Our New Common Forest
SpudWorks, Feb - Aug 2022
Our New Common Forest - A Queer Almanac was a multi-season participatory public art and research project developed collaboratively with artist Luke Pell and LGBTQ+ communities across Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, and the New Forest. Combining site-responsive choreography, somatic enquiry, participatory workshop practice, creative writing, installation, and public programming, the project explored how queer identities, histories, and modes of belonging might be understood through ecological and collective frameworks.
Situated within the landscape of the New Forest, the project investigated the relationship between queerness and ecology by drawing on concepts of interdependence, transformation, multiplicity, and non-normative temporalities found within both natural systems and queer lived experience. The work approached landscape not as passive backdrop, but as an active participant within processes of memory-making, gathering, and collective world-building.
The project drew on writings by LGBTQ+ artists and thinkers including Derek Jarman, Kae Tempest, and Alok Vaid-Menon as generative prompts for collaborative reflection on regional queer experience, intergenerational histories, and evolving understandings of pride, kinship, and chosen family.
Across a series of guided forest walks, somatic and choreographic encounters, found poetry workshops, youth performance sessions, and public conversations, participants contributed stories, gestures, texts, and reflections that informed the creation of an evolving “Queer Almanac.” Developed through residency-based installation practice, the almanac brought together participant contributions with sound, image, movement, and writing to form a living and accumulative queer archive.
The project resisted fixed or institutionalised forms of documentation. Instead, visitors were invited to continuously add their own entries to the Almanac throughout the exhibition period, inviting the possibility of an archive as an open, participatory, and collectively authored structure.
The work foregrounds a methodology for generating situated forms of communal knowledge and for imagining alternative modes of queer ecological relation and belonging, through its integration of choreographic, somatic, and dialogic methodologies alongside public art as a space for collective reflection, affective encounter, and the co-production of social and ecological imaginaries.
Introduction to gallery show (Lucy & Luke)
Our New Common Forest
- a queer almanac –
This exhibition comprises audio, images and text which have been made as part of a SPUDworks residency over spring-summer 2022 as well as a Love Token created by Hannah Buckingham (a paper object which you are encouraged to gently handle!)
During our residency we have hosted different gatherings – gallery visits, scored walks, weekend workshops and talks - for Breakout Youth and other Hampshire-based, LGBTQ+ folks, allies and friends - all of which have been informed by our choreographic practice of somatic tuning.
Taking the ways in which trees in forests are connected communities as our point of departure - how they share minerals, resources and messages through their root systems - we have been exploring what it is to seek out and share queer community and companionship here. Not just with our fellow human beings, but with the more-than-human world, found in the abundance of life and diversity woven throughout this unique landscape.
Informed by research, by labours of love, and by the words and worlds of the people and other living creatures we’ve met along the way - in person, as well as on the page – we’ve drawn on what we call ‘quietly queer’ poetics to create entries for the almanac, and a process of image-uncovering (rather than image ‘taking’) to create photographs that have been printed on sustainable Awagame paper made from hemp, and installed as a skin of scales or leaves.
Almanacs as kinds of calendar have been in use since antiquity for different purposes, and our queer almanac records the new and full moons and responds to the different scales, patterns, sensations and movements of flora and fauna and humans shaping the way that we look, move and inhabit the space around us. The months August to December are deliberately blank, inviting you to contribute your own entry.
As a companion to the almanac, the audio recording, Someone Once Said, is a memory score of the many, and varied conversations that have taken place as part of this project.
We are particularly grateful to two artists that we have met as part of this project: Hannah Buckingham for creating her Love Token and Bevis Fenner who created and performed a midsummer ritual, photographic traces of which are visible in the space.
extract from audio score
//
Someone once said the trees speak
they draw towards and away,
stay in touch;
pass what’s needed to one another
//
Someone once said it’s an invitation
to see the world in a different way -
upturned refracted
the small with the large
a gathering of bodies
touching
entwined
a blanket of moss
a carpet of bluebells
a community of
interweaving branches
above a scatter of leaves
becoming the soil of
our commons:
our forest
//
Someone once said, to be queer is to refuse to follow certain straight lines
so, we follow the forest: heath onto copse, onto bog, onto morass, with river, with brook, out to pasture, estuary, seashore, where -
someone once said I’d like to be a wave in the sea, just one, because I like the idea of being in the universe only such a very short time
//
