Installation #30 - Morag Colquhoun - EDEN
Installation #30 - 26 March 2019
It is fifty years since Eden (1969) was installed by Helio Oiticia at The Whitechapel Gallery.
In its initial starting point or manifestation, Eden (2019) is an experimental space for improvisation, mashup and reading - from a diary describing early colonial encounters between the Welsh and the Tehuelche in Patagonia (Taylor, 2014) to Raymond Williams’s imagined city of dispersed energy production in rural Wales (1979) - accompanied by chicha, grime, reggae and jazz. From Ciro Alegria’s dispossessed peasantry (1941) to Josiah Hunt’s YouTube video on biochar (2012), Eden is also a potential space for the resistance of biomass: the ‘economics of the leaf’ as described by Shiv Visvanathan (de Sousa Santos, 2007).
In August 2019, the installation morphs into a new space of improvisation with children and playworkers from Wrexham’s adventure playgrounds, including the radical junk playground The Land. This improvised space will form the centre of the exhibition Radical Play at Ty Pawb, Wrexham, with archive material and contributions from Assemble and Gareth Griffith.
Morag Colquhoun is an artist based in rural Wales. She works with communities and environmental contexts and is interested in developing work that emerges from a zone of uncertainty, exchange and dialogue. Her project Trofannolismo reimagines a planetary Tropicália from a perspective of rural Wales. She is currently working with two rural Welsh communities - Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) and Elan Valley reservoirs - while focusing on two communities in South America (Salango and Chamana) that are known to her. This reveals common issues, including touristification, local production, water resources and climate change.