ARTIST TALK: Danish artist collective N55 and artist/researcher Mikey Tomkins
NewBridge Project Space
We were joined in NewBridge Project Space during Urban Organsims to hear from N55 who introduced their City Farm Modules to Newcastle, enabling people to grow food anywhere and from artist/researcher Mikey Tomkins who designed an Edible Food Walk around Newcastle city centre.
N55 is a Copenhagen-based art collective founded in 1994. N55 works with art as a part of everyday life. N55 has worked in the cross field of art, design and architecture for the last 20 years. N55’s core message is about freedom and the dissipation of ownership, “but it was also about mobility, about not disturbing your environment, and about not having to own land.” N55’s ‘manuals’ range from topics such as land, rooms, shop, factory, work, to snail shell systems, small fish farms, and hygiene systems. N55 freely distributes these schemes and instructions through their website; written work is available through the downloadable N55 Book.
Mikey Tomkins works as an academic researcher, artist and consultant in the field of urban sustainability and urban agriculture. His PhD researched food growing in community food gardens on London housing estates and currently, he is working as a consultant in the US and Uganda, developing urban agriculture projects in under resourced communities, specifically refugees. Previously, he worked for Sustain as a project officer, developing community beekeeping in the London as part of the Capital Growth food gardening project. He has developed the Edible Map project to help bridge the divide between academic and policy work around food and cities, and the everyday lived experience of cities from the viewpoint of the resident.
This Artist talk formed part of the events programme for Urban Organisms, a project that examined and creatively explored food sustainability in cities.
