Leeds 2023 Presents – Forest as Research

Yorkshire based interactive arts studio Invisible Flock will lead a workshop exploring understandings of forest ecologies through research practices.

This workshop will look to build conversations on ways in which we can learn and understand forests through multiple research practices from mapping and data capture, immersive relationships and long form experimentation.

We are delighted to welcome presentations exploring this question from four unique perspectives, taking us from the Arctic Circle to the Amazon via English woodlands and the Yorkshire Dales.

Writer and poet Zakiya Mckenzie will open the workshop, sharing insights and writing from a year as writer-in residence for Forestry England and how the UK’s nature sector must look outside the old guard to focus on people and activities that are working in non-traditional ways. – http://zakiya.me/

Researcher Riku Paavola will open up the methodologies observed at the Oulanka Research Station in Northern Finland and how a collective of artists and scientists working at the edge of the Arctic facilities the meeting of environmental research and art. – https://www.oulu.fi/oulankaresearchstation/

Curator and producer Lilian Fraiji based in the Amazon, Brazil will lead us through LABVERDE, an art immersion program and multidisciplinary platform that attempts to create new ways of existing and interacting with the natural environment, while speculating on possible futures. – https://www.labverde.com/

Closing the presentations will be Dominick Spracklen, a Professor of Biosphere-Atmosphere Interactions in the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds University who is currently leading a landscape-scale restoration of wildlife habitats around Ingleborough.