The Man Who Fell to Earth is a metaphor for the Outsider, the Outcast

This Is The Land (2022/3)

As I dream of the mythical beings that fall to Earth, I realise that these characters are metaphorical Outsiders, and Outcasts, who find themselves in places where there have been absences and erasures in history. They fall into places, towns, and landscapes where the ghosts of their 'hauntological past' haunt, and they respond to the call.

The landscape of the British Isles is another hauntological landscape, where the past haunts as a spectre of the industrial revolution, the 'march of capitalist progress'. The resulting displacement and lack of connection to the land, portrayed so brilliantly in Paul Wright's film Arcadia (2017), was the inspiration for the project This Is The Land (2022/3). The scene in the film of the fox hunt is a frenzied, bloodlust ritual, which epitomises the cruel domination of the countryside. The Fox is driven from its home into the city, an Urban Fox which is unwanted; an Outsider.

In the image above, the performer Xavier De Santos's embodiment of the Fox was a central image to the piece This Is The Land. The cunning shape-shifting Fox embodies the Outsider and the ability to survive. Driven from the land, their sense of displacement, of not belonging, was linked to ownership of land, inequalities of distribution of wealth, and the consequences of a loss of a deep connection to the land. This sense of belonging is not a nationalistic agenda, but an ecological, humanitarian and spiritual one that connects us to our roots, which are deeply connected to places and landscapes, and our sense of being in the world through an interconnected network.

I dream of filming This Is The Land in an urban landscape.