A foray into installation art: I have been trying my acquisitive hand at viciously appropriating land, as part of the extremely idyllic LEAF (Little Ecological Arts Festival). The idea, partly thrust upon me by festival organiser Bruno Roubicek, was to do something generated by my phd project, partially on the enclosure of the commons around the end of the eighteenth century in England. It turns out that the festival space, the ridiculously lovely Albion Millennium Green in Forest Hill, is pretty much the only remaining scrap of Sydenham Common, itself a survivor of a much larger area of natural oak forest. As a result of this hasty research, I wrote a poetic information sheet to be taken from the installation, which also attempts to think through some of the lexis used in different parts of the UK for land appropriation before the term ‘enclosure’ became the norm. Some of these words are fanatastically evocative. The text is here: In Little Parcels
The use of the space itself was improvised: I arrived on Wednesday morning, was directed towards what was to be my bramble patch, given some rope, card, a black marker, stakes and assorted household miscellanea, and sort of made it up. Probably shouldn’t admit that. Does that count as a methodology? Oh, and I ended up reading the text one evening alongside linus slugg‘s bugs to cover for a delayed Welsh praise singer, too.
All photography by Bruno Roubicek
Dan Eltringham 