Last week I sat with two friends from London, an economist and architect. We had gathered from our respective homes, varied upbringings and working lives to share several meals together. The conversation moved easily between objective analysis and personal reflection, exploring how we each practise philosophy in broad and narrow ways, how meeting people outside our circles is an unknown worth exploring, and how leadership might emerge from such exchanges.
At one point the discussion turned to the potential darkness of Europe’s economic futures. We asked ourselves, how much is that darkness already steering us? From there we began tracing links to ecological patterns that might guide us away from the gloom, reminding us that the flows of economics mirror the rest of nature’s critical infrastructures.
Water’s deluge finding its way to the bank, bursting in flood, withdrawing in decade-long drought, and everything in between, raising questions about control, steering, prediction and participation. Fire, too, has its regimes of regenerative flame, as an economic, spiritual, social, biological and agricultural ally or on the opposite side of the anthropogenic fire story, a violent destroyer, its cycle of cleansing and renewal rested the silence of ash.
Where there is light, there is fire and eventually that fire will burn out to make darkness. Both reveal that what we consider as stability and power is often an illusion. Whether in the flow of water or the spread of flame, the forces that sustain life are also the ones that reshape it and our greatest achievement may be to stabilize the uncertainty by aligning ecology with economics rather than opposing forces for cultural and creative vitality.
Every generation faces a moment when our stories about progress and purpose begin to crack. The systems we built to keep us safe, to balance the uncertainty of change in the universal can feel endangered for the world they created. In those moments, art steps forward to help us imagine what comes next and to remember what once worked well.
Across the world, people are searching for ways to live with greater reciprocity, care and responsibility. The old idea of economy as extraction is giving way to a new understanding of economy as relationship. Researchers and communities are discovering that creation itself, the act of making together, is a pathway to reimagining how we live and meanwhile artists, dancers and musicians are turning away from the arts as object to the arts a collective
This Thursday… tomorrow… I will sit with another group of friends, three remarkable thinkers and makers. Helen Edling, an artist and curator from Sweden, whose projects use play as a method of creativity and resistance. Neelambari Phalkey, an artist and researcher working between India and the United Kingdom, who explores ecological listening through painting, photography, film and sound and Kate Maclean, a feminist geographer from University College London, who will guide our conversation about how art and economy intertwine, and how creative processes can reimagine value and exchange. We will present how can visual, listening and collective practices interrupt dominant narratives, open more-than-verbal ways of knowing, and create encounters that inspire, reorganise attention and make space for other powers and futures?
Within this program sits our shared session “Economies: Reimagining Power and Futures, Arts Based, Process Oriented Ways of Making Worlds.” It asks how art, as process, can help reimagine futures that feel communal and responsible again.
Kate Maclean - Chair
Feminist Geographer, University College London
Kate will facilitate the conversation, guiding discussion on the entanglements of art, space and political economy. She will ask how arts-based processes make-with human and more-than-human others, what forms of value and exchange they bring into being, and how they reimagine power and community.
Helen Edling
Artist and Curator, Lokalen Kulturverkstad, Sweden
Helen will present play as a method of creativity and political resistance. Through examples from her practice, she shows how a play aesthetic can open temporary, in-between spaces that resist dominant narratives and create experimental sites of co-creation. Her work explores how play can unsettle hierarchies and expand what can be collectively imagined and enacted.
Dr Neelambari Phalkey
Artist and Researcher, India and United Kingdom
Neelambari investigates the climate crisis through painting, photography, film and sound. She merges her background in human geography and environmental science to develop ecological listening — attuning to rhythms and entanglements that data cannot convey. Her work invites more-than-verbal ways of knowing and cultivates shared imagination toward sustainable futures.
Alan McFetridge
Artist and Founder, Centre for Ecological Philosophy (CEP)
Alan will present projects where image-making functions as inquiry, combining photography, field notes and conversation to unsettle extractive ways of seeing and to cultivate ecological imaginaries. His work includes documenting climate and fire, and a Covid-era project that engaged six unemployed young people aged 18 to 25 in creative collaboration, exploring art as both inquiry and infrastructure for care.
Together, these four approaches demonstrate how collective making can become infrastructure, weaving art, economy and ecology into practices of care, attention and imagination.
Liviana 2025 Panel Discussion
Economies: Reimagining Power and Futures — Arts-Based, Process-Oriented Ways of Making Worlds
Thursday 13 November 2025
New York 07:00 | Buenos Aires 08:00 | London 11:00 | Amsterdam 12:00 | Nairobi 14:00 | Bangkok 18:00 | Warrane-Sydney 22:00 | Aotearoa-NZ 00:00
Online, hosted by the Community Economies Research Network (CERN)
For full details and registration, visit:
https://sites.google.com/view/liviana2025/program-registration/session-9-2
Posters:
Digital - Free
596mm x 420mm on 170gsm bamboo paper $35 USD+ P&P
Available on Metalable. Proceeds are split evenly between the speakers and support our next project.
Click through for more information here
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.