Climate Festival 2026 - Plastic Planet: Writing, Photography and the Anthropocene
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Central
Plastic has transformed the modern world - enabling convenience, mobility and abundance - while quietly infiltrating every ecosystem and every human body. This interdisciplinary workshop invites writers and photographers to slow down and look again at this most contradictory of materials: at once miraculous and destructive, banal and sublime.
Led by artist and photographer Diego Ferrari and writer Jean McNeil, the course explores plastic as both subject and method. Ferrari’s practice approaches photography as a form of performance, in which the artist collaborates with weather, terrain and chance to create images that fuse plastic debris with the natural landscape. Drawing on traditions of land art and conceptual photography, his work unsettles easy distinctions between beauty and pollution, value and waste, nature and artifice.
Alongside this visual practice, Jean McNeil brings decades of experience as a novelist, nonfiction writer and environmental storyteller. Her work - shaped by residencies in Antarctica, the Arctic and other fragile environments - examines how narrative, memory and attention can help us think more clearly and ethically about environmental change. Participants will explore how to write and photograph damaged landscapes without cliché, despair or moral simplification.
The workshop is open to writers, photographers and artists working at any stage. Participants will develop new creative work while engaging in rigorous, generous conversation about form, ethics and attention in an era of ecological crisis. This is a space for thinking, making, and learning how to see and describe the world differently.
Jean McNeil has published sixteen books, spanning fiction, memoir, poetry, essays and travel. Her account of being writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, Ice Diaries, won both the Adventure Travel and Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival in 2016. As well as Antarctica she has held official residencies and fellowships in Svalbard, the Falkland Islands, Australia and South Africa as well as undertaking ship-based expeditions to Greenland and the length of the Atlantic Ocean. She has collaborated with Diego Ferrari on many exhibitions and artistic residencies. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and lives in London.
Diego Ferrari is a London-based visual artist, photographer, and lecturer with over 25 years of experience exhibiting and teaching across Europe. His interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of photography, performance, and spatial experience. Working across installation, site-specific intervention, and socially engaged art, his recent projects investigate how bodies inhabit and reinterpret public space in the context of ecological crisis of the Anthropocene. A t the core of his practice is an inquiry into the relationship between the body and its environment, where photography becomes both a performative act and a perceptual tool. His installations and photographic works engage with air, sound, and memory as invisible yet structuring forces, articulating new modes of ecological awareness through embodied presence.
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