Extreme Noticing under Lockdown: Trees Edition!

Putting the culture in arboriculture, this short film is about how a newly launched art-walking collective in Birmingham was shut down by the global pandemic... but discovered a practice called ‘Extreme Noticing’ as a result. 

As narrator Fiona Cullinan and her fellow walking artists walked the same streets in Stirchley over and over again under lockdown exercise restrictions, they started to observe all sorts of seemingly mundane oddities and curiosities: a hall of mirrors door, baffling vintage notices, a moustachioed cat, misaligned drain covers – and plenty of curious trees. 

This informal survey turned into a collaborative map with nearly 250 pins, and was opened up to others walking in the area.

The pandemic has offered humans a chance to reconnect to nature and the world immediately around them. We have started to look more closely at our surroundings, and our street, park and wasteland trees, and perhaps really see them for the first time. 

This special one-off ‘Trees Edition’ of the Extreme Noticing project offers a compilation of the weird and the wonderful urban trees in the heart of one small city suburb. From fence-eating trees to franken-plants, strange things that people put in trees, romantic trees, rogue trees, tree tunnels, tree portals and a whole new world of tree-based activities.

At a time when the value of trees is growing in importance, every tree counts and through this film we invite you to take a closer look at the ones in your area. 

Contributor

Fiona Cullinan, Pete Ashton, Andy Howlett from Walkspace.uk

Walkspace is a collective of writers and artists in the West Midlands who are intrigued by walking in all its forms.

From gentle strolls to hardcore psychogeography, group walks to solo explorations, Walkspace covers the interesting, weird edges of the humble perambulation. There are no right or wrong ways to go for a walk but there are definitely ways to make them curious and enlightening.

We launched in February 2020, shut down for the pandemic and are gradually finding our feet again.