book your place for the scything workshops and for more information.

Haystack Talk with Severine von Tscharner Fleming
Thursday 25 May 2020 at 7pm
7a Vyner Street, London E2

Severine van Tscharner Fleming is a farmer, activist, and organiser based
in the Champlain Valley of New York. She is founder and director of The Greenhorns, a US based grassroots cultural organization with the mission to promote, recruit and support a growing movement of young farmers and ranchers in America.

Severine is going to talk about her current work with the Agrarian Trust, a legal, cultural and economic experiment in land commoning. The trust has the mission to support land access for the next generation of farmers both in the US and elsewhere, and is grounded in the work and analysis of Vinoba Bhave, Slater King, Leo Tolstoy, E.F Schumacher and others. The Agrarian Trust has been a long-term institution-making project to co-conceptualize, fund, create and steward farms as community assets.

Severine will also share learnings from the recent OUR LAND 2 symposia in New Mexico, and we’ll have time to talk about land-gifts and land repair, un-monestaries, squatting, gentrification, financialization and much more.
And in case you have land to give away – click here DONATE FARMLAND.

Food and drinks as always.

Want to learn how to scythe?

Need some warming up sessions?
Join local scything instructor, Ida Fabrizio for two great sessions at The WaterWorks Nature Reserve in east London this month.

BEGINNERS
Date: Tuesday, 16 May 2020
Time: 10:00 – 13:00

IMPROVERS
Date: Tuesday, 23 May 2020
Time: 10:00 – 13:00

Venue: WaterWorks Centre
Address: Lammas Road (off Lea Bridge Road) Leyton, London, E10 7QB
Price: £25, £15 concession

- Scythes and equipment are provided, but feel free to bring your own scythe
- The meeting point for this session is the WaterWorks Centre at 09:45
- Please wear suitable clothing and footwear for outdoors
- There are refreshments available at the Centre but please bring a bottle of water and a snack with you to keep you going

Getting here
By train: the nearest train station is Lea Bridge (6 minute walk) or Clapton Station (10 minute walk)
By bus: routes 48, 55, 56 stop along Lea Bridge Road
By tube: the nearest tube station is Walthamstow Central on the Victoria Line

Booking
Booking is required for this session, please email or
call to book your place.

COMMUNITY HAYSTACK DATES 2020
The annual Community Haystacks return to The Walthamstow Marshes for the
fifth time! The dates for 2020 are the  24th and 25th of June and we’ll been soon sending out the full programme and details.

Upcoming Haystacks include

Haystack talk with Severine von Tscharner Fleming
Thursday 25 May 2020 at 7pm, location tbc

Severine von Tscharner Fleming is a farmer, activist, and organizer based in the Champlain Valley of New York.  She is founder and director of The Greenhorns, a grassroots cultural organization with the mission to promote, recruit and support a growing movement of young farmers and ranchers in America.

Community Haystack 2020
Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 June 2020, Walthamstow Marshes, east London

The  two-day community hay harvest on the Walthamstow Marshes is entering its fifth year, again with scything workshops and public talk on the Saturday and haystack building, scything competition and a ‘bring your own picnic’ on Sunday afternoon.

Sat 24 June
10.30-12.30, 1.30-3.30pm & 4.00-6.00pm

Learn how to scythe with scything expert Clive Leeke.
Refreshments and equipment are provided. £18 (concessions £9) per two hour session.
To book a place e-mail

Sat 24 June, 12.30-2pm
Join us for an informal public talk with invited guests about the history of the land and cultures of commoning.

Sun 25 June, 1.30-3.00pm
Scything Competition

Sun 25 June, 12-4pm
Haystack and Picnic: come along to help us build a large community haystack on the marshes.

Sun 25 June, 1-3pm
Ranger Ramble: join a guided tour around the marshes with park ranger Eamonn Lawlor.

Throughout:
A large area of the marshes will be dedicated to scything, and open to those who already know how to scythe.

Community Haystacks Meeting
Sunday 5th February 2020
2 – 3.30pm
Waterworks Centre

The date for the 2020 Community Haystack is set already and we’ll be back on the Walthamstow Marshes
on the 24th and 25th June 2020.

We are meeting on the 5th of February at the Waterworks Centre to have a chat about how to run the 2020 event.
What should be continued, what to change, what to extend? New ideas are always welcome.

This get-together is also the Community Haystacks AGM.
There will be coffee and cake!

Best wishes and hope to see you soon

Jojo, Joe, Kathrin and Louis
Community Haystacks Group

Directions
Waterworks Centre link
Lammas Road (off Lea Bridge Road)
Leyton

Contact
Kathrin Böhm

Meet for a coffee and cake afternoon with Katherine Gibson to talk about re-drawing the economy and representations of the economy as a public realm we are all part of.

Sunday 6 Nov from 4-6pm
7a Vyner Street
London E2 9DG

Katherine has recently set up a new research initiative Re-drawing the economy: creating place-based images that can travel. The research is closely linked to the work of The Community Economies Research Network (CERN), which is comprised of 130 scholars and activists working in communities all over the world to imagine and enact non-capitalist economies.

The economy represented as a Layer Cake with Icing, by the feminist economist Hazel Henderson, 1982

…………………..

Over the last 20 years CERN members have used visualisations of a diverse economy to expand the scope for economic action and legitimate economic politics across a broad front. The image of the diverse economy, originally represented as an iceberg, has travelled far and wide helping people and organizations to represent and transform economic relationships in a variety of settings from the rust belt of Australia and the USA, to the Solomon Islands in the Pacific, to inner city London and Paris, to rural communities in the Philippines. Their ability to translate the ethical concerns of community economies into images that can travel and increase user experience is at the centre of this project.

…………….

Katherine Gibson is in London for a few days and we were going to meet to talk about the collaborative research on “Re-drawing the economy” which started in 2013 with a redesign of the “Economy as an Iceberg” by James Langdon for “Trade Show” at Eastside Projects (co-curated with Gavin Wade).

……………………

Haystacks are moments to make conversations public.
Coffee and cake afternoons are regularly held by the women in Kathrin’s home village Höfen as a good format to talk and catch up.

………………….

Please join us on for a
Haystack on Icebergs with
Coffee and Cake.

Sunday 6th November
from 4-6pm
7a Vyner Street
London E2 9DG

With coffee from Feral Trade (run by Kate Rich)
and  bring some cake to share if you want.

…………………………

About Katherine Gibson
Katherine Gibson is internationally known for her research on rethinking economies as sites of ethical action. She trained as a human geographer with expertise in political economy and, with her collaborator for over 30 years, the late Professor Julie Graham, developed a distinctive approach to economic geography drawing on feminism, post-structuralism and action research. The diverse economies research program they initiated has become a vibrant sub-field of study within the social sciences. In the late 1990s the collective authorial voice of J.K. Gibson-Graham led the critique of capitalocentric thinking that was blocking the emergence of economic possibility. The end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy published in 1996, was republished in 2006.

Join us for a talk and conversation with gleaning specialist and Gleanologics founder Natalie Joelle.

glean, ɡliːn/, verb
1. intr. To gather or pick up ears of corn which have
been left by the reapers.
2b. To strip (a field, vineyard, etc.) of the produce
left by the regular gatherers.
3a. transf. and fig. To gather or pick up in small quantities;
to scrape together. Now chiefly with immaterial object,
esp. to glean information, to glean experience, etc.

–Oxford English Dictionary

Wed 26th Oct 2016
7pm, 7a Vyner Street
London E2

Natalie Joelle is currently writing a transdisciplinary study of gleaning and it’s relationship to lean culture, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has published on Georges Seurat’s drawing ‘The Gleaner’ and The Book of Ruth; her work forthcoming includes considerations of gleaning and lean language in the writings of Peter Larkin (Punctum), Jim Crace’s novel Harvest (Bloomsbury), contemporary agrotechnology (Routledge) and managerial glossaries (Palgrave).

Natalie is going to present and discuss her research on contemporary conditions and practices of gleaning.

Members from the UK Gleaning Network will also talk briefly about their initiative and upcoming activities.

We’ll be serving Thinning Soda and Gleaned Cider, made with fruit gleaned in Kent and produced by Company Drinks.

7a Vyner Street
UK London E2 9DG
Nearest Underground: Bethnal Green

Contact:
Kathrin Böhm
mail:
mobile: 0044 7941 696515

“Gleaned” label designed by An Endless Supply

Come and scythe and celebrate the fourth annual Community Haystack in east London on Saturday 30 and Sunday 31 July 2016

Community Haystacks is a celebration of an ancient piece of common land -Walthamstow Marshes in east London one of the last expanses of semi- natural marshland left in London. This community haymaking event brings together local residents, conservationists, historians, activists and artists who join together to recreate the pre-mechanical hay harvest and revive traditions of scything and commoning.

Towards a Museum of Contemporary Farming: A walk through and
discussion of agricultural dioramas in the Science Museum

Led by artist Georgina Barney with invited guests:
Guy Smith, Vice President of the National Farmers’ Union
Kate Genever, artist and farmer
Alice Carey, curator
Mary Cavanagh, Science Museum London

Wednesday 29th June 2016, 7:30-9pm
Agriculture Gallery
Science Museum
Exhibition Road
London SW7 2DD

Georgina Barney has been exploring the relationship between art and farming since her ‘GB Farming’ project in 2007, an eight month journey around fourteen farms across the UK. Celebrating the ten year anniversary of this project and closing her Kickstarter Campaign to publish ‘GB Farming’ as a book, she has invited speakers from contemporary art, the farming industry and the Science Museum to reflect upon how farming is collectively imagined  and how it is represented in art. Using the historic agricultural dioramas in the heart of London as a starting point, Barney invites proposals from the group on how to update the dioramas as an imaginary ‘Museum of Contemporary Farming’.
The event will take place during the ‘Science Museum Lates’ on Wednesday 29^th June.  Please be aware that the building may be quite busy. We will start in the Agriculture Gallery at 7:30pm and be moving to a meeting room directly upstairs at 8pm.

Directions to the Agriculture Gallery: After entering the Museum from Exhibition Road walk through the Energy Hall directly ahead.  Take the stairs on your right. At the top of the stairs the Agriculture Gallery is on your right.

Alternatively, Kathrin Böhm will meet people at 7.15pm at the main entrance to the Science Museum on Exhibition Road.

About Georgina Barney

‘GB Farming’ was the first of a number of projects by Georgina Barney that explore the relationship between ‘Art’ and ‘Farming’.  In 2007, she lived and worked on a series of fourteen farms, bearing witness in her blog and artwork to a wide spectrum of agriculture, from crofting and family farming to industrially-scaled ‘agri-business’ in the UK.  In preparation for its ten-year anniversary and the publication of a new book of ‘GB Farming’, Barney is hosting a series of events. Barney has worked extensively with farmers, farming communities and agencies such as the National Farmers’ Union to explore questions about farming in practice-led research. What is farming and how do we imagine it? How is farming represented in traditions such as the pastoral and naive livestock portraiture? Who has authority or authenticity to speak of farming? How should farming be represented in contemporary art?

Barney studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University (2003-2006).  Her MPhil research project ‘Curating the Farm’ was funded by the Arts And Humanities Council (2011).  She is based at PRIMARY, Nottingham.

georginabarney.com

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1621463073/gbfarming

Scything the Lea Valley