Your current show's with Ian Rawlinson. Regular collaborators?
We work together every week. We're both working on solo projects at the minute, as well. We keep it all going, together.

It's the inaugural show at Tmesis. Chuffed?
It's such a nice thing to be the first people to have a go at a space. It's really exciting to get a new gallery opening in Manchester showing interesting work.

You've paraphrased Beuys for the show's title. Is the work faithful to him?
Not sure it's the key to the piece but I suppose it's like a joke you get if you get it.
Do you see what I mean? - The associations of Beuys and Green politics, and then you have what the piece is about: preparing for the destruction of the greenbelt. There's an obvious relationship there.

So you yourselves don't sit in the space for the duration?
No. You've got these four big photographs of four sites in the Manchester-Macclesfield greenbelt, with four videos. Each of the four videos show us at one of the sites playing construction sound: horrible, like jackhammers. It's actually stuff we recorded around Manchester.

How do you 'transmit' Urbanism to wild animals?
Through speakers - that in each location are slightly different. When we're wandering around woods we've got these old '50s speakers on poles that we're shoving up into the trees. Then we've got these little speakers, that you can plug into a Walkman, and we put them down the burrows. At each place, Urbanism is explained in different ways to a different eco-system.

Do you trust humans will be moved by this too, or sense a reaction to it?
Well, a lot of the work that we do together comes through discussion so that it has to mean something to us. Yes, I suppose there is always the sense that you're working with the intention of creating an affect on a viewer, but it's not necessarily always 'think about this', it can be 'look at this', you know?

Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson: Explaining Urbanism to wild animals is at Tmesis Gallery until Friday, November 1.