Programme 2006

Last September saw the launch of Desire Lines, a symposium as part of the Arts & Ecology at Dartington programme, which brought together 120 participants from eight countries worldwide, to consider a number of issues and practices.

Click here to view a list of confirmed speakers for 2006

Last year’s speakers included David Abram, Brian Goodwin, Susan Derges, Satish Kumar, Ansuman Biswas, Peter Randall-Page and Alice Oswald. Representatives from a wide range of organisations also spoke, including Vitamin Creative Space, London Fieldworks, BANFF, the RSPB and the RSA.

The symposium was a great success, with overwhelmingly positive delegate feedback. However, the critical feedback that was received focused on the format of the three days: participants felt that they wanted more time to engage with the place, to have more time in the breaks, and more time to engage with each other. 

Read feedback from presenters and participants - Desire Lines, September 2005

In response to this feedback, and our own interest in developing the format of the symposium, Desire Lines 2006 will be run as an Open Space event with fewer presentations, focusing primarily on facilitated debate informed by presentations, films, a performance programme and exhibition. The three days will reflect upon the relationships between ecology, interdisciplinarity and place, and how emergent practices could inform urban and rural regeneration processes and help develop sustainable communities. The Open Space format will allow delegates to inform and shape the symposium as it develops throughout the three days, and give opportunity to raise questions and present thoughts in a supportive but challenging and informed environment.

Day 1 - Wednesday 25/10/2006 - Check in 9am - 11am

Presentations

Programmed presentations and live performance including sessions. Details of these sessions will be released soon and available on the website.

The purpose of this day is to introduce the work of a number of people who we are particularly interested in. There is no specified theme to the day, we simply find their work stimulating and of relevance to questions we are asking ourselves about Arts & Ecology at Dartington. Most of the speakers on Day One will also be present throughout days Two and Three.

Days 2 & 3 - Thursday 26/10/2006 & Friday 27/10/2006

Open Space

In days two and three, the agendas will be set by the assembled group of participants. There will be no advance agenda, no set presentations, and no formatted programme. A few simple, key principals will apply across the two days, based on Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology principals.

During the three days we will be mapping the discussions to see where links are being made, or broken, or built. We are interested in how these connections are made and in the groups and the discussions generated. As such we are interested in participation from anyone currently undertaking significant research in emergence/group dynamics/self-organization/complex adaptive systems/separatedness/connectedness.

Live performances, films and exhibitions will also take place throughout the three days including performances from Helen Chadwick, Sue Palmer, Propellor and film screenings of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man and Terrence Malick’s The New World.

Propellor

Over the course of 2 days, members from Propeller performance company will take up residence inside an office space in order to gather and present new research materials. Symposium participants are invited to sign up for an open conversation with the company: this will be a chance to meet and talk about themes connected (but not limited to) the numerous ways in which ecological issues have a bearing on our most basic everyday lives. The conversation will also include some practical tasks and exercises based on perception of the landscape and scale. Elements from the conversations will then become part of an accumulative performance-archive.

Exhibition curated by Alan Boldon (Dartington College of Arts) 

This exhibition will set up a dialogue between five artists, who will take turns to make an intervention into the gallery space. In each case, the previous artist’s work will be available as material for the following intervention; it can be removed, manipulated, destroyed or added to. It will be unclear to the viewer who had the idea, whose work is whose - and does it really matter?