Peak Peers 2023
In 2023 Peak Peers brought together 11 Young People (18-30) to explore questions of climate change, land rights, biodiversity and creativity rooted in the Black Mountains. The 6-day programme unfolded across Peak’s two sites - Platfform 2, Y Fenni Train Station and The Old School, Crickhowell - alongside visits to local land-based projects and partners. We gathered for creative workshops, walks and talks with artists, climate scientists, poets, farmers and activists.
The programme began with exploring the deep time of the Usk Valley, and learning from agricultural practices, water, and from collaborative projects working to shift land ownership. Together we:
🪨 walked with geologist Alan Bowring and wrote with poet Taylor Edmonds
🗺️ visited Penpont, where Molly Singleton + Hal Rhoades shared practices to map knowledge and land use
💧 explored ideas of ‘Water as Kin’ with ecologist Fin Jordao
🌱 met with artist Phoebe Davies and Farmer Polly Davies, borrowing methodologies from organic farming
🎞️ watched Marwa Arsanios’ film, Who is Afraid of Ideology IV: Reverse Shot, where land is a site of communalisation
✉️ read letters we’d written to our localities and lands, exploring our mutual relationship with Sophie Mak-Shram
Yn 2023, daeth Cyfoedion Peak ag 11 o Bobl Ifanc (18-30 oed) at ei gilydd i archwilio cwestiynau am newid hinsawdd, hawliau tir, bioamrywiaeth, a chreadigrwydd, a oedd wedi’u gwreiddio yn y Mynyddoedd Duon. Cynhaliwyd y rhaglen chwe diwrnod ar draws dau safle Peak – Platfform 2, Gorsaf Drenau’r Fenni a’r Hen Ysgol, Crughywel – ochr yn ochr ag ymweliadau â phartneriaid a phrosiectau sy’n ymwneud â’r tir. Daethon ni at ein gilydd mewn gweithdai creadigol, teithiau cerdded a sgyrsiau gydag artistiaid, gwyddonwyr hinsawdd, beirdd, ffermwyr ac ymgyrchwyr.
Dechreuom drwy archwilio amser dwfn Dyffryn Wysg, gan ddysgu am ddŵr ac arferion amaethyddol a phrojectau cydweithredol sy’n ceisio newid perchnogaeth tir. Gyda’n gilydd aethom ati i:
🪨 gerdded gyda’r daearegwr Alan Bowring + gweithio gyda’r bardd Taylor Edmonds
🗺️ ymweld â Penpont, lle bu Molly Singleton + Hal Rhoades yn rhannu eu hymarfer er mwyn mapio gwybodaeth a defnydd tir
💧 archwilio syniadau’n ymwneud â ‘Dŵr fel Tylwyth’ gyda’r ecolegwr Fin Jordao
🌱 gwrdd â Phoebe Davies a’r ffermwr Polly Davies, gan fenthyg methodolegau ffermio organig
🎞️ wylio ffilm Marwa Arsanios, Who is Afraid of Ideology IV: Reverse Shot, lle mae tir yn ofod ar gyfer cymunedoli
✉️ ddarllen llythyrau a ysgrifennom at ein bröydd a’n tiroedd, gan archwilio ein perthynas â’n gilydd gyda Sophie Mak-Shram
Our second weekend explored speculative storytelling as a way to shift our relationship with a planet in climate crisis. We created our own weather station, slowed down to rock time and learnt about land rights in the Black Mountains. Together we:
🛰️ explored how to image and imagine the earth and its weather with Open Weather, learning how to decode transmissions from satellites.
⏰ visited the Llangattock Escarpment with artist Rebecca Jagoe, to think about rocks, language, animacy and time
🌳 met with Right to Roam campaigner and writer Jon Moses, learning about ownership, access to land, and activism.
🚉 drew the programme to a close with Zeta, a Peak Peers participant, hosting a day of the dead celebration
Adrodd straeon sbeciannol oedd ffenest archwiliad yr ail benwythnos, fel modd o newid ein perthynas gyda’r blaned mewn argyfwng hinsawdd. Lluniom orsaf tywydd, arafom at amser y cerrig a buom yn dysgu am hawliau tir yn y Mynyddoedd Duon. Gyda’n gilydd fe aethom ati i:
🛰️ archwilio sut i ddelweddu a dychmygu’r ddaear a’i dywydd gyda Open Weather, gan ddysgu i ddatgodio trosglwyddiadau lloerenni.
⏰ ymweld â Sgarpiau Llangatwg gyda’r artist Rebecca Jagoe, i feddwl am gerrig, iaith, pethau byw ac amser.
🌳 gwrdd â Jon Moses ymgyrchydd a sgwennwr Right to Roam, gan ddysgu am berchnogaeth, mynediad at dir, ac ymgyrchu
🚉 ddiweddu’r rhaglen gyda un o Gyfoedion Peak Zeta yn cynnal dathliad diwrnod y meirw.
Peak Peers is a development of Platfform Haf 2022, a summer intensive for Young People at Platfform 2 which explored climate change, hope, power and collective making. Young People who took part in Platfform Haf contributed to the programme design of Peak Peers and were part of the selection panel. Peak Peers 2023 was generously funded by Colwinston Trust and Arts Council Wales. We’re grateful to Disability Arts Cymru for supporting Rebecca Jagoe’s Peak Peers workshop as part of their programme ‘Creativity is Mistakes’.
Cafodd Cyfoedion Peak ei datblygu o raglen Platfform Haf 2022, sef rhaglen ddwys i Bobl Ifanc ym Mhlatfform 2 a oedd yn archwilio newid hinsawdd, gobaith, grym, a chyd-greu. Cyfrannodd y Bobl Ifanc a gymerodd ran yn rhaglen Platfform Haf at ddylunio rhaglen Cyfoedion Peak, ac roedden nhw’n rhan o’r panel dewis. Cafodd rhaglen Cyfoedion Peak 2023 ei hariannu drwy haelioni Ymddiriedolaeth Tregolwyn a Chyngor Celfyddydau Cymru. Diolchwn i Gelfyddydau Anabledd Cymru am gefnogi gweithdy Cyfoedion Peak Rebecca Jagoe fel rhan o’u rhaglen ‘Creadigrwydd yw Camgymeriadau’.
Learn more about the Peak Pears 2023 contributors
Alan Bowring is a geologist based in Abergavenny and development officer for the Fforest Fawr Geopark, the western section of the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. Alan is usually found introducing visitors and tourism businesses to the ‘deep time’ history of the Bannau Brycheiniog. In pursuing the links between the ‘-ologies’ and the natural and cultural histories of the Park’s special places, he draws too from his experience of countryside conservation and outdoor recreation to dig beneath the surface of this palimpsest conjured from stone and earth and wood and water.
Taylor Edmunds is a poet, writer, creative facilitator and marketing manager from South Wales. Her work explores themes of womanhood, identity, connection, nature and empowerment. Taylor’s debut poetry pamphlet Back Teeth is out now with Broken Sleep Books. She is currently contributing editor at Poetry Wales. Taylor was the 2021 Poet in Residence for the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales. She is driven by improving the accessibility of creative writing to communities and championing the positive benefits of writing on individual’s wellbeing. Taylor is also a team member of Where I’m Coming From, a community-focused organisation and platform for underrepresented writers in Wales.
Marwa’s Arsanios’ practice tackles structural and infrastructural questions using different devices, forms and strategies. From architectural spaces, their transformation and adaptability throughout conflict, to artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives, the practice tends to make space within and parallel to existing art structures allowing experimentation with different kinds of politics. Film becomes another form and a space for connecting struggles in the way images refer to each other. In the past four years Arsanios has been attempting to think about these questions from a new materialist and a historical materialist perspective through different feminist movements that are struggling for their land. She tries to look at questions of property, law, economy and ecology from specific plots of land. The main protagonists become these lands and the people who work them. Her research includes many disciplines and is deployed in numerous collective methodologies and collaborative projects.
Rebecca Jagoe is a non-binary, disabled, autistic artist who works across text, performance and sculpture. Their work is a material memoir which examines how experiences of illness, madness, and gender are informed by specific Western, imperialist narratives around the ‘human’, and human dominion over the earth. Posing critiques of violent resource extraction; attempting to speak to a coral necklace; seeking erotic connection with a beach in Wicklow; considering the connections between madness, landscape and capital: Jagoe’s work reminds us that all matter is alive, it just moves at different timeframes.
Open-weather is a feminist experiment in imaging and imagining the earth and its weather systems using DIY tools. Co-led by Soph Dyer and Sasha Engelmann, open-weather creates artworks, leads inclusive workshops and develops resources on the reception of images from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. Through these activities, a fragile network has formed around the project, now including over one hundred DIY satellite ground station operators around the world, from Buenos Aires to Berlin. In the tradition of intersectional feminism, open-weather investigates the politics of location and interlocking oppressions that shape our capacities to observe, negotiate, and respond to the climate crisis. In doing so, open-weather challenges dominant representations of earth and environment while complicating ideas of the weather beyond the meteorological.
Penpont is a family run estate set on the banks of the River Usk in the Bannau Brycheiniog and home to the Penpont Project, an intergenerational land-based project. Young people are working in partnership with farmers, landowners, conservationists and local stakeholders, and together they are restoring habitats and ecosystems and exploring innovative farming and forestry approaches to provide a healthy support system for people, biodiversity and agriculture.
Sophie Mak-Schram (she/her) is an art historian, producer, educator and occasional practitioner. She likes to think-work-make-be about how we (come to) know and what forms those knowledges take. Amongst other things, Sophie has been one half of Tail Bend Travel (2016-2019), a (sometimes fictional) tour company offering new ways of exploring the local, one part of Cera Project, a curatorial platform for art of the non-West, and one part of PACTO, an international art collective exploring autonomy within collective practice. She has also been working with experiential and embodied education since 2016, exploring how we understand who we are and what we can do with that understanding, across communities in Turkey, Wales, China, Japan, the Netherlands, India, England, Italy and more. She likes to linger in the ‘and’ between art and education.
Fieldwork Studio is led by Welsh artist Phoebe Davies in partnership with Slade Farm Organics, a three-generation family farm tenancy situated on the Glamorgan Heritage Coast. The studio programme spans artist development, rural residencies and community growing.
Fin Jordao (they/them) is an educator on ecological sanitation, human ecology, water pollution solutions, human – waste – place relations. They maintain the ecological off grid water and sewerage systems at CAT. They farm worms, microbes, fungi and other multitudes in sand filters, bioreactors and compost heaps. They research and write about ecological aesthetics and queer ecology, in the form of manifestos, zines, scripts and choreographic scores. They are currently slowly touring a participatory outdoor performance with the Glanio collective in Cymru. They co-founded a brand new non-profit Criw Compostio collecting things that rot to make compost to grow food. They live with their partner in a self-built straw bale house in the Dyfi valley, their mamiaith is portuguese.
Daearegwr sy’n byw yn y Fenni yw Alan Bowring, ac mae’n swyddog datblygu ar gyfer Geoparc Fforest Fawr, sef rhan orllewinol Parc Cenedlaethol Bannau Brycheiniog. Mae Alan fel arfer i’w weld yn cyflwyno ymwelwyr a busnesau twristiaeth i hanes ‘amser dwfn’ y Bannau Brycheiniog. Wrth fynd ar drywydd y cysylltiadau rhwng yr ‘-olegau’ a hanesion naturiol a diwylliannol mannau arbennig y Parc, mae hefyd yn defnyddio ei brofiad o gadwraeth cefn gwlad a hamdden awyr agored i gloddio o dan wyneb y palimpsest wedi’i greu o garreg a phridd a phren a dŵr.
Bardd, awdur, hwylusydd creadigol a rheolwr marchnata o’r de yw Taylor Edmunds. Mae ei gwaith yn archwilio themâu bod yn fenyw, hunaniaeth, cysylltiad, natur a grymuso. Mae pamffled gyntaf Taylor o farddoniaeth, Back Teeth, nawr ar gael gyda Broken Sleep Books. Mae hi’n olygydd cyfrannol yn Poetry Wales ar hyn o bryd. Taylor oedd Bardd Preswyl 2021 Comisiynydd Cenedlaethau’r Dyfodol. Un o’r pethau sy’n ei gyrru yw gwella hygyrchedd ysgrifennu creadigol i gymunedau a hyrwyddo manteision cadarnhaol ysgrifennu i les unigolion. Mae Taylor hefyd yn aelod o dîm Where I’m Coming From, sef sefydliad cymunedol a llwyfan ar gyfer awduron sydd wedi’u tangynrychioli yng Nghymru.
Mae arfer Marwa Arsanios yn taclo cwestiynau strwythurol ac is-strwythurol gan ddefnyddio dyfeisiau, ffurfiau a strategaethau. O ofodau pensaernïol, eu trawsnewidiad a’u gallu i addasu drwy wrthdaro, i ofodau sy’n cael eu rhedeg gan artistiaid a chonfensiynau dros dro rhwng mentrau cydweithredol a chomiwnau ffeministaidd, mae’r arfer yn dueddol o greu gofod sy’n rhan o strwythurau celf sy’n bodoli ac yn gyfochrog â nhw, gan ganiatáu ar gyfer arbrofi gyda gwahanol fathau o wleidyddiaeth. Mae ffilm yn dod yn ffurf arall ac yn ofod ar gyfer cysylltu anawsterau yn y ffordd mae delweddau’n cyfeirio at ei gilydd. Yn ystod y pedair blynedd diwethaf, mae Arsanios wedi bod yn ceisio meddwl am y cwestiynau yma o safbwynt materolaidd newydd a safbwynt materolaidd hanesyddol, drwy wahanol fudiadau ffeministaidd sy’n brwydro dros eu tir. Mae’n ceisio edrych ar gwestiynau am eiddo, y gyfraith, economi ac ecoleg o leiniau penodol o dir. Y prif gymeriadau yw’r tiroedd yma a’r bobl sy’n eu gweithio. Mae ei hymchwil yn cynnwys llawer o ddisgyblaethau ac mae’n cael ei ddefnyddio mewn sawl methodoleg gasgliadol a phrosiect cydweithredol.
Mae Rebecca Jagoe yn artist anneuaidd, anabl ac awtistig, sy’n gweithio gyda thestun, perfformiad a cherflunio. Mae eu gwaith yn gofiant materol sy’n archwilio sut mae profiadau o salwch, gwallgofrwydd, a rhywedd yn cael eu llywio gan naratifau Gorllewinol imperialaidd penodol o gwmpas y ‘dynol’, a goruchafiaeth ddynol dros y ddaear. Mae’n cynnig beirniadaeth am echdynnu adnoddau’n dreisgar; trio siarad â mwclis cwrel; ceisio cysylltiad erotig gyda thraeth yn Wicklow; ystyried y cysylltiadau rhwng gwallgofrwydd, tirlun a chyfalaf: Mae gwaith Jagoe yn ein hatgoffa bod pob mater yn fyw, ond ei fod yn symud ar amserlenni gwahanol.
Arbrawf ffeministaidd yw Open-weather sy’n arbrofi gyda delweddu a dychmygu’r ddaear a’i systemau tywydd gan ddefnyddio offer DIY. Dan gyd-arweiniad Soph Dyer a Sasha Engelmann, mae open-weather yn creu gwaith celf, yn arwain gweithdai cynhwysol, ac yn datblygu adnoddau ar dderbyn delweddau o loerennau’r Swyddfa Genedlaethol Gweinyddiaeth Gefnforol ac Atmosfferig (NOAA). Drwy’r gweithgareddau yma, mae rhwydwaith bregus wedi ffurfio o gwmpas y prosiect, sydd bellach yn cynnwys cant o weithredwyr gorsafoedd tir lloerennau DIY o amgylch y byd, o Buenos Aires i Berlin. Yn nhraddodiad ffeministiaeth groestoriadol, mae open-weather yn ymchwilio i wleidyddiaeth lleoliad a gormesau rhyng-gysylltiedig sy’n siapio ein gallu i archwilio, negodi ac ymateb i’r argyfwng hinsawdd. Wrth wneud hynny, mae open-weather yn herio cynrychioliadau dominyddol o’r ddaear a’r amgylchedd, gan gymhlethu syniadau o’r tywydd y tu hwnt i’r meteorolegol.
Ystâd deuluol ar lannau’r Afon Wysg yn y Bannau Brycheiniog yw Penpont, ac mae’n gartref i Brosiect Penpont, sef prosiect ar y tir sy’n pontio’r cenedlaethau. Mae pobl ifanc yn gweithio mewn partneriaeth â ffermwyr, perchnogion tir, cadwraethwyr a rhanddeiliaid lleol, a gyda’i gilydd maen nhw’n adfer cynefinoedd ac ecosystemau ac yn archwilio dulliau arloesol ar gyfer ffermio a choedwigaeth er mwyn darparu system cymorth iach i bobl, bioamrywiaeth ac amaethyddiaeth.
Hanesydd celf, cynhyrchydd, addysgwr ac ymarferydd achlysurol yw Sophie Mak-Schram. Mae’n hoffi meddwl-gweithio-creu-bod am sut rydyn ni’n (dod i) ddeall ac ar ba ffurfiau mae’r dealltwriaethau yna. Ymhlith pethau eraill, roedd Sophie’n un hanner o Tail Bend Travel (2016-2019), sef cwmni teithiol (ffuglennol ar adegau) oedd yn cynnig ffyrdd newydd o archwilio’r lleol; roedd hi’n aelod o Brosiect Cera, sef llwyfan curadurol ar gyfer celf nad yw’n Orllewinol; roedd hi hefyd yn aelod o PACTO, sef casgleb gelf ryngwladol a oedd yn archwilio ymreolaeth mewn arfer casgliadol. Mae hi hefyd wedi bod yn gweithio gydag addysg brofiadol ac ymgorfforedig ers 2016, gan archwilio sut rydyn ni’n deall pwy ydyn ni a beth allwn ni ei wneud gyda’r ddealltwriaeth yna, ar draws cymunedau yn Nhwrci, Cymru, Tsieina, Japan, yr Iseldiroedd, India, Lloegr, yr Eidal a mwy. Mae’n hoffi treulio amser yn yr ‘ac’ rhwng celf ac addysg.
Caiff Stiwdio Fieldwork ei arwain gan yr artist o Gymru Phoebe Davies mewn partneriaeth â Slade Farm Organics, sef tenantiaeth fferm deuluol tair cenhedlaeth ar Arfordir Treftadaeth Morgannwg. Mae rhaglen y stiwdio yn cynnwys datblygu artistiaid, preswylfeydd gwledig a thyfu cymunedol.
Addysgwr yw Fin Jordao (nhw) sy’n gweithio ym maes glanweithdra ecolegol, ecoleg ddynol, datrysiadau llygredd dŵr, a chysylltiadau dynol – gwastraff – lle. Nhw sy’n cynnal y systemau dŵr a charthffosiaeth oddi ar y grid yng nghanolfan CAT. Maen nhw’n ffermio mwydod, microbau, ffyngau a phethau amryfath eraill mewn hidlyddion tywod, bioadweithyddion, a phentyrrau compost. Maen nhw’n ymchwilio ac yn ysgrifennu am estheteg ecolegol ac ecoleg gwiar, ar ffurf maniffestos, zines, sgriptiau a sgoriau coreograffig. Ar hyn o bryd, maen nhw’n teithio â pherfformiad cyfranogol awyr agored gyda chasgleb Glanio yng Nghymru. Cyd-sefydlon nhw gwmni nid-er-elw newydd sbon o’r enw Criw Compostio, sy’n casglu pethau sy’n pydru er mwyn creu compost i dyfu bwyd. Maen nhw’n byw gyda’u partner mewn tŷ gwellt a adeiladwyd ganddyn nhw yn nyffryn Dyfi, a Phortiwgaleg yw eu mamiaith.