Legacy of the Land

Times: Artist talks at Turf’s Project Space 11-12:30 and 4-5:30, with a workshop at Croydon Urban Room from 2-4pm.

Join us for a day of programming centred around the legacies and reimagining of Croydon, featuring two talks from Norman Mine and Lukasz Izdebski, and Nicolaas Victor van de Lande and Lucía Scarselletta. There is also a drop-in workshop with Croydon Urban Room and Toe Press.

Focusing on each artist’s practice, the talks will explore their relationship to Croydon and its community, leaving space for questions and conversation between the artists and audience.

The workshop will create a collaborative concertina book using materials from Turf, Croydon Urban Room and Museum of Croydon archives, exploring the potential of these sites through personal narrative and art making. The final collage work will be curated into a book within the session and with permissions, installed in Fungus Press.

‘Legacy Of The Land’ offers a day of workshops and talks that attributes the ownership of space in Croydon to those who live and work locally, exploring how residents and community members are engaging with the area through creative practices.

In collaboration with Royal College of Art’s Arts and Humanities MFA, Turf Projects and Croydon Urban Room, this project aims to explore the potential of community spaces through histories, regeneration and art making. By bringing residents together through creative activities, the project hopes to engage both the dedicated community of Turf, as well as other public spaces within Croydon where the community is positioned at the forefront, and thrives together.

About the artists

Legacy of the Land is programmed by Arts and Humanities MFA students at the Royal College of Art as part of the Live Unit 2025: Giulio Cuccagna, Alejandra Miguel Dada, Emilia Dynes, Tati El Mallah, Binbin Hao, Hojin Im, Yili Ma, Keru Qian, Yuanye Qiu, Levin Stettler, Tori Tanigawa, Hao Wang, and Jinglin Wang.

Toe Press is an independent publishing press and collective, delivering workshops centred around zine creation and short form writing – putting accessible creative education first. Run by Marcie Lewis, a book making technician specialising in zine, book and box construction and Tati Mallah, an editor specialising in short form writing and printed image.

Nicolaas van de Lande is an artist living and working in South East London. He explores fibre in sculpture and painting, using self-taught electrostatic flocking to create tactile, artificial surfaces that evoke comfort through product design aesthetics. He aims for his sculptural paintings to challenge viewers to see artificiality as authentic, re-contextualising the “synthetic” as deeply human and layered.

Lucía Scarselletta is an Argentine artist based in London. Her practice delves into narratives within the textile world exploring themes around migration, ecology and gender. Through research, sculpture, video, drawing and writing she rescues, repurposes and re-signifies discarded material in order to shape a post-industrial, decentralised and resilient worldview. She currently works from her studio at Turf Projects and is in residency at Croydon’s Conditions online program.

Norman Mine is an Italian artist based in London. Norman explores identity through performance art, shifting between personas to reflect the roles artists navigate today. Born Francesco Benenato in Naples, he operates as Norman Mine, the visual artist, and Dino Desica, the actor, using self-reinvention to examine belonging, exclusion, and societal expectations.

Lukasz Izdebski is a portrait photographer passionate about storytelling, identity, queer experiences and wellbeing. His work has been exhibited at Queer Britain – the UK’s first and only LGBTQ+ museum – and the Museum of Croydon, and has earned recognition in the International Photography Awards and Portrait of Britain. Through collaboration he aims to create images to encourage conversations, human connection and understanding of others.