Spike Island Engagement Fellowship for SW-based Curators, Jack Young

Jack Young is an artist and participatory educator living in Bristol. He writes experimental fiction and non-fiction with a focus on queer ecologies. His hybrid chapbook URTH was published by Big White Shed in 2022, and he co-hosts the literary podcast Tenderbuttons. As an educator, Jack works with young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds, developing arts-based critical pedagogy with a particular emphasis on multilingual filmmaking, applied theatre and creative writing. He has worked with schools and institutions in Barcelona and London including MACBA, Institut Moisès Broggi, Royal Academy of Arts, Horniman Museum, Tate and Gasworks. Jack was the recipient of the 2022 Spike Island Engagement Fellowship for South West-based Curators, and curated The Body-Forest, a programme of engagement activities and public events.

The Body-Forest explored how thinking of the body as an interconnected ecosystem rather than as a machine – a metaphor developed under capitalism – might shift the way we think about our human connection to the world. Drawing on the work of biologists Pierre Sonigo and Shrese, among others, the programme included participatory workshops, discussions, radical history walks, reading groups and more. It interrogated how the concept of the Body-Forest might de-centre the human, and change the way we think about time, language, desire and community in an age of overlapping social and ecological crises.

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