Manipulate Festival: Mapping Degrowth Futures

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Join us for a playful, hands-on workshop reimagining the cultural sector as it is – and as it could be.

About Manipulate Festival: Mapping Degrowth Futures

Listed Under Workshops Events / Arts and Crafts Events

Through interactive “choose-your-own-story” mapping, resource distribution games, and collaborative challenges, we’ll envision a more sustainable future rooted in the principles of the Degrowth Movement. Open to everyone from freelance artists to organisational leaders, this session promises rich conversation, fresh perspectives, and practical insights into a meaningful, degrowth-driven future for our sector.

You’ll have space to consider how you can reshape your work to embrace more sustainable practices, both ecologically and in terms of wellbeing, harness tools for discussing degrowth with confidence, and discover new perspectives on arts infrastructures – and why moving towards degrowth could lead to healthier work environments and better art!

This workshop is free, and aimed at and open to people who engage with the creative arts, including individual artists and people who may run groups or organisations. We also welcome people who attend creative activities, and people who may write about the arts as journalists/commentators.

Entry to this event will be via the red side door, on Castle Hill, and take place in the Cafe space.

Biography:
Emma/Emma Jayne/EJ has been called a dancer, theatre-maker, collaborator, facilitator, movement director, dramaturg, intimacy coordinator, activist, organiser, and occasional drag king. They’re not fussed about definitions. Their work is a combination of making, thinking, and doing that seeks to narrow the gaps between ideologies and actions. Often linked to the socio-political or the seemingly absurd, it explores recurring themes of belonging, intimacy, failure, and power.

Their practice invests more in people, values and context than any definable form. Meaning that, while it always starts in the body, it can become anything: performance, conversation, games, installation, cartography, poetry, geo-caching and more. Emma either works with instantly implementable ideas (Daily Dancing) or decade long enquiries that are sometimes resourced enough to be fully realised (Epic Fail).

Since 2019 their work has focused on degrowth, long term collaborations and sustainability, including evolving relationships with Yaraqa (Lebanon) and independent artist Colette Dalal Tchantcho (Kuwait/ London). Based in rural South-West Scotland, Emma currently travels between Central Scotland, London, and Lebanon to work and live.

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All information (whether in text or photographs) is supplied in good faith but should not be relied upon as being a statement of representation or fact.

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