The effects of an ongoing climate catastrophe mark the landscapes of East Anglia, impacting ecosystems and the lives and livelihoods of coastal communities. As the crisis deepens, artists and designers are left questioning whether conventional, studio-bound practices are adequate to serve the region’s communities in a time of crisis.
The Spatial Ecologies project began in 2024 as a research-led attempt to broach those questions. In one-week intensive courses, an international group of tutors and students from across disciplines field-test post-studio methods. Building on insights from last year’s pilot, the 2025 summer course takes these first steps beyond the studio. The course is organised around a two-day field trip to Halvergate Marshes and Breydon Water in the Norfolk Broads.
Halvergate Marshes and Breydon Water, located within the Broads National Park, are among the country’s most climate-vulnerable areas. Here, the meeting between land and water is blurry and ambiguous. Tidal creeks and plateaus, the results of medieval peat excavation, have become enclosures and grazing land for sheep and cattle. Further inundation is prevented by a network of pumps, windmills, dykes, and drainage ditches. Such flat land resists legibility. From our point of view, the flatness makes it hard to judge distance, to train the eye, and to orient the body. Where dramatic landscapes invite exploration, subjugation, and exploitation, flat ones ask us for quieter attention - and for tolerance of not knowing.
This year, Spatial Ecologies invites you to embrace this not-knowing. During the week, we will attune to the slow, off-beat rhythms of the site. We will explore ecological and collaborative approaches to image-making that require sensitivity to place, to listening, and to how we move through it. Working with mark-making, movement performance, and deep listening as methods, we will engage with the softer, slower, and boggier life-worlds of the communities - human and more-than-human - that share this terrain.
We have invited experts, artists, designers, and researchers to contribute to the course.
These include Andrew Farrell (Broads Authority), Jonathan P. Watts, James Hepper,
Geraldine Padilla Matamoros, and Neil Bousfield. In addition, we welcome guest critics Prof.
Teresa Stoppani, Prof. Ellie Nixon, and Ben McDonnell. Course outcomes are displayed in the exhibition When it’s gone, it’s gone, curated by Matthew Bennington, Roter Su, and Kathryn Hammond.
The course is organised by the Architecture and Interior Design Programme, and supported by the Broads Authority, the RSPB, and Hahnmühle UK.
