Episode 069 - Live From the Tremula Festival with Alinah Azadeh

The Earth Sea Love Podcast

Welcome back to a very special episode of The Earth Sea Love Podcast. After four years of recording the podcast, with this nearly being our seventh episode, we bring you our first LIVE face to face recorded conversation.

We are really excited to share a live face to face recording that took place during the wonderful Tremula Festival on Saturday 21 September 2024.

The Tremula Festival, the first of its kind, was a selections of talks, production skills and workshops focusing on the connection between audio, the outdoors and the activism happening in those spaces. Your podcast host, Dr. Sheree Mack, was invited along to take part by the lovely Francesca Turauskis,Founder and Lead Producer of the Tremula Network.

And it was Fran who introduced Sheree to Alinah Azadeh, the guest of this special podcast. We are so pleased to share this episode with you as it was such a powerful conversation between the two creatives.

The conversation covers:

* where the podcast is taking place in terms of situating themselves

* responding to the question, who you be?

* being radical/ creating radical situations within culture and the arts

* nature connection explored through art projects within community

* writing stories set in the future

* being the Seven Sisters' writer in residence and creating a writing community of the global majority

* creating a major audio walk in collaboration along the South Downs coastline - WE HEAR YOU NOW

* Alinah reading a section from her speculative fiction story based in 2053, WE HEAR YOU NOW

* You can read this story yourself at Alinah's substack, The Colour of Chalk

* the two kinds of legacies which have been created through WE HEAR YOU NOW

* the criminal damage that has happened to this public artwork

* responses to the South Downs National Park Press Statement about the racialised attack against this walking trail

* the trauma experienced of having our stories erased for centuries

* the power of the collective voice in pushing back against racism

* the difficulty of putting into practice black-led projects for everyone involved

* what does 'Landscape for All' translate into, in practice, or should mean

* progress in the use of language used to describe us by others, taking the lead from us

* Alinah's childhood and being brought up within nature

* more opportunities are welcomed to meander and wander and wonder with people within the landscape

* how the power of audio can be used to cross boundaries and borders

* followed by questions from the audience.

Bio:

Alinah Azadeh is a writer, artist, performer and cultural activist of British Iranian heritage. She uses writing, audio, and live practices to create poetic narratives that activate spaces, amplifying untold or overlooked stories and future imaginings. Alongside a 30-year visual arts career, Azadeh has been published, most recently in Best British Short Stories 2023 (Salt) with The Beard, a feminist tale of power, hair and revolution. As first ever writer-in-residence at Seven Sisters Country Park and Sussex Heritage Coast 2020-23, for South Downs National Park, she led We See You Now, a decolonial landscape and literature programme exploring the coast through the lens of climate change & justice, loss, migration and belonging. This led to her podcast The Colour of Chalk and the co-writing and curation of We Hear You Now, an audio and performance series of poetry, speculative fiction and myth by women and non-binary writers of Black and global majority heritage, now installed on 14 Listening Posts across the coast and online, co-funded by Arts Council England. Alinah is working on numerous writing projects and commissions, including her artist memoir and is also Writing Our Legacy/ Changing Chalk Associate Artist for The National Trust.