This activity-based workshop is open to anyone interested in activism, social justice and/or climate change as a space of knowledge sharing.
Claire G. Coleman, Venessa Possum, Jen Rae and Syrus Marcus-Ware with Zena Cumpston, Luna Mrozik Gawler, David Pledger, Tara Prowse, Jinghua Qian, Eliki Reade, Zoe Scoglio, Nina Sellars and Ana Tiquia. Photo by Lucy Foster.
This activity-based workshop will include listening, learning, and exploring activism and people power, through an exploration of protest methods and collectivising, through storytelling, talks and videos curated by artists Jen Rae and Claire G. Coleman from the Centre of Reworlding. Multidisciplinary artist Tenfingerz (aka Teneille Clerke) will guide participants through a banner-making workshop as part of the afternoon.
The workshop will provide attendees with practical ways to co-design slogans and work with reusable materials to create banners while listening to speakers and experts who have spent their lifetime organising, creating movements, resisting and practically creating change through the power of the individual and also within groups.
If you’re interested in activism, social justice and/or climate change, this is for you. It is open to all age groups, skill and interest levels. The workshop hopes to create a space of knowledge sharing and ways for everyone to engage in learning and making together. Materials will be provided and there will be light snacks and water available for attendees.
Meet the Presenters
Photo by Emma Byrnes
Dr Jen Rae is an award winning artist-researcher of Canadian Métis*-Scottish descent living and creating on Wurrundjeri and Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Her practice-led research expertise is in the discursive field of contemporary environmental art and arts-based environmental communication. Her work is engaged in discourses around food justice, disaster preparedness and speculative futures predominantly articulated through transdisciplinary collaborative methodologies and community alliances. Jen creates and contributes to experimental multi-platform collaborative projects, including being a core artist of Arts House’s multi-year REFUGE project (2016-current) - where artists, emergency service providers and communities work together to rehearse climate related emergencies and explore the impact of creativity in disaster preparedness.
(*Métis are one of the three recognised Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Pronounced may-tee)
Photo by Jen Dainer, Industrial Arc.
Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia, she was born in Boorloo (Perth) and is currently based in Naarm. Her debut novel Terra Nullius (2017), published in Australia and in the US, won a Norma K. Hemming Award and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and an Aurealis Award. Her second novel is The Old Lie (2019), followed by Lies, Damn Lies (2021) unpacks the damages of colonisation, and her new book Enclave was release in July 2022. Her essays, poetry, short fiction and art criticism has been published in the Saturday Paper, Guardian, Spectrum, Meanjin, Griffith Review and many others. Claire is currently working on a commissioned play for the Malthouse Theatre, and is the lead writer on Child of Now, an experimental site-specific extensible reality theatre project.
Jen is the lead researcher and Claire is the lead writer at the Centre for Reworlding – a collective of Indigenous, people of colour, settler and LGBTIQA2S+ artists, scientists, thinkers and doers with a track record of collaboratively working at the intersections of art, the climate emergency leadership, speculative futures and disaster resilience.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Tenfingerz aka Teneille Clerke (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, creative producer and professional larrikin. Her work focuses on climate action and community engagement through art-making and events. She works across the mediums of writing, visual art and installation; inviting audience engagement through long-form immersive work, satire, live streams and social media content.
Photo by Jalani Morgan
Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, and educator. Using painting, installation, and performance, Syrus works with and explores social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including solo shows at Grunt Gallery in 2018 (2068:Touch Change) and Wil Aballe Art Projects in 2021 (Irresistible Revolutions). His work has been featured as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019 in conjunction with the Ryerson Image Centre (Antarctica and Ancestors, Do You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)) and in 2022 (MBL Freedom), as well as for the Bentway’s Safety in Public Spaces Initiative in 2020 (Radical Love).