​Meeting The Lough On Its Own Terms emphasises a symbiotic approach to developing the Rights of Nature at Lough Neagh; a live ecocide, where the largest body of water in Ireland and the UK became overwhelmed by algae blooms, the complexity of which includes decades if not centuries of extractive forces and neglect. The sound and video installation with footage from the Lough at multiple scales, draws upon a collective writing project and conversations over 2.5 years with Friends of the Earth NI and associates, druids, herbalists, campaigners, and eco-lawyers engaged with ancient Irish Brehon Law, that tells of the multiple stories running through the Lough, from a decolonial, more-than-human, and multi-species perspective.

 

The story of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s work on cyanobacteria, further entangles the microbial with the neoliberal at Lough Neagh, whilst helping to unpack the ideological construction of world views that bring us to a state of systems collapse today. Margulis's work challenges Neo-Darwinist concepts of competition and the selfish gene, offering instead a way to recalibrate human relations with nature, via an emphasis on symbiotic life, collaborative processes, and the understanding that organisms emerge in synthesis with the environment.

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Follow the slurry, follow the money.

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Once a site of great abundance, supplying (as it still does) 40% of all drinking water to NI, with eel fishing famously being passed down across generations over centuries, the complexity of how the Lough became eutrophic presents a textbook case in converging dynamics of power, influence, and conflicts of interest, that have also developed over decades, if not centuries, around Lough Neagh and the watershed. Whilst the work focuses on Lough Neagh, it speaks to much broader concerns regarding how environmental neglect affects both democratic processes, and public health, as neoliberal policies entangle with algae blooms.  The material emphasis on the nutrients in the lough, raises awareness, educates and empowers advocacy for more effective environmental regulations and democratic processes leading to establishing the Rights of Nature.

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Systems Collapse.

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The focus on the microbial scale holds the potential to lead to a paradigm shift in thinking; a gut feeling, even, as humans recalibrate a relationship to nature from a de-centred multi-species perspective. The story of evolutionary biology unpacks the converging ideological world views that bring us to a state of systems collapse today, and how thinking in systems i.e. ‘ecological thinking’ is now vital for our very survival.

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Sonic Ritual workshop and live jam.

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Rituals have acted historically, as early technological interfaces, scoring human / nature relationships, in very particular ways. The work emphasises listening and sound, as practices that can de-centre the human, amongst the vulnerable ecologies of Lough Neagh and the watershed.  

 

The Sonic Ritual live jam performance brings together Clarke with John D’Arcy and HIVE choir, where performing live together proposes new ways of ‘being’ in the world ‘with other species’. Foregrounding considerations of how human voice/s in a polyphonic approach might sit within the delicate ensemble of a multi-species perspective, to reflect the new calibration we are hoping to bring about: a new symbiotic calibration of humans and nature, whilst furthering a paradigm shift to a microbial scale.

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