Art exhibitions, installations and provocations
We are delighted to feature a number of small artistic and creative interventions at the conference. These will be located near conference registration in the Teaching and Learning building.
An intimate connection: society and the ocean in water photography
Giuseppe Lupinacci/Raw-News for the EU project PartArt4OW, ideated and realised in collaboration with Chiara Certoma’ and Federico Fornaro.
31 artistic photographs, taken from below and within the sea, portray the diverse ways in which people create and understand their connection with the liquid, turbulent, mutable, and unpredictable marine environment.
Framed within the marine social geography perspective investigated by the CO>SEA ColLaboratorium for the Socio-Environmental Analysis of the Ocean, the exhibition narrates the ocean as a site of constant change and transformation, compenetration, and bio-chemical and cultural sympoiesis that transform our understanding and shape relational values connecting us to the marine world while inspiring our emotional attachment to the ocean.
Fragments and traces: embodied encounters (2024)
Kimbal Bumstead (filmmaker) and Jessica Jacobs (Queen Mary's University of London).
An audiovisual collage reflecting on the process of making art as a way of encountering and attuning to place. Images and sounds from the artist's local neighbourhood are paired to explore the entanglement between the physical environment and embodied experience.
Everyday geometries of my urban and domestic landscape – paving slabs, parking lines and kitchen utensils – are layered with construction site sounds, satellite maps, and an MRI scan of an injured knee.
On the sea edge: creative approaches to marine and coastal futures
Katherine Willis (University of Plymouth), Carolina Vasilikou (University of Cambridge) and Ashita Gupta (University of Plymouth).
How can we think differently and creatively about the many stories and encounters with marine spaces as places, landscapes, and environments? While there are numerous theoretical and critical approaches to the study of marine and coastal spaces, this workshop aims to explore the potential of creative and experimental methodologies for imagining and engaging with these environments.
We use the term ‘sea edge’ to describe the liminal spaces between land and sea – shores, beaches, dunes, estuaries – as sites of transition, friction, and opportunity. The workshop will consider how these edge conditions, shaped by natural, managed, and planned interventions, opening up new possibilities for engaging with marine places as sites of care, agency, and transformation
The session will be interactive and participatory, bringing together researchers and practitioners to reflect on shared themes, divergent approaches, and creative responses to coastal and marine change.
Together, we will explore ideas and interventions for shaping spaces at the sea-land interface that contribute to more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable futures.
The Pest Confessional
Hannah Fair (University of Southampton, UK).
Rats. Mice. Bed bugs. Flies. Fleas. Embrace the chance to confess your pests and be freed from the shame of domestic infestations. The Pest Confessional Booth invites attendees to anonymously share their experiences of unexpectedly or unwillingly sharing their homes with unwanted nonhuman others.
Stories of disgust, fear, humour, and joy are all welcome. The Pest Confessional is a non-judgmental space that invites participants to sit with the ambivalence of multispecies entanglements.
For more information about the Pest Confessional, contact Hannah Fair on h.l.fair@soton.ac.uk or visit the stand during the conference.
Pin the Tale
Jack Lowe (University of the West of England, UK).
Throughout this year’s conference, all delegates can take part in a brand-new creative activity designed to help you get to know Birmingham, our host city, a little better.
Pin the Tale is a platform for connecting with the world around you through stories. It takes place on a UK-wide digital story map that is freely accessible via web browser on smartphone, tablet or PC/Mac.
The game map uses the what3words grid, a system that divides the world into 3x3m squares and gives each one a unique three-word address.
Delegates are invited to use Pin the Tale to:
- Write stories about places in Birmingham using all three words of the locations’ what3words addresses. Stories can take any creative form, including: fictional, poetic, historical, personal, informative, and imaginative.
- Discover new things about our host city by reading other people’s stories. If you can identify the exact locations that stories are connected with, they’ll be added to your collection of 'Solved Stories'.
Retracing footsteps: the changing landscape of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon)
Dr Daniel Bos (University of Chester), Dr Cian Quayle (University of Chester), Jane Evans and Emma Petruzzelli.
Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon is Wales’s most iconic mountain, hosting 650,000 visitors annually. This exhibition combines cultural geography, art, and photography to document and reflect on past and present encounters with the mountain. Contemporary photographs and moving images are juxtaposed with extracts from the 19th-century visitor books housed at the summit huts.
By retracing the journeys of 19th-century visitors to the mountain, this work reimagines the mountain landscape as it is today, reflecting on the broader contemporary environmental, socio-economic, and cultural challenges facing its sustainable future.
The exhibition is part of an ongoing, interdisciplinary project at the University of Chester in collaboration with Bangor University and Snowdonia National Park Authority.
RGS-IBG 2025 Zine Fair by GEOZONe
The Geography Zine Organizing Network (GEOZONe) will host the Society's first-ever Zine Fair. GEOZONe will be profiling zines on creative methods, activism, material cultures, and anything geography-related for the duration of the conference.
You can send in your zines via mail, bring them in person, or request that organisers print them.
Learn more and get in contact on the GEOZONe website.
Visual art enhancing the communication of science with positive impact at community, municipal, and intergovernmental levels
Trevor D. Davies (University of East Anglia), John W. Pomeroy (University of Saskatchetwan) and Gennadiy Ivanov (Norwich Studio Art Gallery).
The exhibition shows examples of original science-focused artworks produced by the Global Water Futures’ (GWF) Transitions Programme, portraying climate change and its impacts through visual art. Prints of paintings, and pastels (some of which were produced in the field) and oils illustrate Ivanov’s ability to communicate science in two projects
The Great Thaw
The Great Thaw highlights the current state – and likely future – of the cryosphere, especially mountain glaciers and snowpacks, along with the downstream implications of their destruction.
The artwork was directly instrumental in the UN declaring 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, and influential in the ratification of the International Decade of Action for the Cryospheric Sciences.
On World Glacier Day 2025, UNESCO and the GWF published The Great Thaw: A Homage in Art to the Vanishing Cryosphere, showcasing over 140 original artworks paired with accessible scientific commentary.
Climate Mural for our Times
The giant Climate Mural for our Times, spanning from 66 million years ago to 2200 CE, is a permanent installation in Norwich City Hall. It tells rich stories of climate change impacts on the landscape and local social history, which are expanded upon in accompanying smaller oil paintings.
These works encourage conversations – held in front of the mural – between the artist, scientists, politicians, and community groups about preferences for our future, some of which are later represented in community art pieces.
Walking as storytelling
Andy Howlett (Co-founder of Walkspace), Fiona Cullinan (Co-founder of Walkspace), Emily Wilkinson (Aberystwyth University) and Rachel Henaghan (Transdisciplinary Artist)
Walkspace (walkspace.uk) is a West Midlands-based co-operative of artists, writers, psychogeographers, photographers, creative practitioners and walkers.
Walkspace exists to bring together artists and creative practitioners in the region who use walking as part of their practice. We aim to create a community of mutual support and collaboration, working as a co-operative collective to support the creation of new work.
Presentation and workshop
In this interactive presentation, four Walkspace members will introduce you to the Walkspace story, the diverse practices of our members and our current activities. We will discuss the role of walking as a creative catalyst, a medium to highlight narratives, and an inclusive practice to illustrate how stories emerge from the act of solo or group walking.
The session will be followed by a Q&A and group activity exploring our own stories about walking. The session will be presented by Andy Howlett, Fiona Cullinan, Emily Wilkinson and Rachel Henaghan.
This session is followed by an outdoor walk and field trip around the campus. Please register for this session too if you would like to join us.
Field trip
Join Walkspace members on a walk across the Birmingham University Campus. On this urban drift, we will take in resonant spaces, erratic boulders and walking prompts to uncover new narratives. The session will be about 90 minutes long.
Through walking, we can retell stories and discover new ones. Moving through our geographies enables us to share and create knowledge as new oral and multisensory traditions – the kind of knowledge gained by being in the field.
Through walking we enchant, re-enchant and re-wild spaces, acknowledging sites and locations which are not chosen or consciously experienced, changing narratives around place. As a collective we cross and mesh thresholds of urban and rural, looking at places through a creative lens.
Through walking with interdisciplinary artist skill sets, we generate valuable data relating to culture, planning, architecture, development, ecology and communities. Our shared walking songlines are inclusive, creating a sense of belonging – which includes those who do not consider themselves artists.
As a grassroots collective, Walkspace constantly navigates creative geographies, adding to the cultural value of places and creating embodied shared value.
This walk follows an interactive presentation (Walking as storytelling).
Please sign up for this session too if you would like to join us for the whole afternoon.