Rooted in the theme of storytelling, this year’s programme explores the many ways we make sense of the world — from cave paintings and folk songs to oral histories, cautionary tales, hoaxes and beyond.
Scroll down to explore what’s happening at Central Saint Martins (CSM), or browse the full list of events, open to students, staff and alumni across University of the Arts London (UAL).
Marking the start of Earth Week, students and staff are invited into a moment of grounding, reflection and connection through a ceremony led by cultural producer Kay Michael (Culture Declares Emergency / Letters to the Earth), oral storyteller Sam Crosby (Recalling Fire), and Kate Keara Pelen, co-founder of CEN.
Now in its fifth year, the Network continues to navigate urgent societal and environmental realities as a community, and this opening session will offer a space to pause and embrace the week of events with an open heart and mind.
By inspiring communities and individuals to pause, dream and stand up for the Earth, the ceremony will set the tone for the days to come.
As the week unfolds, opening ceremony participants will be invited to return for a More-than-Human Assembly— an opportunity to reflect as a community on what matters most and what futures we want to grow.
Five years since the first wave of Assemblies, CEN will reflect on what matters to us most as a community of creative changemakers, what kind of future we want to move toward and how we might get there.
Drawing on practices from Citizens’ Assemblies (XR / Humanity Project) as well as the Council of All Beings (Joanna Macy / The Work That Reconnects) and Mythology, the session is an open space to speak, listen, imagine and act beyond the limits of our human perspective and collective comfort zone.
This immersive evening will bring together sound, light, and community with BASS TONE REGENERATION — a surreal sound system and installation exploring our connection to the environment and each other.
Curated by Linett Kamala, President of the UAL Alumni of Colour Association (AoCA), this celebration is part of the global DJs4ClimateAction Earth Night — uniting DJs, venues and promoters for the planet.
Featuring DJ sets by Kamala and Omi from the LIN KAM ART sound system, the evening will also offer an edible, plant-based tablescape.
Storytelling with Materials and Objects
Led by the CSM Museum & Study Collection, explore the cultural, environmental, social and economic issues of materials and objects through sharing personal and emotional reactions that they evoke.
Witch Crafting
Create a Witch Bottle (an apotropaic object believed to ward of negative energy) and learn about their historical use as well as the many ways that the bottles can serve the modern mystics need.
Learn how to protect and re-grow delicate native seeds by crafting seed bombs using natural materials, traditionally used by guerrilla gardeners in urban settings.
Weaving Forgotten Voices
Through hands-on weaving, storytelling, and sensory experiences, explore the hidden stories behind our food and materials and even weave a small, meaningful object into your own piece or the communal story wall.
Libraries of the More-Than-Human
As part of workshops and curated displays exploring care, repair and climate futures across all UAL libraries, CSM Library is hosting “More-Than-Human Collage Making” zine workshop and “Mend Along” clothing repair sessions in the library pods.
Eco-Koselig, a serious and cosy tabletop game that facilitates climate change talks with empathy, will take over the Platform Bar. The game offers a safe, enjoyable way to explore emotions and environmental identity around the climate crisis, and players can share knowledge, deepen their understanding of the crisis's effects, and navigate uncertainty together.
Earth Sybmols
Explore how visual storytelling can overcome language barriers and unite us in the fight for our planet. Inspired by ancient cave paintings and untranslatable words, participants will co-create a universal climate code through iconography and mark-making.
Finding Wildness
Join ecological artist Serena Zahra Coulthard for a multi-sensory drawing class that combines nature, creativity, and exploration in Camley Street Natural Park. Using eco-materials to draw the environment around you, create a memory-based drawing to capture the unique experience.
Building Through Breathing
A living archive of biomineralised waste materials created with cyanobacteria, this project encourages audiences to consider how more-than-human systems can inform circular design and regenerative making.
Encountering Cyanobacteria
Meet the Earth’s oldest photosynthesizers in this interactive session exploring the materiality and behaviours of cyanobacteria. Through a hands-on display, look, touch and learn about their unique forms — from jellylike blobs to swimming Spirulina.
Vessels and Reciprocity
Explore the vessel as a metaphor for connection, reciprocity and shared experience. Through guided creative exercises and collective discussion, consider what it means to give and receive—individually and as part of a wider community.
Writing Microfiction for Climate (online)
Reflect on how storytelling can ease eco-anxiety, spark new ways of thinking, and imagine hopeful futures through 100 words at a time in this workshop guided by journalist and London College of Fashion (LCF) lecturer Olivia Pinnock.
Roots to Sky—A Sound Meditation for Body & Planet
Pause, breathe, and reconnect through a guided meditation and sound healing session and find stillness through the grounding tones of sound bowls. Moving through the chakras, this gentle practice offers space to realign inner energy, reflect on our relationship with the Earth.
Mossibilities
Explore the ancient, embodied knowledge of moss in this participatory workshop inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Through sensory meditation, embodied exploration, and collaborative creation, dive into moss worlds and co-create myths and stories.
Get your hands dirty
Through art, zines, podcasts, and more, BA Culture, Criticism and Curation students invite us to the Platform Bar to reflect on colonial histories, question dominant worldviews, and engage with new perspectives on posthumanism, sustainability, and justice in the climate crisis.
Changing the world through storytelling
Led by Dr Rob Eagle, explore how artists and media creators collaborate with charities to make an impact, and discover methods to incorporate these strategies into your own creative practice.
Soil Stories Part 1
Explore personal soil narratives, digging into memories of the land and reflecting on how current practices connect us to the Earth. Through storytelling, collective mapping, and shared reflection, uncover the deep interconnections between humans and the more-than-human world.
Soil Stories Part 2
Learn the practical skills of designing, building, and managing a vermicompost station, while exploring the wonders of soil health and the organisms that live within it — you can even bring a found container to transform into a compost bin to take home.
Story Walks in Nature
Connect with the green spaces and attune to natural systems and more-than-human characters while co-creating narratives along the way. Each walk starts at a different UAL college and invites participants to explore nature through a sensory and creative lens.
Explore Camley Street Natural Park and Central Saint Martins, questioning care, control, and containment through stories with mosses, mallards, and rare fungi.
Join the Minerals Collective for a sensory exploration of Ruskin Park to investigate and creatively respond to objects using Goethean contemplative methods.
Uncover non-human narratives in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park using data-led prompts, culminating in the creation of a nature zine.
Take a sensory journey through Wimbledon Common, engaging with nature through light, sound, and texture, and document your experience for an online zine.
Explore the Olympic Park’s waterways, using fashion to craft masks inspired by nature’s elements and folkloric stories.
Immerse yourself in Chelsea College’s green spaces, reflecting on the flowing river, light, and nature while creating speculative stories and drawings that connect us to the environment.
From Tuesday to Friday, the Platform Bar will function as Earth Week’s hub.
All are welcome to drop in to chat with the London Doughnut Economy Coalition (LDEC), a group of volunteers who have come together to communicate a better vision for London’s economy. Naturally, there will be free doughnuts, too.
Contribute to the Narrative Doughnut Tapestry by stitching your very own “what does the doughnut mean to you” sprinkle onto their giant doughnut tapestry (to be homed in the Platform Bar forever more) or use their content booth, open from 10am to 2pm every day.
You can also join one of two sessions of the Step into the Doughnut Workshop on April 23 which will explore the concepts of Doughnut Economics and how it can help reshape education and the creative industries.
Besides, the Platform Bar will also turn into a green haven dubbed PlaNtform Bar, where all plant lovers will be able to bring their plant cutting to swap, share and take home something new to grow all week between 10am to 1pm.
The Network is a non-hierarchical, evolving and distributed community of students, staff, alumni and friends who navigate urgent societal and environmental realities through collective creative action.
Guided by the principles of Reframe, Reimagine, Renew and Reconnect, CEN is a platform for channelling creativity into climate action across UAL’s spaces and networks.
With a shared purpose to foster an internal movement for change, the Network offers opportunities for all to engage—hosting regular events, developing campaigns, and shaping actions that show how the arts can, and must, respond to the climate and ecological emergency.
Keep in touch with CEN on Instagram: @ClimateEmergencyNetwork.
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