New Constellations

Guy Singh-Watson is an organic farmer, entrepreneur and self-professed veg nerd, passionate about reinventing the food system. Founder of Riverford , Guy vowed not to allow the company to become driven purely by the bottom line, so in 2018 sold 74% of Riverford to its employees at about a third of the market value. Passionate about sharing his decades of organic farming and business knowledge with...

Derek Bardowell is an author, award-winning charity leader, park runner, reimaginer and devoted dad. Once a music journalist and for many years a disruptive funder, Derek works at the intersections of race, culture and philanthropy and believes everyone has the right to feel at ease in themselves, in their bodies and in the places that they live. His first book, No Win Race explores race and racis...

Farzana creates the capacity for transformation. Through the lens of her experience as a youth and community worker, a writer, a director and a leader of Healing Justice, she asks what it would take to envision abolition in our lifetime and to truly practise freedom. She works with communities to imagine and organise around visions that reimagine public health and to build eco structures of health...

Sophy is a weaver of wisdom, traditions and the twin forces of will and love. An engineer and therapist by training, Sophy has spent a lifetime exploring how things work within us and around us. She believes that western culture has lost the rituals that help us come to terms with the fact that everything we love we will lose. As a founder of the transition movement, a grief tender and in her work...

Chagford is a small town on the north-eastern fringe of Dartmoor, in South West England.  In  2019 the Parish Council declared a Climate and Ecological Emergency, following similar declarations by Government and councils all over the UK. Jo and Gemma helped Chagford Parish Council gather the views of residents for a community conversation about climate and the natural environment. Made by Jo Barra...

This encounter takes a new form, a slow conversation between Dan Hill - Director of Strategic Design at Vinnova , the Swedish government's innovation agency and author of the Slowdown Papers - and New Constellation’s Gemma Mortensen. Their exchange - from the urban landscape of Stockholm to the wilds of Dartmoor - explores how to create the hybrid conditions for human and non-human life to thrive...

Gemma and Jo take a walk to reflect on the themes and patterns that have emerged from the first series of audio encounters and look ahead to the next series. The themes from this first series are explored in more detail in our blogs . Made by Jo Barratt. Conceived by Jo Barratt and Gemma Mortensen, with Iris Andrews and Lily Piachaud. Music is made for New Constellations by Art School Girlfriend ....

Candy Chang is an artist who creates public spaces through which people can connect with and share what it means to be human today. She explores how we can create more infrastructure for the soul - to reflect, to forgive, to atone and to see ourselves in each other. Having spent time bearing witness to the confessions of thousands of people around the world, she has seen just how much we want the...

Panthea’s work bridges perspectives, disciplines and divides. Without looking at the past and without healing from it, she believes we can never truly move forward.  So, as a strategist, organizer and facilitator, Panthea helps people explore what type of solidarity can heal, nourish and liberate us and keep us  alive to one another’s beauty and humanity as well as each other’s suffering. She asks...

Sheffield’s journey was an adventure into the future for a group of Sheffielders from all walks of life and all parts of the city in autumn 2021. Together they examined this moment in Sheffield’s history and the past that brought us here, and dreamed of a brighter future for the city they love: one that fully reflects the potential of Sheffield’s incredible people and places. Listen to the crew’s...

Yo-Yo Ma is an internationally renowned cellist and champion of culture’s power to transform lives. In moments of blissful musical flow, he experiences perfect equilibrium when his body becomes part of his mind. Fingers are like tiny brains, Yo-Yo says, they find their way into the sounds they want to hear. He calls for a second enlightenment in which we combine the power of the mind and body, the...

Hilary is a gifted maker and a thinker, blessed with a formidable mind, deep heart and fierce passion. She thinks to make, and makes to think, and her craft is helping communities design their own solutions to the challenges they face. When Hilary works with people for the first time, she asks them to draw maps of their lives. Every map is a zig-zag. Our lives, she says, are ones of constant trans...

Angel has a voice like medicine. It heals. He is a pioneer of the emerging field of healing-centred education - helping children and adults experience and channel the wisdom, pain and potential that resides in our bodies as well as our minds. In exploring his own heritage, he illuminates what is possible when we discover and act from a place of deep connectedness. We have to act from the future we...

Audrey is a poetician and Taiwan’s first Digital Minister. She sees herself as a digital migrant, having moved into the internet when she was 12 years old. The early makers of digital democracy in the 21st century, she says, are like the makers of reflecting telescopes in the 17th century. They are building digital spaces that are transparent like glass and reflective like mirrors, helping us blen...

Anna sees and thinks in patterns. As a child, she carried around a notebook and recorded things that changed and how things were related to each other.  She explores what it is like to live guided by patterns - of the moon, of day and night, of the seasons. How to open ourselves up to the flow of the never-ending spirals we find in nature; in seeds, on the down-like hair of a baby’s head and in ga...

Charles writes to help us rediscover our relationship with the earth – the relationship which has made us the shape that we are. There is, he says, no seam between us and the wild. His writing and teaching draws on biology, anthropology, theology, archaeology, philosophy, law and travel to probe the questions ‘who or what are we?’ and ‘what on earth are we doing here?’.    Made by Jo Barratt. Conc...

Aaron helps creative entrepreneurs break free from their past and set out on the journey of life before them. A celebrated social entrepreneur and arts educator, Aaron founded Sphinx to open up the world of classical music to young people of colour and was President Obama’s first nominee to the National Council on the Arts. The world is full of unfulfilled dreams, he says, so you have to put syste...

Jane is a beautiful woman, light of voice and soul and steely of will and intention. Rod , her partner in love and work, has the magical ability to help young people return to themselves. As educators and storytellers, they work with cycles of nature to enable people to see and experience a deeper sense of self. They encourage people to return to a time there was no time, 14 billion years ago. The...

adrienne communicates the power of vision. What would it take, she asks, to create a positive vision of the future that becomes our muscle memory; something so powerful that we act on it even when we are under pressure or when we are scared? She works with whatever is necessary to do that - words, pleasure, sci-fi, singing, birthing … to pose the question: “how do we relinquish power so that we ca...

On a dark night in December 2020, 15 people from across Barrow joined a voyage to discover Barrow’s new stars –  Barrow’s New Constellation . This is their story, of the place they love and how the people of Barrow can build a brighter future.  Made by Jo Barratt with Gemma Mortensen, Iris Andrews and Lily Piachaud.  Music is made for Barrow’s New Constellations by Art School Girlfriend and Tom Ja...

Geoff wonders what makes societies and institutions wise. Everything in our lives, he says, depends on systems beyond us. We depend on them for absolutely everything, our feelings and our thoughts. So what would a political philosophy look like that recognised our dependency on the world around us rather than asserting our sovereignty over it? Having studied as a Buddhist monk, worked in governmen...

Rob is a story-harvester, imagineer and sewer of inspiration, who collects and shares the chronicles of communities who have dared to ask ‘What If?’ and dared to do things differently. He lives with a ‘make your own’ spirit, spending time with people who are cracking on and building the future they dream of. A future that will fast be upon us. Things will change very fast, he says; we need to be p...

Poppy first saw a dead body at 27 when she decided to set up a funeral directors, one that helps us think differently about loss, grief and death. Death lurks in the shadows, haunting us. She works to bring death into clearer view;  bearing witness to lives that have ended and the emotions of those who are saying goodbye. This is heart work, she says.  Made by Jo Barratt. Conceived by Jo Barratt a...

Lonnie carries the deep well of history in his sparkling eyes and the deep resonance of his voice. He uses history as a tool to give us a fuller picture of who we are so that we can grapple with our past. As founder of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture , Lonnie curated the story of the USA's – and many other countries’ – tortured racial past. He is now the first person...

Margaret twinkles, the sparkle of a full life exploring her two passions: political science, for which she is famed, and Aboriginal art. Growing up in Baltimore in the 1960s, Margaret was taken on civil rights marches as a young girl and she is still marching now. Margaret shows us how we are living through the declining years of neoliberalism. It is time to bring a new political and economic syst...