Languages of land as night draws in

This event—hosted by Lyth Arts Centre in partnership with The Bare Project and CUSP at the University of Surrey (UK) as part of Creative Carbon Scotland’s Climate Beacons for COP26 and linked into the 2021 ESRC Festival of Social Science—is designed for local people in the Caithness area, who are interested in land justice, the role of language in our relationships with land, and contemporary performance.

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What does a reciprocal relationship with land look, smell, feel, sound like? If we try to move beyond ownership and extraction—or even conservation—how do we then relate to the hazel-shaws, aps’tgu’j, and móinéar**?

Whilst the COP26 conference is in full-swing in Glasgow, The Bare Project (a theatre and interactive arts company) together with CUSP will be at Lyth Arts in Caithness, the UK’s most northernly mainland arts centre, trying to understand ancient relationships with land that may help guide our future.

We will be working with crofters, linguists, a herbalist, academics, a filmmaker, and a fiddle player to get to grips with the languages of land that have been all-but lost to British colonialism, and post-industrial capitalism.

We are a group of English speakers and recognise that these stories, concepts, and words cannot necessarily be directly translated. So, what experiences can we create to help others to understand these languages of land when words are insufficient?

Join us at 7pm on the 11th November for an audio-visual performance installation and a meal to help us answer these questions. This installation is part of a broader project called The People’s Palace of Possibility, a long-form arts and permaculture project which took off via the postal service during the lockdowns of 2020, and will culminate in a community-owned food forest in South Yorkshire. The live audience will be invited to explore the many rooms of The People’s Palace of Possibility, each with a different invitation for conversation or play. The piece will feature an audio artwork including the voices of local people on the theme of their relationships with land. As part of the installation we will also share a meal created from locally grown and foraged ingredients.

The work will be made available to online audiences in the form of a short film on 24 November.

The exact location for our evening in Caithness will be confirmed shortly.