We are pleased to announce the launch of the ‘Of Lost & Found’, an online archive exploring the material history of the Phytology site by Ellie Doney.

Ellies work explores the physical properties of disregarded objects that have collected over the years, including rubbish, historical artefacts and animal material. She scrutinises this discarded matter to assemble an insightful and playful portrait of modern urban culture, blurring conventional taxonomies and value systems, creating an index of a place and its inhabitants. 

“The site is a midden; a repository of marginal matter, a gap in the conscious life of the city.” 

 www.oflostandfound.org

The Conscious Cities Festival gathers those interested in the creation of human-centred environments. Research and practice using the conscious cities approach explores how architecture and urban design can better consider and respond to human needs through science informed design, data analysis and new technology.

This year’s festival looks at the key factors in creating a better built environment. The events over 5 days will focus on Architecture, Urban Design, City Tech, Behavioural Science, and Property.

Tue, October 23, 2018

10:00 am – 9:00 pm

Professor Andrea Mechelli

The Alternative School of Economics is a collaboration between artists Ruth Beale and Amy Feneck.  It is both an artwork and a way of working; it links artist practice with self-education as a way to study economics, creating a framework for investigating political, social and cultural issues.

The Alternative School of Economics are in residence at the Phytology site throughout the autumn and winter of 2018.

‘Speaking to the City’ responds to the position of the Phytology billboard, facing out towards the City of London. Taking on the radical East End tradition of resistance, the Alternative School of Economics present a series of statements that challenge the City and its logic of prosperity through financial growth. The statements morph and change over a period of three months, as each word becomes the next, a narrative of collective action is told. 

The Alternative School of Economics began in 2012, and was in part a response to the banking crisis of 2007/2008 in which economics dominated political and media discourse, when every subject from immigration to education was increasingly spoken about only in economic terms, and the inevitable outcome, we were told, was ‘austerity’.

“From this starting point, and our interest in self-education inspired by our residency at The Working Class Movement Library, we saw a demand upon the general public to redefine economics on their own terms, to study it through the lens of day-to-day reality and personal experience.

We continue to re-think what the study of economics is – to think of it not just as a scientific study of money and finance, but a subject that expands in to the study of many things – such as politics, geography, sociology, conflict and social relations. In this way, The Alternative School of Economics aims to respond to the changing pressures on the societies (local and global) in which we live and work.

The Alternative School of Economics sets out to learn together, collaboratively, and in a non-hierarchical way. It is a social practice, working with people, questioning ideas through conversations and relationships. It is also a process of education and our own self-education. Sometimes we make artworks like books, films and installations as part of the process.”

Conceptually The Alternative School of Economics is a statement – that people who are not economists, can set up an alternative school to reclaim economics as a social, everyday tool.

View the evolving billboard here.

Urgent Matters III

3pm – 5:30pm, 8th Sept

Urgent Matters III – Soil, poetry and care, brings together creative, philosophical, ethical, poetic and political concerns in relation to soil. We are delighted to invite Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Dimitris Papadopoulos to share their work on these themes, in conversation with the Soil Ecologies poetry group, and a selection of performances from Katherine McMahon, Ama Josephine Budge and Helena Hunter.

This event will be chaired by Shumaisa Khan and Katherine Mcmahon.

This is the third in a series of talks and workshops addressing urgent material, social and environmental challenges through making and thinking together.

For tickets & more information about the event click here.

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Location – Phytology, Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, Middleton St, E2 9RR

This is a Compost Mentis project.

Supported by Goldsmiths.

Help us understand how city living is affecting mental health and wellbeing

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6pm – 8pm, 20^th September 2018

Eastern Curve Garden, Dalston, 13 Dalston Ln, London E8 3DF

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Please join us for the launch of Urban Mind, an international research project exploring how the urban environment influences mental health and wellbeing.

Over three-and-a-half billion people, more than half the world’s population, live in urban areas. This number is rising fast, and it is expected that 66% of the global population will live in cities by 2050. What are the implications of this increasing urbanisation for our mental health and wellbeing?

Urban Mind is a citizen-science project exploring the wider questions that surround urban planning, social policy, design and health, as well as historical and cultural perspectives on the city and the human mind.

The launch will see the research team and experts from the arts and sciences discuss the project from different perspectives. Guest speakers include Siobhan Davies (Artist/Choreographer), Daniel Raven-Ellison (Campaigner/Urban Geographer), Professor Gunter Schumann (Centre for Population Neuroscience & Stratified Medicine, King’s College London).

www.urbanmind.info

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Urban Mind is a collaboration between arts foundation Nomad Projects, landscape architects J&L Gibbons and the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry & Neuroscience, King’s College London.

All welcome – book here! 

Urban Mind – Arts in Mind Festival

5th June 2018, 18:00 – 20:00

Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, Denmark Hill Campus, London

Over three-and-a-half billion people, more than half the world’s population, live in urban areas. This number is rising fast in both developed and developing countries, and it is expected that 66% of the global population will live in cities by 2050. This ongoing urbanization has major implications for global mental health.

Urban Mind is an innovative smartphone app developed in a collaborative research project between arts foundation Nomad Projects, landscape architects J&L Gibbons and the IoPPN. The app encourages users to record and reflect on how their mental state is affected by their experience of city living.

You are invited to a presentation about the app, which will reflect on wider questions around urban planning, social policy around design and health as well as historical and cultural perspectives on the city and the mind.

The panellists are:

• Johanna Gibbons, partner at J & L Gibbons, an award winning Landscape Architecture studio based in London
• Neil Davidson,  partner at J & L Gibbons, an award winning Landscape Architecture studio based in London
• Dr Andrea Mechelli, Reader of Early Intervention, Kings College London
• Professor Matthew Beaumont, British novelist, author of ‘Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London’,  Professor of English and Co-Director of the Urban Laboratory at UCL
• Michael Smythe, Creative Director of Nomad Projects, a contemporary arts production & commissioning agency.

This event is free but booking is essential.

PHYTOLOGY
New season launches on Saturday 19th May 2018.

5pm -10pm
ALL WELCOME!

We will preview new works from last year’s resident artists DJ Simpson, Kathrin Böhm & Ellie Doney, with live music from
The Nest Collective.

Our resident artists for 2018 include Lu Williams, Ruth Ewan, Vanessa Kisuule, The Alternative School of Economics, Sheaf & Barley + Rya.

Address: Phytology, Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, Middleton St, London E2 9RR.

Phytology

Saturday’s 11am – 5pm

26th May – 8th September 2018

Address: Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, Middleton Street, E2 9RR

Established in 2014, Phytology is an artist led project that explores the function and value of wildness within the urban ecosystem. Located within the Bethnal Green Nature Reserve in East London, Phytology is a medicinal garden and a cultural institute, providing a platform for collaborations between artists, scientists, and community groups.

For more information please visit – www.phytology.org.uk

Admission free

The National Gallery of Victoria Triennial (Melbourne) is a celebration of contemporary art and design practice that traverses all four levels of NGV International, as well as offering a rich array of programs.

Featuring the work of over 100 artists and designers from 32 countries, the NGV Triennial surveys the world of art and design, across cultures, scales, geographies and perspectives.

15 DEC 17 – 15 APR 18

The Triennial features the Ourhouse film series, our film project with Nathaniel Mellors’s. Ourhouse chronicles the decline of a wealthy and eccentric English family as they receive an unlikely visit from ‘The Object’, who devours the contents of their library. Over the course of the series, the artist explores the power of language with characteristically dark humour.

Ourhouse episode –1: Time, 2015–16, is the fifth and final episode in the series and Mellors’s most ambitious instalment to date. It deals with contemporary issues surrounding technology and ideas relating to ‘otherness’ or difference as considered through a lens of prehistory. The events unfold in the ‘Northern Wing’ of the family’s dilapidated country manor, inhabited by tribes of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

Hauser & Wirth Somerset  ‘The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind’

20th January – 7th May 2018

This ambitious survey exhibition explores the contradictory nature of society’s relationship to the rural featuring the Phytology project.

The presentation features over 50 international artists and creatives, as well as works on loan, by artists working from the 1500s to the present day, including Paul McCarthy, Beatrix Potter, Carsten Höller, Laure Prouvost, William Holman Hunt, Samuel Palmer, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcus Coates, Fernando García-Dory, Roni Horn, Aaron Angell and Mark Wallinger, Mark Dion, Mildred’s Lane, Myvillages, Somewhere, Kultivator, Fairland Collective and Phytology, among many others.

Curated by Adam Sutherland.

Michael Smythe (Phytology) & Kathrin Böhm (Company Drinks) will be in conversation at the launch of ‘The Social (Re-) Production of Architecture’ tonight @ Central St Martins, Granary Sq, London N1C 4AA – 6:30pm, March 1st 2018.

The Social (Re)Production of Architecture
Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice

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Edited by Doina Petrescu, Kim Trogal – 2017 Routledge.

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The Social (Re)Production of Architecture brings the debates of the ‘right to the city’ into today’s context of ecological, economic and social crises. Building on the 1970s’ discussions about the ‘production of space’, which French sociologist Henri Lefebvre considered a civic right, the authors question who has the right to make space, and explore the kinds of relations that are produced in the process. In the emerging post-capitalist era, this book addresses urgent social and ecological imperatives for change and opens up questions around architecture’s engagement with new forms of organization and practice. The book asks what (new) kinds of ‘social’ can architecture (re)produce, and what kinds of politics, values and actions are needed.

The book features 24 interdisciplinary essays written by leading theorists and practitioners including social thinkers, economic theorists, architects, educators, urban curators, feminists, artists and activists from different generations and global contexts. The essays discuss the diverse, global locations with work taking different and specific forms in these different contexts.

A cutting-edge, critical text which rethinks both practice and theory in the light of recent crises, making it key reading for students, academics and practitioners.

In January 2018 Urban Mind will be featured in BioScience, a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

King’s College London, Landscape Architects J & L Gibbons and Nomad Projects have used smartphone-based technology to assess the relationship between exposure to nature and mental wellbeing.

We found that (i) being outdoors, seeing trees, hearing birdsong, seeing the sky, and feeling in contact with nature were associated with higher levels of mental wellbeing, and that (ii) the beneficial effects of nature were especially evident in those individuals with greater levels of impulsivity who are at greater risk of mental health issues.

The full article can be found here!

Urban Mind will launch a full-scale international study in March 2018. More details coming soon…

July 29th 2017, Phytology, Bethnal Green Nature Reserve

with Kim Trogal, Ana Vilencia & Kathrin Böhm

Phytology is described by its users and keepers as a cultural institute, a bat paradise, a garden, a medicinal field, a community space, and much more.

Existing without a purpose built architecture (except the fence) Phytology is a great example for how users of a place construct and develop spaces which have multiple functions and complex spatial configurations.

This lunch time talk introduces three speakers who work with the concept of Social Architecture, one that primarily evolves from social and everyday uses, and manifests itself in a number of spatial outcomes, the built one being one of them.

Architect and researcher Kim Trogal is co-editor The Social Reproduction of Architecture, recently published by Routledge, and researcher Ana Vilencia and artist Kathrin Böhm are both contributors.

The book will be the starting point for this informal lunch time talk, with the three authors first introducing their ideas and concepts, to then make connections to the garden we’ll be sitting in, and how to read and articulate it’s spatial complexities.

Supported by Arts Council England

So Below has been recently published in Italy’s reputable Internazionale magazine.

.So Below is an online graphic essay by cartoonist and journalist Sam Wallman. Exploring the idea of land ownership, Wallman melds the political with the poetic, connecting both historic and contemporary manifestations of territorialism and dominion.

Supported by Arts Council England

Artist Kathrin Böhm will generate a new body of research throughout 2017/18 exploring how the Phytology site can be best accessed as a cultural hub for ongoing, meaningful participation & exchange. Böhm’s practice often forges extensive connections between complex social, cultural and material resources.

Kathrin is a founding member of the international artist initiative My Villages and the London based art and architecture collective Public Works. Böhm’s recent project is titled Company draws upon the hop picking tradition of London’s East End, re-connecting new and existing communities, places and processes involved.

Supported by Arts Council England

18/02/2017

10:30 till 13:00 – £5 inc. lunch

Landscape Learn, in collaboration with Phytology, invite you to explore the process of redefining a city landscape in the context of changing urban ecologies.

Landscape Learn is a J & L Gibbons social enterprise, a new prototype for learning and engaging with the landscapes around us. Landscape Learn will use the seasonality of nature to structure our approach to adaptive and immersive learning.

Book tickets – here

Location:
Phytology
Bethnal Green Nature Reserve
Middleton Street, London
E2 9RR – View on map

Edge Hill Station
Tunnel Road
Liverpool
L7 6ND

Cultivating Behaviours: featuring ‘Phytology‘ & ‘Urban Mind‘

As urban citizens how do we engage with our physical environment in our daily routines? Do green spaces help people feel connected to public life? How can interactions with green public spaces inspire action on local environmental issues?

Metal Liverpool invite local residents, artists, and organisations to a Future Station event exploring how public green spaces benefit our day-to-day lives and can drive awareness of environmental sustainability.

More info – here

‘Backyard – Reflections of Home & Belonging’ is a story collecting project exploring the importance of oral history within London’s Afro-Caribbean community.

Launch Event: 7pm – 9pm, St Katharine’s Precinct, October 20th. 

Resonance FM Broadcast: 8pm – 9pm, 25th October / 9am – 10am, 26th October.

This is a Off The Wall Players & Cultivaters project.

Commissioned and produced by Nomad Projects.

Supported by