Living-Language-Land: minority languages and the environment
CnaG Aotearoa is delighted to welcome Neville Gabie, Philippa Bayley & Malcolm Maclean to discuss their work with Living-Language-Land
The languages we speak shape how we understand the world around us, including our connections to land and nature. But as fast as we’re losing species from our planet, so we’re losing languages that offer different ways of seeing. Living-Language-Land is a journey through endangered and minority languages that reveal different ways of relating to land and nature. Through 26 words shared in the run-up to COP26 the project is giving a global audience fresh inspiration for tackling our environmental crisis. This presentation by Living-Language-Land’s creative co-producers Neville Gabie and Philippa Bayley, will also feature Malcolm Maclean, a Scottish Gaelic contributor to the project. Malcolm will share his own lived experience of language and how that directly informs a relationship to the natural environment of Western Scotland.
Philippa Bayley is a scientist, research manager, and public engagement specialist. She has co-produced Living-Language-Land with Neville Gabie. From 2011-16 she managed the University of Bristol’s environmental research institute, the Cabot Institute. Her passion is facilitating sensitive conversations that matter, whether that’s about death and dying, neuroscience or our relationship with the natural world.
Neville Gabie is an artist whose work responds to specific landscapes and communities of people, exploring an intimate relationship to ‘place’. Collaborations with the public, artists, writers, musicians and scientific researchers are central to his practice. As creative co-producer of Living-Language-Land he draws particularly on connections with the Noongar community of Western Australia, the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project in Mashpee, Massachusetts, and his time as artist-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey at their Halley Research Station.
Malcolm Maclean is an artist and an arts & heritage consultant based in Ùig, Leòdhas on Na h-Eileanan Siar, and a former chair of UNESCO Scotland. He directed the short film 'Aibidil' as a contribution to the Living-Language-Land project for COP26 Green Zone in November 2021.
