The Slow Grind presents The Dreaming Room
Grounded in deep listening The Dreaming room is a space for reflection, discourse and contemplation. Expect songs, audio bites and readings around themes of colonialism, futurity, ecologies of care and our relationship with our bodies, greater communities and the natural world.
This immersive salon is space for soft reflection, focused on encouraging a movement towards a collation of ideas around collaborative dream-mapping; inviting curiosity, grief, vulnerability, silence and most importantly reconnection. Our hope is that our audience will be active participants in conjuring up intentions for individual and collective liberation.
We look forward to celebrating our magic with you on September 12th at 7:00pm 💚
BIOS:
Emii Alrai
Emii Alrai is an artist and trained museum registrar whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large- scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Weaving in oral histories, inherited nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire and the power of hierarchy to interpolate the static presence of history. Clay vessels, gypsum forms and steel armatures punctuate the labyrinth-like spaces Alrai creates, mimicking museum dioramas and romanticised visions of the past.
Kalpana Arias
Kalpana Arias is a technologist, urban gardener, climate activist, ecosomatics and food growing educator, writer, speaker and the founder of Nowadays On Earth, a social enterprise advocating for contact with nature. Alongside Nowadays On Earth, Kalpana campaigns for urban nature and nature rights through urban rewilding projects and tech policy reforms, has been researching ecosomatics and technological ecologies for over 7 years, delivered a global TED talk, spoken at the United Nations and The Eden Project, and is a trustee for GROW charity. Kalpana is currently an environmental consultant for corporations and governments and workswithleadingcharities,institutions, brands and grassroots change-makers.
Georgina Johnson
London-based artist and curator Georgina Johnson is the editor of the Intersectional Environmentalist anthologies; The Slow Grind: Practising Hope and Imagination (2023) and The Slow Grind: Finding Our Way Back to Creative Balance (2020). Johnson is an Earthworker, a curious individual and powerhouse whose work focuses on cultivating equitable creative ecologies that put nature and community at their heart.
Her hybrid practice has resulted in the curation and production of experiential installations and works that illustrate the delicate and complex connection between radical ecology, race, mental health, sustainability and intersectional environmentalism. She has worked with a constellation of globally recognised platforms including: Frieze London, The Design Museum, Eco-Age and SPACE 10 and been commissioned by; The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The Photographers’ Gallery London and received awards from Arts Council England, Jerwood Arts and Mulberry England. In essence, her work in the creative, cultural and social-environmental worlds is a vital asset to the development of future imaginings of these spaces.
The Slow Grind: Practising Hope and Imagination
Edited and Created by Georgina Johnson
Blending climate activism, radical ecology, degrowth, social justice and creative philosophy through essays and conversations, The Slow Grind: Practising Hope and Imagination proposes that the expansive power of artistic imagination and creative agency be used to open up the way we imagine and understand our role in safeguarding our inner and outer worlds.
This book and wider arts and ecology research project foreground the voices of those working directly with the land as a means of regenerating histories, establishing cultural sovereignty and finding lost foodways. Discussions on how to communicate crisis are juxtaposed with conversations on giving yourself permission to imagine. Speculative thinking on future city design goes hand in hand with practical advice on planting for pollinators, gathering a multitude of disparate strands of thinking, weaving them together to offer actionable ways to uphold ourselves as citizens of this beautiful world we call home.
Contributors: adrienne maree brown - Amirah Mitchell - Alfonso Cesanz - Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg - Bel Jacobs Claire Ratinon - Emii Alrai - Fariha Roisin - Francesca Gavin - Jasleen Kaur - Kalpana Arias - Kostas Stasinopoulos - Lucia Pietriousti - Martha Dillon - Martin Raymond - Moza Almatrooshi - Renuka Ramanujam - Simon Whitehouse - Sophia Li - Samaneh Moafi - Willow Defebaugh - Zeba Blay
Assistant Edited by Lorén Elhili and Celeste Hay