Join artist collective Al-Wah’at for a hands-on workshop exploring Sheffield’s relationship to the Mediterranean fig tree.

Al-Wah’at (Ailo Ribas, Gabriella Demczuk, Areej Ashhab) often work with plants to look closer at the histories and ecologies of places and people. For their four-day artist residency with Arts Catalyst, they chose the fig tree as their companion to unveil stories of the migration of seeds and people as inherent to Sheffield’s industrial heritage.

For years, Sheffield’s steel industry had warmed the local rivers by using river water to cool its machinery and metal, creating microclimates that allowed exotic flora, like wild fig trees, to grow along the urban riverbanks. As fig seeds traveled with people, they began to germinate and lay roots in their new home. Amidst the heavy industrial pollution, they found a way to thrive in an unfamiliar place.

With these ideas in mind, the workshop will use natural materials such as plants, fabric, leaves, and soil to print images and explore alternative mapping methods that will come together into a zine publication. You will be invited to take part in a tactile and sensorial conversation around the movement of seeds, the stories they carry, and their connection to people, guided by your experience of and encounters with the fig tree.

Seeds that Travel: Finding Figs with Al-Wah’at is part of Castlegate Festival 2026 and is the first public activity of La Escuelita, Arts Catalyst’s new programme dedicated to sharing intergenerational migrant knowledges of plants, soils, places, and environments.

This workshop is part of Castlegate Festival 2026.

Access

The workshop will be held in Arts Catalyst’s Community Hub at Exchange Place and starts at 12pm. A break is scheduled at 1.30pm but participants are welcome to move around, take time out, and eat whenever they need to. Light refreshments will be available throughout the workshop.

The workshop will be on the ground floor and has step free access. You’ll find the entrance to the workshop space at the back of the Exchange Place lobby and someone on the front desk should be able to point you in the right direction. The entrance to the venue is wheelchair accessible. You will need to ring a doorbell for someone to let you in.

Public universal toilets are available on the ground floor. While the toilet is designed to be wheelchair accessible, this is through two sets of double doors.

Soft and hard seating options are available.

About the Artists

Formed by Ailo Ribas, Gabriella Demczuk, and Areej Ashhab in 2022, Al-Wah’at is an artist-research collective engaging with practices of care and repair in lands designated waste. Their work investigates colonial and nationalist representations of wastelands and “invasive” species through attending to an array of knowledges -local, folk, scientific, literary- to advocate for a deeper understanding of these murky ecologies, especially in light of climate change. They are 2025 residents at the Jan Van Eyck Academy, 2023 LINA fellows, and recipients of the 2023 COAL prize for art and ecology. Their project Wild Hedges, begun at Sakiya organisation in Ein Qiniya, Palestine, through the Soil Futures program organised by Arts Catalyst, is supported by the British Council, ANHAR Culture and Climate Platform, The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and TEXERE.

Description supplied by the event organiser.