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Cape Farewell’s SHORTCOURSE / UK is a series of short, rural and urban expeditions that brings emerging artists and art students into dialogue with scientists and leading scientific research in order to stimulate a creative response.

Created by Cape Farewell together with three of the UK's top art schools, University College Falmouth, Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University, and University of Arts London colleges Chelsea Camberwell and Wimbledon (CCW), SHORTCOURSE / UK is a surrogate art school of sorts; a place-less cohort comprised of a temporary student body and changing staff of artists, writers and scientists.

On 24 - 26 October 2011, 20 CCW research students embarked on three unconventional urban expeditions that explored London's infrastructure of water. Three intense days of presentations, workshops and discussions framed the climate change debate in some extraordinary environments and challenged the students to take their learning outside of the studios, seminar rooms and lecture theatres.

Kindly supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

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SHORTCOURSE / UK was born out of conversations concerning the state of UK art schools, their future, and the position of ecology and environment in the education of contemporary artists. And though the habit of discussing new models for art education with recourse to these terms is hardly new or remarkable, the way in which we were applying them was: metaphors abounded of earth and dirt, air and breath, of water, depth and darkness. These were soon supplanted with ones of arsenic, gunpowder, pollen, plastic, fish, the fume of flowers and the dirge of birdsong. Suddenly physical location became essential to how we would continue these discussions — somewhere where teaching and making would have their twin genesis in place and environment.

Over the course of three years 2010-2013, a series of unconventional psychogeographic tours - beyond cordons and behind hoardings - will visit some of the most extraordinary sites and territories within the cities, countryside and coastlines of the UK. Refuse barges, landfill, New Towns, tropical islands, biomes, floating oceanic margins, designated wilderness and so-called Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the terrain vagues and contaminated land of Olympic sites offer thematically charged backdrops for consideration of spatial practice, materiality, land art, the sublime, trash and trash culture, future fossils, entropy, sustainability, Romantic Nature, conservation, vulnerability, accountability, and ultimately despondency, despair, loss, and grief.

In Spring 2011, we bussed students from Falmouth a few miles from their campus to rescue dead birds from barbed wire to identify their wet headless corpses, and thrown seed heads into cesspools bubbling up from the serpentine rock of the Lizard Peninsula. We spent a sweltering night in a cockroach-infested rainforest deep within the clay pits of St Austell and found ourselves half-naked in the morning in a sweat lodge ceremony led by a Peruvian Ayahuascan shamam down from Manchester. And sailed to the sub-tropical gardens of the Scilly Isles barely 30 miles from the mainland to hear of shifting winds and ocean currents that threaten the islands' strangely un- English gardens.

In October 2011 we set sail with 20 students from CCW, aboard a flotilla of barges, tugs, clippers and ribs down the length of the Thames to Rainham Marshes landfill. We travel back upstream to hear of flood risk in the London mega-city and visions of the apocalypse. And inevitably, we'll make our way up the canalised River Lea to take an alternative tour of the Olympic site and hear of reclaimed land, of regeneration, re-growth, and progress, and so too of this massive development's darker legacy…

And so SHORTCOURSE / UK stands outwith the architectures and hierarchies of the art school, and there it seeks to question: What is the role of the art school in a time of environmental crisis? How can we reflect a growing interest in multi-disciplinary learning, where expertise is shared and where concern for sustainability and local environmental issues figure prominently? And what does it mean to be an artist or an art student; what is at stake, now, in being called a sculptor or a painter, an architect or a designer?

Downloads
+ London-Guide.pdf
+ London.pdf