Material Matter[s] Market Day + Report Launch

Join us alongside Material Cultures to explore material opportunities available to Neighbourhood Public Square + our wider neighbourhood(s).

Join us on Thursday 5th September, 10am—6.30pm as we celebrate the culmination of the Material Matter[s]: A Skills for Transition Learning Journey alongside the launch of the latest report from Material Cultures: an ecoregional mapping study of Birmingham and the West Midlands that presents the material and productive landscape that the Neighbourhood Public Square sits within, indicating key sites in our region that offer a variety of material opportunities for us to explore together.

A lively activation of South Loop Park, the CIVIC SQUARE Courtyard and polytunnel as one part of the Neighbourhood Public Square Co-creation Week, the day will include a material market of suppliers, manufacturers and educators from across the region, activities to get hands on with bio-based materials, inspiring discussions, screenings and the Material Matter[s] Learning Journey showcase, contributed to by peers from across the UK.

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SCHEDULE

MARKETPLACE

10:00 - 16:00 | Materials Market with Fircroft College, Jericho's The Wood Shack, Ketley Brick + Dreadnought Tiles Co., Kind Supply and Unity Lime

Meet with just some of the incredible suppliers, manufacturers and educators from within our ecoregion, bringing the latest report by Material Cultures off the page and into the park to make, connect and explore material opportunities for our neighbourhood(s) together.

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SPEAKERS CORNER

11:00 - 11:30 | Introduction To Material Matter[s] with CIVIC SQUARE and Material Cultures

11:30 - 12:45 | 3ºC Neighbourhood with Indy Johar, Jack Minchella, Leon Sealey-Huggins + Immy Kaur

13:00 - 14:30 | Demonstrating New Material Economies with Anna Francis + Rebecca Davies (Portland Inn Porject), Melissa Mean (WeCanMake) + Immy Kaur (CIVIC SQUARE)

14:45 - 16:15 | Reuse + Biomaterials In The West Midlands with Debbie Ward (Reuse Hub), Jon Owens (Jericho's The Wood Shack) + Sarah King (Earthli Projects)

16:30 - 18:30 | Report Launch Presentation + Panel
with CIVIC SQUARE, Indy Johar + Material Cultures

Join as we launch Building Skills: A Material Strategy for Birmingham and the West Midlands: exploring through presentation and discussion formats how this research supports the material strategy for Neighbourhood Public Square, its place within existing and emergent supply chains, and what learnings this surfaces for the region.

Framed by a responsibility for material and environmental justice, this report is an exploration of using our site as a platform for skills dissemination and learning, demonstrating how neighbourhood civic infrastructure, bio-based building skills and knowledge exchange can be designed into, and staged as integral parts of, the process of retrofitting and assembling a new structure, throughout its lifetime.

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PARK

10:00 - 12:00 | Grow Your Own Hope with Lisa Franklin
In part poetry workshop, in part hands on gardening, come and grow your own hope. We’ll be adding our words to seeded paper and planting them. Take them home and watch your hope grow!

10:00 - 12:00 | Soil In An Entangled World with ffin Jordāo
In this creative workshop, ffin Jordão invites us to explore soil - food web stewardship practices in response to the polycrisis that many communities face. Together we will acknowledge that soil health is an entry point to understanding how our climatic circumstances change, how to relate to what is happening as our soil changes, and how we can start to reestablish our connection to soil.

10:30 - 11:30 and 13:30 - 14:30 | Material Doughnut with ACAN Climate Literacy

12:00 - 13:30 | Film Screenings + Discussion with Material Cultures
Join for screenings of four films produced by Material Cultures: EXTRACTION, TIMBER, STRAW and LABOUR, followed by a discussion led by George Massoud (Material Cultures) and Rachel Milliner, editor for LABOUR.

13:00 - 14:30 | Regenerative Skills in Construction
with Mel Lenehan (Fircroft College), CIVIC SQUARE + Material Cultures

15:00 - 17:00 | Eat Your Words: Growing Mushrooms on Books with Lisa Franklin
Discover how an old book can be transformed into edible mushrooms. Learn how these beautiful living fungi (something neither plant nor animal) decompose organic material (even books). Lisa will take you through the process of growing grey/blue oyster mushrooms in recycled materials and start you on your own mushroom growing journey. This demonstration will see recycled materials inoculated with mushroom spawn, eventually producing beautiful edible mushrooms. During this time, learn all about mycelium and our relationship with it, alongside hearing about Lisa’s own relationship with fungi in her artistic practice.

15:00 - 17:00 | String Is A Very Important Thing with Alys Fowler
Learn how to process common wild plants into fibre to make beautiful, sustainable, free string. We’ll then explore the many things you can make from string. Knowing how to make a string is such an ancient, important tradition because if you can make string, you can make a rope, climb out of a window, catch a fish, make a net to carry things, make a trap, tie your shoes, write a poem (there’s a long history of string language that appeared around the same time as the written word), hang up your harvest, or just make a ribbon to tie up a present.

15:00 - 16:30 | Retrofit Reimagined Screening with John Christophers (zero carbon house, Balsall Heath Retrofit), Melissa Mean (WeCanMake) + Immy Kaur (CIVIC SQUARE)

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COURTYARD

10:00 - 12:00 and 14:00 - 16:00 | Material Matter[s]: A Skills For Transition Learning Journey Showcase

Explore exhibitions and interactive activities from Material Matter[s] Learning Journey peers—Andrea Torrico, Aneliya Kavrakova, Anna Francis, Chiara Fingland, David Smart, Ellie Birkhead, Emma Pfeiffer, Fred Hubble, Hannah Latham, Hugh Ferguson, Jasmine Tippett, Joseph Schneider, Katrina Wilde, Kez Sleeman, Lauren Hutchinson, Laurie Ramsell, Lucy Kerr, Mariam Aslam, Nancy Touré, Naomi Bennett-Steele, Nidhi Shah, Roo Dhissou, Ruben Worth, Sarah Rose Collings, Sophie Wall, Terri-Louise Doyle and Vik Chandla—who have been rehearsing the practical skills to embody and enact the regenerative material transition of our homes, streets and neighbourhoods together over the past 6 months, through practical explorations in straw, clay, timber and mycelium.

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POLYTUNNEL

10:00 - 11:30 | Mixing Clay Plasters + Learning about Clay
with Annabel Cameron-Duff [click Get Tickets to book]

13:00 - 14:30 | Applying Clay Plasters with Annabel Cameron-Duff [click Get Tickets to book]

15:00 - 16:30 | Making Cob Blocks with Annabel Cameron-Duff [click Get Tickets to book]

Annabel Cameron-Duff (The Roundhouse Company), an artist and builder with over 20 years experience in the field of natural building, will lead a series of workshops, sharing her broad knowledge of materials, including cob, hemp, lime, straw, stone and timber. She is committed to exploring how they create meaningful spaces and how many people can use these methods to bring about positive change within their own lives and communities. Annabel has been an active member of Earth Building UK & Ireland (EBUKI) since 2011, and led sessions as part of the Material Matter[s] Learning Journey.

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10:00 - 13:00 | New Material Alternatives Workshop with Sarah King [click Get Tickets to book]

Explore the use of ‘new material alternatives’ like seaweed, bacteria and food waste. We will look at samples of materials made from these unusual raw materials, work with and make some of our own material examples and begin to imagine how they could be used in the future.

Sarah is a design-researcher and creative practitioner whose practice incorporates circular design principles and bio-fabrication processes to create new material alternatives. She is a materials researcher at STEAMhouse, and the founder of Materials Club, and Earthli Projects. Her current work seeks to explore the intangible relationship between materials, the human senses, and future environments, whilst questioning the role of waste in our future material culture.

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14:00 - 17:00 | Introduction To Mushroom Growing Workshop with Pamela Shor [click Get Tickets to book]

This workshop will start with an introductory presentation on mushrooms and mycellium networks followed by an activity to get hands on with growing our own oyster mushrooms. In this session you will make and take your oyster mushroom starter kits to grow at home!

Pamela Shor is a community leader, youth engagement specialist and Head Grower at Black Rootz. Established in Spring 2019, Black Rootz is part of The Ubele Initiative and the first multigenerational Black-led growing project in the UK, where the older generation share their expertise on growing whilst also supporting youth engagement in their surrounding natural environment. Pamela has already generously shared their knowledge with peers as part of the Material Matter[s] Learning Journey in the workshop focused around mycelium and soil.

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CANALSIDE

10:00 - 18:00 | The Floating Front Room is Open
Pick up a hot brew and a warm welcome from The Barge, with hot drinks, delicious food and space to chat and connect with friends neighbours and practitioners available throughout the day.

13:00 - 14:00 | Lunch Is Served

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ABOUT MATERIAL MATTER[S]

Material Matter[s] is a hands-on, practical collective learning journey to fundamentally reimagine our relationship with materials and the systems that govern their production, distribution and end-of-life through a lens of material justice.

Hosted as a partnership between CIVIC SQUARE and Material Cultures, 27 peers, including artists, architects, makers and community organisers, have been taking part in this learning journey over the past 6 months, aimed at developing practical skills in working with natural materials to be put into practice in homes, streets and neighbourhoods in different contexts across Birmingham and the UK.

Find out more about Material Matter[s]

As we work towards the co-building of the Neighbourhood Public Square, we invite peers and neighbours to continue to join us in exploring using bio-based materials for building and retrofit, considering the site as a classroom, with this process of learning, making and sharing together just the very beginning of a much longer journey together ahead, including through developing a neighbourhood microfactory together on site.

If this interests you, join us on Tuesdays in the polytunnel on site to rehearse Skills For Transition together in the here and now, share your existing knowledge, as well as ideas for the future.

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ABOUT NEIGHBOURHOOD PUBLIC SQUARE CO-CREATION WEEK

As we prepare to mark 5 years of CIVIC SQUARE and 10 years since the founding of Impact Hub Birmingham, we invite you to gather for a Neighbourhood Public Square Co-creation Week that brings together the best of what we have practiced and built together with you all so far.

Having co-created the Neighbourhood Doughnut, activated our streets to reimagine retrofit, and so much more, now is the time to take this forward into the next stages of designing and co-creating Neighbourhood Public Square together, actively working towards the shared goal of retrofitting the Icknield Port Loop site in Ladywood, Birmingham to be held in common for generations to come.

Come along to find out more about the research, design principles, material possibilities, and more for Neighbourhood Public Square as we explore how to design, co-build and steward regenerative civic infrastructure to democratise access to the spaces, tools and resources our neighbourhoods need, whilst ensuring the site acts as a classroom and system demonstrator to shape wider local and global possibilities for bold, imaginative, distributed transition.

Bring your questions, ideas, dreams, fears and concerns with you for a week filled with food, play, learning, making, talks, performances, and more, celebrating the work of so many in B16 and beyond, as one part of co-building Neighbourhood Public Square together for the long term.

As we endeavour to move towards practices of sustainability and regenerative care, we ask you to bring your refillable water bottles or coffee cups/mugs to help us reduce waste and single use cups. As an organisation we are aiming to eliminate our use of single use items by the end of 2025. So please remember to bring your refillable bottles and cups to stay hydrated and fuelled throughout the day.

Wherever possible, we encourage you to come to CIVIC SQUARE by foot, bicycle or public transport. There is very limited parking nearby and we are easily accessible by bus or the canal towpath if you are travelling via Birmingham City Centre.