2025 GCCA Symposium -- The Understory: Art in the Climate Commons

GCCA Symposium -- The Understory: Art in the Climate Commons

The understory of a forest is a biodiverse and regenerative nursery with a crucial role in forest generation and forest resilience. Fostering beneficial soil microbial relations, enhancing nutrient availability, and providing essential habitat, the understory enables larger species to start life before growing skyward. Climate action practitioners make up an understory or sorts, creating diverse networks of advocacy, care and knowledge exchange as critical to the cultural production needed to pursue climate justice.
This retreat-style symposium celebrates relationship at the centre of climate action and provides space for creative practice, research, and organizing towards non-extractive economies: slow, relational, emergent. With special guest speakers, participatory workshops, and forest walks, we will engage with themes such as: Experiments in Low-Carbon Living; Joyful Economies; Art, Not Consumption; Zero-Carbon Art Methods & Targets.

Please join us at the beautiful Evergreen Brick Works with artists, designers, researchers, caregivers, academics, and more as we explore relational networking and opportunities to nurture connections and foster creative research towards climate action.

This event is generously supported by BMO.
Thank you to our event partner Evergreen Brick Works.

Info: Charlene K. Lau (Art Historian, Critic and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen); Aliya Abaya (Circle Community LandTrust); Charmaine Lurch (artist); Echo Railton (Block Ambassador, Pollinator Partnership); OCAD U members Amish Morrell (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Art); Peter Scott (Lecturer, Faculty of Art & Science)

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Evergreen Brick Works, 550 Bayview Avenue, Toronto, Canada