Blackburn’s National Festival of Making Celebrates Collaborations Between Art and Industry | Colossal

July 9, 2025
Art
Craft
Design
Kate Mothes

Morag Myerscough in collaboration with Crown Paints. All images courtesy of the artists and the National Festival of Making

This year marked the seventh edition of the festival’s theme, “Art in Manufacturing,” with large-scale installations and dozens of events.

Every year, in the town of Blackburn, Lancashire, a vibrant festival erupts with creativity in a celebration of art, craft, and industry. This year marked the seventh edition of the National Festival of Making, organized along the theme of “Art in Manufacturing.” Acclaimed artists and designers teamed up with industry leaders to create works using a variety of materials, from Morag Myerscough’s collaboration with Crown Paints for a vibrant new mural to Liaqat Rasul’s partnership with textile producer Herbert Parkinson for an optical installation.

Locality played a central role in the festival, as artists were paired with manufacturers in Lancashire. Matter at hand, the design practice of Lewis Jones, teamed up with Darwen Terracotta and Faience, which focuses on traditional glazed earthenware for home products and restoration (faience is a type of tin-glazed pottery).

Matter at hand in collaboration with Darwen Terracotta, “Poured Earth” (detail)

Matter at hand created a large-scale installation titled “Poured Earth,” which takes an architectural approach to materials in the northern transept of Blackburn Cathedral. The piece invites visitors to walk through an archway of wooden crates and around cast elements in various shapes and sizes, emphasizing the timelessness and continuity of earthen building materials and styles. […]

Detail of a mural by Morag Myerscough in collaboration with Crown Paints

Source: Blackburn’s National Festival of Making Celebrates Collaborations Between Art and Industry

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Could ‘degrowth’ save the world? | BBC News

A group of academics and activists are questioning the possibility of endless economic growth on a finite planet and are advocating a bold solution: degrowth.

Originating in France, the degrowth movement has spread to places like Japan, the UK and Barcelona, taking root in academia, grassroots organisations and among university students.

The movement argues for a ‘democratisation of the economy’ and for collectively managing key resources, like housing.

Critics argue that opposing economic growth is impractical and warn of negative consequences, especially for the most vulnerable.

We take a look at the theory – and ask what the practice might look like.

00:00 Intro
02:32 The Barcelona School of Ecological economics: the roots of degrowth
05:39 Is GDP a good measure of our economies?
06:45 Could the economy be more democratic?
08:07 A net-zero housing cooperative
10:16 What can grow, and what needs to degrow?
12:31 Could green growth be a solution?
13:29 Degrowth and social justice
17:18 Challenging degrowth

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The Middle East interval: Aug 2nd

I just did a composition called Middle East Fantasy. I initially wrote it to show how the augmented 2nd interval is used in music, but I ended up doing more because I got interested in the musical idea. When a scale contains a fat tone, that’s what gives it the Middle East sound. And when it appears in a scale, the fat tone will be written as an augmented 2nd.

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How I wish Scales & Modes were explained to me as a student

➡ My Guide to Scales/Modes: https://www.nahresol.com/scales-modes (use discount code LEARN10 for $10 off)
➡ Patreon: / nahresol

Instagram @nahresol
Twitter @nahresol
Facebook @practicenotes

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Man Spends Over a Decade Beautifying His Brooklyn Neighborhood With Street Art [Interview] | Colossal

By Jessica Stewart on July 8, 2025

“Life is way too short not to give it your all!”

Born and bred in Bushwick, Joe Ficalora has transformed the face of his neighborhood, transforming it into an open-air art museum with a project he calls the Bushwick Collective. But Ficalora is not your typical art curator. In fact, one could say he’s an accidental art curator who, in the best way, used his personal pain to reshape his environment.

n 2011, after losing his mother to a devastating battle with brain cancer, Ficalora was looking for a change. Unhappy with the graffiti-covered walls around him, he and a cousin went and painted a wall white, only to have it defaced after six hours. Frustrated by the situation, he began searching the internet for street artists who could transform the walls with their art. Even though he had no connections or experience with the art world, he took a chance and invited several artists to come and paint. And in June 2012, the Bushwick Collective was born.

Over the past 13 years, Ficalora’s personal initiative has changed Bushwick and drawn top-tier local and international talent. Everyone from legendary street artists Blek le Rat and Jef Aerosol to My Modern Met favorites Dasic and Alice Pasquini have left their mark on Bushwick’s walls.

What makes the Bushwick Collective unique in terms of street art projects is its scope, which moves far beyond the aesthetics of the finished artwork. Ficalora cares deeply that anyone who brings their work to the neighborhood understands its history and is passionate about being part of the community. And each year, an annual block party brings that community out en masse—a stark contrast to Ficalora’s days growing up there in the 90s, when he wasn’t allowed to play outside for safety reasons. […]

Tymon de Laat for The Bushwick Collective

Bushwick Collective Artist BBQ, an annual event held for artists who have painted for the collective. (Photo: Dave Lee)

Interview & more: Man Spends Over a Decade Beautifying His Brooklyn Neighborhood With Street Art [Interview]

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This Gorgeous Gemstone Traps Nuclear Waste

This month’s Rocks Box is the perfect combo of beauty and brains. Sodalite is a gorgeous blue mineral that has a superpower – its tiny pores can trap all kinds of molecules, making it the perfect sieve for everything from industrial practices to cleaning up pollution. And this month’s Rocks Box subscribers get their own! Head to Complexly.store/rocks to learn more.

Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)

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My Wife Cross-stitched the London Underground

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Ana Paula Mota | DANÇA DA MÃOZINHA? ✋ (participação especial Mário bros) @tchakabum

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Jemma Heigis | Phrygian Dominant

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You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism

Go to https://ground.news/benn to combat rampant misinformation online. See through bias and compare multiple perspectives. Sign up through my link to get 40% off unlimited access on the Vantage plan. Proceeds for this sponsorship will go to UNICEF Ukraine.
Notes, suggested reading, and corrections below 👇🏻

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Corrections and notes:
A few things were possibly over-simplified to prevent this from becoming a 170 part Ken Burns series. Please do some searching/reading and learn your butt off! I’ll add to these as needed, as responding to comments will just get lost in the ether of YouTube comment pages.

Futures contracts and options are a bit different. In a contract, the buyer is obligated to buy the asst, and an option frees them of that obligation.

The wealth generated in the 1950’s can also be greatly contributed to much of Europe’s destruction and how America used that as leverage to lend money under the condition of the US dollar being standardized for trade. This is a fascinating hour long video in itself.

I anticipate that a portion of viewers will argue that this is just a new phase of capitalism. I disagree, but delving further into that disagreement requires further analyzing the semantic definition of “capitalism”, which is probably a waste of time. So whether this is a new thing that doesn’t have a name or a new mutation of capitalism that doesn’t have a name, both are correct in describing the circumstances.

Bitcoin would’ve been a great answer to a lot of these problems. Unfortunately it’s not used as a currency, but as a prospective asset. If it’s not replacing the US dollar enmasse, it’s not a solution to anything in this video. In fact, it makes a lot of this worse when you consider the insane amount of alt-coins.

Further viewing:
There is no higher recommendation on YouTube than @PBoyle for anything related to finance or economic history.

Adam Curtis (BBC, etc) makes films that provide excellent surreal recaps of recent history that absolutely inspire me greatly.

LOTS of books I recommend:
Technofuedalism is an excellent and accessible book about this from Yanis Varoufakis. It’s actually a bit more far-reaching (and scary) than my conclusions in this video.

All of the following inspired this video:
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
New Dark Age by James Bridle
Capital is Dead: Is this something worse? by McKenzie Wark

Finally, there are too many books to name about WWII and the Soviet Union that fascinate me endlessly. There is so much to learn those time-encapsulated parallel economies.

Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro
1:43 – CH1 Capitalism (A Eulogy)
9:23 – CH2 History Repeats Itself
19:33 – CH3 Post Capitalism
26:27 – CH4 Digital Sharecropping
36:10 – Conclusions

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