Future Natures

About Artronix: Artronix are curators of funky diy electronic workshops, kits and part time movie makers, having spent a decade working with young people as STEM and Digital Technology delivery partner for the Prince’s Trust. HAKOTO | Speaking Leaf is an ambitious, interdisciplinary project that combines art, technology, and environmental awareness to shed light on the intricate relationship between nature and climate change. This initiative is designed to create an immersive aesthetic experience and inspire dialogue about environmental responsibility.

Description: Artronix will host a hands a diy electronics workshop where participants will get to build their very own ‘Solar Theremin’, a simple soldering project and a fun device for electronic music lovers, after the world ends and the centralised power stations grow cold.

About Carmen Wong: Carmen Wong is an artist-researcher, and creative educator with extensive experience in arts, community, food systems, and higher education. Dedicated to food citizenship and sovereignty, racial equity and social justice, particularly in the field of arts, theatre, and intersections in food communities, she is growing skills rooted in nonviolent communication. Carmen is a co-animator of JarSquad, a social art project growing a solidarity economy by making communal preserves using food surplus.

Description: Participants are invited to bring a small amount (1-2 cupped handfuls) of clean (drinking) water from their homes (or locations of personal significance) to use the workshop. We are also invited to bring spring blossoms to contribute to the washing ritual.  The session will centre on discussions about the belonging to our hydrocommons, focusing on personal water stories, rights to water, water memory, and hydrofeminism. Participants will explore and partake in a washing ritual inspired by the Southeast Asian “mandi bunga”.  We’ll collectively assemble a migrant’s version of “mandi bunga” with locally sourced flowers and plants, scented water, and positive incantations for washing and anointing.

About Clem Sandison: Clem is a grower, facilitator and community organiser. She is one of the directors of Alexandra Park Food Forest – an urban commons in the East End of Glasgow designed to nourish people and the more-than-human world. She also works for the Landworkers’ Alliance, supporting member-led democracy, food sovereignty, land justice and the transition to agroecology. Both organisations operate non-hierarchically and are learning how to decentralise decision making through sociocratic methods.

Description: To manage any commons effectively we need to dissolve hierarchy and learn how to govern as equals.  This interactive workshop will introduce some tools from Sociocracy for building our collective power through consent based decision making.  

About Robyn Wolsey: Robyn’s role (Community Economies Manager) was created to acknowledge and nurture ATLAS Arts networks and address fair value systems in the ways we work and live. Reframing the economy can better represent the multitude of people, places and activities that allow us to survive and thrive. ATLAS Arts organises collective art projects across Skye, Raasay and Lochalsh. We work with artists and local residents to have conversations that are rooted in this place and time through a programme of screenings, gatherings, residencies, meals, workshops and sharings.

Description: Join Robyn for a play around with ATLAS Arts’ Making Publics Press. The MPP is a book making studio, which has all the equipment to design, print, bind and trim your own books and publications. The main purpose of the kit is to support the making of small runs of creative book projects, quickly and cheaply – getting books out into the world and across Skye, Raasay and Lochalsh. We see our book making studio as a space for conversation and community building. Together, we’ll bind some books and reflect on how publishing can support diverse & community economies and shared commons as we go.

About Kate Derickson: Kate Derickson is a Professor of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota. Her ongoing collaborations with a range of social movements and community groups, including the Gullah/Geechee Sustainability Think Tank, informs her work on the relationship between scholarly knowledge and transformative social change.

About Gehan Macleod: With roots in 90s activism, Gehan found herself caught up with GalGael – a community organisation that originated around a protest fire at an anti motorway camp in Pollok. GalGael are currently exploring the capabilities communities need to reclaim their agency amidst increasing uncertainty.

Description: What if there was another way we could share risks like illness or unemployment by living beyond employment, the market and ‘protections’ offered by the state? What if there was a way we could collectivise our needs and share income generated through paid work by organising in small groups or ‘pods’ that could network together for more strength? Could we find radically more choice about how we spend our time, how we live our lives – beyond consuming as individuals or nuclear families, beyond selling our labour to an employer? Could we share tasks that sustain us like care, food growing and fixing or making things so our needs are adequately met through agreements in these small groups? 

This workshop will explore potentialities caught up in commoning pods, as an idea that seeks to experiment with a radically different way to organise how our needs are met and collectivise risks as a form of resilience and resistance in uncertain times.

About David Harvie: I’m a founding member of the Institute for Commoning (inCommons), a project to offer free, in-depth educational courses on commoning. For the past decade I’ve been involved in workplace/union organising, which I understand as a form of (and through the lens of) commoning. I was, until March 2025, honorary treasurer of the University and College Union (UCU). For seven years, from its formation in 2015, I sang with Commoners Choir,  ‘a choir unlike any other’: ‘peculiar, memorable, feisty, celebratory, witty, angry and welcoming’. I’ve also written about commons and commoning.

Description: ‘I believe in singing. I believe in singing together. … When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.’ (Brian Eno)

In this session we’ll sing together, collectively producing cacophonous, glorious harmonies. Specifically we’ll learn and sing two or – if we have time – three Commoners Choir songs. One of these – ‘Descendants’ – we’ll adapt in order to commemorate the struggles that are particularly resonant for participants.

About Bernadette Floresca: Bernadette Floresca is a mixed media artist, and a professional archivist and librarian located in the Gulf South of the United States. Themes of decolonization and deconstructing western tradition carry over into all of Bernadette’s work, challenging the concept of the abject and focusing on its impact on individuals, society, and nature. Manifestations of this concept can often take on dark formations and reference the human condition, the body dysmorphia accumulated from personal lived experiences and how the proximity of living in a postcolonial world influences perception. Bernadette’s work is not just a critique but a deliberate act of breaking and reassembling traditions to create new possibilities through awareness.

Description: Feminist Encounters of a DIY Kind: Crafting Divination Cards Together is a making session that overlaps with three Strange Broth strands: learn, make, and play. During the session, participants will learn about Newcomb Archives and its Tarot and Oracle Collection, then craft their own divination cards using provided random collage materials and supplies. The session is intended to teach folks about DIY feminism in archives and special collections, how it and divination fits into the archives’ collection development while allowing participants to play with collage as a technique to create a personal tarot or oracle card. Participants are encouraged to develop and discuss interpretations of their cards and try out simple cartomancy spreads. The overall goal is to create a deck of cards specific to the session and its participants which will represent evidence of culture, and a community resource created. With permission, cards created will be digitized and made digitally accessible to participants.

About Johanna Koen: I’m a community gardener, artist, and educator based in Edinburgh. My socially engaged practice spans radical mycology, folk herbalism, and decolonial approaches to foraging. Drawing from my work in community gardens and ecological outreach, I facilitate workshops and participatory projects that invite connection with place, seasonality, and more-than-human kin.

Description: This workshop explores foraging as an act of resistance — a way of reclaiming access to land, knowledge, and care beyond capitalist systems. We’ll also learn how to identify some common plants and mushrooms you can forage this time of year.

About Robert Mercer: Robert is a Fine Art graduate who works in various fields that are interlinked through the medium of craft. Robert has been a tutor of woodcarving in Glasgow for 4 years, is involved in upland conservation projects, designs and builds outdoor furniture, works with leathercraft, toolmaking, and photography.  Robert is involved in the development and management of the Woodville Woods project in Govan, a project which, at its core values, explores generosity, reclamation of communal territory, and connecting people/community through heritage craft knowledge.

Description: An opportunity for a group of people to explore the ancient Norse craft to be found in a ‘Grindbygg’ structure. These were log-built shelters found in Norway, used as barns, stores, workspaces etc. The Grindbygg is built as a movable and extendable system of logs and wood-joints that required a competent level of skill and understanding to get right. Using a scale model of the Grindbygg, folk can have a grapple with the complexes of its build, whilst making a connection to Govan’s Norse heritage. Made from locally felled trees, the Grindbygg build has the potential to become more than the practical structure itself – a Grindbygg can come to symbolise the strength of a community,  whose collective energy is represented by a solid physical structure made from the immediate resources to be found in our local urban green-spaces.

About Nuria Lopez: My tight relationship to the land and to food growing dates back to my childhood in the Basque Country. I was born into a family of cooks, part of a matriarchal lineage that spans at least four generations. I learned early on that food is political — that experiences around the table, behind the bar, growing food collectively, building relationships, and tending to existing ones are all made possible through land and food sovereignty. I am a white and trans researcher, community organiser, and grower, and I situate my work within decolonial ecofeminist practice. In 2023, I began my training in politicised somatics within the lineages of generative somatics and through my practice, I seek to dismantle embodied white supremacy and cultivate collective values and visions rooted in equity and interdependence.

Description: This is a land connection workshop that includes somatic exercises and a short session on making seed bombs. Rooted in our relationship with the more-than-human world, we will explore how we want to tend to the land, the soils, and our wider community of humans, and the forces that shape these relationships. Through embodied awareness and opening exercises, we will explore how we can challenge the structures that do not serve us, and how, with regular practice, we can develop new ways of being and relating — ways that reflect a broader vision of working towards social and climate justice. As we make seed bombs together, we will explore what interdependent care looks like in land-tending practices and reflect on the importance of somatics and how centering in our bodies allows us to extend care to the soils.

Director: Cloudberry MacLean. Duration: 1hr 15mins
About the film: Low Rent spans the year I spent secretly living in a hut I built on my allotment in Edinburgh back in 2005. It follows the full cycle of the seasons and captures moments such as early dawn from the hut doorway, a fox running with a scavenged egg in her mouth and trees bending with fruit. In its course I explore questions that continue to preoccupy me about land ownership in Scotland, class, poverty, colonialism and how the violence of capitalism and the joy of life meet in our bodies. With a unique score created by Jer Reid drawing from live improvisation by Jer Reid (guitar) and Una MacGlone (double bass).

Content note: references to colonialism and chattel slavery.

About Maria de Lima: Maria de Lima is a Brazilian-British artist currently based in Glasgow, working across video, installation and painting. Using a visual aesthetic driven by colour across film, installation, painting and text, Maria de Lima’s practice employs a feminist lens to explore the colonial imposition of language as a means to extend territory. She considers how linguistic overlays can become sites where geographies and cultures intersect, and conflicting ideas inhabit our bodies. She has previously worked with Indigenous and Traditional Peoples from Pará, Brazil, and communities from Scotland discussing themes of land rights, solidarity and women led resistance.

Description: The session will start with a screening of This Map of Affections (30mins), which explores a knowledge exchange event held on the Isle of Skye in 2022 and attended by representatives of Indigenous and Traditional Peoples from Pará, north Brazil, and community activists and academics in Scotland. Land rights, solidarity and women’s voices are central to the conversations featured in the film, which find commonalities around colonial erasure of traditional cultures and languages, private ownership and capitalism.

The screening will be followed by a discussion circle featuring objects collected during the making of the film to ignite conversation.

About the session: Enclosure is not just a historical event – such as the Clearances that dispossessed people of their land, common grazings and collective forms of life. Enclosure sits at the core of capitalism and is an ongoing process – deeply dependent on colonisation, violence, extraction and dispossession. Since the 1970s, new politics and technologies have fueled so-called ‘new enclosures’ that not only involve military force and legal ‘sleights of hand’, but ever more invasive forms of surveillance, bureaucratic control and clever accounting to enable insatiable elite extraction to consume any remaining commons. 

In more recent years, we’ve seen an acceleration of ‘new enclosures’ – driven by green colonialism and the so-called ‘just’ transition’s demand for critical minerals and green energy: as the Global North strives for Net Zero while creating huge sacrifice zones and pitching land defenders into violent struggles for their territories and ways of life. New mining planned across these isles brings this assault closer to home while data centres threaten our water sources with enclosure. Meanwhile even our Net Zero targets are disguising corporate enclosure of our municipal governance structures. Carbon credits absolve polluters like Shell, transforming emissions into speculative assets and further deepening enclosure across Scotland as risk and carbon emissions are fashioned into new financial instruments for endless death projects.

Talks

New enclosures: projects for life or death (Brian Garvey) – Current challenges linked to enormity of critical mineral demand, versus the low ebb of local active involvement alongside weakness of international mobilisations. What should an International gathering in 2030 look like?

Black, Black Carbon (Alastair McIntosh) – Alastair will speak to his 2023 paper The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Carbon for Community Land Scotland and developments since. The paper explores how carbon credits generated through the sequestering of carbon (currently through tree planting or peatland restoration) are then packaged and sold by the tonne to end users wishing to offset their own individual or corporate greenhouse gas emissions. Offsetting can be a licence to carry on with business as usual – to continue to pollute and have widespread social implications of major changes in land use. They look good on marketing material, but fail to challenge the consumerism that is a leading cause of climate change. A recent planting scheme of 240 Ha in Skye is estimated to sequester 64,000 tonnes of carbon over a 95-year period just to offset the carbon produced by 40 jumbo jet return trips from London to Sydney. This example alone calls into question the amount of land required to service the offsetting market.

The ‘rewilding’ agenda often justifies its urgency on grounds of climate change, but treats huge swathes of rural Scotland as a colonial ‘terra nullius’ – another example of how the drive for a just transition is impacting the global community negatively (from hydro dams in the Amazon, to trees on Skye). Emissions trading systems rose by 60% in 2021 to $84 billion and represent a new revenue source for Scottish landowners in return for activities that sequester carbon. If not governed carefully this new carbon rush could ‘land Scotland’s rural communities with a fresh driver of upheaval, disempowerment and depopulation’.

Decarbonisation infrastructure in Glasgow: reshaping the local state through enclosure (Bronagh Gallagher) – As cities embark on the urgent and transformative task of decarbonisation, significant potential for equalising access to infrastructure, such as heat, electricity and insulated housing, comes into view. However, despite rhetoric and policy statements, the actual development of infrastructure like district heating and retrofitting appears to be opening up a fresh round of commodification and enclosure. This talk invites us to examine the roll-out of these developments in Glasgow, exploring the troubling implications for ownership of cities and the questions it raises for local democracy and the shifting role of the local state in the era of climate breakdown. 

About the speakers / organisers:

Brian Garvey is a Senior Lecturer at University of Strathclyde, Scotland, in the Department of Work and Organisation. With a background in labour organising in Ireland, Scotland and Brazil, Brian’s current research investigates local and global tensions regarding labour, land use and commodification of natural resources. Brian has a particular interest in Scottish land reform, mineral prospecting in Ireland and the territorial demarcations and resistance by agrarian, traditional and indigenous communities in the Global South. Brian is a co-founder of the Centre for the Political Economy of Labour, which seeks to reflect this ambition in its praxis. 

Alastair McIntosh is a founding trustee of the GalGael Trust and the original Isle of Eigg Trust for land reform, the author of books including Soil and Soul, and an honorary professor in the School of Education at Glasgow University.

Amber Huff is researcher and coordinator of the Centre for Future Natures. Her work explores evolving ecologies of crisis, commons and enclosures and engages with the global politics of environmental change. She works with popular genres like comic books, zines and podcasts to illuminate contemporary commons, enclosures, and the disorienting crises of capitalist modernity.

Bronagh Gallagher has an eclectic mix of skills and experiences, including research and facilitation, from years of working in communities in Glasgow and organising around climate and economic justice issues. She recently completed a political ecology master’s in which she examined how decarbonisation infrastructure is reshaping our cities and in whose interest.

About David Blandy: David Blandy is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas that range from ecology, history and science to arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again. He searches for meaning in cultural life, an expanded form for auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives. He builds complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play.

Description: Explore the complexities of a better future through playing David Blandy’s tabletop roleplay game “Our Place, No Place”, where we imagine a world together, and roleplay living a year in the space we have created. We will draw a map, establishing our terrain through defining different aspects of the space, then each become a character there. The game then offers a series of local events to react to, and a picture of a living community will emerge through our play.

About: Radical bodywork Scotland are a group of bodyworkers who understand embodied practise to be a political tool and an integral part of radical social change. They meet regularly to exchange and create events and offerings for tending our collective health.

Description: The session will give a short introduction to somatics and why we feel it is important for collective movements. Then we will guide you through some self-touch, paired somatic exercises, and one group exercise including an invitation to try group touch (on each other’s backs). There will be an active listener present and all exercises are optional.

Covid-caution: We will have a HEPA air purifier running and will provide FFP2 masks which we ask you to wear unless medically exempt.

About Andrew Black: Andrew Black is an artist and filmmaker based in Scotland. His work, creates portraits of places with which he has a biographical attachment. Black’s films look at how the infrastructures and ideologies of capitalism, militarism and nationalism have shaped the land and its inhabitants. Often working closely with local people, his work shows ways that communities can imagine and create alternative and oppositional ways of being.

Description: Filmmaker Andrew Black, archivist Catherine Macphee and others will share experiences, photos and snatches of video from recent knowledge exchanges between Munduruku and Riberinho peoples from Pará, north Brazil; communities in Skye, Belfast and the Sperrins. Reflecting on autonomy and the differing shape of land struggles informed by recent visits to the Amazon – Munduruku and Riberinho territories and communities to learn from some of the struggles they’re engaged in; such as the successful self demarcation struggle of Sawre Muybu that took over 25 years and took in territories twice the size of Scotland. The exchange went on to host a Munduruku delegation on a trip to Skye where residents face on a daily basis struggles including rewilding, clan chiefs, housing and over-tourism. And then lastly on to Belfast and the Sperrins to learn from those fighting gold mining or reclaiming Irish language and political education at Glór na Móna in Belfast.

About Frédéric Sultan: Frédéric is the coordinator of the transnational network: Remix the Commons. Since 2010, Remix has been a collective committed to the growth of a culture of commoning, cooperation and co-creation for solidarity. The association contributes to the development of knowledge about the commons through initiatives and commoners’ projects. As its name doesn’t suggest ;-), the association is a French-speaking intercultural initiative and we like to forge links with commoners from other linguistic spheres in order to share resources and benefit from their contributions.

Description: The workshop is an invitation to experience a very short time of co-creation of a card game for commoning. What can we do as activists with the theories of commons and commoning to open conversations that can inspire and reinforce action and politics of commoning?
The game can open some conversations out of the formal and traditional form of organizing. But the co-creation is also about what do we do for being in solidarity? What can be made visible as situation of action struggles and strategies? And finally, what can be a ecosystem of commons and commoning?

About Col Gordon: A lot of my research and activism is related to commoning, particularly a Gàidhealach worldview and understanding of commoning. I’ve been involved with groups like The Shieling Project, Highland Good Food Partnership, Invergordon Development Trust, and The Landworkers’ Alliance.

Description: In this session we’ll try to imagine how to reinvent existing institutions that have associated histories of commoning, but today don’t feel like they can offer this. Starting with the examples of Common Good Assets and Funds and Common Grazings committees we’ll blue sky think how these institutions could be reinvented and repurposed to enable new or revive old ways of commoning. 

About Bob Hamilton (Common Good Awareness Project): I have had a particular interest and concern in Glasgows Common Good Fund, since the city council in 2007 placed control of our city’s heritage, which is publicly owned, in the hands of a private company, without any consultation, discussion or debate, with the public who own it.

Description: Scotland’s Common Good Fund. A 500-year-old network across the country was born out of mutual support and collectivism. Why isn’t it being used to connect projects for young people in mutual support and collectivism? Why can’t people add to the Common Good Fund? Why are these assets being ignored, apart from the councils whose responsibility is to protect them, as they dwindle away? The Common Good “Fund” is unique to this country. Why wasn’t its 500 years history celebrated on banners in George Square?

Awareness of the Common Good could help to engender the idea of citizenship and responsibility. What is it, so many people need in their lives at this moment in time, is to feel that they are part of something. Something common to all for the good of all. No matter who they are or where they come from. That is the essence of the Common Good. This teach-in will look at some ideas for building knowledge of, and some uses for, the Common Good Fund. 

About babs nicgriogair: babs nicgriogair is a stornoweegie – born in Stornoway, made in Glasgow – a strange hybrid of heathery Hebridean softness and big skies, gritty Glaswegian wit and not so mean streets. Based in the dynamic Woodlands hood they strive with neighbours to see the wood as well as the trees. A member of the Greencity Wholefoods Worker Co-operative for more than 20 years, they would consider themselves (when not driving a forklift truck) as a worker-poet, a socio-political and cultural activist with the GUIR Gaelic Arts Collective and Ceòl is Craic, (Glasgow’s dynamic Gaelic-language arts organisation).

Description: babs will speak about the rich tradition of proverbs in Scottish Gaelic, many humorous, always experiential and rooted in community with a focus on the ways commoning and commons were stitched into the language and the landscape. Turn some of these into patches in Keng Keng’s workshop following or bring fabric (bags/tshirts) to print on.

About Catherine Macphee: Catherine MacPhee is an Archivist and activist from Skye,  she works to improve communities by sharing powerful local stories, learning from the past to create a positive future for the Island. Using archives for cultural initiatives, organizing events and workshops, collaborating with artists, researchers, and communities to address issues like social justice, climate change, and land rights through a renewed connection to tradition. A deeply rooted connection to Skye and its traditions fuels her commitment to using heritage as a form of activism. Coming from a family of tradition bearers, she aims to share powerful stories of the area, contributing to positive change and a hopeful future.

Description:  This talk delves into the rich, often buried, archival materials that document histories of common lands with a focus on land agitation, resistance, and reclamation in Skye. From uprisings and movements and state suppression, we’ll explore how archives capture the tensions between land, power, and belonging. Through letters, testimonies, photographs, and state records, we trace the voices that challenged dispossession and asserted alternative relationships to land. The talk will also reflect critically on the nature of the archive itself: Who documents resistance? What gets preserved or silenced? And how can researchers, activists, and communities engage with these records to reclaim suppressed histories and imagine liberated futures?

About Tim Zocco: Tim Zocco lives in Govanhill and makes comics for a living. He has worked with Future Natures to create several comics, from, in and for the commons. These include his most recent effort, Little Elle, written with Amber Huff, an affectionate parody of Windsor McCay’s classic comic strip Little Nemo, in which Karl Marx tells his daughter an incredible bedtime story.

Description: This session includes a short talk, introducing comics not merely as a medium through which to tell stories, but instead as a way of thinking about storytelling itself. With a beginner friendly focus on the language and grammar of comic books, and a variety of examples, we will examine how the construction of a comic page can open up possible avenues of story telling which are unique to the form.
The talk is followed by a group making exercise. As a group we will decide on a simple story to tell (hopefully something inspired by the history and futures of the Scottish commons), before breaking into groups of threes and fours, each with a different challenge. Each group will have the same task of producing a simple comic page (no art expertise necessary) based on the story we have decided upon. At the end, we’ll share our stories, read each other’s comics, and compare how each challenge affected our storytelling.

Description: 21st century concerns meet local histories. In Knoydart a commons opened up against a background of a total highland clearance. After 25 years there is a struggle around a different way of doing things. Craft vs trade. A community vs. mega rich. Cooperation vs. mechanisation. Out at the raggety edge – defiance beats doom and gloom.

Bio: tigh coichiacan (the shared house) and cleanup of coastal knoydart

About Clem and Kyle: Clem Sandison is a grower, facilitator and community organiser. She is one of the directors of Alexandra Park Food Forest – an urban commons in the East End of Glasgow designed to nourish people and the more-than-human world. She also works for the Landworkers’ Alliance, supporting member-led democracy, food sovereignty, land justice and the transition to agroecology.

Kyle Baldock is a grower, community engagement practitioner and urban environmentalist. He is the Urban Agriculture Project Coordinator at Glasgow Community Food Network, helping develop the Ruchill Golf Course project and chairing the Urban Agriculture Working Group for the Glasgow City Food Plan. Previously, he helped establish the organisation Energy Garden, working alongside communities to gain access to land along London’s railways. 

Description: Starting with a big question; Is self governance possible? – we will drill down into what it actually looks like in the Glasgow context. What are the conditions that enable its practise? And how can this process create a cultural/political shift away from individualism? We’ll explore these questions with case studies from Alexandra Park Food Forest and Ruchill Golf Course. Connect with fellow commoners and share your practice via small group discussions.