Decolonising The Outdoors is a creative and community project which dismantles narratives of dominating land and extracting nature. Their events focus on rebuilding relationships with our natural environment, and imagining anti-imperial and anti-capitalist futures. 

As part of their commission for EAF25, artist Aileen Angsutorn Lees explored our connections to the outdoors and how our surroundings affect what our bodies carry. This project became Tectonics, an artist book in which the artist weaves their writing and artwork with community voices and historical texts.

For their first collaboration with the EAF Civic Programme, diaspora/sunago brought space for BPOC* participants in Edinburgh to gather, walk, reflect and discuss ways of healing. Following a closed group session in June 2025, this continuing body of work brings together those previously separated (sunago) to explore ways to heal through food, community and the outdoors. 

Decolonising The Outdoors is run by Aileen Angsutorn Lees, a queer Thai-British multidisciplinary artist and facilitator based in Perthshire. 

Events Programme

See more from Decolonising the Outdoors in:
→ UPCOMING: Decolonising the Outdoors: Tectonics Book Launch at EAF @ 92
→ PAST: diaspora/sunago at The EAF Pavilion

*BPOC stands for ‘Black people and People of Colour’ and is a self-identifying term. While the term BPOC is used here, there are limitations with this terminology. These sessions aim to address and overcome systemic barriers that people face directly or indirectly based on their ethnic or national identities, race or perceived racial identities, or the colour of their skin as per the Equality Act 2010. This includes people who identify as Black, brown, people of colour, Global Majority, mixed-race, multiple heritage and/or are from the Global South, and/or are East and Southeast Asian, West Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Arab, African, African-Caribbean, Caribbean, Latinx, Pacific Islander, Indigenous, or First Nations, and diasporas.