The Research
The idea to explore residues and the frequencies within the garden and spaces of Ponderosa, a community working and living together for over 20 years.
A constant flow of new people in and out, many regularly returning, forever growing the community.
We are interested in looking at the history of how and why Ponderosa was set up and if the original ideas are still relevant or a reality.
The ghosts of the past that lie in the land before it became a community and the journey it has been up until now.
A process of recording the sounds of the environment, bringing them together, synthesising and creating a sonic catalogue with the residues of the past and present energies.
To interview and catalogue and then sample parts of the interviews with core members about their original intentions and processes of building the community
and to see how they envision the future.
To create together a new work that will be the backing and basis to a score with the idea to eventually incorporate a
choir of singing voices from the worldwide and visiting community.
As well as this sonic catalogue, to make drawings in the space, drawings of dance of the architecture and the land and from these drawings, make costumes.
As part of a performance to wear these paper costumes and go in the the water to swim and let them be dissolved.
As a symbol of letting the energy of the past go, a recognition of transience, interaction and transformation.
Community in the arts is of utmost importance in the present day if non- commercial artists and visionaries are to survive and be sustained. Community means working with the land, listening to each other and listening to what is needed to break out of the limitations of our own personalexperiences.
Constantly opening to new diversities, outlooks, connecting with young and old and looking in to how hierarchies might unintentionally or naturally
exist in such communities.
Looking at systems and infrastructure and how it is vital to constantly check-in and question if things need to be updated or looked on in new ways.
The Artists
Nina Hynes – Laura Burns – Alicja Czyczel
Nina Hynes
Bio to come
Laura Burns
I am an interdisciplinary artist working across writing, performance, dance, painting, sound and healing practices. Finding ways of listening to plant, stone, spirit, water, land and its relations guides my practice and is an ongoing collaboration with human and nonhuman ancestors. I explore the intersection of somatic practice, journeying, ceremony and vocal sounding as a primary mode of communicating with a plurality of beings; asking in what ways earth-based devotion/divination practices intersect with transformative justice and abolitionist futures. I am particularly bound to the ongoing and otherwise power of rivers and their material-spiritual life-force.
I hold an AHRC funded, practice-based PhD in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University. My project follows an ongoing relationship with the River Wyre, its witch-hunt history, its alchemical river stones, personal ancestries of mental health, and the entanglements of this history with white settler colonialism.
“The unearthings” are the umbrella term for an ongoing body of artistic research that emerged from this PhD, exploring how an expanded form of land dreaming/listening at the imaginal encounter between body, place and spirit, gives rise to certain “otherwise” futures.
I am also a Family Constellations practitioner and Kundalini Yoga teacher; these inform my artistic practice. My constellations work focusses on land/migration/displacement as well as constellating creative projects, dreams, spirit/soul worlds. I am in ongoing collaborations with Shelley Etkin, as LARK: Living Archive of Re-membered Knowledges and am a member of the working group Decolonising Botany, initiated by Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe and launched at Liverpool Bienniale 2021.
Alicja Czyczel
Bio to come
The Outcome
