An immersive experience to help small coastal settlements adjust to likely futures in the most positive way
With a global lack of leadership on environmental issues, many people feel they are not ready for what the future may bring and are seeking means to come together to face approaching uncertainties. They might feel that the big issues of our time are not their business, but want to influence what happens round them.
This Coastal Town Reimagined is a 2-hour Live Action Role Play (LARP) workshop devised to help address this gap between the global and the things we can (and would be prepared to) do in coastal towns we care about: to encourage people in a neighbourhood to find each other and devise ways of managing issues that stem from their varied social and ecological interests and concerns.
LARPs are events designed to spark imagination and action through collaboration. Role play, improvisation and critical thinking collide, enabling people to explore the “What ifs” about any situation, from the probable to the very unusual, and “rehearse” the outcomes they would like to see.
To learn more watch this short film by Hydar Dewachi, 2024. (10 minutes)
Initial success has led to a broader ambition: to take the techniques devised and offer them for other contexts, as well as transforming early imaginings into both real-world and fictional visions of thriving eco-social communities in Felixstowe.
These events are devised as part of an ongoing art-action-research loop that builds on years of collaboration between Ann Light and Ruth Catlow, and creative practice and research inspired by communities of experimental artists and designers working with eco-social change. These are some of the papers that study and theorise how and why this experience works.
We gathered feedback as part of developing the LARP, but also encouraged people to take time at the end of each session to reflect on what was learnt and what townsfolk might do (or do differently) in considering their futures and that of those around them and other living things. We give a few of the many comments we received:
It’s important to use our imaginations to create the futures we want
“It just reminds us that we have to bring our creative imaginations to the future that we want. – It’s playful, it’s going to make a lot of people think, it’s going to surprise a lot of people” – Adrian
This experience made it more fun and less worrying to exploring the future
“It brings up serious issues while you are allowed to have a bit of fun with them. But also in a way allowing you to disassociate so your prime self doesn’t have to worry about them, because it’s this future self” – Mark
It’s important to respect ideas and feelings of young people in this town
“It’s great to involve younger people who don’t always get involved in these conversations because we feel a bit disenfranchised, and we feel a little bit pushed out by the older generation sometimes. In Felixstowe, it seems to be an older population…we are trying to get a place for younger people to be collectively together and work with you guys so we can make something we are ALL proud of. It’s just great to have a platform to be able to share ideas and feelings about Felixstowe and have them listened to and respected by everybody.” – Courtney
At heart, this is a live action role-play (LARP) exercise giving the chance for people to leap into the future of their area, speak as different generations and work successfully on issues that concern them. By setting the action in the future, participants reflect on how some of the challenges they predict can be tackled and even solved. Themes emerge through groups of townsfolk meeting together in conversation. This experience has been developed to raise difficult issues supportively and in such a way that people feel stronger and more connected, rather than anxious or powerless. It was devised as “hyperlocal eco-social” place-making: that is to say, people living in the same neighbourhood are understood to share some social and ecological concerns related to their environment and need something around which to gather and move from individual worry to co-created action.
It is also designed to help people recognise how local systems are interdependent, relying on the plants, animals, institutions and places that make up the area, just as the major global systems, such as weather, climate and geography, work together to affect what happens. This understanding is part of supporting readiness, because changes in these relationships are part of what we are all experiencing and have to deal with.
This Coastal Town was created by Ruth Catlow, director of arts organisation Furtherfield, which has been establishing itself in Felixstowe, a town of about 24,000 people, and Ann Light, an academic at the University of Sussex wanting to learn how creative participatory and immersive practices can support people in a locality to be ready for the increasingly uncertain futures ahead. Devised in 3 stages, Ann and Ruth first invited Felixstowe residents and visitors to chat about the futures they wanted in May 2024. In July 2024 they shared what they discovered with three creative practitioners from the region: Mimi Doncaster and Frazer Merrick, and Kirsty Tallent. Together they created an immersive future fiction that formed the basis of This Coastal Town, a public “time-travelling” event to work on the future together. This LARP was first held in Felixstowe in September 2024, then further developed with local youth empowerment consultants Courtney Hessey and Lauren Bruen, for a second Felixstowe iteration in Spring 2025. Ann and Ruth worked on a version that could travel, and events were also held in May 2025, in partnership with First Light Festival’s Battery of Ideas in Lowestoft and Hospitable Environments in Newhaven. These events have supported preparation for the creation of the playbook.
This Coastal Town is made possible by partnership with The University of Sussex, and is part of Reimagine This Coastal Town supported by Level Two Youth Projects, Hamilton MAS, and the Felixstowe Citizen Science Group and with support from Arts Council England and the Suffolk Cultural Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant no AH/Y003330/1.
Feral Class Book out now!
Untamed, Unheard, Unstoppable… a moving memoir about being a working-class artist… Art on the Margins, Life Without Permission
Furtherfield is thrilled to announce the release of Feral Class, a bold and deeply personal memoir by its co-founder, Marc Garrett. This powerful narrative chronicles his journey as a working-class artist navigating a system designed to exclude voices like his.
At Furtherfield, challenging the entrenched class inequalities of the art world has always been at the heart of our work. Today, as rising costs, hostile institutions, eroded social welfare, and dwindling opportunities push working-class artists to the margins, Marc’s story reminds us of the urgent need to uplift, fund, and amplify the next generation of working-class artists before their contribution is lost completely.
Feral Class is Marc Garrett’s deeply personal and thought-provoking exploration of his early years, chronicling his journey as a working-class artist navigating a world that often rejects them. Through humorous, vivid storytelling and incisive critique, Garrett explores how his upbringing shaped his identity, forging a path that defied societal expectations. How can one survive, let alone thrive, as part of what Garrett describes as the feral class: a group of individuals who, like him, exist outside traditional institutions and thrive in the margins, using resourcefulness and rebellion to carve out their own artistic spaces?
Weaving together personal memories, political reflections, and the struggles of working-class artists, Feral Class challenges the elitism of the art world. It celebrates the radical potential of those who refuse to conform. Garrett’s narrative is both an intimate self-portrait and a rallying cry for artists who refuse to be tamed. Passionate, unfiltered, and insightful, this book is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections of class, creativity, and resistance.” Minor Compositions
Foreword by Cassie Thornton.
Ordering Information
For Ordering in the UK Only
Available direct from Minor Compositions (in the UK) for the special price of £13.
Pre-orders for the book will be taken during July 2025.
https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1561
Anyone who pre-orders the book directly from Minor Compositions during this month will receive a special, barcode-free version of the book with colour images (the regular trade version will be printed in greyscale). Advance orders to be shipped in August.
218 pages, 5.5 x 8.5, paperback
UK: £20 / US: $25
ISBN 978-1-57027-439-8
Release to the book trade 1 January 2026
For 30 years, Furtherfield has pioneered the critical imagination of art, technology, and networked cultures. In this time dominant global actors have created and imposed systems that support contemporary life for some at the same time as poisoning our planetary-wide environment and societies at an escalating rate. There is an urgent need to adopt the principles of less, again and differently, in a fair and equitable way. Seeking to cause less harm. Acting again on the knowledge that has been available (if ignored or downplayed) for decades. Acting differently in response to emerging knowledge, ways of knowing, being and feeling. Understanding our work in this way, how it exists within a living system, is one way of accepting how we are all material beings situated within vast chains of consequence, enmeshed within larger ones. This requires a different standard of responsibilities, a way to be responsive and accountable in a changing world working to address the uneven impacts on people, creatures, and places that may be geographically remote from us, but which nevertheless bear the cost of our actions.
In 2025 we shift the main focus of our work from our long-standing gallery in Finsbury Park, North London to a mid-sized town on Suffolk’s East coast. With a population of 24,000, Felixstowe town is our new home, where we will join existing communities, cultural partners, ecosystems, and species. This transition is a modal shift for the organisation and means we are doing things differently. In Felixstowe, we begin a new journey of becoming an embedded and community-needs-led art organisation focused on art, technology, and eco-social change. Eco-social change is systemic transformation, integrating social justice and ecology— to create fairer, more resilient futures for all.
With this move we commit to being in relation to communities, contexts, and biodiverse regions that are entirely new to us. In creating this policy we hope not only to “move to” but to “move with” our new location, developing different relationships with ourselves, each other, and the land, at the same time composting and letting go of existing practices and connections that harm. This environmental action plan therefore refers to listening, learning, flexibility, agility, stamina, synchronisation, and interpersonal mobility that will be required.
Our first environment action is to sign up to Culture Declares Emergency. Our second has been to develop an environmental policy for the next three years. Our third will be to make two climate pledges by the end of year one.
“We declare that the Earth’s life-supporting systems are in collapse, threatening biodiversity and human societies everywhere.
Alive to the beauty of our planet, we unite to challenge the dominant global power structures that fail to protect us as they disregard scientific consensus, silence marginalised voices and perpetuate ecocide.
As Declarers, we take action to harness the power of arts and culture to express heartfelt truths and address deep-rooted injustices, to care for and create adaptive, resilient and joyful communities, and to influence the urgent and necessary transformation of harmful global systems.”
On creating this policy, we :
In this new phase, we are committed to
Research shows that young people worldwide are deeply concerned about the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. As the generation that will be most affected, they have the power to drive change—spreading new habits, attitudes, and technologies. However, they also face significant barriers to meaningful action.
What is Felixstowe Youth VOICE?
Felixstowe Youth VOICE is a series of creative workshops co-produced by Furtherfield and young people (18-30 years) from the Felixstowe Peninsula. Through art, storytelling, and collaboration, we explore how creative practices can empower young people to lead positive eco-social change and contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In these workshops, we:
🐝 Step into the worlds of local species through experimental role-play, discovering what truly matters to them.
⚖️ Unpack the justice issues behind the Earth crisis, from climate collapse to species extinction.
🌾 Turn insight into action, exploring meaningful ways to create change—for ourselves and the ecosystems we depend on.
Together, we aim to
🧭 Explore artistic methods and creative ways of taking environmental action.
🤝 Come together as a community to shape a better future.
📣 Make sure young voices are heard and take an active role in decisions that impact our planet.
💡 Empower young people to improve and create real change in the places they love.
We have been exploring how artistic methods developed by artists in Furtherfield’s community can support environmental actoin:
Multispecies role-play was developed with artists, biodiversity experts and park lovers as part of the 5 year project, The Treaty of Finsbury Park. The Hologram, is a feminist peer-to-peer healthcare system, that was initially developed by artist Cassie Thornton at Furtherfield and is now practiced by thousands of people around the world.
Organising Team: Courtney Hessey, James Garden, Lauren Bruen, and Ruth Catlow
Co-production Team: Alexander Fotheringham, Cameron Sawyer, Jamie Lea , Katie Clark, Luke Winston, and Mark Richards
Film, animation and illustration by James Garden
Photography by Chris Clayton
Part of a European Research Initiative
Felixstowe Youth VOICE is part of VOICE a European research project examining how artist-led innovation and citizen engagement can help achieve the UN SDGs. In Summer 2025, the team will showcase creative media, tools, and learnings in an exhibition in Felixstowe.
Partners & Support
Special thanks to Laura Locke at the Felixstowe Wellbeing Hub, and Level 2 Youth Projects, Felixstowe for their partnership.
This work was realised within the framework of the VOICE project at Waag Futurelab with support from the Horizon Programme of the European Union.
Part of The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is an immersive fiction that looks at what it would be like if other species were to rise up and demand equal rights with humans. For 5 years human park-lovers have taken part in this fiction by playing for and as another species (so, like, NOT as a human ok?!).
From October 2024, you can scan the hoardings that wrap Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park to watch highlights from the 2023 Interspecies Festival. You can also access the the magical Finsbury Park Sentience Dial app to make a pledge that advances interspecies justice and blooming biodiversity!
Now you can be among the first to pledge your support for a cooperation agreement between ALL living species in Finsbury Park.
Biodiversity is crucial in reducing the harmful effects of climate change, and city parks have a huge part to play. But it’s not all about us humans! Think like a dog, bee or even grass and help change the way we all see and participate in our local urban green spaces forever! It’s time to spark new ways of being, feeling and acting together!
Will you…
⏳ Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 September 2024
🏡 Furtherfield Gallery, at the McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park, London N4
🐕🌳Exhibition and Treaty Signing activities 11 – 4pm
🎟️🐿️ Multi-species Meditation sessions – DAILY at 11am, 2pm and 3pm.
Join us for fun with family and friends in Finsbury Park to connect with park life in fantastical new ways.
🎟️🐿️ Book your free place for a Multi-species Meditation session led by Scirius the cockney squirrel, played by Human artist Max Dovey. Use your imagination to transform into another species with a totally different sense of what is important. Sessions daily at 11am, 2pm and 3pm.
🌳Use the magical new Finsbury Park Sentience Dial app to tune into all flora and fauna! Scan the park and meet up to 7 local park species representatives, then make your pledge for bountiful biodiversity!
⇨ Watch Tracy Kiryango’s short docu-fiction film The Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park 2023 celebrating the cultures and talents of ALL Finsbury Park’s species, and using camera, lighting and post-production effects to convey multi-species-perspectives of the festival events.
⇨ Join the Multisensory Mystery Tour to see, hear and smell the old forest through the sensory superpowers of squirrels, trees, and dogs…
⇨ Hear the squeaks, squawks, howls and honks of the Multispecies Choir and their “songs” of lament, celebration and protest…
⇨ Sample delicacies from Pass-The-Poop-Parcel, the multi-species gastronomy game…
Help shape the first-ever interspecies treaty of cooperation for bountiful biodiversity!
Don’t worry! From October 2024, you can scan the hoardings that wrap Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park to watch highlights from the 2023 Interspecies Festival. You can also access the the magical Finsbury Park Sentience Dial app to make a pledge that advances interspecies justice and blooming biodiversity!
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 depicts the story of the dawning of interspecies democracy. It’s a new era of equal rights for all living beings, where all species come together to organise and shape the environments and cultures they inhabit – in Finsbury Park, and urban green spaces across the UK, the world, and beyond!
Based around a set of live action role play games – or LARPs – the Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is played from more-than-human perspectives to encourage the blooming of a bountiful biodiversity and interspecies political action.
Like many urban parks, Finsbury Park is fraught with environmental issues from noxious gases and traffic noises to governance struggles and financial sustainability. The pledges are based on research collaborations and prioritised with participants. Find out more about the story so far, the research, and the importance of biodiversity in urban green space by visiting our FAQs.
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is a major collaborative project led by Furtherfield, exploring new ways to build empathy pathways to non-human lifeforms through play.
It represents a major undertaking to do long-term work exploring how an arts organisation based in the heart of an urban green space can support a deeper understanding of that green space and ALL its inhabitants. Beginning in 2020 and spanning a minimum of 5 years, the work was originally developed in collaboration with The New Design Congress. The first 3 years are being supported by CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures). CreaTures project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.
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