Land Marked was created in 2001 – echoing and reflecting on the UK’s then obsessions with how communities are made and broken (Survivor, Big Brother, the EU…). The piece addresses the manipulation of territory, the circulation of power, and the patrolling of borderlines – from the micro level of the family to the macro level of nations. Heimat, Casa, Hjem, Home.

Carrying with them everything they own, three foreigners arrive in a new place. Your place. Asking for your hospitality because – ‘it’s a harsh world out there, and nothing is worth more than a little kindness to strangers’ – they proceed to map the territory, to learn the landscape and to make this place a home.

On a blank piece of 4m square paper, the performers work with pens, domestic lights, and a ghetto blaster to construct and reconstruct a ‘living’ map – their own memories of home interwoven with stories and images of the local land and community. This creates a performed geography where ‘real world’ sound and ‘fake’ sound effects collide with each performers ‘mother tongue’, in a landscape where metaphor and memory are friendly neighbours with observed reportage. Under the guise of democratic process, the three strangers argue and rearrange themselves, to try and establish a shared history. Alliances are made and broken as each person desperately tries to smuggle into the group their own idea of what a home should be.

The piece was performed simultaneously in German/Italian, Norwegian and English.

At the Frankfurt premiere we made a 3 channel video/sound installation edited from research walks around Frankfurt. A looping mediation of the ‘real’ Frankfurt the audience had just arrived from (or were exiting into), the installation was presented in the foyer of Mousonturm surrounding the entering audience and acting as a prologue/epilogue for the more abstracted geography of the performance itself.

As research for performances of Land Marked in Exeter and Wimborne summer 2002, we made a series of mapping interventions; attempting to ‘learn’ the lay of the land from the perspective of the people who live in it, and building them into the live performance. The performers moved around town finding pitches for their map at varying street sites in each town. The public were invited to donate information in the shape of directions, pictures, anecdotes and sounds to the map; telling their own stories of ‘home’ by chatting to the performers as they moved around the town. This working process significantly influenced the subsequent development of our 2004 rural film-making project VANLAND.