Submarine Consciousness

Breakwater, the artist duo of Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe, presents Submarine Consciousness, Or What Have You, a new project exploring historical and contemporary ideas of rewilding in and around Hadleigh Farm in the Thames Estuary. The project considers the neocolonial relations of Essex as the backyard of the capital and their impact on environmental degradation, as well as remarkable survival and resilience. It unpacks the complex narratives of the flood-altered landscapes, local submarine psyche, social and environmental trauma, a witness to the interspecies resilience, and intense ecological negotiations within the Estuary.

Engaging the audience through the immersive experience of the hydrosphere, ghostly conversations, an overlaid cartographic mess, intimate reading and a walking ritual, Or What Have You culminates in a site-specific installation and a sound walk of the second iteration of Cockles of My Heart. The installation and participatory sound walks resonate with each other, focusing on the entanglement of cockle habitats with the landscape of extraction, shaped by toxic waste disposal, industrial fisheries, military operations, and the global trade gateway.

Breakwater has collaborated with the Decolonising Botany Working Group (Laura Burn, Ayesha Keshani, Cian Dayrit, Tuan Mami, Helen Pritchard) to produce a publication offering a transnational critique on rewilding and conservation. In addition, the collective will offer two hands-on public workshops that actively engage the audience in the critical texts of publication through various creative activities.

Cockles of My Heart 2

Join an immersive sound walk around the Hadleigh Farm during Estuary 2025 festival about the endangered cockle habitats.

Decolonising Botany Public Programme
As part of the art research practice group Decolonising Botany, Ayesha Keshani and Laura Burns will facilitate two participatory workshops. Both workshops attempt to shift our perspectives and relationships to the land and multi-species communities in the Estuary through remedial gorse dying and creative mapping of strange feelings concerning nature. These engagement programmes are also a convivial activation of the publication that the Decolonising Botany members have been working on, commissioned for Estuary 2025.

Dye-ing Hope 22 June, Laura Burns: A workshop with gorse as a natural dye and flower remedy* 
Gorse is a prominent plant on the Hadleigh Farm site. A so-called “native” species to the British Isles, it is used as a flower remedy to bring hope to those who have lost faith, or a situation that seems impossible. But when I spent time with Gorse and asked about its medicine, it actually said, “I am so much older than hope”. I was curious about this sentiment, and the sensation of rock-like time that the gorse bush had. 

We will harvest gorse and make a solstice flower remedy, spending time with the enquiry: in times of political hopelessness/despair, what does being “older than hope” mean and how might we track Gorse in our collective listening? Can we let hope die as we dye, to make space for the medicine of this ancient plant to emerge?

*Participants will be able to leave with their own small flower remedy. All materials provided.

Laura Burns is an artist and facilitator tending to the remembrance of embodied knowing. They make and search for reparative practices to attend to the impact of colonial capitalism’s enclosures of land, bodies and practices, asking instead how the land guides and gives rise to transformative justice and abolitionist futures. 

strange feelings 29 June, Ayesha Keshani
What does it mean when a landscape doesn't feel right? This workshop explores uncertain reactions to land and waterscapes, with a focus on discomfort, mistrust and uncanny gut feelings. Pushing against the notion that land and water should accommodate us, how can we sit productively with the possibility that we might not always be welcome? What kinds of strange feelings have we experienced in relation to ‘nature’ and where might they come from? How do we hold ourselves in relation to place, and what else is held alongside us?
 
We will work through small creative activities – speculative and reflective writing, drawing and discussions – in response to a series of prompts. We’ll be thinking about place spirits, fractured histories, and longer cycles of time, to understand the complex forms of relation that emerge in the places we find ourselves in.
 
The workshop will take place at a gentle pace, with time for reflection and centring. No prior experience is expected. Participants should be aware that sensitive and uncomfortable subjects may come up in discussions and be willing to hold space for others. Workshop limited to 6-8 participants. 

Project Image: Breakwater.