Forage is an attempt to understand what it means to leave and to arrive, to lose and to find, to be uprooted and to make a home. It emerges from my own experience of migration from my native Finland to establish a home in the North East England.

 

Through a series of structured ‘foraging’ walks through historic landscapes at National Trust Sites of Seaton Delaval, Cherryburn and Gibside, the project introduces newly arrived / displaced people to the environment beyond the urban spaces they are asked to inhabit in order to develop an understanding of the ecological and historical context in which they find themselves.

 

Through the practices of foraging we find those things we hold in common, that eliminate distance and difference and forge us into communities. Walking and foraging together

brings us to a deeper understanding of the complex, sometimes conflictual and more often

rewarding relationship we hold with the world we inhabit and those we inhabit it with.

 

Forage was commissioned by ISIS Arts and Counterpoints Arts for Platforma Festival 2017. The project was funded by Arts Council England.