Late in 2015, NATURAL LIGHT reported a remarkable case of environmental protest art that helped in the fight to save the magnificent beechwoods of Zilbeti, in the foothills of the Navarran Pyrenees. 
 
Mining company MAGNA, supported by the Government of Navarra, proposed to fell 54,000 trees to enable the extension of a magnesite mine.  People from the tiny village of Zilbeti and their supporters in neighbouring areas, local conservation groups and national NGOs such as SEO-BirdLife Spain resorted to guerrilla art to highlight the injustice, and the environmental damage, that would be caused by such a fragrant breach of EU law.

While SEO-BirdLife led a legal fight in the Navarran High Court, the local activists created Guernica de Zilbeti - a 25 metres wide by 15 high reproduction of Picasso’s Civil War protest painting, using harmless pigment on the trees themselves.  In October 2015, we reported a High Court victory, but that proved not to be the end of the story.  MAGNA, along with some local authorities, challenged the regional High Court’s decision in Spain’s Supreme court.  Two weeks ago, on 29 March, a definitive decision was made, once and for all, confirming full protection for the forest. 

Fevered Sleep, the arts company whose Artistic Director David Harradine we featured last week, have responded to this narrative of loss and change with an on-line artwork, launched today, called An Open Field.  Last week Harradine told NATURAL LIGHT "When I read the report, and understood the scale of loss of species and habitats, I wondered what this meant to the people who live and work in those places."

"We invited people from various locations to take a walk with our Associate Artist Luke Pell, he recorded the conversations, and we've turned the words into a poetic landscape.  It's an attempt to recreate the experience of walking in a real place but in a different form, an on-line form.” 

Pell found that ordinary and remarkable things were shared and revealed from those places, and from those people’s lives. Memories surfaced and changes were noticed. Each encounter carefully excavated years of detail, unearthing how deeply people know themselves in relation to the places where they live and walk.

The words on-screen at anopenfield.co.uk are the words of the participants, and the final artwork is a poetic expression of the conversations that happened through each encounter as they walked.  





An Open Field is launched today and is produced by Fevered Sleep.  Developed and led by associate artist Luke Pell.  Design by Valle Walkley. Made with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

It's a good sign when you go to an arts company's home page and see they have a category called "bees". Even better when it turns out a couple of hives-full are members of the company, and may perform in a future project.  But then Fevered Sleep, founded nearly twenty years ago by David Harradine and Sam Butler, is no ordinary company.

"I was never interested in doing the normal stuff about human-to-human relationships". David told me, "I am interested in people's relationships with other things, like nature, or the weather, or place." We had chosen our meeting-place well, then: the wild, windy, seabird cliffs near Bempton, in David's home county of Yorkshire.

I first met David at Above Me The Wide Blue Sky in 2013. It was a performance piece that was at the same time an installation, an audio-visual landscape.  It was based on stories collected from the general public that told of "our deep-rooted, deeply felt, easily overlooked and profoundly important connection to the land, the sky, the sea, the weather, and the other living things that surround us".

The event didn't stop when the performance was over. David and the team gathered some chairs together for a discussion session with members of the audience.  It was the kind of extended interaction, the shared exploring of issues, that has become a Fevered Sleep trademark.

"My ambitions have never really been about profile or scale," he explained as we peered over the cliffs at the kittiwakes and puffins, "deeper connections with fewer people seem to me more important than the mass market."  Over the years the company has made works that explore issues ranging from ageing to climate.  A number of recent works have been with, by and for children, such as Dusk.  "We strongly feel children's cultural rights are compromised, we want them to have access to art and be engaged from the start."

“I didn’t grow up in a family that prepared me for being an artist at all, we weren’t going to the theatre or listening to music or reading books.  I spent all my time completely immersed in nature.”  David grew up in Clifford, a small village near Wetherby, where his family were market gardeners.  “I was always in the fields and streams around the village and I feel that connection was what made it possible for me to end up being a professional artist.”  

He moved to London study biochemistry but found he was more in tune with the students reading English and drama. 

“There’s something within people who are interested in and connected to nature that seems to me to be the same thing that is within artists – the same quality of attention, and empathy, and interest in detail, a desire to properly look at things and understand things.  Being interested in things you don’t understand.”   

He made the switch to Middlesex Polytechnic – now Middlesex University – and a Performing Arts degree. After graduating, David and fellow student Samantha Butler formed Fevered Sleep "because we wanted to continue working together".  Looking back, David feels the early years lacked real coherence but things changed when in 2008 they were invited by the Brighton Festival to make a work based around the town's special light quality.  An Infinite Line has since become a long-term series of projects inspired by the quality of natural light in different places. During 2016 filming will take place on the coast and estuaries of Merseyside, recording various light-inspired performances.  In 2017 the film will be presented as "a lasting document of the infinite variability of Merseyside’s light, and a visual poem celebrating Merseyside as a place that is always on the move".

"Our work is about creating a space where people can observe or perceive things differently."  He draws an interesting parallel between our respective professions.  "Conservation and art both try to model the world in a different way, imagining how things could be different."

I wanted to know what David and the team were working on right now, and the answer was closer to home than I was expecting!  Twenty-five organisations, including my own, the RSPB, produced the State of Nature Report in May 2013.  "When I read the report, and understood the scale of loss of species and habitats, I wondered what this meant to the people who live and work in those places" he says.

"We've made an on-line artwork inspired by State of Nature, and we're launching it this month."  "what exactly is an online artwork?" I ask, trying to get him to reveal something ahead of the launch.  "Well... State of Nature is a narrative of change, and so is this new piece, which we call An Open Field.

"We invited people from various locations to take a walk with our Associate Artist Luke Pell, he recorded the conversations, and we've turned the words into a poetic landscape.  It's an attempt to recreate the experience of walking in a real place but in a different form, an on-line form.  You drift through the space and encounter experiences in the same unplanned way. There's no designated route, no map, you can get lost, you can get bored with it and leave."

That doesn't seem very likely, but like everyone else, I'll have to wait until next week to know for sure.  An Open Field is launched on 21 July.

Robin Perkins, also known as producer El Búho, asked eleven musicians from across South America to create a track each, inspired by the song of a different endangered species.  NATURAL LIGHT invited him to write a guest blog.  He also sent us this video!

Robin says: 

From Patagonia to the Amazon rainforest, South America has some of the most biologically diverse areas on the planet. It is also home to an incredible range of bird species, many of which are under threat of extinction, such as the Hooded Grebe with only around 800 adults left in the wild or the critically endangered Araripe Manakin, endemic to Brazil.

Through A Guide to the Birdsong of South America I want to help tell their tale and spread their song through inspiring music by some of the continent's rising stars. 

The idea began a few years back when, as a producer I started experimenting with the idea of making music inspired by birdsong.  I knew a lot of bands and producers across the continent, and thought, why not use this to highlight the wave of exciting musicians across South America, as well as the plight of its wildlife?

I came up with a tentative list of threatened birds from the seven countries represented by the list of artists. Then I took this list to the community birdsong site Xeno Canto to source and get permission to use the rare song samples themselves. Once I had 22 birds, each musician chose their song and species and went to get inspired!

I wanted to ensure the project also supports the organisations working on the ground to protect these birds. I reached out to an NGO called Aves y Conservación, a partner of BirdLife International in Ecuador that works to protect and raise awareness about bird species. Proceeds from the album will support them and their work.

I have also been working with the graphic designer Scott Partridge who has created 12 unique illustrations, one for each species.

The list of artists is confirmed, they have chosen their birds and are now hard at work making their birdsong inspired tracks. These will be completed in the next month and from there I will send the tracks to be mastered and produce the album. Scott's bird designs are done and looking fantastic (see below) so we can't wait to get them printed!

Now I’m raising the 2,500 Euros needed for professional mastering, vinyl pressing and packaging, the illustrations, printing costs and the distribution all over the world. I have all of this lined up and ready to go. At the last count we had over 1700 Euro in the form of dozens of small donations through our Kickstarter project