Chaotic Degrowth via Artistic Practices

Alexandra Papademetriou is an artist and designer from Athens, Greece, currently based in Gothenburg, Sweden. She earned her MFA in Fine Art from HDK-Valand and her post-master from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Using shared learning as method, she aims to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborations; exploring how artistic practices can provide the testing ground for environmental and social change.

Sean Roy Parker is a visual artist, writer and landworker who works open-endedly across many disciplines including sculpture, installation, foraging, cooking, publishing, workshops and community gardening. Until its closure, he was a core member of The Field, an experimental artist-run living project in an ex-Steiner School building in Derbyshire, East Midlands.

Roy practises slow, low-tech crafts and food preservation with consumer waste and wild abundance, and shares extensively through labour exchange, favours and artswaps. Against the backdrop of the climate crisis and class division, he challenges the received understanding of what constitutes artistic production through his process-led and (re)generative practice. Under the name Fermental Health, he writes about material lifecycles, interspecies intimacy and collaborative problem-solving through the lens of food justice. In the spirit of degrowth much of his work gets eaten, composted or repurposed. 

Roy is a board member of Two Queens, an artist-run gallery and studio complex based in Leicester, UK, that is breaking ground as a Community Benefit Society. He attended nomadic altMA School of the Damned in 2016/17 and was in residency at Wysing Arts Centre 2023-24. In 2024 he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Visual Artist Award, and published ‘stewarding’, his debut collection of poetry, with Monitor Books, London.