This Weekend? Seminar Weekend

11th - 13th September at Treveal Farm, Zennor
(courtesy of Jon & Wyn Brookes and the National Trust)

This seminar brought artists and others together to look at what could be said to be an increasingly contested territory: the rural. The seminar explored an approach to practice that sites itself amidst the complexities of context, that concerns itself with questions beyond the specificity of place: change, complexity, systems and power relations.

Against the back-drop of credit crunch and ecological imperatives, the rural is increasingly becoming a site to which people are drawn to find alternatives. People who perhaps ten years ago might have been drawn to escape the rat race, to re-embrace the good life, in today’s climate, may well make a similar journey but frame it as a political or ecological choice.

On the other side of the coin, many people living in Cornwall feel like they are ‘living in a museum’. Now derelict landscapes were once thriving with activity and a resident population. What is the meaning of these sites in a contemporary world of instant connection? Are they still places that can be actively lived and worked? And what of preservation? What are we preserving – granite, landscapes, memories or shared histories? Whose history, whose story?

It is a context that ranges from the picture post-card image, the poetic and the idyllic to contemporary issues that leave it as politically contested as at any time in its past.

What strategies can we use to engage meaningfully in these complexities?

A seminar with a difference - camping, sea dips, coastal ambles, lots of good conversation, stimulating dialogue and ideas exchange, chilling, good food and amazing company...!

Speakers

Chris Fremantle www.chris.fremantle.org
On the Edge Research www.ontheedgeresearch.org and Ayrshire Artists Network www.ayrshirearts.com
and the text is at www.fremantle.org/chris/writing/soil-v20/

Annie Lovejoy & Mac Dunlop
Caravanserai, Roseland, Cornwall

Caravanserai is an arts residency project initiated by Annie Lovejoy and Mac Dunlop at Treloan Coastal Holidays (fieldsite.wordpress.com), a caravan and camping site on the Roseland peninsula in Cornwall. In partnership with the campsite owners, Pete & Debs Walker they are working to promote sustainable tourism through hosting creative activities that engage with, and celebrate the local environment and culture.

The project is envisaged as a creative way to engage in issues that are resonant with Cornwall. From local food to transport to energy, from waste to water & wildlife ..without a sustainable approach to tourism that protects the specific qualities of place and people we are faced with losing the amenities and meeting places that are central to our communities.

Jem Mackay
This Weekend? and Swarm TV www.swarmtv.org
An enquiry into the political structures of open, non-heirachical collaborative filmmaking. Jem designed the website for the This Weekend? project and has an interest in the use of inter-active technologies in rural environments.

Alex Murdin
r u r a l r e c r e a t i o n www.ruralrecreation.org.uk/ countryside and leisure: access: environment: inclusion

Alex talked about a range of his projects designed to elucidate the political structures that control access to the countryside, suggesting alternatives to cliched Romanticism and hackneyed environmentalism.

For instance one of his projects is Immersion: A Strategic Framework for Eco-recreation in British Waters delivers a unique perspective on the future of sustainable water recreation.
Essential reading for strategic organisations and others in the UK whose work impinges on water environments.
Drawing on major social and ecological themes it:
• Sets out the case for more sustainable leisure use of waterscapes in the UK.
• Explores the major challenges for water ecologies in the 21st century.
• Visions a radical new future for redundant lidos and pools as facilities for recreation, aquaculture and education

A text based on his talk is available on the Art Cornwall website here www.artcornwall.org/features/Alex_Murdin_Art_in_Aspic.htmg

David Paton
TEND Trewidden Garden, Penzance