On the first Saturday of each month Abbas Zahedi hosts a support group for the collective processing of ecological grief. In collaboration with thinkers, artists and musicians, participants are invited to consider ‘How can we make sense of a world increasingly shaped by loss and disconnection?’.
The discussions take place in a new commission entitled Begin Again. As part of the installation, instruments and playback devices have been plugged into Tate Modern’s utility pipes and deeper architecture. The sound composition shifts between moments of harmony and disintegration. Each sonic collapse prompts the piece to rebuild, emphasising the power of renewal and beginning again.
The commission creates a space for collective listening and discussion where participants can reflect on how to protect and restore ecological connectivity.
Begin Again is part of the exhibition Gathering Ground which explores threatened ecologies.
Join Abbas Zahedi, Libita Sibungu, Jol Thoms and Sally Davies for a conversation about ecological connectivity.
Libita Sibungu
Libita Sibungu (b.1987, Cornwall, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist, drawing on her British-Cornish-Namibian heritage to make discursive works which explore entangled personal histories and colonial legacies inscribed in the body and land. Sibungu has exhibited with Konsthall Trondheim (Norway, 2023), Temple Bar Gallery (Ireland, 2021) and Gasworks (UK, 2019). She has been awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Arts Foundation Future Awards, both (2022).
Jol Thoms
Jol Thoms (b. Tkaronto) is a multimedia artist, curator and educator based in London UK teaching on the MA Art & Ecology and MA Art & Politics programs at Goldsmiths University. His work reconfigures boundaries between the non/human, cosmological and scientific using strategies from anticolonial feminist science studies and an ethics of pluralities. Thoms is the founder of the ongoing Radio Amnion sound art platform that commissions and transmits artists messages of care and lament 2Kms deep into the Pacific Ocean during each full moon – presented during the opening ceremonies of the 60th Venice Biennale.
Sally Davies
Sally Davies trained as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist and worked for 20 years in the NHS, leaving in 2017 to pursue her interest in clowning and poetry. Sally is interested in the therapeutic potential of play and created Queer Family Cabaret, a workshop for families to play together using costume and clown. She has also curated workshops exploring surrealism and clown as a means to connect more deeply with nature. Sally currently uses clown and tarot to create connection and community, devising tarot decks which use the historical characters and psycho-geography of London to celebrate diverse groups. These decks, written as poems, become psycho-magic art-brut objects, created in community, as well as immersive embodied tarot performances (devised with the ecological clown collective Divine Ridiculous). Sally’s most recent deck, The London Clown Tarot was made for The London Clown Festival and used a cast of 22 contemporary London Clowns. She is currently working on her fifth deck within this series for and is returning to train as a psychotherapist using Breathwork.
- How Ocean Dreams, a 15 minute Audio-Essay by Jol Thoms and Konstantinos Damianakis (2025) in Seismograf Journal, Volume 31 ’Sound and More-Than-Human Worlds’. https://seismograf.org/node/20854
- Radio Amnion: https://radioamnion.net
- Dionne Brands ‘Maps’ (2019) on e-flux Journal Issue 105:
- https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/302980/maps
- Christina Sharpe's introduction of In the Wake (2016): https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake
Abbas Zahedi
Abbas Zahedi (b. 1984, London, UK) is an artist with a background in medicine from University College London and an MA in Contemporary Photography and Philosophy from Central Saint Martins. His practice engages with systems of care, thresholds of experience, and the creation of communal spaces for dialogue. Zahedi is an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, and has taught at universities across the UK and internationally.
