Earth Rising is a festival that brings people together through art and ideas to help us feel more connected, make sense of a chaotic world, and imagine better ways to live, together.
This year’s Earth Rising talks programme invites you to imagine bold, creative, and collective responses to the climate crisis. Inspired by IMMA’s Staying with the Trouble exhibition, the series brings together artists, scientists, activists, and storytellers to explore themes of community, ecology, transformation, and care. From post-growth economics to rewilding our habits, from intergenerational justice to the wisdom of beans, birds, and the Cailleach, these conversations offer space to reflect, connect, and reimagine what comes next. All events are free and open to all – come join the conversation.
Scroll further down this page for more details.
Location: The Chapel
Free, booking required. Book here.
Keynote presentation by Jon Alexander
Followed by a panel discussion with Easkey Britton, Seán McCabe (Bohemians FC), and Aisling McCarthy. Hosted by Aoife Barry
What if solving the climate crisis isn’t about lone heroes, but about coming together, building trust, and finding strength in each other? Our opening talk at Earth Rising invites us to imagine a different kind of future – one built on connection, care, and shared action.
The evening will open with a keynote presentation from author Jon Alexander. We live in a moment of deep crisis but also huge opportunity. If we can step into a bigger story of ourselves as citizens, not just consumers; if we can come together and commit to the places we live and love; and if we can open up our institutions, the future could yet be bright.
Following John’s presentation, he will be joined for a panel discussion by
After the talk, stay for a warm, sociable close to the evening with delicious Palestinian food from The Great Oven, refreshments, and music by Donal Dineen.
Free and open to all – come join the conversation.
Location: The Chapel
Free, booking required. Book here.
Fast fashion is fast waste. But what if we could break it down and grow something better in its place?
This conversation explores the fashion industry through the lens of breakdown and transformation. What might emerge from the collapse of fast fashion systems? Taking inspiration from the composting theme in our Staying with the Trouble exhibition, we’ll dig into textile reuse, the politics of waste, and the creative potential of circular and slow fashion approaches.
Joining the conversation:
The event will also feature a mini fashion show curated by Zeda, showcasing stylish looks created entirely from thrifted clothing, offering practical inspiration for dressing with creativity and conscience.
Join designers, makers, and storytellers as they unpick the fast fashion mindset and explore new ways of dressing that honour time, ecology, and community. Because what we choose to wear can help shape the kind of world we want to grow.
Location: Lecture Room
Free, booking required. Book here.
Join Trócaire at the Earth Rising to hear directly from activists around the world on the frontlines of climate breakdown.
This special event includes a short film screening of Boiling Point and a panel discussion exploring the injustice and inequality of the climate crisis, and why Ireland needs to urgently phase out fossil fuels.
Global climate activists you’ll hear from include:
Location: The Chapel
Free, booking required. Book here.
How does spending time in nature change the way we think and feel? And what happens when we forget that we share the world with countless other living things – even the ones we can’t see?
In her presentation, Cassandra Murphy will explore how we form relationships with nature, and the effect those relationships have on our physical and mental health. She will explore what being connected to nature really means and how each one of us can form relationships with nature in our own unique ways.
This presentation and lively panel discussion will explore how nature shapes our minds and what we lose when we become disconnected from it. As cities grow and digital lives expand, can we rewild not just our landscapes but also our habits, cultures, and everyday spaces?
Joining the conversation are
Come along for a discussion that asks how we can make room for the critters, within us and around us, and why doing so might just change how we live, work, and care for the planet.
About Cassandra Murphy
As an Environmental Psychologist, Cassandra Murphy is a researcher and educator dedicated to understanding the profound bond between people and the natural world. Her work explores how building a relationship with nature can enhance human well-being and inspire sustainable behaviours. Drawing on her experience with interdisciplinary research and her teaching on ecopsychology, she examines how we can foster a more sustainable and compassionate relationship with our planet. She believes that by understanding our place in the natural world, we can discover new ways to coexist and foster a natural transactional relationship with nature that mimics our human-human relationships.
Location: Great Hall
Free, booking required. Book here.
The Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC) is a climate tribunal founded by lawyer, academic and writer Radha D’Souza and artist Jonas Staal that prosecutes climate crimes by states and corporations, even when they have formally been dissolved.
The latest CICC case against the British East Company, commissioned by Serpentine Galleries in London in partnership with IMMA and Create Ireland, proves that the organization continues to be active today, and that colonial crimes are climate crimes.
Non-human agents acted as evidence and witnesses in the court, in the form of plants that played a pivotal role in the colonial and industrial projects of the British Crown and the East India Company. In Dublin, these non-human witnesses assemble in a monumental installation of lightboxes, combined with a new video work gathering key testimony from the trial.
During this event, D’Souza will introduce the legal framework of the CICC and the case against the British East India Company, and be questioned by legal scholars, historians and activists. The public is invited to join this inauguration as members of the public jury, and will be asked whether they believe the evidence filed against the British East India Company stands. Public jury input will be included in the court’s final judgement.
Putting the British East India Company on trial, 425 years after its founding and 168 years after its dissolution in 1857, expands notions of intergenerational justice. It raises questions about reparations for crimes that transcend generations and examines how dissolved entities, like the EIC, endure as legal, institutional, and ideological frameworks for extractive capitalism and imperialism, perpetuating ecological collapse.
Location: Greenhouse Stage
Free, Drop-in
3 x 15 minutes talks about birds with Marie Louise Heffernan occurring on the below dates and times,
Marie Louise Heffernan is an experienced environmental consultant and Director of Aster Environmental Consultants Limited. With over 30 years of expertise in ecology, biodiversity planning, and marine assessments, she specializes in the Habitats Directive, ornithology, and fisheries.
Location: Greenhouse Stage
Free, drop-in
In conversation, Alannah and Marie Louise will explore how art can work together with science, as well as the importance of balancing biodiversity action with climate action. Interface’s work exploring art & ecology /land & sea
Marie Louise Heffernan is an experienced environmental consultant and Director of Aster Environmental Consultants Limited. With over 30 years of expertise in ecology, biodiversity planning, and marine assessments, she specializes in the Habitats Directive, ornithology, and fisheries.
Alannah Robins is a visual artist with an international interdisciplinary practice, with a love of nature at its heart. She is the founder and artistic director of Interface which has developed a strong reputation for its programming of arts which explore and interrogate ecological crises.
Location: The Chapel
Free, booking required. Book here.
Artist john gerrard will present recent art works both on and offline in this lecture which fundamentally asks: how to respond artistically and at scale to a global ecological and cultural polycrisis, now? And how, if at all, should contemporary mediums of computer, simulation, network, LED and web browsers operate and function in these responses?
john gerrard (b. Tipperary. Ireland 1974) is regarded as a key figure in the development of simulation within contemporary art. Recent exhibitions include Surrender (Flag) at Hayward Gallery, London. Western Flag at Dark Mofo, Tasmania. Flare for Onassis Foundation, Greece. Corn Work at Galway International Arts Festival, travelling to Gwangju Biennial, South Korea. Gerrard’s work is in the collections of Tate, London; MoMA, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; LACMA, Los Angeles, IMMA, Dublin
Location: Johnson Room
Free, booking required. Book here.
As part of the Dinnseanchas project, storyteller Aindrais de Staic met with members of the upland’s communities along the western seaboard from Ballybofey to Ballydehob.
Join Aindrais for an intimate session of scealtí cois tine as he explores the sustainable wisdom buried deep in the dinnseanchas.
Andrais de Staic is part of the Dinnseanchas project. Dinnseanchas is one of four projects selected from a national open call for Earth Rising 2025.
Location: Johnson Room
Free, booking required. Book here.
The book launch will feature conversations, readings and contributions by poet, artist and choreographer Alex Cecchetti, and writer and designer of Speculative Fictions, Onome Ekeh.
Biographies
Lucia Pietroiusti is Head of Research & Emergence at Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam. Pietroiusti founded the General Ecology project at Serpentine, London (2018-2025). Working on research, programming and experimentation at the intersection of art, ecology and systems, she is the curator of Sun & Sea (Venice Biennale, 2019 and international tour); and the co-editor of the More-than-Human (2020) and The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (with Filipa Ramos, 2025).
Onome Ekeh was born and raised on both sides of the Atlantic, OE started out as a painter , transitioned to design, fell in love with cinema, and somewhere in the collusion, went digital. Along the way she picked up an AI habit. She presides over a diverse body of work that encompasses film, video, theater, literature, and radio. Collaborations include works with Mabou Mines, Grisha Coleman, Okwui Okpokwasili, Carl Hancock Rux, David Thomson, and Annie Dorsen. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation Fellowship, a Turbulence Media Award, and the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen Fellowship. Most recent exhibitions include shows Especulaciones at Museo Moderno (Buenos Aires); the House of Electronic Arts Basel (HEK); Basel Social Club (Art Basel) and the upcoming Open Relationship (Fall 2026) at the Kunstmuseum Basel. During Berlin Art Week 2024, she curated The Glittering Field, a showcase featuring 16 international artists for AOA;87 Contemporary. OE is a frequent speaker and panelist on the cultural intersections of digital technology, AI, and nature. She currently lectures on Speculative Culture in the Masters and Bachelors program of the Basel Academy of Art & Design in Switzerland.
Alex Cecchetti is an artist, poet, choreographer who has developed a unique practice, difficult to classify, that could be called art of avoidance. Tactical and poetic, aesthetic and materialistic, its system produces specific situations or objects that can exist both inside and outside traditional exhibitions. It is in this double movement of representation and concealment that it is possible to inscribe his staging of invisible choreographies of hidden nudes and sleeping dancers. His work is focused in the construction of specific narratives that are experienced both mentally and physically by the audience. Two works can describe better the world in which Cecchetti plunges his audience. Louvre is the tour guide of the Louvre without the Louvre. The whole collection of the museum is summoned from the domain of the invisible through techniques of rhetoric, story-telling and dance. In Walking Backwards the spectator is accompanied literally to walk backward inside a story and to become the core of the vision. One who walks backwards does not know the nature of the images to come. The world does not come into sight smoothly, but it suddenly appears from nowhere. In the new paradigm in which the viewer plunges his life, the future is on the back and the past in the front. Unknowns are the images that appear, and intimate and full of meaning are those that leave from us, that remain still visible in the horizon. Devised and orchestrated by Alex Cecchetti, Voices of Urgency it is four days of panels of poetry and science hosted by Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, produced by FIAC and programmed during the international fair of contemporary art in Paris.
Cecchetti has exhibited his work broadly: recently with a double solo show with artist Laure Provoust at Netwerk, Aalst and an incantation at Serpentine Galleries London. An installation of his paintings and watercolours have been shown at Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2019). Solo exhibitions include: At the gate of the music palace at Spike Island, Bristol, UK and Void, Derry, Ireland (2018). Tamam Shud at La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel, France and Centre For Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; Cetaceans at Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2017); The Printing House of Hell at Kunstraum, London, UK (2015); Comrades of fear and wonder at Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania (2012). Cecchetti’s performances and incantations have been presented at venues including Serpentine Galleries (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris and ThalieLab / Thalie Art Foundation, Bruxelles (2017); Parades, Palais De La Découverte, FIAC, Paris and Playground Festival, M Leuven & STUK, Leuven, Belgium (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London (2015); Serralves Foundation, Porto, (2014); South London Gallery, London, and Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard in Paris (2013); MAXXI museum, Rome (2012).
As a writer, Alex Cecchetti has published two novels: “A society that breathes once a year”, Book Works, London, 2012; and “Tamam Shud”, Stenberg Press, Berlin 2017. Books of poetry include: Marie & William, a performance by Alex Cecchetti, MIDI & Mousse Publishing with Åbäke, 2015; and Manque D’imagination, Les Contemporains, Éditions P, Paris 2016. His texts and poems have appeared in different magazines and books.
Location: Lecture Room
Free, booking required. Book here.
The Cailleach, our deepest lore of place and most mysterious deity, requires that we look deeply at the stories shaping our world and choices. This talk looks at why transformation to a more regenerative society is not just about planting more trees but also requires a shift in perspective, mindset, and belief.
From the end of the last ice age right through to today’s world, Dinnseanchas’ researcher Jennifer Ahern will bring you on a journey across time, exploring some of the stories embedded in the Irish landscape through the eyes of the Cailleach. Looking at what lore and lessons they might hold in relation to the current Metacrisis.
Jennifer Ahern is part of the Dinnseanchas project. Dinnseanchas is one of four projects selected from a national open call for Earth Rising 2025.
Location: Lecture Room
Free, booking required. Book here.
Inspiring conversation with ecologist Dr Joanne O Brien, artist Lisa Fingleton, Rena Blake, Sean Cullhane and the Brilliant Ballybunion community collaborators. Showcasing the strength of collaboration between people, communities and nature. Celebrating collective effort and shared ideas.
We will share learning over the previous two years of our Creative Climate Action Project and will particularly focus on new Ballybunion Nature Group (Ring Plover Conservation) and Ballybunion Bean Festival.
This festival took place in August and focused on our relationship with the bean, ‘boldly going when no one has bean before’ to explore a more climatarian and plant based diet.
Location: The Chapel
Free, booking required. Book here.
What happens when artists, activists, and communities come together to imagine new ways of living, creating, and caring?
This panel brings together the four commissioned projects from Earth Rising’s national open call, each offering a unique and inspiring approach to building connection with land, with community, and with the more-than-human world. While diverse in form and theme, these projects share a common goal: to create kin and cultivate more caring, resilient, and imaginative futures.
Hosted by Lisa Fitzsimons, Head of Strategy and Sustainability at IMMA, the panel will feature:
From humpback whales to wild herbs, upland rituals to offshore resistance, join us for a rich and hopeful conversation about creative climate action, rural innovation, and the power of place-based storytelling.
Location: The Chapel
Free, booking required. Book here.
In the face of planetary crisis, what if we imagined a different way forward?
Conceived as a hopeful and grounded space for reflection at the end of the festival, this closing panel doesn’t shy away from the scale of the challenges we face. Instead, it invites us to explore bold alternatives to the dominant logic of extraction and acceleration.
Together, we’ll consider how post-growth thinking, climate justice, and new definitions of prosperity and resilience can help us navigate the real-world tensions between breakdown, transition, and transformation.
Drawing inspiration from the Sowing Worlds theme in IMMA’s Staying with the Trouble exhibition, this conversation brings together creative thinkers, and changemakers to explore how imagination, storytelling, and creativity can help shape better futures. It’s about what happens when we plant seeds, of ideas, of action, of community, and how they might take root in surprising ways.
This final gathering is a space to reflect, reconnect, and carry the spirit of the festival forward – with honesty, courage, and care.
Panellists include:
The EARTH RISING 2025 programme offers a wide variety of events under the headings – Art Installations, Workshops, Talks, Music, Tours & Activities and Screenings. To see what’s on browse the panel below under each of the headings.
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