AN INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL REWILDING with Katie Byford

Open to grads of Squads 1-9, if you are Squad 10 and want a place should one become available then email steve@writingsquad.com

There are two workshops, one on 26th November the second at the same time, 19.30 on the 10th December, please don’t sign up unless you can make both.

This is an experimental workshop delivered as part of the development of a larger funding bid to carry on this work.

You will create works of text, image and/or audio to explore ways in which they can transform places important to you, with the aim to reclaim them through imagination.

There are two sessions.

In the first Katie will introduce the project and we will explore how creating a piece of text, audio or image can ‘rewild’ a place. We will talk about notions of nature, wilderness/wildness & ‘rewilding’; ecology; and creativity as a tool of empowerment at a granular local level

Then you will have two weeks to go away, think about the brief and make some work.

The second session will be a discussion and a sharing of both the process of making and the work made.

We hope that if the funding bid is successful, work produced in this workshop will inform and maybe feature on what will become the Digital Rewilding Project’s website, with work throughout the UK accessible through an interactive map.

Katie is a poet, filmmaker and arts facilitator, and a former Writing Squad member. She has performed poetry across the UK, including at the Houses of Parliament and in tandem with a live orchestra at Durham Castle. Her poetry has been published in Magma, Popshot and anthologies by Bloodaxe (Hallelujah for 50ft Women) and Macmillan (She is Fierce: Brave, Bold & Beautiful Poems by Women). Katie is a Barbican Young Poet alum, and her work with the Barbican has included workshops and commissions, most recently for major exhibitions AI: More than Human and Lee Krasner: Living Colour. In 2015 Katie founded Thorn, a grassroots arts collective based in Durham which continues to provide space for young people across all art forms.