Here Commons Everybody
Ecological recovery: land, shared commons and coexistence
Reflections, undercurrents and new pathways
VideoSonic explorations and compositions
UK & international programme
2020-22
Working closely with:
CCRI - Countryside and Community Research Institute (UK, co-funder)
Jesse D Vernon 'Morning Star' (composer, musician, conductor, Bristol & Paris)
&
The Letterpress Collective & Nick Hand (Bristol; socially-engaged print studio)
&
Closely connected to an eco-art residency project in Portugal, also supported by the Endangered Landscapes Programme & Rewilding Portugal
Situations, explorations and locations included:
Regional rewilding in the Greater Côa Valley, Portugal, working with rural communities, archaeologists & museums.
Upland farming+heritage site in Wales (via a linked artist-residency with Elan Links)
Forests and coasts via the Satoyama Initiative & Satoumi (traditional approaches, Japan) creative research dialogues with CCRI.
Historical practices in Ireland (Meitheal, Turbary, Land League legacies etc) creative research and fieldwork.
The primary programme funder was Arts Council England
(individual artist residencies had additional funders)
The lead artist, Antony Lyons, is an ecological artist and creative researcher based in Bristol, UK. His video, sonic and sculptural works engage with ecological, social and landscape futures, with a deep-time lens. Creative 'geopoetic' responses are based on long-term connections with territories in flux, focusing on ecological coexistence and eco-social healing.
New stories, new voices:
In this project, Lyons reactivated a previous association with the CCRI - as ‘artist-in-dialogue’ - addressing braided themes of ‘shared eco-commons’, community sustenance, ecosystem recovery and restorative agriculture. Bridging diverse perspectives and agendas, the focus ranged from the deeply local to global interactions. Coexistence and re-connection are core themes.
Outputs included a series of individual ‘film portrait’ migrant stories; creative, poetic documentaries; work/play-shops with young people; public events & printed works. Works from the project features in a festival and major exhibition in Birmingham:
Ten Acres Of Sound (Artefact Projects, Stirchley, 2020)
&
Watershed (MAC Birmingham, 2023)
A follow-on collaborative ecological project is being explored for 2024/25
As well as the residencies and exhibitions listed above, the project investigated and assembled material across three connected themes:
Ecological Reflections & Memories
Diverse personal cross-cultural stories and reflections (with invited participants) on perception of home, commons, migration, community, freedom, protection, belonging, in-between-ness etc. Production of a series of short films, forming individual subjective 'film portraits'. The first two in this series were screened at the CUBE Cinema in Bristol in 2022.
Online links:
Cross-Cultural Research & Learning
Creative dialogues with academics, ecologists, activists and others. Cultural practices & landscapes; community management of resources; adaptations to land abandonment; agro-ecology, regenerative agriculture, rewilding and the multi-species commons; linkages to folk traditions (via recorded music, song, poetry). Much of this was assembled as blog writings, and media outputs shared at workshops, conferences and community gatherings (Cambridge & Portugal).
Landscape Imaginations past/present/future
Speculative videosonic explorations of connection/togetherness and disconnection/ alienation - via concepts of dark ecology, deep-time, entanglement, collective unconscious (symbolism, psyche, shamanistic, animistic), liminality etc. This aspect of the project is anchored in three specific landscape settings:
- Orford Ness (Suffolk), site of an artist residency by Lyons in 2018-9 (Sensitive Chaos).
-
-Cornwall Clay-Mining zone, site of an artist residency by Lyons in 2018 (Limbo Landscape Lab)
-
-Avebury/Silbury (Wiltshire), an ancient mound; a pastoral landscape. What undercurrents do we find?
In all three research strands, the aim was to venture beyond the rational and perceptual, allowing space for the emotional, affective and imaginative registers. The geopoetics of art, science and place.
EXHIBITIONS & SCREENINGS:
SPRING-SUMMER 2022
Summer 2022 blog & news updates:
https://antonylyons.blogspot.com/2022/06/coa-valley-symphony.html
https://www.endangeredlandscapes.org/wild-coa-symphony/
PROJECT CONTACT: antonylyons@mac.com
