Free talk: In the Field

Date: Thursday 30 June
Time: 7pm (doors: 6.30pm)
Venue: Small Seeds, Huddersfield, HD1 2UD
This event is free to attend and you do not need to book a ticket in advance.

As part of our new series, The Current Climate, we are pleased to announce In The Field – a deep dive into radical artistic practices that address environmentalism and climate change.

Join us for a panel discussion unpicking the motivations artists have for addressing climate action in their music, as well as the expectations our industry places on individual creators. We’ll be discussing responsibility and influence. Who should be leading the charge towards sustainability in the music sector, and how do artists make an informed impact with their work?

After the panel, we’ll be screening a short film from Amy Cutler. Working across what she calls ‘living cinema’, Amy’s work directly responds to the ‘age of extinction’. Her new documentary, All Her Beautiful Green Remains In Tears, was co-composed with an artificial intelligence. It explores ‘climate anxiety and the afterlives of nature documentary’. Alongside a screening of the film, Amy will discuss her use of movie-making as a tool to document the climate emergency.

Panellists

Amy Cutler is an artist, cultural geographer, curator, writer, and film-maker who works with ideas of geography and non-human others. Her background as a trained geographer informs her output as an artist, performer, and curator. Through her work in live and immersive cinema, as well as exhibition events, Amy seeks to provoke public conversation around ideas of space, geography, and nature-cultures. She is currently an associate lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, leading the AudioVisual Composition modules – but she also teaches more publicly, applying her cross-disciplinary training to developing unusual live sessions and and fieldtrips for museums, festivals, and galleries. Visit Amy’s website.

Nwando Ezibie is a Todmorden-based multidisciplinary artist. Nwando creates Afrofuturist speculative fictions and alternate realities at the intersection of live art, experimental music and multi-sensory installations. She proposes new myths, rituals and provocations for radical change and radical transformation of the self and community, drawing from science fiction, Black Atlantic ritual cultures, biophilia, neuroscience, electronic music, and her own neurodiversity and Nigerian heritage. Visit Nwando’s website here and find out more about her piece The Garden of Circular Paths here.

Sophie Cooper is the Learning & Participation Officer for hcmf//. A composer, improviser and practitioner, she also makes music as a solo artist and as a member of The Slowest Lift.

We will be announcing another panellist shortly.

-- About the Current Climate:

Earlier this year, we launched The Current Climate, a new season of creative work focusing on climate change and sustainability in the music industry. Through a range of discussions, performances, workshops and commissioned projects that ask questions about the challenges we face in making culture greener, we’ll be inviting our community to explore our relationship with the environment.

The Current Climate will run throughout our 2022 and 2023 festival programmes, and will also be a prominent feature of our year-round activity. These events will be collaborative and explorative by design; we’re not claiming to be an authority on environmental sustainability, and we’re not aiming to settle a conversation. Instead, we want to bring in voices, identify issues, ask questions and share ideas with artists, audiences and other organisations. Through this season of work, we’ll imagine what change in the music industry might look, and sound, like.

This event is a part of the Kirklees Year of Music 2023.

For more information visit https://hcmf.co.uk/free-talk-in-the-field/