Wild Essex Imaginarium

This event will appeal to academics, art practitioners, heritage workers, activists and policy makers.

The Wild Essex Imaginarium aims to re-energise/re-enchant the relationship between the arts and conservation practice in Essex over the next five years of this 'critical decade'. We begin by asking how arts and cultural practice and engagement can influence environmental policy (local/regional/national) and support diverse participation.

This event will bring people together into a space of learning and sharing in the hope of meeting potential partners and collaborators from around the country, either those working around similar themes, or those also passionate about the Essex landscape.

We have a full programme of special guest speakers and creative practitioners, including

KEYNOTE

Ken Worpole (prolific British writer and social historian)

Panel Sessions include Special Guest Plenaries from

Mona Arshi & Karen McCarthy Woolf (authors of Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority, Faber & Faber, 2025)

Natasha Carthew (writer and poet, author of Winter Damage, The Light That Gets Lost, Only the Ocean, and All Rivers Run Free)

Steve Waters (leading British playwright and author of The Song of the Reed and Dodo, Phoenix, Butterfly and Professor of Scriptwriting at UEA)

More speakers and full programme to follow…See the Event Blog for more information:

CERG present the 1st Wild Essex Imaginarium Symposium: Re-enchanting the Essex Landscape in Times of Climate Crises - The Cultural Engine

“Re-enchanting the Essex Landscape in Times of Climate Crises”

Rationale

Enchantment, writes Jane Bennett, need not be a ‘fall-to-your-knees awe’ but might be understood as ‘a state of interactive fascination’ with the potential to ‘energize your social conscience’. Where better to generate such fascination that at the interface between the arts, community and the natural world, a lively interface sparking with creative possibilities – an Imaginarium. The Imaginarium is a shared space for action, intersectional and ‘ecosectional’ in form, where new speculative research, creativity, and community engagement converge. It is a place for diverse perspectives, fantastical visions, and wild advocacy. It is open, inclusive, and permissive, welcoming everyone to contribute their own unique creative talents and insights. Through excursions into making and doing – writing new fictions, running events, and leveraging the expertise of academics, artists, heritage workers, conservationists and activists—the Imaginarium seeks to energise the locus of research and inspire fresh thinking.

The relationships established between the Wild Essex landscape and the communities living within and beyond its boundaries are nuanced and highly charged. Its rivers, coasts, forests, wildlife, and parks are places of emotional connection, resilience, beauty, and natural heritage. Ken Worpole has described the distinctive ‘working landscapes’ of Essex as having a ‘renegade aesthetics’ combining ecology, industry, agriculture, and a tumultuous social history, home to plotlands and the utopian communes of the back-to-the-land movement (not to mention the artists and intellectual of ‘the People’s Republic of Pebmarsh’).

Wild Essex is a place people feel proud and passionate about, care for, and often romanticise. For many, there is an intense, affective association with nature and place. Our bond with this emotional geography provides a sense of belonging, and a source of endless creative inspiration. However, Wild Essex is also a fragile landscape, facing profound challenges in a contemporary era defined by climate vulnerability, crisis, and adaptation. As its coasts erode, rivers run dry, or overflow with rainfall and sewage, Wild Essex forces us to reimagine it as a brutally disrupted ecosystem with a declining biodiversity. Since this dramatically changing landscape poses a risk to community infrastructures, we are all compelled to re-examine what these places mean to us now and reimagine what they will be like for future generations.

We need to start by asking some fundamental questions like why do we care about these landscapes? What do they signify for our communities. What will they be like in the future, and how can we ensure their survival? These questions are not just academic – they are deeply personal, and communal, and creative. Ultimately, they are speculative questions which provide a light we must steer by as we move into an uncertain future.

The first public event of the Wild Essex Imaginarium (WEI) invites participants, including – but not limited to – academics, arts practitioners, environmentalists, heritage workers, and activists, to contribute to a symposium on re-enchantment and the Wild Essex landscape. We welcome proposals comprising of speculative fictions, alternative epistemologies, new fairytales, reimagined folk customs, local legends, the weird, the eerie, and other creative forms that help to energise and reorientate the relationships between land, community and wildlife.

How can we reenchant the Wild Essex landscape in the contemporary era of climate vulnerability, crisis, and adaptation? We are interested to hear about projects and ideas that have worked well elsewhere in the country.

What innovative narratives, speculative fictions, fairytales, folk customs, and reimagined local legends can we weave together that navigate and celebrate the wild, untamed spirit of Essex, providing an equitable future for nature?

What subversive stories, surrealist interventions, ecopoetics, polemics, and manifestos can challenge the status quo and inspire collective action?

How can local community arts (local choirs, amateur dramatics groups, watercolour societies, and writing circles) become hubs of creative resistance, fighting for an equitable future for nature?

How can policy documents and environmental strategies be turned into speculative theatres of imaginative cultural activity, transforming abstract issues into tangible, meaningful experiences for everyone?

How can arts audiences become participants, actively negotiating the future heritage of this landscape and making its evolving story more broadly meaningful?