The Land

THIS DRAWING I made for the current issue of the marvellous Land Magazine ~ written by and for people who believe that the roots of justice, freedom, social security and democracy lie not so much in access to money, or to the ballot box, as in access to land and its resources

I think the drawing probably doesn't need very much explaining, but it was designed to fit in with Issue 13's theme of Land Grabs, whereby global corporations and wealthy nations buy up huge swathes of land in "less developed" countries to make money from biofuels, agribusiness, industry, and other ecocidal delights, thereby ousting those human, animal and plant communities living on that land. 

Land is such a fundamental thing to all of us. It would take a certain kind of unimaginable stupidity, short-sighted greed or off-the-scale insanity to believe that destroying the land upon which you stand, your only home, is somehow sustainable. Access to land is the thing which keeps us alive, rooted, fed, watered, and sane, which is why uprooting these communities is such a terrible thing. Not so very different from what happened in this country in earlier centuries.

My drawing in Issue 13 of The Land Magazine - somewhat cropped, for some reason

As The Land's manifesto states:

Demands to “make poverty history”, and the responses from those in power, revolve around money: less debt, freer and fairer trade, more aid. Rarely will you hear someone with access to a microphone mouth the word “land”.

That is because economists define wealth and justice in terms of access to the market. Politicians echo the economists because the more dependent that people become upon the market, the more securely they can be roped into the fiscal and political hierarchy. Access to land is not simply a threat to landowning élites — it is a threat to the religion of unlimited economic growth and the power structure that depends upon it.

The market (however attractive it may appear) is built on promises: the only source of wealth is the earth. Anyone who has land has access to energy, water, nourishment, shelter, healing, wisdom, ancestors and a grave. Ivan Illich spoke of "a society of convivial tools that allows men to achieve purposes with energy fully under their control". The ultimate convivial tool, the mother of all the others, is the earth. 

The timeline of civilisation has mapped a continuous robbery of land from the poor, the indigenous, the non-human, to bring us to the point where those holding the power own or control a vastly disproportionate area of land to their numbers; for example: Queen Elizabeth II, current monarch of this tiny green-grey island in the North Sea, "owns" 6,600 million acres of land, one sixth of the earth’s non ocean surface.

So, in the face of this sickenly unfair system, what choice do we have but to grab the land back? As Gill Barron points out in her excellent article on land-reclaiming - There is an honourable tradition worldwide, and strongly so in Britain, of small-scale land acquisition by stealth. These historic precedents suggest that even more of us should be actively following in the noble (if a bit scruffy) footsteps of our cotter & squatter forebears. [The Land - Issue 13]

Alongside the many admirable land-reclaimers, guerilla gardeners and squatters mentioned in Gill's article, a group of folks off the western shoulder of London's sprawl decided last year to occupy some disused land on the Runnymede Campus of Brunel University, which has lain disused since 2007 when Brunel University sold the land to a private property developer to turn into luxury homes, to much local concern. The property owner stalled, however, and so in between the apocalyptic gusts of tumble-weed blowing through the empty overgrown university buildings, watched over only by the sinister eyes of  CCTV, the Diggers2012 walked in, planted vegetables, put up tents and shelters, begun building a cob longhouse, and lived. The site is significant, being so close to the Magna Carta Monument, heralded as the "birthplace of modern democracy", where the Magna Carta was signed 800 years ago, introducing, alongside democracy, ideas such as freedom through law and limitations on authority. The Diggers2012 take their name from the original seventeenth century Diggers who planted crops on St George's Hill in Surrey in order to make the land a "common treasury for all". You'll all know the folksong telling their tale:

World Turned Upside Down
written by Leon Rosselson
recorded by Dick Gaughan

In 1649

To St George's Hill

A ragged band they called the Diggers

Came to show the people' s will

They defied the landlords

They defied the laws

They were the dispossessed

Reclaiming what was theirs

We come in peace, they said

To dig and sow

We come to work the land in common

And to make the waste land grow

This earth divided

We will make whole

So it can be

A common treasury for all.

The sin of property

We do disdain

No one has any right to buy and sell

The earth for private gain

By theft and murder

They took the land

Now everywhere the walls

Rise up at their command.

They make the laws

To chain us well

The clergy dazzle us with heaven

Or they damn us into hell

We will not worship

The God they serve

The God of greed who feeds the rich

While poor men starve

We work, we eat together

We need no swords

We will not bow to masters

Or pay rent to the lords

We are free men

Though we are poor

You Diggers all stand up for glory

Stand up now

From the men of property

The orders came

They sent the hired men and troopers

To wipe out the Diggers' claim

Tear down their cottages

Destroy their corn

They were dispersed -

Only the vision lingers on

You poor take courage

You rich take care

The earth was made a common treasury

For everyone to share

All things in common

All people one

We come in peace

The order came to cut them down

I visited the Diggers2012 camp last autumn, following a path through the woods and a wheelbarrow track through the dewy grass to a hole in the chicken wire fence.

And found there a friendly and diverse group of people sat around a fire in the main cob longhouse, talking unhurriedly about the day's plans, and cooking breakfast.

There were escapees from London, who had found no way to live the expensive life the city demands, nor been able to afford housing. There were activists and foragers and visiting families with children and dogs. Fifteen people were living there permanently, and as we sat and drank our fire-cooked coffee, they referred, with despairing seriousness, to the sprawling city which we could see in the distance from our hill as Mordor.

As well as growing vegetables and running workshops, they had set up a rudimentary water system from a spring higher up in the forest, which carried the water down through a long blue pipe via a home-made filter suspended between the trees.

I felt a great deal of purpose in the people I met there. They had had several evictions served against them but were fighting on, with a great openness to engage with the local and wider community, and challenge the deeply embedded idea of land ownership. The day I was there they were leading a foraging walk, and visitors gradually arrived to join us on the hunt for wild foods and medicines growing on this patch of "disused" land.

We found various edible and useful mushrooms, this one below is Chicken of the Woods

Not all fungi were in easy reach

We returned to the camp to make tea, and I had to leave before getting the chance to share in the meal of foraged foods.

But I did learn a new plant - this is water pepper - which has amazing spicy-tasting seeds!

It seems to me that we have been so disconnected from the land beneath our feet by so many tools of modern civilisation, that we no longer are able to tend it and speak to it, live with it and love it and know deeply that we cannot live without it. And because we have had our earthen umbilical cords which tie us to our ancestral place cut so brutally, for so long, we cannot stand up for our land when it is threatened, either. As Derrick Jensen says: "It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land and this particular moment in these particular circumstances."

Activists take to the trees to stop the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas and Oklahoma
as part of the Tar Sands Blockade

There are those still fighting for their land, though, like the Combe Haven Defenders, who have been standing in the way of the UK government's new road building program, by protecting the trees and hedgerows of the soon-to-be-annihilated tranquil and beautiful Combe Haven Valley in Sussex. Or the Unis'tot'en Action Camp in unceded occupied Wet'suwet'en territory of "British Columbia", where the land's indigenous people are standing in the way of massive pipelines for transporting tar sands oil and shale gas from fracking being built through their territory. In France right now Europe's biggest post-capitalist land occupation La ZAD (Zone À Défendre) is fighting a new airport in the most inspiring ways, which I really recommend you read about here: part 1 & part 2. There are countless other warrior projects across the world taking place right now where people have decided that enough is enough, and that they are prepared to fight to the death for the only thing that gives them life: their sacred and beloved land. To all those stopping in their flight from the enormous pustulent grabbing hand of progress, and turning back to face it and say: no more! I offer this fantastic rousing song by the Oysterband ~ We'll Be There! The last impassioned lines Leave this land alone always make me cry.

I've walked this hill a hundred times
To hear the river talking
A murmuring, a secret sound
Never found
And times I've leaned into the wind
To smell this earth I'm walking
With the song of the wind my heart is wound
All around
It's holy ground

CHORUS:

You can bring your JCBs
You can bring your drills and your 'drivers
You've got the might
But you've got no right
We'll be there, we'll be there, we'll be there

We've wandered under winter stars
To trace them in their courses
Summer nights at standing stones
We stood alone
We took the water in our hand
We rode the chalk-white horses
We dreamt one day they'd understand
We share this land
This holy ground

CHORUS

Leave this, leave this land alone
Leave this, leave this land alone
Leave this, leave this land alone
Leave this, leave this land alone
Leave this, leave this land alone
I said leave this, leave this land alone
Leave this, leave this land alone
Leave this, leave this land alone

Old Women Who Paint On Their Walls

I WOULD LIKE TO TELL YOU A STORY about three old women. Their art is an extraordinary sort. And it is by accident that they and their creations have come to light.

I have long been interested in what is generally known as "Outsider Art", "Naïve Art" or "Art Brut" - i.e. art which is made by those not formally trained in any artistic discipline, who mostly do not consider themselves "artists" as such. This isn't an easy genre to define by its very liminal nature, but the creators of it fascinate me. They are the marginal folk, the mad ones, seers of the Other Place, and their work often has a folk art quality to it which enchants me. Paintings and objects are frequently made with discarded things or drawn straight onto the edges of their surroundings: walls, doors, pavements.

So it is with these old women. They paint the walls of their houses. And the paintings are not demure tasteful interior design by any stretch! The walls and ceilings and doors are covered with bright bold "primitive" imagery, strange and wonderful. There are flowers, wolves, cats, angels and demons. There are peasant, religious, bucolic and mythical scenes. Often this urge to make imagery on their house walls bursts from these women later in life, after many hard years in poverty, or following the death of family members.

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Enni Id's cabin - photo above © Laatuaika Oy, photos below © Padasjoen 4H

First we have Enni Id (1900-1992) who lived in the community of Padasjoki in Finland. Her painting career began with widowhood. She covered the walls of her cabin with brightly coloured floral motifs, cats and plants. And she painted canvases too - with angels. Some of these paintings were exhibited in Helsinki, and nowadays her painted cabin can be visited at weekends. Below are panoramic views of her cabin interior which you can mouse-pan to look around. (QuickTime required)

Panoramic images copyright © 2005 Laatuaika Oy.

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Photo: still from La Sérénité sans carburant - Un film de Marie Famulicki

Second comes Bonaria Manca, born in 1925 in the small community of Orune in Sardinia. In 1947 the Viterbo Province of Tuscany became her home, and there she lived a simple cattle-herding life with her family. This is where, after the death of her parents, she began to paint the walls (and canvases) with scenes from her youth, landscapes and forests.

photo credit above : Roberto Loru

Bonaria is reluctant to sell her paintings as she feels that the work has soul and therefore should not be separated from her.
A film has been made about her by french filmmaker Marie Famulicki titled "Serenity with no Fuel", which I would be fascinated to get hold of.

La Sérénité sans carburant - Un film de Marie Famulicki

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Third is Polina Raïko (born 1928 as Pelageya Andreyevna; died 2004), from Tsyuryupinsk, in the dusty, remote Kherson region of the Ukraine, not far from the Black Sea coast.


Polina's painting began after a hard and painful period in her life. In 1994, she lost her daughter Olena, and within a year her husband Mykola was dead too. Then in 1998 her son Serhiy, who was a violent alchoholic, was taken to prison, and it was only then (when she was 69) that her first wall paintings began. Serhiy died in 2002, and his mother's painting continued.


Flowers began to grow from the windowsills, mythological beasts roamed the edges of rooms, primordial forests grew beside kitchen cupboards. Babushka-Polina's strange enchanting figures, animals and scenes covered the walls throughout her house. Her colours are bright, and the paintings have overwhelming presence. As Nataliya Kosmolinska says, it is as if these things were born new from the Yaytse-Raytse (the Ukrainian Mythic Egg from which all things are born).

Above: imagery inspired by "Arktika" water bottle label.
All photos above by Oleksiy Kachmar

Polina used ordinary house paint, and for inspiration she took images from water bottles, chocolate, wine labels, religious postcards and translated them onto her house walls. In all she painted thirty-six walls, nine ceilings, and some of the courtyard.

All photos above and below from English Russia and Kolya-S-Raena

In the last years of her life, Polina's creations were discovered by tourists and there followed visits from journalists, artists, film directors and many others. Communist ideology creeps into her work in places: hammer and sickle, a female Soviet Army captain and a "military medic". But much of her imagery was religious in nature, with churches, saints, winged figures and heavenly birds appearing regularly. After Polina's death on January 15th 2004, a painted phrase was found on the garage door: "How to find a way to paradise..."

Nadia

The house was inherited by Polina's grandson who was utterly unappreciative of her work, and saw nothing in his grandmother's strange paintings. He put it up for sale for $6000 and it was bought by an American couple living in the Ukraine. It is inhabited now by Nadia, a relative of Polina's, who sees herself as a kind of museum curator. Sadly the paintings were made directly onto the plaster and so with the passing of time and damp, the paint is peeling away in places...

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What fascinates me about these women is the obsessiveness in their painting. Perhaps because they've kept a lid on their creativity all their lives, and it boils over dramatically in their later years, we see wild, imaginative, otherworldly art produced lavishly beyond the boundaries. There is a difference about it. But the interesting thing is that it is not "Art" but paintings, all over the walls of these women's houses. This transgresses any staid assumption of social boundary - i.e. what is or is not acceptable in one's dwelling place. It is too much. It is mad. And it is marvellous! They are peasant frescoes, and are utterly truly-wrought I think.

There seems to be a spiritual element to the work too, it is a kind of mantra, the repeated designs and complete covering of all surfaces appear like a constant and dedicated prayer. And the beauty of the work must not be forgotten either: to make your surroundings so colourful and decorative and replete with symbolic imagery is a magnificent and powerful thing. Entering these houses must feel quite wonderful.
For me there's a delicious juxtaposition between the sacred and the profane here: Polina Raïko longed to paint a church, but could not until she found an image on a wine bottle label for reference. And the eagerness and obsessiveness with which these women painted belies some seeming sacred purpose, written out on the edge-place of the ordinary.

I leave you with a quote from Jean Dubuffet who defined Art Brut thus:

"Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade."

~ Jean Dubuffet. Place à l'incivisme (Make way for Incivism).
Art and Text no.27 (December 1987 - February 1988). p.36


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If you are interested in seeing and reading more about Outsider Art, I can highly recommend Raw Vision Magazine.
And thanks for information and photo credits go to these sites:
Outsider Environments Europe
Animula Vagula
(both of the above also recommended for Outsider Art enthusiasts)
English Russia
Oleksiy Kachmar
Laatuaika
Kolya-S-Raena
Nataliya Kosmolinska
Totem, Kherson