Spring Again 🌸
Spring Again
Hi there! We haven't given a real update in a while. What can we say other than we've been really busy as we adjust to some major changes. We're always busy and at capcity it seems and I'm sure many people in organising and activism can relate. This is something that needs to change. How can we create a culture where there is less demand for output and constant activity? We talk about care and healing but we still uphold productivity as a marker of success. We have been thinking about this a lot and want to see how we can change this within our collective.
January and February have been busy for us but we are excited about the current projects we are working on. Cultivating Justice with Landworkers Alliance LGBTQIA+ working group and Farmerama. There's two exciting zines in the pipeline and a podcast series which we can't wait to share with you. Research is about to begin with our Jumping Fences project, collaborating with Landworkers Alliance BPOC working group and Ecological Land Cooperative - this time expanding to all of Britain to understand the different barriers facing BPOC growers in Britain. We want to spend this year connecting with our community and building accountability and transparency into our work.
Anyway, thank you again for all the support that you've given us. We hope this spring is full of joy, rest and play for us all. Please have a look at the great open calls, events and content we've packed into this newsletter for you!
Cultivating Justice Zines Callout
As part of the Cultivating Justice project, the LWA LGBTQIA+ organising group is working on the creation of two new zines.
Zine 1: Decolonising X Queering Botany
This zine will explore the decolonisation and queering of plant science, gardening & market gardening, and will centre voices from BIPOC communities, recognising the fact that decolonisation risks being frequently used as another ‘buzzword’, in addition to white voices taking up more space in all discourse surrounding environmental and agricultural issues.
Zine 2: LAND / WORKERS
The aim of this zine is to showcase some of the landworkers that are part of the movement towards a more just food and land system, their stories, their realities and their joy. The end result will be mostly photos, with some short bits of text. We’re looking for roughly 8 people to take part. And yes this could be you, we know it might be daunting, you might feel unsure if you really qualify, please be brave. If you feel like you’re a landworker you are a landworker, if you feel like you’re part of the food and land justice movement you are.
Zines are one of many creative tools that can help us to reproduce and exchange knowledge, empower one another and disrupt dominant colonial patterns of education. Our hope is that the process of creating these zines, as well as the finished works themselves, will inspire lasting connections, conversations and community-led change for social justice within food and farming systems.
Deadline for expressions of interest: Feb 25th | More information here
Right of Way
Challenging the narrative of the rural idyll through archive film and new work from contemporary artists.
Salary: £9,000 commission fee
The ICO and LUX are looking to commission three new artists’ moving image works by Black, Asian and ethnically diverse artists for the upcoming Right of Way project.
Interest in the British countryside has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, as people have realised anew the importance of nature and open spaces for our health and mental wellbeing. However, recurrent lockdown measures have also highlighted inequalities of access to, and relationships with, rural spaces.
This project, launching in Autumn 2022, will challenge the enduring, imagined notion of the British rural idyll as an untouched and unchanging space where time stands still; and explore the historical and current absences of Black, Asian and ethnically diverse people in the pastoral narrative and what this erasure represents.
The ICO and LUX, with funding from the BFI Film Audience Network and Arts Council England, are now looking to commission three new artists’ moving image works by Black, Asian and ethnically diverse artists for this project.
The full brief is available here.
Submissions of interest
Submissions should be submitted to info@independentcinemaoffice.org.uk and should include:
An outline of your core concept, to include consideration of the theatrical setting in which the commissioned work will play (max. 500 words), accompanied by proposed budget.
Any supplementary information you feel would be valuable for the commissioning panel to consider, such as timelines or visual materials (e.g. mood board).
Your artist CV.
A maximum of two online links to previous work.
Further information
On the afternoon of Tuesday 22 February, LUX will be available to discuss submissions of interest and the wider project. To book a ten-minute slot please email: jemma.buckley@independentcinemaoffice.org.uk
Please also email Jemma if you have any questions about this brief or need extra support to apply.
The closing date for this position is 11/03/2022 at 23:59
Miknaf Haaretz | The Shmita Sessions
Thursday’s at 7:30-9:00pm GMT, Feb 17th – March 24th, Zoom
Get Tickets here - Sliding Scale from £6-12 per session. No one turned away for lack of funds.
No prior knowledge assumed! These sessions are open to all – you don’t have to be Jewish, or have any knowledge of Shmita to attend. We think these sessions will be relevant & exciting for anyone!
All sessions will be recorded for participants, so if you can’t attend live, don’t worry – you’ll be able to access the session afterwards.
17th February – Introduction: Torah of Shmita & Orientation to personal Shmita practice
What is Shmita and was it ever practiced? What does it teach us about our ancestors and how does it look around the world today? What might it contribute to our movements for political, social & ecological change? How might this ancient practice support our own journey’s of rest and renewal in these times? Join Kohenet Shamirah Bechirah aka Sarah Chandler with Sara & Samson to ground in the Torah of Shmita and begin our enquiry together.
24nd February – A History of Land struggle in the UK through story and song
Shmita offers us time for a profound reckoning with our relationship to the land on which we live. Shmita asks us, can we ever really own land? What is the consequence of believing that we can? In the UK, our relationship with the land we live on is shaped by histories of dispossession, enclosure, activism and resistance that many of us were not taught in school. Join Kohenet Rachel Rose Reid (Yelala / Three Acres and a Cow) to discover and reclaim inspiring ancestors who bravely struggled for themselves and for the land.
3rd March – Jewish Land Justice & Radical Diasporism
How do we, as a Jewish people, reckon with relationship to land, after millenia of displacement? Is there an alternative to nationalism and how might Shmita speak to this alternative? Join land-worker, activist and researcher Rachel Solnick in conversation with Linke Fligl, the radical, queer leftie Jewish chicken farm offering a blueprint for what radical Jewish diasporism might look like in practice and why we need it for co-liberation, healing and justice.
10th March – Shmita & Reparations
In the Shmita year we forgive all debt and release all enslaved. What might this mean for confronting the legacies of slavery and colonalism in the UK today? How might it help us to dismantle white supremacy and embolden our racial justice organising? What might reparations mean in the UK context and how might we support this movement? Join Sam Siva and Kate Bernstock from Land in Our Names, a grassroots Black-led collective committed to reparations in Britain by connecting land and climate justice with racial justice.
17th March – Shmita of Disability Justice
Shmita teaches us that rest is radical and that society cannot live on productivity alone. Isn’t this the expertise of the disabled community, who carry and live this wisdom so powerfully? Join queer, Jewish, disabled activists and educators Felix and Camille to delve into how disability justice has the power to liberate us all – disabled or not – and explore rest as resistance in a society that so often only values us when we are ‘productive’.
24th March – Ecologies of Shmita
It is said we may have 100 harvests left if we continue to treat the soil as we do. In a time of ecological collapse, what medicine might Shmita offer to our soils? If the Shmita year can be distilled into two words: ‘Everybody Eats’, how can we eat without destroying the earth? And how might Shmita speak to the concepts of re-wilding & agro-ecology more broadly? Join Laura Fair, ecologist and re-wilding lead at Embercombe to examine the crises and opportunities facing Britain’s wildlife today and how as ‘ecological humans’ we may act as a ‘keystone species’, re-wilding ourselves and the earth.