Does data need to be wetter? What would happen if policy walked itself into soily existence? Why is ‘love’ a dirty word in science? If we could sonify the evidence, whose voices might we hear clearer? What do snuffly truffle pigs and Jodie Foster have to do with fieldwork?

The Department of Artecology is a research club exploring the role of art within ecological stewardship in England. Each session focuses on a different theme where we examine current practices within environmental management and find opportunities to intervene, spaces to imagine otherwise and methods to experiment with in times of chronic environmental breakdown.

What does art, artists and art practice have to do with taking care of nature? Each session we take a theme, a provocation or an overlooked opportunity and find out how art creates research and research becomes (conservation) culture. We do this through taking part in thinking-doing experiments; bringing dry texts and data to life in tactile and sensory ways; engaging with theorists that tickle our thinking and having permission to draw on our own lived, embodied experiences.

London National Park City have supported the first series:

– Resonating with research, listening as a tactile event
– Cooked data and being-walked as a form of research
– Emotional geography and love in the time of research
– Yummy PDF’s and Retaining the wetness of an encounter

The social-ecological crisis requires joining the dots between disciplines, lifeways and generations – but this doesn’t happen very often! Each session is comprised of a dynamic and diverse group of practitioners working in conservation ranging from grassroots volunteer waterkeepers, to curious policymakers; queer ecologists to soily social scientists.

The research club has already proven generative, sparking encounters between people who would not usually meet, creating space in the diary (that we never have time for in our working days) and igniting new collaborations. It has emerged as less of a place to solve or answer, more a place to find new approaches, processes and language.

The Department of Artecology is conjured and convened by Ranger Becky Lyon as part of her doctoral research at Goldsmiths University.