Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths

Save the Date!

Doing Ecology Otherwise: Pathways for Art and Transdisciplinary Collaboration in Ecosocial Change

International Conference hosted by the Centre for Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths, University of London

11-12 September 2026

Doing Ecology Otherwise addresses the imaginative, sensory, material and embodied capacities of art to address urgent ecological challenges. Drawing on essential insights from Natasha Myers and Lola Olufemi on the potentiality of imagining and acting ‘otherwise’, the conference explores how art can hold space for new understandings, practices, relations and structures of feeling that may be marginalized in mainstream scientific and environmental action.

The conference is organized and hosted by the Centre for Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths, University of London, in conversation with the British Ecological Society (UK), Celadon Center for Arts and Ecologies (Cyprus), Contemporary Art Archipelago (Finland) and Kafkárna Center for Arts and Ecology UMPRUM (Czech Republic).

Contributors include:
Adriana Arroyo, Louise Ashcroft, Claire Baily, Paola Bascón, Amálie Bulandrová, Ama Josephine Budge, Frances Cannon, Youngsook Choi, Anna Collin, Louie Destouches, Taru Elfving, Matthew Fuller, Carle Gent, Paul Granjon, Althea Greenan, Gabriel Koureas, Jack Hannam, Esther Lu, Becky Lyon, Elspeth Mitchell, Harun Morrison, Elena Parpa, Lotta Petronella, Eva Koťátková, Ros Gray, Sophie Seita, Chooc Ly Tan, Jol Thoms, Melissa Thompson, Evanthia Tselika, Becca Voelcker, Kateřina Vídenová, Lenka Vráblíková, Rain Wu, Rehana Zaman, Wood Roberdeau.

Read the full conference text and register via our website (link in bio). The full programme will be announced soon.

The conference is free upon registration.

Visual Cultures and Inframetropolitan Systems invites you to part 2 of summer Public Programme!

Part 2 includes Visual Cultures recent research fellow Edward George, Visual Cultures PhD student Lynnée Denise as well as the much missed Visual Cultures colleague Dhanveer Singh Brar.

All are welcome, no need to register! We hope to see you there.

Visual Cultures invites you to this week’s Public Programme Touching Infrastructures: Samuel Delaney’s Perceptual Economies of Racial Capitalism with Samuel Fisher.

Thursday, 11 June, 3-5 PM

Avalon Cafe, 

Unit D, Industrial Estate, Juno Way, London SE14 5RW

This event will be kindly hosted by the Avalon Cafe as the Goldsmiths University and College Union (GUCU) continues striking after the imposition of 100% pay deduction. The talk is free. Donations to the GUCU strike fund are welcomed.  

Dr. Samuel Fisher is a newly minted PhD thrown into the moloch maw of unemployed lumpen academia. His research interests include black studies, Marxist theories of value, and the aesthetics of racial capitalism.

Upcoming exhibition! Imagined as an exploratory, collective project, Spaces to Daydream searches for where oneiric, everyday utopias might already exist in our lives - or where they might be imagined into being.

Hi All!

As we don’t have a public programme event this week we encourage you all to attend: Cultural Studies from Below, with Emma Warren, on the 28th of May, from 6 pm in RHB 139. Please do share far and wide; the event is open to all and will be interesting and inspiring to anyone involved in grassroots and independent culture.
Emma is a writer and activist whose work focuses on independent youth and music culture and the infrastructures that make it possible. She is the author of Make Some Space (2019), which was a MOJO book of the year; Steam Down (2019) which was published by Rough Trade Books and named an Irish Times read of the year; and Document Your Culture (2020). Dance Your Way Home (2023) was a Guardian book of the year.

In this talk, we revisit Emma’s seminal zine Document Your Culture, a text that offers guidance and methods for reflection and documentation of grassroots cultural practice. In the years since its publication, the zine has lived an independent life even as the challenges, tensions, and contradictions it was written to address have sharpened. In this session we discuss what documenting culture means today, using the zine as a jumping-off point to think through what grassroots cultural scholarship, activism, and writing can be today.
Cultural Studies From Below is an ongoing initiative reflecting on the future of Cultural Studies as an intellectual tradition and practice. All our events are free and open to all. With very few academic programs and little institutional presence surviving the drastic restructuring and cultural austerity reshaping universities in the UK, finding new forms of collective work and thought is becoming increasingly pressing. We will be hosting a series of conversations over the course of the Spring and Summer of 2026. For more information, head to our website.

We are delighted to invite you to an event organized in collaboration with the Centre for Art and Ecology!

The Q***r and Other Beds in the Rainbow Garden and the Joy of Unsolicited Gardening in Public Space by Barbora Lungová

Artist talk, Wednesday 17 June, 5-6:30 PM
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre, Whitehead Building, Goldsmiths

In her artists talk, the Czech artist Barbora Lungová will introduce her artistic research projects dedicated to gardening. Through creating her Rainbow Garden in Kyjov, Czech Republic, she has explored how irises and queerness can be wedded through deconstructing the cultural imagery associated with cultivar names in the context of landscape and biodiversity enhancement. In her other – solo or collaborative projects – she has been preoccupied by the thin line between traditional village-style “beautification“ of public space, its translation to urban context, and the questions of the spontaneity, joy, absurdity, and the sense (or the lack) of space as commons that guerilla gardening entails.

Barbora Lungová graduated from the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic in the field of Film Studies, English and American Studies (2002), and from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology in the Studio of Figurative Painting (2006). She has recently completed her doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Art in Bratislava, Slovakia. In the last two decades, she has been regularly exhibiting and curating exhibitions in Czech Republic and Slovakia. In 2025, she won the prestigious Jindřich Chalupecký Award, presenting her Rainbow Garden project in the award laureates‘ exhibition in the National Gallery Prague in 2025.

Upcoming event! How do we break something that is already broken? A virtual assembly of the Critical AI Network, held by the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths.
27-29 May, online.

Keynote speakers include: Helen Beethem, Dan McQuillan and Fieke Jansen.

The programme will discuss the topics:
AI in Education, AI as Education
AI in and as Law, Governance, and Politics
The Ecology of AI, AI and the Environment

If you would like to attend this online event, please register: https://tinyurl.com/critical-ai-network.

Public Programme this Thursday! 💥Sensuous Abstraction: Two Moments in the History of Music and Money with Paul Rekret

21 May, 5 - 7pm
RHB 309

This talk examines the aestheticisation of money in rap music across two distinct historical conjunctures: late 1990s New York and mid-2000s to early 2010s Atlanta. Developing the concept of sensuous abstraction, it approaches hip-hop not simply as a representation of wealth but as actively mediating and producing the sensory life of money within popular culture. Rather than merely reflecting economic change, rap emerges here as an agent in the circulation of financial logics, affects, and imaginaries.

The first moment traces a transformation in late 1990s New York, where a newly dominant rap aesthetic stages wealth as mobility, liquidity, and surface. Emerging alongside the financialisation of the music industry and the reorganisation of urban space, this formation translates the increasing abstraction of money into sensuous form, aligning popular affect with the expanding logics of finance. The second moment turns to trap in Atlanta, where the conditions of precarity, debt, and informal labour reshape both the sonic texture and narrative world of rap. Here, money is no longer staged primarily as spectacle but as an ambient and continuous force, and rap participates in embedding financial abstraction within the rhythms of everyday life in a more abject form.

Dr. Paul Rekret is the author of Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence (2017); Derrida and Foucault: Philosophy, Politics, Polemics (2018) and editor of George Caffentzis’s Clipped Coins, Abused Words & Civil Government (2021). He has published on political and cultural theory in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, Constellations, South Atlantic Quarterly and his writing has appeared in Frieze, The Wire, Art Monthly, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere. He is a Lecturer in the School of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster.

Public Programme this Thursday! Julian Henriques presents The Sonic Gaze: Alterity, Futurity And Instruments of Dominance
14 May, 5-7 pm
RHB 309

This presentation argues that sounding offers a different understanding of spatialities and temporalities compared to the dominant visualization of space and time as pre-existing dimensions. Though distinct in terms of horizons, futures, and power, both the sonic and visual dimensions are equally dependent on the instruments that generate them. The dancehall sound system is an exemplary apparatus for generating the lived experience of spacetime through sounding: situated, sensory, intensive and social. The Renaissance painters’ gridded window is equally an instrument, but for visualizing space in terms of measured units. The closed window of vanishing-point perspective creates an alienating, abstract, and “objective” world outside. This Modernist worldview obliterated the third “reverse perspective” technique used to depict the Medieval cosmos, based on involvement, proportion and human values – as with the dancehall session. The Sonic Gaze proposes two reversals. One gives attention to the power source of the Gaze, rather than only its reifying effect on the gazed-upon; the other reverses the modality from visual to auditory. Such synaesthetic traffic is dramatically expressed in Denzil Forrester’s dancehall paintings. The Sonic Gaze recognised the power that – with the sound system – is in subaltern hands.