Camden Art Centre with Susanna Davies-Crook and Sarah Shin as part of Ignota Books present 'Gaian Ecologies'

On this day of active research in the garden, artists, speakers and gardeners lead journeys and enquiries into organisms, slime trails and compost, and expanded ways of looking at life.

Knee-deep in swamps and water, pulling up clumps of mud and silt, Margulis studied the microbial in order to understand Gaia as a whole. Ignota’s Gaia Season echoes Margulis’ methods of hypothesis and experimentation to dig into the theories of Gaia and the practice of examining life on Earth.

Artists and speakers include Tamara Henderson, Taey Iohe, Tom Jeffreys, Harun Morrison, Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, Wild Alchemy and Community Apothecary.

Ignota Books’ Gaia Season: A Body in the Form of a Planet celebrates Gaia theory and the influence of interdisciplinary biologist Lynn Margulis’ life and work.

Earth is a body in the form of a planet: a self-regulating organism sustaining life for the purposes of life. At the same time, the cell structures Margulis devoted her life to researching form our own world-skin: the dermal boundary that keeps us separate from, yet interrelated to, the planetary body and its multitude of species. As Margulis, Dorion Sagan and James Lovelock assert, we are not apart from Gaia but a planet in the form of a body.

Through creative approaches and practices, Gaia Season invites groups and individuals who are imagining our collective futures. From the microbial to the planetary, we look within to look out: to our bodies and the world, the universe, in a declarative or a gesture.