Project Outline

Building on recent work that explores liminal or threshold states, I am developing a public event for Bordering that explores the relationship between humans, horses and the borderlands. The site for the project will be the old Racecourse just outside Oswestry.

The town of Oswestry has a strong historical relationship with horses through agriculture, racing and through its location on the London to Holyhead mail coach route. I approached Jane Lloyd Francis from Equilibre Horse Theatre to see whether she would be interested in collaborating with me on the project and ideas have been developing since then. We are planning to create an event on the Racecourse that would involve two horses, one black and one white. My research for this project has explored the mythological association of the black horse with the people of old Celtic Britain and the white horse with the arrival of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Through the interaction of the two horses, the performance will focus on the exchange of energy that occurs when two cultures meet, collide and are altered as a result. The horses will perform a 'dance' around and within a circle, in which they would enact the polarity and harmony of opposites, working simultaneously with themes of tension and fusion.

We are also planning to conduct a workshop open to people in and around the Oswestry area in which participants will work with body movement in conjunction with a horse. It is hoped that this will take place at Carreg y Big Equestrian Centre. We hope to involve the participants of the workshop in the event at the Racecourse.

This project has several implications for exploring the relationship between art and geography, for example the relationship between communication systems and the land, as well as how (and to what effect) communication systems negotiate borders. In addition, a number of geographers have begun in recent years to explore the non-human elements operating within networks. ANT (Actant Network Theory) aims to re-examine the nature of agency and how actants are recruited and bound into networks and how these networks then unfold in material terms. Networks in this concept are perceived as a kind of electricity which holds the various actants together, placing emphasis on the 'performativity' of actants. Actants can refer to human agents, animals or machinery or other non organic elements and 'consideration is given to non-human and human entities equally, with no prior assumption of privilege, rank or order' (Fitzsimmons and Goodman (1998)). As Owain Jones has pointed out, that while this theory has given attention to previously ignored subjectivities, it is also a mistake to see the identity of animals only in terms of relational interconnectedness with other actants such as tools, as this ignores the question of how and why animals are enrolled into particular networks and the ethical implications of this. As Ingold has said:

to regard the animal as a mere tool is to deny its capacity for autonomous movement; tools cannot 'act back' or literally interact with their users

And Peterson has stated:

rethinking human nature means not only dethroning humans but also liberating other animals from their passive and mechanistic portrayal by Western rationalism