Field Trip – Learning with Save Our Sperrins

On 6 September 2024, participants of the Extractivist Landscapes workshops travelled to the Sperrins Mountains in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland to meet and learn with community activists and artists from the Save Our Sperrins (SOS) campaign (https://www.instagram.com/save_our_sperrins/). Our group was warmly welcomed by SOS campaigners Cormac McAleer, Fidelma O’Kane, Marella Fyffe, Jackie Keenan, Anton McCabe, and Sheila Byrne Morrison at the Greencastle People’s Office where they gave an overview and personal account of the campaign and the impact Dalradian’s exploratory license has had on the community. We discussed the significance of arts practice as a way of maintaining community bonds and mitigating the mental and physical exhaustion created by such a long campaign of resistance to extractivism.

We then walked together to take-in the farms that would be impacted by the proposed mine. After sharing lunch we toured the Sperrins Mountains further—an area declared as one of outstanding beauty—before visiting the Park Village for a presentation and discussion on ‘Art as culture protest’ led by Sheila Byrne Morrison of the Park Village Art Group. We discussed how the campaign has drawn on a variety of arts practices to reach and inform wider audiences, as well as to build solidarity with others resisting extractivism in different places. Participants spoke about the personal and community significance of creating and displaying art made as part of a group. Others reflected on how arts practices can be a mode of advocating for the integrity of land, and the rights of future generations of beings in the Sperrins environment. Learning on the land with SOS deepened our understanding of the significance of arts practices in resisting extractivism.

We would like to thank the SOS campaigners for their warmth, time, and expertise.

_{Meeting with the Save Our Sperrins community activists at the Greencastle People’s Office}

Image Credits: All photographs taken by Anthony Assad