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The Project

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The KinShip Project is a long term public artwork, developing a variety of socially engaged cultural initiatives at Tramore Valley Park, starting in 2022.

 

Tramore Valley Park has been the site of great environmental change. From 1964 to 2009, this site was used as a landfill for Cork city. The area first opened up as a park in 2015 before fully opening to the public in 2019.  From the complex engineering works that supported this process, the site has the capacity to harvest rain water and gas produced by the former landfill providing energy to power approximately 500 local homes.

 

Tramore Valley Park is home to The KinShip art project which offers artists and interested communities an opportunity to gather, and to respond creatively and critically to the ecological and climate action challenges we face today. The overall aim of the art project is to develop a sense of connection between the people of Cork and the ecology of the park. This project is an opportunity to develop a new relationship with the park, modelling ‘care’ as a civic responsibility to all the inhabitants. This is a space to alter our mindset about the relationship we have with the natural world, to address the legacy of ‘throw away’ culture and to engage with new modes of managing waste.

 

To achieve this, there will be a year-long creative programme of citizen-led skills and knowledge based exchanges, artist's placements, a KinShip EcoLab construction commission, and a focused series of creative interventions in the park. All of these elements will endeavour to put the local community at the heart of the KinShip project.

 

The KinShip project is led by artist collaboration Lennon Taylor in partnership with Cork City Council. Local partners have formed a working group that includes Cork Healthy Cities, Cork Nature Network, Cork UNESCO Learning Cities, Green Spaces for Health, MTU Clean Technology Centre, UCC Environmental Research Institute.

 

This is one of fifteen climate action projects in Ireland that are being funded by the Creative Climate Action fund through Creative Ireland for 2022. The Creative Climate Action Fund supports creative projects which can meaningfully connect people with profound changes happening in our environment, society and economy arising from climate change.

 

To learn more about the KinShip Project, check out our presentation as part of a 'Greening Our Cities' webinar recording. 

 

A draft working document of a Manifesto for the park was created in collaboration with the KinShip Working Group in November 2021. The Manifesto will be used as a way of sharing the project values in order to bring us as a community of citizens into a shared commitment to the park and it’s wider community of life.  During 2022 the manifesto will be revisited to enquire if our promises are still valid, still useful, or if they need to be adjusted.

 

What is a manifesto?

Manifestos are traditionally forward-looking public declarations and principals, and may be used as a source of inspiration that can be both read and realised every day, and as a means of focusing the mind on personal and community priorities and shared values.

 

 

The KinShip Project Manifesto (November 2021)

 

  • All living beings are interdependent.

 

  • We believe in kinship, and in the reciprocal nature of relationships between humans and all other living beings.

 

  • We believe that Tramore Valley Park is a home for all living creatures and that we all have a commitment to thrive, replenish, heal, care for and develop this home together

 

  • We believe that we hold the atmosphere in our lungs, we believe that all species have the right to clean air.

 

  • We will nurture respect for the soil by telling the history of the Tramore Valley Park site as a landfill, how it has been repurposed to develop a new kind of park for the city

 

  • We will commit to partner and engage citizens in replenishing and nurturing the natural environment of the park

 

  • We aspire to pay attention, reclaim, reconfigure, remediate and inhabit new creative thinking to climate action and behavioural change

 

  • We aspire to remember that we have a shared ecological legacy of harm, and as humans we share a responsibility to be stewards of this legacy.

 

  • We aspire to promote a vision of Tramore Valley Park as a permeable space that lives in continuity with surrounding communities.

 

  • We will tread lightly, encouraging generous, inclusive and open heartedness exchanges.