Alisa Ruzavina, MA Material Futures student at Central Saint Martins has been selected for the AER residency at Waltham Forest.
Set up by Professor Lucy Orta UAL Chair of Art for the Environment - Centre for Sustainable Fashion in 2015, The Art for the Environment International Artist Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the exceptional opportunity to apply for short residencies at one of our internationally renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy, and human rights.
Read Alisa's successful proposal:
Updated Project Proposal for AER Residency @ Arbeit, Leyton - Alisa Ruzavina, September 2021
I am a sustainability and community-focused artist and designer of ecological experiences and tools living and working in Waltham Forest. I have moved to the area during the first lockdown which has forced me to rapidly form a hyperlocal network of connections and resources due to the implemented restricted conditions and access. This, along with my own growing longing for a more locally-focused place-based practice after working on mostly internationally-focused community engagements have combined to form an internal commitment to finding ways in which my creative outputs can be of long-term service to this borough, contributing to and working with communities with which I interact in my day to day life.
During my recent thesis project for MA Material Futures, I’ve been exploring within the local context how playful interactive public art can help to shift ways of seeing urban nature as a backdrop to experiencing nature as an interconnected web of complex beings, to whom we are responsible to and need to grow relationships with. What I am currently interested in is taking this rich conversation even further into a wider community dialogue on ecological belonging and experiment with how can creation of a physical civic space for social dreaming, building of shared knowledge and ways for re-connecting to local nature, culture and community stimulate the re-indigenisation of our way of being on the land in our urban environments. The pandemic has brought to the surface the importance of access to spaces of understanding and nature that are filed with rich local relationships, both human and more-than-human. What I am interested in is seeing how the momentum of that conversation can be kept alive and vital post-pandemic, even when the feelings of boredom and frustration around being ‘stuck’ in one place are also bubbling to the surface.
I am searching for ways of establishing a long-term bi-weekly club in Waltham Forest that would serve a container for creating a strong community of practice that cultivates place-based collective research and understanding through exploration of numerous interlinked topics such as adaptation to climate change, building relationship and resilience within the local, ways of cultivating nature connection and exploring inner and outer rewilding within the city context. I am especially interested in using creative craft making activities while exploring these themes as both a way for more embodied dialogues and for approaching making as a different but equally valuable way of thinking and knowing. Being able to participate in this residency would be an invaluable experience for kick-starting this long-term engagement with the help of much needed access to initial mentoring, space, social and financial resources, and most importantly helping me cultivate deeper relationships with the local residents and WF council. I hope this residency will broaden and deepen my understanding in how to design, structure and facilitate meaningful site-specific learning experiences and help me gain experience in how to navigate the co-design process of creating public participatory artworks.
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DRESSING UP GRAYSON -
I believe we cannot wait for change to happen from top down. What is in our control though is our immediate environment and therefore I believe that the future’s hope is in localised community action. Choosing to work with “Chaos Embrace” scenario from Fashion Futures 2030, what I’d like to propose is a creation of a community space inside Arbeit studios for the duration of the residency. This space will serve as an invitation for the community to see their own borough with new eyes, participate in emergence of new regenerative community ideas and networks and attain a deeper sense of belonging. Adopting some methodology from Camden’s Think & Do space and following principles of Emergent Strategy gathered by Adrienne Maree Brown, I’d like to help facilitate this temporary community centre that will host several workshops co-created with the Waltham community along with becoming a home for the growing participatory textile mural map and collective mind-map that will serve as communal experiments in place-making cartography, communal dreaming and storytelling.
Direct-story Map (directory + story) will be a key outcome of the residency. Community members will be invited to use second-hand textiles from Forest Recycling Project along with my own textile waste stream from previous projects to build a textile mural map of Waltham Forest, creating a wall of honour dedicated to marking special places where they experience the greatest sense of belonging as well as marking local makers, craftsmen and sustainability heroes that they know of who have touched their heart. Whether it’s somebody’s grandmother who is a master knitter or an independent upholstery collective, every maker’s presence is welcome on the map. Equally, whether it’s a tree, community centre or an off-license with a friendly owner, every place and person that evoke the sense of belonging are invited to be marked onto the map. The participants will be invited to learn basic sewing, applique and embroidery skills to help them register these local faces and places on the map, along with being invited to more deeply share stories of the encounters. These mentioned sites and people (with their allowance) will have their contacts and GPS locations registered, which at a later stage will be gathered into a digital and physical atlas zine The Waltham Forest Book of Enchantment: Local Sites, Heroes, Visions & Dreams so that more community members can explore the richness of the local area. The fluid intersection of tracing of both belonging and makers on one site is intentional, experimenting with seeing whether the two will crossover and intersect, creating a collective map of feelings, real places and real people that make Waltham Forest a cherished tapestry of diverse connections for many.
Arbeit studios space will be transformed into a social dreaming and workshop space that will be open for public, walls of which will be used as a gathering point for the research and contents of The Waltham Forest Book of Enchantment: Local Sites, Heroes, Visions & Dreams. The walls will serve as a dynamic ever-changing place for creating a community vision around belonging, shared dreams, values and directions. Together with a few local practitioners I will deliver 4 workshops, situated both inside, and outside the studio space : “Grow It All” will be a workshop around food and textile growing and foraging; “Urban Edens” will explore our relationship to urban nature and local cultivation of micro city gardens everywhere; “Living Stories of Care” will be a sharing session exploring local oral history around community care and “Exploring Eldership” is planned as an intergenerational gathering stimulating discussion on the importance of elders within the local context. All workshops will have an integrated craft making activity to supplement and enrich the discussions, with the intent of exploring making as another way of stimulating the dialogue, while also using making as a form of exploration and integration of the new knowledge that is being formed. After each workshop new related findings will be distilled onto the Direct-Story Map mural and onto the residency’s walls, contributing to these continuously growing common resources.
Related Links:
Art for the Environment Residency Programme
The Art for the Environment Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the opportunity to apply for a 2 to 4 week fully funded residency at one of our internationally renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy and human rights.
Founded in 2015, internationally acclaimed artist Professor Lucy Orta, UAL Chair of Art for the Environment – Centre for Sustainable Fashion, launched the programme in partnership with international residency programmes and UAL Post-Grad Community.