ARTANGEL 2014
A WALK HOME
ANDREW & EDEN KÖTTING
My daughter Eden will be dressed as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and with her walking frame she will lead a procession of Folkloricists through a forest. The event will be filmed using high-end HD cameras, dollies and cranes. It will then be edited into an eighteen-minute time-line and projected onto a cloudy night sky above the city. A soundtrack will be made available via a telephone app as well as through a live Radio 4 broadcast.
Roadside Picnic? - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The kid was walking lightly, cheerfully, as if she
hadn’t spent two agonizing hours inside the damp forest on the bare hill
in restless sleep, huddling with her father for warmth, waiting out the
torrent of green slide that was flowing around the hill and
disappearing into the ravine.
Why Eden?
Eden is my anima, adjunct and inspirator. With her I
have journeyed to the Otherside. She loves to dress up and I love to
walk beside her. Dorothy as a precursor to the revolution and cypher for
fantasy and time travel.
Why The Folkloricists?
Spectacular, pagan and secular, they are metaphor for
both The Pre-religious and The Post-modern. A clumsy snake of
celebration and quiet ambition, a compelling reflex against the pull of
the Up-to-date. A human river, curious in its reaction to the drudge of
deep greenery. Whatever their particular interests, Folklorists
recognise the value of experience-based knowledge and the artfulness of
everyday life. The cultural, educational, historical, and political
questions Folklorists raise place the ground at the heart of
contemporary life. Folklore is the primary field of all of humanity. It
loves dressing up.
Why the forest?
Because it is not all birdsong, wild honey and
bluebells. The forest is more than just poetry and does not need to
speak. The forest is nature and nature becomes landscape by fixing a
gaze. Placing it within the frame it becomes a cultural space. A place
that resonates. (Somewhere like Kings Wood near Canterbury or Bedgebury
Forest in Kent.) The chosen location might be regarded as outside of
time. The landscape is its own metaphor. Woodlands are managed and
controlled and thus is the procession of celebrants. So that the
arboreal ethnicity might loom above the city.
Why the city?
Charged site of consequence. Major business and
financial hub, invariably established by merchants and the melting pot
for all things cultural and significant. Besides, Arcadia was imagined
in both Greece and Rome as a wooded, rocky place, the haunt of satyrs
and the realm of Pan. The city springs from the motherwood of Rhea
Silvia, where wild men and jack-in-the-greens issue forth from the
trunks of old oaks. Tin shacks hurtle overhead. I have never been to
Kansas but I have spent most of my life living in a city and the forest. This is an invasion. Heads up towards the skies as the Lady and Toto pass by.
Why the procession?
The procession is a day of judgment; away from the pox
of settled existence and towards the gleam of the unknown. The
serpentine amble of costumed humans is a celebration of fallibility; we don’t know why they are doing it but they are doing it nonetheless. Eden will lead the procession in a sensual, ritualistic performance. An immense rabble and locomotion without a goal.
How the projection?
Outdoor laser image configurator. For eighteen minutes
twice a year. Eighteen minutes before midnight on the summer solstice
and eighteen minutes before midnight on the winter solstice. Onto a
cloud of shift, a cloud of magnificence, vapour displays over the
cityscape. Ephemeral apparition and ghost-like specter. A man-made
enigma burnt into the night skies. Urban alchemy and digital jiggery
pokery. Helicopters and smoke canons.
What of the ambition?
Upwards towards the sublime, ever-tending and mindful of
the universal yet local and pragmatic in its vision, almost level with
the ground. What’s more Mikhail Bakhtin believes that this type of
happening is a theatrical expression of life experience and he should know, because like Michel de Montaigne he went all round the houses.
Landscape and memory?
Landscapes are culture before they are nature;
constructs of the imagination projected as a vision onto water, mortar
and city. Once the smoke clears we are left with what we never had
before; the memory.
Why the app?
The app would contain the sound design for the
spectacle. Multi-layered and radiophonically mixed. A complicated mulch
of native dialects, field recordings, scratchy archive and mangled
information. (Much might be mulled, culled or curated from the beautiful
Saydisc Record Series). The soundtrack would be free to download and
would escort all projections of the work.
Simultaneous broadcast?
There would also be a live Radio 4 broadcast, designed
to accompany the projection. (The collaboration between Channel 4
and Radio 3 when they presented Derek Jarman’s Blue remains branded on
the brain).
The End of Faith? - Sam Harris
This universe is shot through with mystery. The very
fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only
miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself
central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish
to call ‘spiritual’. No myths need be embraced for us to commune with
the profundity of our circumstance. Follow the yellow brick road and all
will be revealed.
Ps
A WALK HOME is the life, the gathering,
the letting go and the accidental encounter. It is a dialogue with the
natural world, memory fugue anecdote, the nudge forward, the confession
and the transference. It is the pilgrimage, the weather and a preview of
purgatory and heaven. The long deep breath and the pant of up-hill
mortality. The psyche and its’ geography, autobiography and
universality. It is the way and the light and a right fucking carryon.
Pps
An antidote to when the world turns ugly.
