A participative event that took place on Saturday 14 September 2024 from 14:00 to 15:30 BST at Coventry Cathedral.

"In June 1968, John Lennon and Yoko Ono launched ‘Acorns for Peace’ on the grounds of Coventry Cathedral.

Alongside trees planted in 2005 by Yoko, their global planetary intervention, will be situated by specialists in music, art and ecologies. We will exercise participative arts, hear the speakers Pete Chambers (Music Museum), Paul Wood (author of many books on trees) and Ros Gray (Co-Director of the Centre for Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths), facilitated by Nirmal Puwar (Co-Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths). Organised with the Food Union Harvest Festival as part of Heritage Week.

This workshop will journey the routes and after-lives of specific acorns linked to the cathedral. John Lennon and Yoko Ono unexpectedly showed up at the cathedral in June 1968, to enter their ‘living sculpture’ into the prestigious Exhibition of British Sculpture, held in the ruins of the cathedral, including the works of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, which coincided with an international conference on ‘People and Cities’. The question of space was central to the exhibition and the conference, as it was to John and Yoko’s living sculpture. Their ‘Acorns for Peace’, for the East (from John to Yoko) and the West (from Yoko to John), were planted outside the exhibition, on the grass outside the Chapel of Unity, constituting an event, which enfolded further when the acorns were moved soon after, by the cathedral, stolen by a fan and found again this year."