The Relational Ecologies Laboratory was situated within ACCA’s foyer for the duration of the exhibition to generate and model climate aware creative methodologies, alongside the two-day public intensive in February 2025. Relational Ecologies is an experiment in collaboratively generating and modelling climate aware creative methodologies. Incorporating workshops, discursive dialogues, performances and pedagogical investigations, it aimed to enable and empower artists and art institutions in fostering collaboration, collective action and new imaginaries in response to our planetary emergency. It extends the network’s investigation of the embeddedness of material and conceptual art practice and pedagogies within histories of colonialism and logics of extractive capitalism.

The Relational Ecologies Laboratory is presented by CACP Network members and artists Katie Lee, Mark Friedlander, Beth Arnold, Terri Bird and Clare McCracken with CACP curator Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris. The laboratory is a relational artwork staged over the three months of the exhibition, in which network members build an inventory and do what climate aware artists do best: work across precarious platforms, sharing, reworking, collaborating and understanding the materiality of artistic circular economies. The lab can be thought of as a sculptural work, a residency, an incubator and a publicly focused exhibition working space. 

The Relational Ecologies Intensive was held at ACCA, February 21+22, 2025. This two-day program consisted of workshops, reading groups, panel discussions, walk-shops, speculative design workshops, and performances all drawn from the nation-wide CACP Network and the artists included in The Charge That Binds. The intensive questions how we study and teach climate aware creative practices, with a special focus on practice that attends to Indigenous land justice. Curated by CACP member Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris with Tristen Harwood and Tara McDowell, and ACCA curatorial team Shelley McSpedden and Elyse Goldfinch. The full intensive program will be launched in 2025 and includes events facilitated by CACP members artists and educators; Jo Politt, Anastasia Murney, Charles Robb, Courtney Pedersen, Clare Milledge, Andrew Goodman, Tessa Laird, Lucas Ihlein, Lauren Burrow and Helen Hughes as well as Laboratory artists Katie Lee, Mark Friedlander, Beth Arnold, Terri Bird and Clare McCracken.

This project is supported by; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; RMIT Melbourne; Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne; Deakin University, Public Exchange Bureau and Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University.