holos

holos a mythopoetic eco-feminist ritual made in collaboration with  Natasha Lohan and community groups.

Photos by Leonilda Prenga,  Alexa Reid, Paul Scannell, and Tom Turner.

holos was a site-specific performance installation made for/with Nunhead Cemetery Chapel, London. Conceived as a mythopoetic ecofeminist incantation, holos explored Scenography as an ecological interface. Responding to the urgent realities of ecological crisis, precarity and grief, through a site-based, community-centred approach. Rooted in ecofeminist thinking, holos drew upon practices of maternality, mythopoesis, and sympoiesis as frameworks through which to investigate how Scenography might operate as a practice of ecological care, attunement, and re-enchantment.

The project emerged through sustained deep-site observations, field recordings, material gatherings, and eco-somatic practises that sought to become porous to the Cemetery's hidden resonances, palimpsestic histories and ecologies, and more-than-human narratives.

Drawing particular inspiration from the diverse tapestry of lichens inhabiting the site, the project engaged not only with their material presence, but also with the ecological insights that they offer as bioindicators and symbiotic organisms formed through collaborative and interdependent relationships between fungi and algae. Lichens offered a conceptual framework through which to explore entanglement and more-than-human relationality. From this enquiry emerged the projects central speculative provocation: How to lichen?

holos engaged a multi-generation cohort of participants through a range of creative workshops, and site-based encounters. Including an oddkin workshop series with children from Ivydale Primary School which informed the design and fabrication of the costume/sculpture.  The textiles used in the costume/sculpture were in part naturally dyed using plants and organic matter gathered from the site. Surface treatments incorporated lime plaster, local London clay and ground Kentish Ragstone fragments, fallen from the Chapel walls. This was interwoven with clay oddkins (made by Ivydale Primary School children), dried vegetation, grasses seeded into the fabrics, and living plants native to the Cemetery.

holos Audience Survey – Fill in form

Documentation from the enrichment strand of holos. oddkins Workshop series. These workshops informed the scenographic methods and aesthetic language of holos.

With thanks to Mary Utuk (Creative Lead at Ivydale Primary School) and the teachers of Reception and Year 2 classes, and the SLT at Ivydale Primary School, for supporting the