Workshop
Cultivating the We
A series of one-day creative workshops in locations around South Devon to invite you into BLC's practice of Sensing the Bioregion.
Slow down, notice and explore your relationship with place through collective artistic practice.
Join our workshop in Buckfastleigh at the inspiring Moor Imagination Centre. Throughout the day, we’ll engage in two creative walks known as dérives, an open-ended way of exploring a place through embodied wandering and attention, often used by artists to notice how environments affect us. Rather than following a route or plan, we invite our senses and intuition to guide us. Using our phones, we’ll capture sounds, short videos, and images that we’ll share and reflect on together in the afternoon.
What we will explore together:
Throughout the day, we’ll work with a series of accessible, creative activities inspired by art practice. These may include:
- walking and wandering without a set destination
- listening to sound, nature, place, and to one another
- simple mark-making, drawing, or creative mapping
- moments of silence, reflection, and collective sharing.
The activities are offered as invitations, not instructions. They encourage us to loosen familiar ways of seeing, and allow ourselves to get a little lost together. From this shared space of not-knowing, we’ll explore how sensing through the body and paying attention to the present moment can help us move beyond habitual or culturally conditioned perspectives, opening up new ways of relating to nature, place, and one another.
The rhythm of the day:
The workshop follows a gentle structure that balances individual exploration and collective practice. Timings may shift slightly in response to the needs of the group.
- Morning: arriving together, grounding, and sensory wandering in and around the local area through creative, place-based practices
- Midday: a shared potluck lunch (supplemented by The Lounge, the organic, plant-based café) and time for rest and informal connection
- Afternoon: collective creative work, mapping, and reflection, exploring how creative practices can help us adapt to an uncertain future.
Practical information:
- Location: Moor Imagination Centre, Chapel St, Buckfastleigh TQ11 0AB
- Date & timing: Sunday 22nd February, 10am-5pm
- Group size: Limited to 25 participants
- Cost: Minimum donation of £10
What to bring:
- Comfortable clothes and suitable footwear
- Food to share for a communal potluck lunch
- A fully charged phone, to capture sounds, images or short videos during the day.
An ongoing invitation:
As one of a series, this workshop is part of a BLC practice, Sensing the Bioregion. We’re interested in how ways of noticing, listening, and being with place could create connected communities of creative practice across an entire region, as an integral part of a citizen knowledge network. While the workshop is open to everyone, we are especially interested in artists who feel drawn to participate in this exploration as a foundation for learning - and from which we anticipate a group exhibition emerging.
Connection with BLC's wider work:
This important form of individual awakening and collective learning will also inform and contribute to BLC's programmes. At the moment the bioregion doesn’t know it is a bioregion, which is why helping the bioregion to see and sense itself is so important. And for the Sensing practice to involve everyone across the bioregion, sharing experiences, being met where we are. It is an invitation to experience our local places afresh and also gain a sense of being a part of the bigger whole of South Devon within a web of relationships that provide identity and belonging - a foundation for addressing immediate issues and crises.
BLC's practices are in service to growing the capacities of the people of South Devon to be agents of change. Able to sense for ourselves, record information and data about the world around us, interpret and share that data, collaborate, design and communicate, make the case for the devolution of decision-making and resources to community level, able to influence the form that funding takes, more able to take governance decisions. This is so that we can both plan for the future and gain the agency to take action for adaptation.
Key information
Workshop led by Emilio:
