:.Catherine Clover.:.8 Miles.:.

VIII Miles from Hyde Park Corner (2023)

As part of #EnCOUnTERs X #MusicandOtherLivingCreatures
A Helen Frosi/Café Oto Off-Site activity
Saturday 15 July, 12.30 - 2.15pm
Sunday 16 July, 1.15 - 3pm
Meet at Richmond Station (underground /overground)
Join us on Sat or Sun 15/16th July (start times are shaped by the Thames tides) for a walk with our avian companions. We'll be walking, listening, voicing and languaging as Catherine guides us through Royal Parkland and our historic uneasy relationship with winged creatures and the Crown-appropriated land they inhabit. The walk is limited to 15 participants.

This walk is inspired by both the Western imaginary – the creative imagination – as well as being grounded in the physicality and materiality of place, the land on which we walk, the ground beneath our feet. I will be sharing some ideas about birds, time, place; Indigenous Australian cosmologies; geology, geography, rivers and tides, the moon, Chaucer.

No audio recordings for this walk as the wind and the planes were too loud...

Chaffinch score

Chiffchaff score

As a royal parkland Old Deer Park is ripe for a decolonial re-thinking, of assessing the damage and impact of our colonial past upon peoples, places, landscapes and the more-than-human world. I have spent many years living in the northern part of Melbourne, Australia, and have been influenced by the Traditional Owners’ relationship to land, to Country, in particular the Wurundjeri people whose relationship to Country is as strong as it ever was despite the devastation wrought by British colonial eradication practices. I see this walk as a small attempt at re-connecting us to the world around us via the voices of the birds, a kind of posthuman counterpoint, perhaps. to the colonial project.

Despite the fact that Old Deer Park is a royal parkland it is a seriously depleted and damaged ecosystem and the birds may not be as audible as we might hope. It is a broken ecology, close to a major arterial road out of London and also under the Heathrow flight path. However, common wild birds can be incredibly resilient creatures.

Image Credit Helen Frosi

Some of the ideas that accompany our walk include

geology - the bedrock of London, the London Basin, London chalk and clay.
the birds that sing and call along the northern boundary of Old Deer Park including Chiffchaffs, Chaffinches, Greenfinches, Carrion Crows and more

Image Credit Helen Frosi

Kulin Nation/Gumbayngirr Australian academic and writer, Margo Ngawa Neale’s introduction to Indigenous Australian understandings of the world through knowledge, culture, language including the concept of songlines, a generalised whitefella term from author Bruce Chatwin (1982) that many Aboriginal Australians now accept today to describe the extensive knowledge that is held in the land by the 350+ cultures and languages across the Australian continent
Chaucer’s dynamic use of Middle English in his poem The Parliament of Fowls, 1360

Image Credit Helen Frosi

A participatory voicing with the local birds under an oak tree of about 200 years old. Across the UK a generation of the 300-600 year old oaks are missing, felled and used during the industrialization era primarily for shipbuilding during the period of colonial expansion. Their absence destabilises the ecosystems for both the older and younger oak trees.
A final stop at the Richmond meridian line along the Thames, which was replaced by the Greenwich meridian line, Greenwich Mean Time, in the 1880s. Greenwich Mean Time was created to standardise and structure time across the British Empire, used as a form of power and control both within Britain and across the British colonies