Practice in Place - Ashish Ghadiali
Ashish Ghadiali shares his experiences of living and working as an artist, filmmaker and writer in rural Devon.
Tell us about you and your practice
My background is in filmmaking. In 2006, I was part of the team that set up the Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp in Palestine, and after a short stint writing scripts in Bollywood, I established the film unit there before coming back to the UK in 2013 where I started working on a feature documentary, The Confession. Through the testimony of a former Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg, The Confession chronicled the history of the War on Terror. It was released in 2016. After that, I started working as a screenwriter, developing TV and film projects for various production companies. Then, during COVID, a different kind of practice began to emerge. Alongside film, I’ve always been an activist for racial justice; that’s what took me to Palestine in my mid-20s in the first place and it's what inspired me to make The Confession in my mid 30s. In 2019, as I turned 40, I became part of the climate justice collective Wretched of the Earth, and got busy organising to raise consciousness around the intersections of racial injustice and the environmental crisis. That led me into collaboration with climate scientists, civil society groups, arts institutions, policymakers, school strikers – all sorts – and has underpinned the establishment of an organisation I co-founded in 2021, Radical Ecology. It’s also inspired the essential research question that has driven my creative work over the last three or four years, which is really around how we can embody principles of climate justice or environmental justice from wherever we are. I also think of this question as an inquiry into how we can embody the “planetary” within ourselves. My commitment is to researching that question from here, where I am, in the South West of England, and for me that often means moving through layers of the region’s deep imperial history to encounter the landscape and time in transformative ways. It’s also meant moving beyond narrative fiction and narrative non-fiction, though there’s a way that I’ve allowed my moving image practice to be reconstituted through principles of movement organising in, for example, the five-screen film installation Planetary Imagination, which I made for The Box in 2023. Through this piece, I was looking to find a form where many narratives and points of view could co-exist in a single space. These are considerations that I’ve continued to develop through moving image works including Invasion Ecology (2024) and Can you tell the time of a running river? (2024) for Southcombe Barn and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) respectively, and that also play out through performance works including A Silent Walk (2023) for KARST and Where do we go when we realise that we can’t go back to nature? (2024). I’m also at work on a book, Dart River, for Hutchinson Heinmann, which explores the psychogeographies of empire from the footpaths of South Devon, where I live.
What are the great art spaces and organisations you love to visit?
The great art spaces that I love to visit are places like Start Point and Slapton Ley, the North Wood in Dartington or Wistman’s Wood near the Two Bridges Inn, even Hookney Tor and Grimspound, Hounds Tor or Haytor. These are the masterpieces of creation that we live among and it always amazes me when I’m standing near them or within them that we can connect through them so directly to two to three million years of the earth’s history, maybe more; to histories of volcanic eruptions, entropy and continental drift. These sites and spaces put the troubles of human beings in our contemporary age into context. When we connect with them, from deep within ourselves, we also come more profoundly into ourselves.
We’re also lucky, across Devon and Cornwall, to have a network of arts organisations doing great work, sometimes in very challenging conditions. Some of my favourites include Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton, Southcombe Barn in Widdicombe-in-the-Moor, KARST in Plymouth, the Eden Project and Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange. Though it doesn’t exactly appear as a space for serious artistic activity right at the moment, the Dartington estate and its cultural history are a true treasure of the region and a source of endless inspiration in my own creative life. I am fortunate to live, work and walk there every day; it’s where Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, informed by the modernist innovation of Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal, manifested a vision of 20th Century cultural rebirth here in South Devon that was later further developed in collaboration with creative lights including Beatrix Farrand, Kurt Joos, William Lescaze and Michael Chekov to name just a few.
What resources or facilities are there that you (can) access?
At risk of being repetitive, this ocean-facing landscape here in the South West of England is our greatest resource. I sometimes say that if you’re a capitalist artist then it’s probably quite important for you to locate yourself in a capital city, where you can access the commercial galleries and the collectors and the media exposure that will drive your career. But, if you’re an environmental artist, which above all I consider myself to be, a region like the South West of England, and perhaps any region on the earth, that provides so much opportunity to listen to and sense the planetary dimension of our existence, is simply a gift.
There has been a considerable level of capital investment here in the region, notably in Plymouth, and facilities for film exhibition at organisations like The Box and Real Ideas Organisation are world class. The immersive dome at the Market Hall in Devonport is a gem. I spend my Wednesday evenings helping out at the youth club at Mount Wise Community Centre, run by the Zebra Collective. I tell the kids there that in Devonport we have some of the best facilities for the production and exhibition of immersive film anywhere. There’s work to do to connect the resources to the people and to make the living culture of the region sing. We’ll get to it.
Cheerlead for your peers! - Who would you like to shout loudly about?
The current team at Radical Ecology – Tilly Craig, Iman Datoo, Tsitsi Chirikure and Katie Natanel – are a dream to work with. It’s so exciting to witness the emergence of Ashanti Hare, a creative giant whose career will be immense. Lucy Stein is a genius, and we will all want to tell our grandchildren we knew her when her prodigious output receives the proper recognition that it deserves. Angeline Morrison’s album, The Sorrow Songs, is such an important contribution to our cultural ecosystem and I cannot wait to hear what she channels next through her research into alchemy. Building on her extraordinary work as the creator of the Empirelines podcast, Jelena Sofronijevic’s appointment as contemporary art curator at The Box is a gift to the region. Kudos to CEO Victoria Pomery and Head of Collections and Programme Rebecca Bridgeman for making such an inspired decision on that role. I encountered a rare new talent in Anisz Simon at the final art foundation degree show that took place at King Edward VI Community College in Totnes this summer. Her confident handling, at this early stage in her career, of cement, plaster and moss suggests great sculptural promise and I look forward to seeing what happens next, in terms of artistic practice, for Anisz. It’s very sad to see such a great art foundation degree course discontinued but these are tough times for art education and cultural funding more broadly, as elements in our wider society lose contact with the origins of value. Nevertheless, we are blessed to be surrounded by so much inspirational and powerful feminine talent and the future of our cultural environment, when seen through this prism, looks bright indeed.
Where do you make your work?
I cut Planetary Imagination with Soundview Media at their offices in the East End of Plymouth, and made Invasion Ecology and Can you tell the time of the running river? between location shoots on Dartmoor and my home. The participatory performance, A Silent Walk, was developed through six weeks of the Open City Night School in the Fenster space at KARST in Stonehouse, Plymouth, and Where do we go when we realise that we can’t go back to nature? was developed online between Iman Datoo, Tsitsi Chirikure and myself, using Zoom.
I rent an office that was once a bedsit in a boarding house on the Dartington estate. I thought I would write my book Dart River there, but actually I always write in bed and the office functions in my life, I’m afraid, as a glorified cupboard. However, a studio in Dartington village now beckons for Radical Ecology which will get the film, editing and projection facilities out of my house finally – something that my lovely daughters, now six and nine, are keen to see happen. More on this below.
What opportunities are there for artists in your area?
I think we should create our own opportunities. I think we should make our work and that we should create living communities through our work. We should create meaning in the world. I don’t think we should wait around for other people to serve us opportunities. We should set our own agendas.
What or who helps you maintain your practice?
Contrary to what people often say, I’ve found that the descent into middle age and the advent of kids and a dog have been a great boost to my creative life. They have grounded me, and certainly my practice as it’s currently constituted has been entirely aligned with the structure of life that comes with the school gate and a daily walk, usually on the Dartington estate. One of the best things about working with KARST (as Curator on the 2023 exhibition Against Apartheid) was how warmly Donna Howard and Ben Borthwick welcomed Dharma (my lurcher) in as part of the family. When he’s happy, I’m happy. It’s been a similar story at Southcombe Barn, though Vashti Cassinelli’s cockapoo, Frida, can be a little territorial. The Box and RAMM have shown less hospitality to my dog, but the girls have been a part of every install that I’ve done so far and they are increasingly a presence and a participant within the work itself. In fact, I’m starting to understand how the practice I’m developing is in so many ways about them and for them. It’s about facing the future. It’s about being a dad.
What else would you love VASW's audiences to know about where you live and work as an artist?
Yes, a studio now beckons for Radical Ecology. We are in the process of moving into our new space in Webbers Yard, next to the Almond Thief Bakery. This will be a space for production, exhibition and participation; and it will also serve as a centre for sharing resources on decolonial ecology here in the heart of South Devon. This will be a whole new setting for me from which to make work and for the public to engage with it too and we look forward to sharing details of our Open Studio programme in due course. Look out for events in November where we’ll be inviting Alexis Pauline Gumbs back from Durham, North Carolina to celebrate the publication of her highly anticipated biography of Audre Lorde, Survival is a Promise. In the meantime, my new film commission, Can you tell the time of a running river?, which I’ve been working on with RAMM’s excellent contemporary art curator Lara Goodband, will be in great company as part of the group exhibition Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape, which runs from October 2024 until February 2025 at RAMM in Exeter. And then in March 2025, curator Gemma Girvan and I look forward to welcoming you to my debut solo exhibition at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton, where you’ll have a chance to experience my recent film works including Planetary Imagination, Invasion Ecology and Can you tell the time of a running river? as a unified whole.
How can people find out more about your work?
www.radicalecology.earth
IG: @ashishghadiali & @radicalecology
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ashish-ghadiali-1733352
