From Little Acorns...

In 1993, Octavia E. Butler published Parable of the Sower, a dystopian climate fiction novel, set in the not-so-distant future of the 2020s. Photoworks Festival 2022 takes Butler’s Parable as inspiration and as a starting point to think about who can shape the future and how.

From Little Acorns… presents ten international contemporary artists including Mohamad Abdouni, Antony Cairns, Felicity Hammond, Josèfa Ntjam, Johny Pitts, Ebun Sodipo, Harit Srikhao, Diana Tamane, Anshika Varma and Charlotte Yonga. Each of these artists’ practice engages with themes of community, the act of archiving, love, family, the environment, recycling and being resourceful, and imagining the future. Using these ten bodies of work as a starting point, the festival theme From Little Acorns… is also a call to action for audiences to imagine and reimagine the future. If we believe that the future is made from fragments of the past, which parts must we keep for the future? How can we create change and adapt? Who is responsible for the future? How can artists help visualise a better tomorrow? As Butler suggests,

‘All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.’

In line with Butler’s narrative exploring new models of community building, and continuing our research developing new festival models, the Photoworks Festival 2022 can be experienced as a Festival in a Box where you become the curator. We encourage you to unpack and activate it with your community, in your own time, wherever you are in the world. This experimental festival model attempts to promote accessibility, environmental sustainability, and agency.