work towards the acknowledgement, presence and inclusion of women, LGBTQIA+, disabled communities, and people of all other ethnic groups combined.  This talk is part of Deeper, a series of in-depth conversations with artists presenting work elsewhere within the festival, offering a weekly moment to delve beyond the surface of the AND Festival 2021 programme.

Weedweavers by Angeliki Diakrousi and mariëlle verdijk is commissioned and produced by Abandon Normal Devices, curated by New Emergences. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England and Creative Industries Fund Netherlands.

In this edition of Deeper, the speculative future artist and director Anita Fontaine joined AND Creative Director Luke W Moody to talk about the ideas, research and complex production processes behind her ambitious new AR commission The Blue Violet River. Fontaine’s artwork transforms the iconic Mersey Ferry to inhabit a fantasy-fiction world exploring an evolved reality brought about by climate change, rising sea levels and tropical climates.  This talk is part of Deeper, a series of in-depth conversations with artists presenting work elsewhere within the festival, offering a weekly moment to delve beyond the surface of the AND Festival 2021 programme.

In Sustaining Uncertainty, we’ll ask how to nurture and protect space for the unknown within arts institutions. How do we exist within, and subvert, models of production that often require predictability and classification? How do we resist the ‘flattening’ of identities which can so often happen in organisational settings? And how do we navigate the tensions between the uncertainty (and chaos) of our real lives and collaborations with the demands and constraints of cultural production? Cultural practitioners Razia Jordan, Jonathan May and Penny Rafferty join Siddharth Khajuria in a reflective and open-ended conversation to explore these questions. This conversation is part of Resurface, our conversations programme looking at how we work together and reshape the future of art. 

Artist and architect Kate Davies was joined in conversation by marine biologist Steve Simpson to talk about her AND Festival 2021 commission By the Sound of Things – an immersive audiovisual experience onboard the unique steam-powered, Mersey-built boat, the Daniel Adamson. The work explores sonic resonances of global sea trade through a hypnotic binaural sound work and accompaying film.  This talk is part of Deeper, a series of in-depth conversations with artists presenting work elsewhere within the festival, offering a weekly moment to delve beyond the surface of the AND Festival 2021 programme. Tune in every Thursday, 7pm at andfestival.org.uk/live. Each talk will be available to listen to throughout the festival, until Sunday 11 July. And tune in every Sunday for our conversation series, Resurface.

Following the premiere of The Grief Interval, writer Harry Sword joined Aura Satz and Sarah Davachi in a conversation to reflect on the film, their processes and projects.