Saturday 16 November

University of Sussex
Fulton A Lecture Theatre
Falmer, BN1 9RG

Symposium: 2pm - 5.30pm
Awards Ceremony: 5.30pm - 6pm
Followed by drinks in Falmer Bar.

Please join us for an afternoon of talk and debate and to celebrate some of the outstanding artists of Photo Fringe 2024

Open to all. Free entry

Donations welcome. Booking essential.
[Book your place via Eventbrite here]

Cultivating Change: Unseen Stories of Land, Identity, and Resilience

To wrap up this year's Photo Fringe festival, please join us to consider the evolving relationship between land, labour, and identity.

Through the lens of leading photographers, this event highlights the untold stories of rural communities—women-led regenerative farming; the fading traditions of Italy’s olive groves; and the invisible labourers of Spain’s industrial agriculture.

Discover how global challenges are reshaping our landscapes, food systems, and cultural heritage in this thought-provoking conversation on resilience and transformation.

Speakers include: Arpita Shah, Murray Ballard, Joanne Coates, Bandia Ribeira and Krasimira Butseva
chaired by Professor Benedict Burbridge.

Organised by Photo Fringe Emerging Curators 2024: Dominika Jarečná, Oliver Mansell, Jackson Mount, Ngo Chun Tse, mentored by Rebecca Drew, Chair of Photo Fringe and curator Ricardo Reverón Blanco.

About the Speakers

Arpita Shah is a photographic artist based in Eastbourne, UK. She works between photography and film, exploring the fields where culture and identity meet. Shah spent her early years living between her birth-country of India, Ireland and the Middle East, before settling in the UK. This migratory experience is reflected in her practice, which focuses on the notion of home, belonging and shifting cultural identities.

Sankofa, part of Photo Fringe 2024, is an exhibition in collaboration with the inspiring women and communities at Go Grow With Love and Black Rootz, London growing projects addressing injustices in the food system. In the UK, 71% of farmland holds less than half the remaining biodiversity, making regenerative agriculture a key component in building climate resilience. Arpita Shah spent time witnessing the acts of reciprocity between generations of women growing together in London, honouring the work of their ancestors to plant the seeds of knowledge for future farmers.

arpitashah.com
@arpitashah_

Murray Ballard is a photographer based in Brighton, UK. His work explores a variety of subjects across several interrelated areas: the environment, social issues, science and technology.

Murray's series Ghosts in the Field is an exploration of life in rural Salento. Up until a few years ago Puglia produced nearly half of Italy’s olive oil, but a deadly plant pathogen, Xylella, thought to have been transported from South America on imported coffee plants, has decimated nearly all the region’s ancient olive trees and in turn the local agricultural economy. Now, the landscape is in a state of flux as a centuries-old tradition fades out and a new industry of tourism takes hold. Capturing the trees in various states of decay, Murray Ballard’s project traces the impact on the region’s past, present and future.

murrayballard.com
@murrayballard

Joanne Coates is a working class artist and photographer who is interested in rurality, hidden histories and class. Based on the border between County Durham and North Yorkshire, she was educated in working class alternative communities, then at The Sir John Cass School of Fine art (FdA Fine Art) and The London College of Communication (BA Hons Photography). Participation and working with communities are an important aspect of her work. Coates is a farm labourer practising active nature friendly methods, this forms an intersection with her art.

Joanne's recent exhibition Daughters of the Soil focused on women in agriculture in Northumberland and the Scottish Borders. The exhibition aims to redress the lack of documentation of female farmworkers, who have played a central role in agricultural progress throughout history, with captivating portraits of women’s role in farming. Women make up 28% of the farming industry in the UK, and their contribution is significant but often overlooked, with underlying barriers such as access to land, class, motherhood, and lack of clear leadership roles assisting this.

joannecoates.co.uk
@joannecoates_

Bandia Ribeira is a Spanish photographer, she graduated with a degree in political science, but took a photography course while studying that reoriented her towards journalism. Since then she has been combining her photographic practice with jobs in agriculture. Bandia has exhibited her work in several galleries and festivals in Europe.

Bandia’s exhibition Not a Home Without Fire is currently on display at Bristol Photo Festival and stands as a historic record of agricultural production in the 21st century. Here she focuses on the often-invisible labourers of the vast network of greenhouses that dominate the landscape of the agro-industrial region of Almería (Andalusia, Spain), known locally as ‘The Sea of Plastic’. It is an area dedicated to the production of out-of-season vegetables for export to northern European countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany, where communities of workers form an often-invisible part of a system of ‘techno-agrarian’ capitalism, where lax labour and environmental regulations fuel cycles of exploitation and segregation.

bandiaribeira.com
@bandia_ribeira

Krasimira Butseva is a visual artist, researcher, writer and educator based between London, UK and Sofia, Bulgaria.

In her creative and academic work, she explores political violence, traumatic memory, and the official and unofficial history of Bulgaria. Krasimira employs video, photography, installation, sound and text, in the recontextualization of difficult and erased histories in relation to the communist regime. Her works are both part of gallery spaces and academic journals. Krasimira is also a curator of the archive and programme of History in Between; alongside one of the co-founders of Revolv Collective, and a former editor of eep mag.

Krasimira will talk about The Neighbours, an interactive multimedia installation in the Bulgarian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, that brings to light the silenced and faded memories of survivors of political violence during the Communist era in Bulgaria. The project was created by Krasimira Butseva, Lilia Topouzova and Julian Chehirian, and is the result of 20 years of historical and artistic research.

krasimirabutseva.co.uk
@krasimirabutseva

Travel and Directions

Find information on travelling to the University of Sussex here.
To get to the lecture theatre, walk through Falmer House, straight on past the library and into the Arts A building.