Making Routes

Over the past few years I have undertaken numerous creative residential retreats. This prompted me to think about the benefits of these processes for artists, writers, thinkers and performance makers. All images are the author's own from the Performing Wild Geographies event at the Knepp Estate in October 2017.

Retreating: Thinking, Making, Being

The word retreat implicitly has the promise of a “treat” within it, referring to the…

The event:

Performing Wild Geographies, a two-day creative workshop, took place at Knepp Castle Estate, West Sussex (2nd-4th October 2017). Focused on collaborative performance-making strategies between artists and academics from disparate disciplines, the event aimed to be a cross-disciplinary experiment around wild(er)ness and rewilding, drawing in particular on the Knepp’s Wildland Project case, in the southern block of the estate.

The event was led…

Introduction

Performing Wild Geographies brought together artists and academics working in the fields of rewilding, human geography, paleoecology, conservation, performance studies, theatre, visual arts and journalism, in order to explore the potential for transdisciplinary collaboration in rewilding. The two day research event took place at a pioneering rewilding project: Knepp Estate in West…

Under the Surface of Knepp

(This was written as a response to the Performing Wild Geographies event which took place at Knepp Estate on the 2-4^th October 2017).

An arch of ghostly manta rays

Entrance to a wild place

Petrified and stacked

Bleached brown coral reef

Signalling death and end

Palimpsests

of lasts

 …