For SALT + EARTH Festival of Landscape, Seascape and the Environment.

Between sedimentary lines of compression and exposure, connected under a body of water, SITE presents FAULT LINES : a multi-media installation gathering together material from site-responsive collaborative performances that took place in quarries in Kent, UK and Northern France.

Documented and offered as a witnessing of temporal images, actions, and gestures, this installation presents processes and dialogues between artists and sites where the visible process of erosion and extraction provides the opportunity to respond to the geological and anthropological histories uncovered by human and industrial scale touch.

By taking a queer ecological approach FAULT LINES unfolds the potential to explore how geological connections might offer reciprocal encounters and the ways in which we might learn from the unearthing of layers of compressed histories.

Between Bodies and Place brought together 13 artists from Performance Art Networks S I T E (UK) and PAErsche (D). Through a series of collaborative performances the artists explored sites across the Rhur region in Germany, generating dialogues though Performance Art actions around Queer Ecologies and the politics of erosion.  

The Ruhr and the UK have a shared industrial history of mining and resource extraction - a history of landscape erosion and social change. 

Through the process of collaborative Performance Art exchange places of social, political and ecological degradation are transformed into places of encounter, discourse and creative expression.  

Performances took place on: the viewing platform on the Bo-West freeway interchange in Bochum, Rheinorange in Duisburg, and Schurenbachhalde in Essen with open social gatherings taking place after each performance.

“Through the language of performance art, we aim to contribute to the emergence of a respectful global consciousness; locally, personally and internationally. Through encounter and exchange we can learn to be empathic and geologically compassionate again.”
– Between Bodies and Place –