Phase One: RENOUNCE ALL WALLS

At the Littoral Arts' Merz Barn, former home of the great Kurt Schwitters, Ambleside, Cumbria, UK.

About the project:

This seminar set in to motion a proposed year-long project to deconstruct a drystone wall and to reconfigure the wall both physically and ideologically as a dis-enclosure of common space available for public access and communal use, a new counter-hegemonic landscape. The project is yet to develop, watch this space during 2017...

Phase One took the form of a seminar led by UNIT and featuring Christian Eriksson, a London/Liverpool-based freelance journalist investigating land issues, cities, power and political economy and Martyn Hudson, a Research Associate in the Northumbrian Exchanges programme at Newcastle University whose work aims to develop new thinking and research about Knowledge Exchange and traditional and experimental music of Northumbria and related areas of visual arts and rural economies.

Further Information:

-Visit the MERZ Barn website

Context:

In the mid-late 1800s a series of land reforms, Parliamentary 'Inclosure Acts', gave people the right to enclose previously common land and claim it as their own, essentially privatising vast expanses of rural space and removing the rights of other local people to carry out activities such as cultivation, grazing animals, using resources or even living on the land. This necessitated a culture of wage-slavery and consumerism in a time of falling wages and rising living costs, it secured the enslavement of the many by the few.

The Inclosure Acts gave rise to much wall building in Britain, over 5000 Acts privatised more than 7 million acres of land. Today, following 150 years of privatisation, 0.6 per cent of the British population owns 69 per cent of the land and the ideology of profit over people continues to transform our social landscape through the privatisation of civil life and services such as education and healthcare. This project will aim to subvert this ideology through the collective production of an alternative landscape.

RENOUNCE ALL WALLS is a project initiated by UNIT with support from Merz Barn and Littoral Arts. Great thanks go to Martyn Hudson and Christian Eriksson.