I have recently started working as an external reviewer with the bilingual Welsh group Carreg Creative. They are currently planning Wrth Wraidd – At Root for the sixth Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, which is to be held on the 20th-22nd of November at the University of Wales Trinity St David, in Lampeter.

Carreg Creative’s aim is to provide a bilingual space for questions, considerations, mapping and dreaming in the Foyer of the Arts Building. As a starting-point, they are inviting conference attendees to join them at any time, bringing along a small amount of soil or roots from home and/or unanswered/unasked questions from their conference experience. They will also be hosting a reflection session in the Foyer of the Arts Building at the end of each day.

The Carreg Creative bilingual team is somewhat unusual in that it consists of experienced artists, performers and poets with backgrounds in food, farming and the environment. Between them, they work as artists in performance, creative writing, poetry, film, photography, drawing, painting, print-making, and sculpture. However, what particularly interests me about their planned approach is their emphasis on the value of conversation and, in particular, on the importance of prioritising listening as a basis for whatever work they do over the delivery of a pre-determined programme or agenda. I hope to be writing more about their work at the conference in a future post about particular ways in which certain artists are now engaging with issues of land, environment, ecology and farming.