LEADERSHIP LAB
+ Youth Advisory Board 2024
Elevating arts leadership through our Youth Advisory Board.
Following the success of an initial pilot project, we expanded the scope of our 2024 Youth Advisory Board by combining it with Leadership Lab — a new programme blending mentorship, training, and hands–on arts project experience for aspiring leaders aged 25 and under.
Our four participants put the programme into action by creating their own mini-projects, which you can experience below.
PROJECTS
IN YOUR ELEMENTS
By Emily Thompson
Saturday 20 July, 11am — 2pm
Granby Winter Garden, 37-39 Cairns St, Liverpool L8 2UW
Have you ever wondered how you can use the world around you to inspire creativity?
Join Emily Thompson for a fun-filled family workshop that will show you how!
Creatively connecting with Earth, Air, Water and Fire in your space, with your community, in new and exciting ways.
Inspire connection and creativity in your local places, exploring the materials our Earth provides.
Just drop in — no booking required.
A LOVE LETTER TO THE LAND
By Angelica Willis
A Love Letter to the Land showcases five young perspectives from Wirral as they connect and explore their local landscape.
The film documents a day out in Birkenhead Park, where they attended a tour of the park. After reflecting on their walk, they wrote a letter to show appreciation and care for their land. Overall, the film exhibits the young people being custodians of their local environment.
Angelica is a youth worker at The Hive Youth Zone in Birkenhead, and the young people featured are regular attendees of the youth centre. She got the inspiration for this project from exploring youth-based environmental activities in her home country, Australia.
Thanks to The Hive Youth Zone and Birkenhead Park.
THE FLOWERING EYES
By Piotr Marchewka
The idea for this work-in-progress project was born out of my fascination with imagination, rewilding practices and introspective theatre. I wanted this video to be an invitation to close your eyes, sit comfortably on a chair in your bedroom and bring to these natural places in our mind some objects or characters that don’t usually inhabit them; to play with the boundary between presence and absence; to encounter the familiar unfamiliarity and use it as an opportunity to reimagine and rewild usual ways of relating to nature.
Richard Kearney in Poetics of Imagining writes about imaginations that ‘juggle impiously with the accredited distinction between being and non-being, turning things into their opposites’ (3). This transgressive potential makes imagination a great tool that could help us to create non-hierarchal relations with nature, bring new possibilities of meaning, and escape the empire of reason and asylum of unreason.
This video can also be seen as an invitation to create poetical connections with the world; to imagine a golden string that connects to you a tree you know really well and follow a strange character that has just appeared by its side.
The title – The Flowering Eyes – is a reference to Sophie Strand’s book The Flowering Wand; Rewilding the Sacred Masculine.
Camera Operators: Angelica Willis, Jack Young and Kamila Rochna.