2025: Land

In 2025, Lancaster Arts will take Land as our annual theme following on from Flight in 2024. Our thinking about Land builds upon conversations and projects in 2024 exploring what connects us to nature, particularly in LANDING, our micro-festival in Morecambe with We Live Here including commissions from Henna Asikainen and Breakwater. Henna will be back with us in 2025 with new work exploring land, migration and belonging.

Throughout our public programme, residencies, commissions, projects and events, we will work with artists, audiences, academics and activists to explore Land from a wide variety of perspectives:

·      The physical geography of the landscape

·      Land and belonging, nationalism, borders and boundaries

·      Landscape as body, a physical and health relationship

·      Land ownership and access

We are interested in the physical landscape that surrounds us, the land beneath our feet, be it rural or urban – and the forces that shape this land and our relationships to it. Land can root us in deep time, and yet it is continuously changing- mountains were once sea beds, and as sea levels rise, areas of land return to the sea.  

The programme will think about land and belonging, stewardship of land, and ownership of land. Land rights and land access, close at hand and globally. Who can lay claim to a particular patch of land? How does it feel to make a home in a new land? The word Land carries political connotations: Homeland Security, the Promised Land, Land of Hope and Glory. Lives are cut short or transformed through wars over conflicting claims on land.

More hopefully, we might ask, how can we look after the land we inhabit, and how does it look after us? How do we form relationships to the land that are sustainable? What might we do differently?

Many of these questions are rooted in our commitment to artistic work that addresses social and environmental justice. This work will take place within our dedicated art venues on the Lancaster University campus, but also out and about across our district, from the city centre to locations within the Forest of Bowland National Landscape as part of Are You Lost?

Across the year, three TEST residencies will bring together artists and researchers for shared explorations on a range on aspects including land and folklore, biodiversity and neurodiversity, and ways of experiencing landscape that may not be only about physical access.

If you are interested in exploring these questions with us, please join our mailing list, come along to our programme, look out for our artists opportunities, or drop us a line – we’d love you to be part of the conversation.