Bunker Talk #152: Lena Šimić x James Marriott

Dr Lena Šimić is Liverpool-based transnational performance maker, local politician, activist, pedagogue and scholar researching contemporary performance and the maternal as well as arts responses to the climate crisis. Reader in Drama at Edge Hill University. Lena was a co-organiser of the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home between 2008 and 2018. Together with Emily Underwood-Lee, she ran the AHRC funded Performance and the Maternal project with a number of outputs including Manifesto for Maternal Performance (Art) 2016! (2017). Her short play, Three Conversations in collaboration with her sons, Neal and Sid, was commissioned for Climate Change Theatre Action in 2019. She has recently collaborated with James Marriott, Platform, on an audio play Three Sisters: A Story from the Climate Future (Big Light, 2023).

James Marriott works as part of Platform, which since 1983 has combined art, activism, education and research. He is co-creator a wide range of projects from performance to download-opera, from film to non-fiction books. These include And While London Burns (2007), The Oil Road (Verso 2012), Crude Britannia (Pluto 2021) and The Oil Machine (BBC 2021).