Speakeasy: Artists in Conversation

DOORS & BAR OPEN: 1:30PM

WORKSHOP STARTS: 2:00PM

WORKSHOP FINISHES: 5:00PM FILM SCREENING STARTS: 7:00PM

FILM SCREENING FINISHES: 8:00PM EVENT FINISHES: 8:00PM

Join us for an informal series of talks at The Straw Yard in a cabaret-style setting.

Speakeasy is programmed by Berwick creatives Samantha Cary and Chris Adriaanse, who are inviting artists with practices that resonate with them to share insights about their career, art and creative practice, followed by a Q&A with the audience.

We are delighted to be hosting Helen Knowles at the Straw Yard for the first of our Speakeasy workshops. Helen will be leading a Cosmotechnics workshop followed by a screening of her recent film Indexed Beings. Samantha has invited Helen describing her latest work as “very moving not only for its work with cutting edge technology and its exploration of other than human sentience but for holding at its heart an exploration of what it is to be human.”

Workshop: 2– 5pm

Anyone with a relationship to plants is warmly invited — botanists, scientists, herbalists, gardeners, foragers, artists, those working with plant spirits or plant beings, and all others whose lives are shaped by them. This is a three-hour workshop exploring what happens when different ways of knowing plants are held in the same room.

The workshop draws on the methods behind Helen Knowles' recent film Indexed Beings (2025), made in the Colombian Amazon with the Herbario Etnobotánico del Piedemonte and members of the Kamëntsá, Inga, Cofán and Siona communities. The film centred on the re-enactment of a real dispute between a scientist and a taita (shaman) over the role of the herbarium: for the scientist, a vital tool for defending territory; for the taita, plants are autonomous, intelligent beings that cannot be catalogued.

Participants will bring their own relationships with plants - through science, herbalism, spiritual practice, or other paths - into a shared performance space. The workshop stages a pluriversal exchange: not a synthesis of perspectives, but a holding open of the frictions between them, and the technics that emerge from each.

Film screening of Indexed Beings: 7–8pm 

What can science and knowledge production look like, if we begin with the premise that other-than-humans can know, act, and produce their own worlds?

Join us for a screening of Indexed Beings, a film by Helen Knowles and a nominee for the Jarman Moving Image Prize 2025 

The film re-enacts a real dispute at an ethnobotanical herbarium in Colombia, between a Western-trained scientist and an indigenous Taita (shaman). At its heart is a question that resonates deeply with natural history collections: what is lost when plants — viewed by indigenous communities as sentient, sacred beings — are reduced to catalogued specimens on a shelf? 

A short discussion with the filmmaker will follow the screening.

About Helen Knowles

Helen Knowles (b. 1975) is an artist working with expanded forms of moving image. Her practice examines the intersection of immateriality and life, focusing on responsibility, autonomy, and ethics in relation to technology, AI, and the non or more-than-human. Knowles explores the digital world through a planetary lens. Working collaboratively with indigenous communities, medics, scientists, lawyers, crypto specialists, midwives, childbirth professionals and inmates. Her use of performance and film focuses on the relational and generative qualities of discourse. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions and Screening include ; Cambridge University, Spore Initiative, Leeds City Art Gallery, Neort Gallery Tokyo, Gallery North, Northumbria Uni (2025), Science Gallery, London, Hyundai Motor Studio, Beijing (2023), Alberta University of the Arts, Leuphana University (2022), Hannover project, Kunstlerhaus Graz, Oil Tank Cultural Park, Seoul, (2021), arebyte Gallery, London, Ars Electronica (2020). The Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Hannover Kunstverein, 104 Paris (2019) Centre de Cultura Comtemporania del Carme, (2018) ZKM, Karlsruhe, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2017). She won an honorary mention at Ars Electronica in 2020 and was nominated for the Jarman Moving Image Award 2025.

Find out more about Helen’s work: https://www.helenknowles.com

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is supported by Create Berwick through funding from Northumberland County Council and North East Mayoral Strategic Authority.

Our publicity materials are created through a series of micro-commissions. This event poster was created by Jill Spence: @jillspence51