Camden Art Audio

John Merrick and Alina Kolar discuss the history of The Radical Thinkers series from Verso. To reflect on how it enabled them to discover and engage with the ideas presented by favoured radical thinkers and the challenges of publishing at large. John Merrick is a writer based in London, where he is an editor at Verso Books. He has had work published in New Left Review, Boston Review, TLS, Jacobin, Tribune, New Statesman, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book about class, culture and the North of England.

The New Radical is an online series of conversations between Arts of the Working Class and contributing writers for Verso Books, discussing what the new radical means today. Maya Goodfellow and Alina Kolar speak about the understanding of the word Radical in relation to Immigration and Borders, Affect and Effect of Time, with regards to the ongoing impact of the pandemic, and what is within and beyond our control. Maya Goodfellow is a writer, researcher and academic. She has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Statesman, Al Jazeera and the Independent. She received her PhD from SOAS, University of London and is a trustee of the Runnymede Trust. She is the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, out now in paperback with Verso.

The New Radical is an online series of conversations between Arts of the Working Class and contributing writers for Verso Books, discussing what the new radical means today. Aaron Bastani and Alina Kolar try to determine The New Radical between the news, fact and fiction. They examine voices that make up the realm of thinking and unthinking the mainstream and the grass-roots.

Aaron Bastani is co-founder and Senior Editor at Novara Media and has a doctorate from the University of London. His research interests include new media, social movements and political economy. He has written for Vice, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the New York Times and regularly appears as a commentator on the BBC and Sky News. He is the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, out now in paperback with Verso.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the value and importance of outdoor spaces. Recent studies into public health and well-being state that green environments are associated with reduced levels of depression, anxiety, and fatigue and can enhance both children and adults' quality of life. However, access is not always a given, nor is everyone encouraged to feel welcome in green spaces.

Flock Together is a birdwatching collective for people of colour initiated to challenge and dismantle existing prejudices. Over the past year, every month, they have been organising walks around London's green spaces. To promote the mental health benefits of birdwatching — and expand the perception of what it means to be a birder. Since its inception, Flock Together has attracted hundreds of young people, who have either physically attended or joined their expanding online community. Recently branches have opened in NYC and Toronto, with more to follow.

For this episode of Public Knowledge, Flock Together co-founder Nadeem Perera walks us through Hackney Marshes in East London. To explain what interested him in birdwatching, how he and Ollie Olanipekun came together to form the collective – and why birds can teach us all a thing or two.

Artist Tamara Henderson in conversation with Gina Buenfeld (Camden Art Centre Exhibitions Curator) co-curator of The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree. They discuss the concerns that run throughout Henderson's work including hypnosis, altered states, life processes, seasonal patterns and vegetal motifs.

Conversations are a series of public talks with artists, academics, thinkers, and writers investigating themes, processes, and histories presented in the exhibition programme.

Michael Marder, author of numerous books on plant philosophy, will be in-conversation with Camden Art Centre Director, Martin Clark, to discuss the significance of plants for our lives, ways of thinking, and relationships between human and non-human beings.

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology.

Conversations are a series of public talks with artists, academics, thinkers, and writers investigating themes, processes, and histories presented in the exhibition programme.

What's Love Got To Do With It? is a three-part podcast series about Radical Love. The final episode of this podcast series is a conversation between two friends: Ariana Reines and Sophie Robinson, poets and educators who look to spaces of hospitality for connection and kinship. Sharing their poetry and the experiences that shaped its writing, the pair discuss possibilities for care despite institutional cruelty, getting sober as an act of radical love, and how the Sun and Moon communicate very different and sometimes uncomfortable truths to Reines and Robinson respectively.

What's Love Got To Do With It? is programmed and curated by Beatrice Gibson, produced by Alannah Chance, and features unique compositions by Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright. It is a commission by Bergen Kunsthall; Camden Art Centre, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, Toronto.

What's Love Got To Do With It? is a three-part podcast series about Radical Love. In the second episode, poets Alice Notley and Precious Okoyomon converse together for the first time to discuss how they tune into interconnectedness, why dreaming together might forge collective states of belonging, and ask each other how love moves them and the world. Sharing their poetry and its rootedness in their personal histories – as well as their hopes for the future – Notley and Okoyomon render visions of intergenerational lives in continuous acts of translation.

What's Love Got To Do With It? is programmed and curated by Beatrice Gibson, produced by Alannah Chance, and features unique compositions by Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright. It is a commission by Bergen Kunsthall; Camden Art Centre, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, Toronto.

What's Love Got To Do With It? is a three-part podcast series about Radical Love. In this first episode, CAConrad and LeAnne Howe share an intensely personal conversation with one another about First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who insisted she was tormented by an Indigenous Spirit – a reminder that her husband's record on racial equality is fraught with violence and oppression; AIDS and loving during the Reagan years; and the new horizons created by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Please note: this episode contains sensitive content from the start. What's Love Got To Do With It? is programmed and curated by Beatrice Gibson, produced by Alannah Chance, and features unique compositions by Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright. It is a commission by Bergen Kunsthall; Camden Art Centre, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, Toronto.

'Stop Making Sense : Part 1 – Portals to understanding' is a two-part online series, curated by Camden Art Centre's Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellow, Phoebe Collings-James. The work looks to unravel what it means to facilitate and hold spaces of knowledge sharing. In Part 1, Collings-James invites Serafine1369 and Daniella Valz Gen to consider how their practices of tarot, divination and performance can embody queer thinking around teaching in spaces outside of institutional structures. Rooted in spirituality, the artists consider how, through these shared practices and spaces, one can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and find relief from alienation.

Produced by Sandra Pierre White with music by Kelman Duran.