Regenerative Agriculture/Regenerative Arts – Els Dietvorst & Karla Sánchez Zepeda

Join Artist Els Dietvorst & Curator Karla Sánchez Zepeda for a stimulating conversation on agriculture, arts and culture and the future.

Heritage Week Lunchtime Talk

Els Dietvorst’s work is concerned with the relationship between the human species and the natural world while exploring our socio-historic and economic systems and values. She has often focused her attention on that which is taken for granted, lies in the peripheries, or is not seen. During this first part of her touring exhibition Adrift, she will discuss some key issues regarding agriculture and farming.

A former shepherdess, Els, will talk to curator and farmer Karla Sánchez Zepeda, the co-founder of Blackbird Cultur-lab, an experimental culture-laboratory, that aims to provide a space for agriculture and the arts to meet, about ‘regenerative arts’ and Regenerative Agriculture. What it is, why it is relevant now, and how it can influence culture at large in a positive way.

ABOUT

Els Dietvorst is a Belgian visual artist and filmmaker based in County Wexford. Her work has been shown and supported by organizations such as the Kaaitheatre, Brussels; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; M HKA Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp; and BAK, Utrecht as well as internationally in New York, Casablanca, London, and Vienna. She has been awarded international prizes such as the Evens Arts Prize in 2017, and more recently the Belgian Art Prize. In 2021, as part of the Belgian Art Prize, she hosted two exhibitions concurrently – This is what you came for – in Bozar and CENTRALE for Contemporary Art, both in Brussels.

Karla Sánchez Zepeda is an art historian, curator, and cultural producer. She has participated in numerous educational, research and curatorial projects in Ireland. Her research interests are the environment, art education, the role of art in contemporary society, interdisciplinary collaborative practices, and the construction of the rural. Karla, who is also a farmer (regenerative agriculture), is the co-founder of Blackbird Cultur-lab, an experimental culture-laboratory that aims to provide a space for agriculture and the arts to meet.