I recall that the process of making these bottles (wedging sloes into the small bottle necks, pouring in gin) was accompanied by music and much general merriment. I also remember feeling vaguely worried – as organiser of this event – that our funders, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, might not deem this an appropriately scholarly use of our time. This was an understandable anxiety, perhaps, but looking back it was also completely misplaced: much of the success of the network (if success it was, let’s not be too self-congratulatory) was built on a sense of camaraderie and openness that relied precisely on moments like this. There’s an ecology in this, of course – the connectivity of the social and physical alongside (and as vital stimulants to) the intellectual and artistic.

3 years on, that first meeting seems a long time ago. We met subsequently at Cove Park in Scotland, at Kings College in London, and some of us then also convened for an additional meeting in Bristol… The last paved the way for Multi-Story Water (officially “Before the Flood”), the year-long follow-on project in collaboration with members of another AHRC Researching Environmental Change network, which developed site-specific performance work in collaboration with community members in flood-threatened areas of Bristol and Bradford. That ran in 2012 (during which we also published an edition of Performance Research arising from the network proceedings), and in 2013 we got a bit of additional funding to do further Multi-Story follow-up activities, which we’re still in the process of reporting on.

And then just two days ago, October 15th 2013, I was in Swindon (lovely Swindon) as part of a team being interviewed by AHRC high command to see if we merit a large grant award to pursue a 3 year, interdisciplinary consortium project on “Hydro-Citizenship”… in many ways this follows on directly from Multi-Story Water, which follows on directly from the network. So yes, a lot got started this day 3 years ago. And it’s finally time to drink the gin, I think…

OK, so I was a bit apprehensive about this… thought I might poison myself with rotten fruit. But I am delighted to report that, just as Sue said it would, this concoction has certainly improved with age! … Some people drank theirs pretty much straight away, and it tasted like neat gin with a hint of fruit. Three years on, though, it’s rich and full and fruity and really rather gorgeous.

Cheers!

The Naked Nave

the Normans as non-racist colonialists

the abbey – a place of capital accumulation – the expansion of which generated a crisis in the 14^th century (the manilla ring – holding the price of a slave in one’s hand – what is the equivalent here?)

origins in ascetic resistance – a riot that became a march/quest – the choosing of a bleak place

ENACT THE 13 REBEL MONKS – BLOK’S ‘THE TWELVE’ – IN THE SNOW REJOICING IN POVERTY – THEIR INITIAL REBELLION INSPIRED BY THE SIGHT OF A PROCESSION OF HUMBLE CISTERCIANS – BUT THEIRS WAS A FAILED UTOPIA AND THEY EVENTUALLY TURNED TO THE CISTERCIANS TO KEEP THEM GOING

every year a meeting in France – globalisation under Rome

birthplace of capitalism

not so sure we should jump to the assumption that these were Chaucerian figures (with a brothel over the hill) – what if they were Ayn Rand types worshipping the more ascetic and minimalist pleasures of power (the generator of pleasurable hypocrisy – the tension between the display of humility and the exercise of power through exchange and fastidiousness and accumulation)

INSTALL A RAILWAY THROUGH THE NAVE (a railway track was installed when the removal of rubble from the nave was effected – an early Pope Pius ordered the roofing of Christian places of worship – the establishment of interiority)

INSTALL A BMW IN THE NAVE (a pair of swans fly down the nave)   vapour trails

RESTORE THE DIVISIONS OF THE NAVE – TODAY IT SUGGESTS A HUGE DEMOCRACY, REPLACE THE WALLS WITH GIANT CURTAINS

Altar Celebrants (Tim Nunn, Phil Smith)

the attitude to nature – it is not a fixed ‘given’, but a gift, a tool – the river is redirected – floods – the past reasserting itself

“surprise” views  – the engineering of ‘spontaneity’

the eighteenth century Serpentine Tunnel – this seems to be a symbolical device, for there is a moment when the tunnel twists cutting off light from the entrance and it is necessary to take a single step into pitch darkness in order to see the first glow of light from the other end of the tunnel… this is a suggestive of a spiritual or esoteric process – through darkness into the light. – Stephen, you called the tunnel “completely gratuitous” but I wonder if it is not part of a very carefully constructed symbolic machine…

Serpentine Tunnel

ENACT A MASS INDUCTION THROUGH THE TUNNEL – FROM THE HIERARCHICAL LOOKING TO THE BRUTAL AFTERMATH OF CARNIVAL AROUND THE POOLS – DARKNESS INTO LIGHT – THE RITUAL OF THE EARTH’S MASS EXTINCTIONS … EVERYTHING COVERED IN ASH, A CRASH SITE

there is a hierarchy of looking – the gardens here have been constructed to be observed (from the Temple of Fame) – spied upon – from the upper path – taking pleasure in looking (the manilla ring – holding the price of a slave in one’s hand – what is the equivalent here?)

MASSIVE CHILDREN – HUGE PUPPETS OF MASSIVE CHILDREN – PLAYING AMONG SKELETONS – THE ABANDONED CHILDREN NINE MONTHS AFTER CARNIVAL… A PARTY IN THE TEMPLE OF VENUS, AND ORGY DRESSED UP AS PIETY

(it should be noted here that I am proceeding as usual with low level paranoia, over-explaining in order to contest the ideological over-determination of under-explanation)

CLEAR THE PATHS OF TALLER SHRUBS AND TREES – THE IDEA OF THE UPPER PATH IS THAT THE GEOMETRICAL PATTERNS FADE IN AND OUT OF ECLIPSE, THEY ARE MOON POOLS – USE PERFORMANCE SO THAT THE AMBULANT SPECTATOR BECOMES THE LOOKING-PERFORMER, SEEING THE DIFFERENT NATURES/HERITAGES/MOONS COMING INTO ECLIPSE

we are told that the micro climate is “more and more unpredictable” – this is a fascinating description… what records are there of predictions for this micro-climate… if none, then how subjective are such comparisons between weathers that might be characterised as unexpected (a storm) and those that are not (a grey overcast day), but may equally have been unpredicted? – the role of storytelling and narrative in the discourse of climate change.

“things never used to be like this” … there is an appealing quality to this, the idea that we live in unique times, it gives us importance and significance…

Trees are people too

the political aspect to thinning the woods – is there a sentimental attachment to the individual tree that overrides concern for the wood as a whole? “the empathy paradox – closeness to individual stories can often limit grasp of a ‘bigger picture’”

– foresters were pleased and relieved when in 1987 so many trees blew down

“BEHOLD THE WOOD OF THE CROSS, BEHOLD THE IRON” (DEATH OF TREES, EFFECT OF INDUSTRY)

there’s a strange concept – the “wood as a whole”? do we resist that making ‘organic’ and ‘machine-like’?

is the wood a leaderless mass, a form of large scale slime-mould? Are the imagined as Ents? Or attractive stage scenery. Animosity to the appearance of a thinned landscape – is this animosity the result of the democratisation of the eighteenth century picturesque – that there is an assumption that a healthy wood will be picture-like?

the thinned forest is an assault on the fantasy of the thick impenetrable forest as the place of human origins, the fairytale, Vico… and yet rather than these sexual forests, some believe that deer may have restricted (thinned) the great forests of Europe – that the ‘primal forest’ is much more like today’s New Forest than the dark forest of the Grimm Brothers.

today the deer are giving birth later

there are honey bees about that may be a legacy of the monks’ bee-keeping

gardeners’ diaries… fund of climate information or seductive dramatic narratives?

we walk the site together –

there is the industrial-religious complex of the abbey. with its machine of hospitality, the hotel a mark of its influence – this great expense, but to have great trains of opinion-formers and policy-makers entertained, rulers and soldiers pacified – entertained and inducted, accommodated and accommodating

SET UP WHAT APPEARS TO BE A PERFORMANCE, BUT THAT IS “AN ECONOMY OF BELLS” – each hour marked out by duties – RE-ESTABLISH THE ORDER OF SAINT BERNARD OF PROGRAMMES – the raising and the lowering of gaze, the art of living by bells, compartmentalisation (as the prerequisite for mystical happening)

this is now a cleaned ruin – like an eighteenth century painting – where was the romantic, theatre of such ruins – after Shakespeare and the desolation of the heath, it would return in the popular horror-gothic adaptations – the icy wastes where Frankenstein dialogues with monster, the ruined castle of the vampire.  there is a kind of ‘dread on a billiard table’ feel to these manicured ruins, the lawns around them are no less surreal than the green bathmat on which a stuffed bison once stood in Exeter’s museum …

the linkage between the abbey ruins and eighteenth century gardens (geometrical, symbolic, with its Temple of Venus (later changed to Piety!)  – the Temple of Fame is made in wood, the Temple of Venus in stone… were we intended to draw some conclusion from this? Fame is temporary, but lust is eternal… I feel very uneasy in this area of linkage… I walk too quickly… I feel that I am being rushed by the landscape… I am being en-functioned…

this is a decompression chamber (when I read over these notes I wonder if this is the key terrain from which to begin to think a performance?)

it is a bad joke in reverse – the eighteenth century garden is an insincere contrition – in the guise of a work of art, it is a massive act of enjoyment and sensuality – it laughs at those who do not recognise it – it is elitist and esoteric  (as if the misunderstood and romanticised Green Man in the abbey had begun to believe his own publicity and spread himself across the property)

“eyecatcher” – hmmm, that is too comforting

the Visitors Centre is incoherent – and this feeling of illegibility remains with me all the way down to the abbey ruins – the paths feel over-policed and enclosed… nothing begins the story of religious worship or commercial machine

PUT A RAILWAY THROUGH THE VISITORS CENTRE AND REMOVE THE RUBBLE THAT IS FILLING IT

there is no helpful direction into the abbey  – one must make sense of it oneself… driven to the information boards… this is a rather helpful incoherence… as one struggles to picture the processes – aware that what remains may have been selected… selected ruins… ruin is not a natural process alone, there is choice, there is action, there is omission and commission…

“let’s see the killing of the deer”

NUMBERING THE TREES – USING THE LADDER USED WHEN SHOOTING PHEASANTS

EVERYDAY IN THE NT SHOP THERE IS A LECTURE ON THE POLITICS OF THE SHOP

THE NT SHOP SELLS BADGES OF CCTV CAMERAS – TO REMIND PEOPLE OF HOW THEY DISCIPLINE THEMSELVES – NOT SAFE, NOT FOR ME, NOT THE RIGHT WAY…

in protecting the tender feelings of the public, the Trust perpetuates an unrealistic narrative of their own management

what if we could see the excarnation of our own dead?  (I recently came upon a huge pile of human ashes beneath a tree in a ‘local beauty spot’.)

the area around the ponds today is a democratised picturesque shorn of its ideas – and this is to destroy it entirely – the grotto had once had its hermit – the brain in the landscape –  this spreads out and coats the rest of the complex (until it is disrupted by the banal policing and the commercial accretions of the Visitors Centre)

there are people in the wilderness, but they are not white, they are not industrialised, so they are invisible – the wilderness is empty… scenery for travellers… ‘natural’ as a kind of genoicide of the mind

re-wilding   A DAY OF RUNNING ON ALL THE WALLS

wild by design   (a neo-sublime) … will always be comical

wilderness – a place of wild beasts –

ecology:  to preserve for future speculation/expropriation/exploitation

misreading tailored landscapes as “wildness”

after listening to John Fox, a strange Mister Punch-like character said to me – “I want to save the world, but I don’t want to be Barry Bucknall.”  the set square, a shape in the cliffs – the freemasons’ symbol, the roof of masons buildings… MAKE A MASSIVE SET SQUARE AND PLACE IT IN THE GOUGE IN THE CLIFFS – rebuilding and fit the roof into the gouged shape – invite a Masonic lodge to meet there – in what sense is the abbey a simulacra (and a recreation) of an imagined and never existing Jerusalem?

this is the dark re-creation inside today’s recreation at Fountains Abbey

“THEY BUILT FOR ANGELS – DARK GEOMETRICAL ANGELS”

“THEY HAD A DIFFERENT IDEA OF THE FUTURE TO US”

“THE ANGELS THEY PAINTED AND CARVED ON THE WALLS HERE WERE THE FUTURE INHABITANTS”

there are assumptions about the righteousness and efficacy of the ‘idea of nature’ – but I cannot help thinking of the nature imagery of horror-dictatorships – of Ultima Thule and the Externsteine and the Eternal Forest and Ice Theory and the Hollow Earth… worries about what is “essential” (to protect and preserve)

A: NOTHING.

Q:  WHAT DOES THE PREY HAVE IN COMMON WITH ITS PREDATOR?

A:  WHAT OTHER QUESTIONS RENDER ‘NOTHING’ AS THEIR ANSWER?

Q: WHAT DOES NOT THE MASTER HAVE IN COMMON WITH HIS SERVANT?

A: THE WOMAN.

Q:  WHAT SENSE DOES ‘NATURE’ OR ‘HERITAGE’ MAKE WITHOUT GOD?

A:  A PERFORMANCE ENTITLED ‘THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS…’

restore… but nowhere was “as it was”

ACKNOWLEDGE, SOMEWHERE, THE MALENESS OF THE ABBEY

we need  a new kind of wild – a social wild – a machine wild – a virtual wild… thinking of the dangerous ‘jungle’ playground of Huxley’s Brave New World – so, must a new wild be some version of tourism… is that such a problem…  an anti-tourism, a post-tourism…the precedents have been recorded, the models are already in place

A BETTER WILDING WOULD BE THE PREPARATION FOR CATASTROPHE – COMMUNAL PREPARATIONS THAT REVERSE EVERY DISASTER AND APOCALYPSE MOVIE TROPE

wilding as a hobby – the abbey as primitive capital accumulation – how can we communicate ‘more lightly’? (this worries me) – at home/our place – surely the two are one? –

PERFORMERS DRESSED AS PEREGRINES HUNT PERFORMERS DRESSED AS PIGEONS

PERFORMERS IN DEER COSTUMES, RUTTING, HUNGRY

Mike: “resisting the vertical” – falling things (challenge to ‘the vertical’) “bits that fall off”  (without putting an importance or unimportance to that)

Mike:  not “intervention” and “connect”, but ablative “in the shadow”, “beside”

ruin and anxiety = nostalgia

miniaturisation as a means to ‘holding’ values  (I hold these values, I have a model in my pocket)

replace the National Trust with the Verfremden Trust – for Fountains Abbey is a place of ‘making separate’

a helicopter flies in Neptune  – IN THE PERFORMANCES THERE IS MOSTLY SILENCE WITH AN OCCASIONAL NECESSARY PHRASE

puncture

“I’m part of the food chain”

what is it that migrates through all the species  (memes?)

where do the accidents happen here?

the bound man being breast fed

better to shoot the deer than let them starve – in order to save the village it was necessary to destroy it (General Westmoreland)

FILL THE NAVE OF FOUNTAINS ABBEY FOUR FOOT DEEP WITH PLASTIC RUBBLE (a swirl in the centre of an ocean)

use the hotels to entertain “those responsible”

BUILD A CURTAIN BETWEEN THE ABBEY GROUNDS AND THE EIGHTEENTH CETURY GARDEN – A PORTAL (MARK THE CHANGE) … does the general visitor perceive the change or do they regard it all as a single entity (and what entity?)

“we will exploit you, but we will become you”  (THE NON-RACIST COLONIALIST)

Chapel of Excuses: “I want to, but…”

PLACE 200 HUGE BOOKS IN THE ABBEY AND LET THEM SLOWLY ROT IN THE RAINS

the abbey as giant body… whale ribs

the monks had collectively owned breeches which they took out for travel and then returned to the collective ‘wardrobe’

white robes (of coarse undyed sheep’s wool) – put these on sale… the purchaser then takes a series of ecological vows – can only remove the robes when the vows have been fulfilled (by the world)

‘we are predicting the unpredictable’

install a whirligig on the river

BRING BACK THE HERMIT TO SIT AND THINK ABOUT NATURE ON BEHALF OF EVERYONE ELSE

DESIGNATE THE TRUST PROPERTY AS AN ARISTOCRATIC TEMPLE OF NATURE TO WHICH ONLY THE FIT AND YOUNG MAY HAVE ACCESS – CHANGE THE ENTRANCES TO AIRCRAFT FUSELAGES (being honest about travel)

rename the Deer Park as Venison Park

rename all the animals according to human usage of them – pigs become porks, horses become competitions (or exercises) , etc.

A WEEKEND – FOUNTAINS ABBEY IS CLOSED TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC AND OPENED TO ALL WHO WISH TO PARTICIPATE DESPITE THE WARNINGS

ON FRIDAY EVENING AND SATURDAY MORNING THERE IS BUILDING AND REBUILDING IN THE ABBEY, THE RE-ERECTION OF SCREENS, ASCETIC, BELLS, THE STRUCTURAL COMPOSITION OF BEHAVIOUR

ON SATURDAY EVENING THROUGH TO SUNDAY MORNING, THE UPPER PATHS ARE CLEARED OF OBSTRUCTIONS AND THE INITIATES FROM THE ABBEY ARE DIRECTED ALONG THE UPPER PATH, THROUGH THE TUNNEL, TO THE TEMPLE OF VENUS – PARTY AND BATHING – INDIFFERENCE  – AROUND THE PONDS ARE NUMEROUS MOTHERS WITH BABIES- THEY CREATE A SERIES OF GEOMETRICAL DANCES, SLOW WAX AND WANE

ON SUNDAY MORNING TO SUNDAY EVENING – THE GENERAL PUBLIC ARE ONCE MORE ALLOWED ENTRANCE TO THE GROUNDS – THE WORK IS ON SHOW IN THE ABBEY – THE DETRITUS OF THE PARTY IS ELEGANTLY CLEARED AWAY – THE INITIATES/PARTYGOERS ARE DRESSED AS DEER AND LIVE AS DEER IN THE DEER PARK

deer births are coming later

There’s a summary sheet here with a number of broad headings, which were arrived at as a kind of digest of other discussions. I’ve tried to make sense of the annotations through fleshing them out with a little more commentary. In their transferable abstraction, these headings may (or may not) also prove useful as a kind of template / guide to apply when thinking about Cove Park as a performative site:

1. TEMPORAL LAYERS. What does the site reveal (whether visibly or through narrative commentary on what is visible/invisible) about its own history of human intervention in the environment? What narrative continuities and/or discontinuities (i.e. past moments of rupture, crisis) are legible? Or indeed, in what ways has the site been ‘airbrushed’ to conceal or disguise the fractures of history; to introduce nostalgic or romantic views of the past?

At Fountains Abbey, of course, these temporal-historical issues are very much apparent to anyone paying attention: but how might they apply at Cove Park, set in a more ‘rugged’, ‘unspoiled’ location, and surrounded by a nature reserve in which the ‘wild’ has ostensibly been preserved/contained? And what of the present uses of Loch Long? (e.g. nuclear submarine base)

2. ACCESS AND INTERPRETATION. What routes through the site are suggested or invited by its existing layout and presentation? What kinds of response are invited by signage and available information? Who has access to the site, and at what price? What kinds of ‘privilege’ does such access suggest (and how does this relate to the histories of privilege associated with a site such as Fountains/Studley) ?

And what might all this say, in ecological terms, about the way the site is ‘normally’ conceived –e.g. in connection with or self-contained isolation from its surroundings?; e.g. as a ‘live’ location/stage for natural processes (migration, erosion, biodiversity etc.)?; or as an ’empty space’ referencing either the people currently being asked to make ourselves present in it, and/or the absent humans who have occupied this (museum) location in the past?; etc.

3. SCALE AND SUBJECTIVITY: How do (or how have) people orientate(d) themselves in relation to the physical landscape of the site? How does the scale of the human figure relate to the macro- and/or micro- dimensions of the location? For example, at Fountains Abbey/Studley Royal, the individual is very much immersed within (subject to?) a shifting landscape that cannot be comprehended from a single perspective (except perhaps via the affected omniscience of the overhead map). Indeed, the ‘pictureseque’ landscaping of the Water Gardens would have aimed to evoke an awestruck sense of the Sublime in man’s confrontation with landscape and nature… And yet the site has also been made subservient to human control via the monumentality of additions to the landscape varying from the Cistercian Abbey itself to the sculpted figures and ‘eye-catchers’ of the 18th. C. garden designers (i.e. the landscape as extension, reflection and expression of human subjectivity and/or divine dominion [which arguably amounts to the same thing]).

Again, how will these reflections relate to the ostensibly ‘wilder’, but equally mythologised landscape of Scotland’s lochs and mountains, as visible at Cove Park?

4. CURRENT ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS / STRESSES: In what ways does the site make apparent the factors threatening (or at least changing) it ecologically? And how are these threats being ‘managed’ on a daily basis? At Fountains, the estate has to be micro-managed to preserve its historic fabric, but ironically it is the history of the site’s management that creates some of the stress factors (e.g. over-planting of trees on the hillsides resulting in exhausted soils; e.g. re-routing of River Skell by monks adding to the Abbey’s vulnerability to flooding when the banks burst and the water resumes its ‘natural’ course). On the macro-scale, can (human-driven) “climate change” also be seen to be threatening the site? Again, at Fountains, persistently low average rainfall over the last decade has left soils dry and the river level low — and thus especially vulnerable to occasional torrential “weather events”  such as the 2007 floods.

5. DISSENSUS / AMBIVALENCE /RUINS. One of the key factors marking our discussions at the Fountains event was a degree of underlying disagreement — which perhaps needs to be discussed head-on in future meetings — about how best to address the ‘issues’ arising…  The ruins of the abbey, and its ghosts of Christian apocalypticism, made some wary of the contemporary tendency toward ‘apocalyptic’ judgements about the state of the environment: aren’t we rather too attracted towards ‘doomsday’ scenarios? (cf. Hollywood eco-blockbusters etc.)  Aren’t we better to express a sense of ecological relationships through circumspection, indirection, an embrace of complexity (or ‘mental biodiversity’?) ? There again, might such approaches not amount to an evasion or obfuscation of pressing questions?

Reviewing the flipchart sheets and my own notes from Fountains, it’s this unresolved sense of ambivalence that seems to loom largest — not least in relation to the site itself, which seems to have attracted appreciation/awe and suspicion/unease from us in almost equal measure. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves needing to confront such ambivalence more frankly at Cove Park. Or perhaps that site will retrospectively cast the whole Fountains discussion into a different kind of perspective…

With ambivalence very much in mind, I’m adding below some further flipchart-derived notes about Fountains, in various states of coherence (but perhaps with some value as memory-joggers). These are interspersed with some distinctly ambivalent photographs of vapour trails seen from the Abbey’s grounds at sunset, Saturday 16th October 2010.

After Barnett Newman...

SITE AS A SPECTACLE OF TEMPORAL/HISTORICAL LAYERS:

Layering of time made visible; site maps onto history of western ideas; human relations with environment … Religion / power / class / labour / leisure

The Abbey: Religious / technological / hospitality complex. Surrounded by philosophical/cosmological landscape…

Power ambiguities / genderings?

– Wild/rugged site (masculine?) vs. domestication of abbey (feminine?)

– Conversely: all-male abbey community dominating surrounding landscape and economy; sheepherding industry etc.; centre of wealth; architecture as expression of power; Abbey as the master brain in the landscape? (Who plays God?);

– and yet monks charged with reception of strangers/visitors (cf. reception of Christ amongst us?) … service and hospitality

Monks – theologically – masters or custodians of nature?

Aristocratic owners of estate… sculptors of landscape; very much the masters (see class structures; estate ownership; land enclosures); landscaping as expression of power and – initially – imposition of order/control

–  yet “picturesque” landscaping tradition rooted in (romantic construction of) human awe before nature / the sublime….

National Trust, currently – as owners or custodians of site? (see recent mission statements)

NT visitors / members – afforded sense of privilege (culture?) through their visits…? What of class profile of visitors (or indeed ethnic profile, gender profile…) ?

NT volunteers – new “lay brotherhood”?

Spectacle of (picture perfect) ruin:

Melancholia / nostalgia / romanticism / apocalypticism

Abbey as spectacle of ruin / traces of monastic dissolution / Doomsday

Crumbling monumentality (yet the missing parts emphasise the monumentality of the remains?): “Bits that fall off”; “trees that fall down”

“Ann Boleyn’s Seat” – vantage point for spectacle of dissolution… (linguistic joke on decapitation?)

Yet ecological dissolution visible in choked waterways; sliding topsoil and exposed tree roots; etc. … perfect picture rendered imperfect by forces beyond human custodians’ control (yet forces ultimately related to human climatic impact?)

Environmentalism as 21^st C. apocalypticism? (mania / melancholy)

Assorted Vapours

SITE AS GEOGRAPHIC (DIS)CONTINUUM

As with the “sweep of history”, the different physical elements of the site “flow” into each other; yet are also marked by points of crisis / breakage (cf. the remains of the precinct wall, dividing “Abbey” turf and “Studley” turf)

Migration through spaces –   the same elements and yet changing/different:

River corridor; flow of water table

People flowing in and out (once monks and visitors; now tourists)

Shifting soil / grass qualities / wildlife

Performative confusion of signposted routes through the site: “chaos” of layout / “incoherent” series of spaces? Strange signage; privileged access or denial of access to certain areas (go “off path”?); “access for wheelchair users”

Over-managed? “Packaged place.” Too neat / too clean ? “empty” of rough edges…  (sentimentalised? Dishonest?)  Stark contrast to the wild place of swamps and thorns described by original monkish settlers (but do we risk romanticising that too?)

Some areas left deliberately untended: weeds/flowers growing on ruins; wildflowers in pavement cracks… (part of the “picturesque”?)

Sculptures / anthropomorphic bodies placed in the landscape – embodiment — eye-catchers (“I”-catchers?)

Ambivalent responses: Attraction to the site’s beauty and theatricality, simultaneous with suspicion towards its micromanagement; eco implications.

Entirely artificial site, and yet a natural site (the topography, the river, the trees and soils….)

Nature and “Us” in dissensus

Micromanaging natural processes? – toad access ramps (cf. human/car access?)

Roots / routes

Theatrical ironies: Temple of Fame (stone “played by” wood); Faux hermitage (once with resident hermit / actor)

Questions of Scale:

Domestic and epic; Monumental/vertical and fluid/horizontal

Controlling perspectives (Ann Boleyn’s Seat?); “excessive vistas”…

… and yet also too big and diverse an estate to get a visual grasp on the whole; human body immersed in landscape, moves through it (no god-like omniscience except through mapping diagrams…) (moving through the Serpentine Tunnel; plunging into sculpted darkness / rectum)

POTENTIALS:

A defamiliarising or “alienating” landscape? Unnatural nature. Brechtian perspectives. Potential for demystification / de-“naturalisation” of “the environment”.

Site as document of historical moments? – “moments when people were making decisions”… choices made in site’s evolution

Stimulate relations of responsibility through highlighting such perspectives?  Reconnecting people with awareness of “human impact” on nature/landscape.

Temporality of landscape – remembering and forgetting?

“Forgetting the Abbey?”  Counter-balance dominant interpretation narratives (focused on anthropocentric history of human habitation) with attention to environmental features… historical ecological debt?   (There again, Abbey has arguably been little more than a giant “garden folly”, since 18^th C.)

How do different communities of people now connect to this site and its (fractured) history? Connectivity / disconnectivity

Potential of the ablative: working in the shadow of / in the vicinity of / in proximity to… approaching indirectly

Impossible performances / spectacles of the imagination: Neptune flown in by helicopter; Dancing grebes; Giant toads on rafts; Crossbow parties; “Rebuild the abbey!

Jet - Moon - Abbey

‘Nature’s gift: The economic benefits of preserving the natural world’ – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11606228

While I was sitting silently with the recorder running a pair of swans flew the length of the abbey, through the windows at either end and about 10 to 12 feet up, over my head. It was bright morning sun and a blue sky and all very beautiful.

The recording was made in the tower of the abbey ruin with the microphone pointed into the rear wall to maximise the impact of the building on the ambient sound around it. Sounds are coming through the entrance, from above and through the stone walls, so it is intentionally a bit muffled and echoey.

8.00am on Sunday 17 October at Fountains Abbey, Ripon, North Yorkshire.

Fountains Abbey 17Oct10

National Trust Interview R4 18Oct10

Thinking about this as a very old stage set put me in mind of two extraordinary sites I visited while on holiday this summer in Italy (yes, I flew there). The first was the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, which is Europe’s oldest indoor theatre. Opened in 1585, it predates Shakespeare. It was designed by Palladio (originator of the “Palladian” style of neoclassicism, of course), but completed after his death under the guidance of his former student and rival Vincenzo Scamozzi, who placed an extraordinary wooden stage set of forced perspective scenery behind Palladio’s neoclassical facade:

I couldn’t help wondering how many other 425-year-old wooden stage sets there are left in the world — this one is apparently supposed to represent the Thebes of “Oedipus Rex” (the theatre’s first production), lovingly preserved in suspended animation. But the fragile scenery has been able to survive in part because it is so well-protected from exterior elements: the Teatro Olimpico was built within the so solid walls of Vicenza’s former city jail (there’s a pun here somewhere on ‘captive audiences’ that I’m not bright enough to figure out just now).

A few days later I saw Giotto’s extraordinary Chapel Scrovegni in Padua – commissioned by the Scrovegni family around 1300 to atone for the sins of their usurer patriarch (so bad he gets a namecheck in Dante’s Inferno). Giotto painted images from the lives of Mary and Jesus from floor to ceiling on every wall of the chapel, and added a star-studded sky across the vault that is still the most stunning azure blue after 700 years. (A theatrical space if ever there was one.) But some of the images have decayed somewhat, and not so long ago it was realised that this was because of external atmospheric pollution. After a major renovation a few years ago, visitors are now admitted to the chapel in groups at 20 minute intervals – having sat for the same period in a sort of air-lock space, watching a video about the chapel’s history. This zoning phase allows the exterior air that visitors have brought in with them to be filtered out, thereby protecting what they call the “micro-climate” of the chapel itself. An attempt precisely to *arrest* environmental change in a controlled, enclosed space.

Of course, the same cannot be done for the similarly aged Fountains Abbey. I’m reliably informed that bits of the over 800-year old masonry have just been falling off it this year — as the medieval mortar expands and contracts with the rapid temperature fluctuations that we’ve experienced during the spring and summer. Fountains exists in a “microclimate” of its own — a characteristically damp one, given the way that clouds come across the narrow Skell valley and drop their loads, and the rainwater then drains down the steep hillsides into the river itself. But even after the devastating flooding of 2007, the sheer dryness of this year has left no ground moisture to speak of. There’s little flow to the river, and the Georgian lakes are clogged with weed as a result. This microclimate, needless to say, cannot be regulated by airlocks, and so this ancient, very vulnerable “stage set” is increasingly being subjected to erratically destructive exterior forces.

Although seeing that fragility often comes along with disturbing news of environmental ‘disaster’, I like the apparently increasing awareness we gain of the dynamics of our environments, our places. It feels better to be more in touch with that sense of life and aliveness. And I am guessing that this is one of the things we will explore.

Scratch at the grass, and a medieval floor appears (or is this an American town viewed from the air?)

This week I made my first site visit to the Fountains Abbey / Studley Royal estate since we secured the network grant. I was reminded how perfect this site is as an exhibit of the way that humans here have responded to, and reshaped, the environment over centuries — from the 12th C. monks who chose the natural rock ravine of the Skell valley as a sheltered site for their monastery (and then proceeded to redirect the flow of the river), to the 18th C. landscape architects who laid out the gorgeous water gardens further down the valley. By the time the Abbey and its grounds were bought up and joined onto the Studley Royal estate, landscaping fashions had changed to embrace a certain romantic wildness rather than pristine cultivation — and that too is reflected in the rugged-and-yet-sculpted look of the valley walk. So much here to explore and reflect on.

A meeting with the estate’s Learning and Interpretation Officer Tessa Goldsmith and with Head of Landscape Michael Ridsdale proved very encouraging for the project: they seem keen to contribute to the network discussion, and to collaborate in facilitating a potential site-specific performance project here, somewhere down the line. Tessa is to send me a CD containing an 500-page archeologist’s report on the site’s entire human history. She is, herself, a mine of information on the estate and the way its history is constantly being performed for visitors, school children and so forth. (The estate’s properties, she mentions, include about 150 monk’s habits of various sizes, for re-enactment purposes.)

A Giant Redwood. Not native to Yorkshire.

It’s also depressingly clear, though, how immediate the question of environmental change is on a site like this. Michael, who when asked about his specific job remit explains that “if it grows or flows” on the estate, he is responsible for it, has worked at Fountains since 1984. Although he confesses that his evidence is anecdotal, he believes that the last five years or so have seen a marked change in climate conditions — with sudden shifts in weather and temperature becoming much more prevalent than previously. Only last month, the sudden cold snap we had in the midst of the warm May/June weather brought temperatures on the estate down to minus 8 degrees Celsius, killing a sweet chestnut tree. Most native species are not equipped to cope with rapid temperature changes of this sort.

The most pronounced recent climatic impact on the estate came with the heavy rain and flooding of summer 2007, when severe damage was done to the Georgian water gardens. The river became so swollen that it burst its banks and returned to its natural course down the middle of the valley that runs between the Abbey and the water gardens.

I’m struck by the fact that, in the centre of the Moon Pond – the water garden’s centrepiece – is a statue of Neptune, God of the Sea. Yet the water surrounding him is not (or at least not normally) a roaring ocean, but an utterly still, placid pond. There’s a performative assertion in this image, something along the lines of “look, we are godlike, we can control and subdue the elements, bend them to our control.” The Enlightenment’s self-delusions in a nutshell? Rather wonderfully though, during a recent renovation of the pond’s landscaping, “toad ramps” were built in for easier amphibian perambulation around the site.  Does this represent progress (a more genuinely enlightened consideration of the needs of “lesser” species?), or further evidence of our urge to micro-manage the environment?

Neptune of the lilies