Expanding on my speculative project – residencies
‘If the land could speak to you and you were listening to try and understand it, what would you say back?’ (https://atlasarts.org.uk/assets/files/Samhla-Publication_Digital-merge-with-Poster.pdf)
This was the question posed to artist Lauren Gault for her cultural project Samlha which explored land and place relations in 2022. This question solidified part of what I am trying to explore in my speculative project. What emotions/stories/memories does the land hold? And how can we reconnect with this emotional Anthropocene?
During this week’s meeting with my collective I decided that my project would take the form of a residency. At the moment I am thinking that I might invite four artists to partake in three month residencies – one artist for each season. Responding to the seasons, the residency would take place on a plot of land, with each artist invited to care for and cultivate the land using ancient farming techniques. These techniques could date back to ‘An Gorta Mór’ (the famine), or the could even be a pagan land ritual. Both the famine and paganism represent a strong emotional connection with the land, the former connected by trauma and grief, and the latter connected spiritually and narratively.
Listening to the land as a way of better understanding it – something explored in Rural Futurisms, a work by Leonardo Pisano and Philip Samartzis (2016). It was an artist residency which mapped the geography of rural Italian regions through collecting sound.
The Rural Futurism Manifesto (https://www.ruralfuturism.com/) puts forward that sound is linked to knowledge. Therefore by collecting and exhibiting this form of knowledge, the political discourses and paradigms which relegate rural areas to invisibility and marginality are challenged. The residency aspect played an important role in the piece, with the artist invited to the regions to respond to a space with fresh eyes, encouraging them to collect data in the form of sound.
Therefore my project is going to look at the possibility of an artist residency.
