Homeland

… and opening [this] to critical reflection and debate (Source: Pinder 2008, 732).

[It] investigated Londoner’s emotional connectedness to those lands and peoples who produce what we consume, using the metaphor of the lightbulb (Source: Platform ndb, np link).

[It was] a ‘nomadic public dialogue’ [that] explored Londoners’ ideas of home and their emotional connectedness with lands and peoples on which their lives depend. Focusing on the metaphor of a light bulb, it addressed the routes taken by that commodity’s components and the energy needed for its illumination (Source: Pinder 2008, 732).

[It] uncovered the reality of the ecological footprint of trade across Europe by tracing the origins of the light bulbs, copper and coal that came together to make light in a London home (Source: Marriott 2018, np link).

It unpicked the constituent resources – coal, copper and glass – and showed the ecological footprint of a London home (Source: Khan et al 2016, p.75).

[It] engaged the audience and the participants in a coal mine in Wales, a copper mine in Portugal, and a light bulb factory in Hungary. … So obviously coal, which is electricity, copper, which is the means by which the electricity passes from the power station to your house and then a light bulb, this thing you stick in the ceiling (Source: Marriott in Lisiak 2023, np link).

At the heart of the project was a space that was created for discussion with those who visited the installation (Source: Marriott 2008, p. 212-3).

A large furniture truck, a pantechnicon, housed the event, parking each day of the 10-day Festival on a London street … (Source: Heim 2003, p.185).

… in front of the corporate offices of RTZ [Rio Tinto Zinc], GE [General Electric], or British Coal, or by a building representative of one of the countries involved: two Portuguese cafés, two British-Hungarian societies’ meeting rooms, and the London Welsh Centre (Source: Heim 2003, p.189-190).

[It parked on] Jermyn Street (near the HQ of Rio Tinto Zinc), Shortlands (UK HQ of General Electric); St Dunstan’s Road (Hungarian Reform Church); and Wren Street (opposite the London Welsh Centre) (Source: LIFT 1993, np link).

[All were] points of relevance to our story of light coming to the capital (Source: Platform 2013, np link).

On the exterior of the pantechnicon was an image which was composed of two photographs, one of a bombed rural dwelling and one of a burned forest landscape with the words: ‘WHAT DO YOU LOVE MOST YOUR HOME OR YOUR LAND?’ Once the pantechnicon was parked, the back shutters were opened and white steps set out onto the street. The area nearest the opening was laid with artificial grass and set with garden tables and chairs. The public were welcomed to step up onto this garden terrace and invited to sit down. They were given a brochure, with questions printed in English, Hungarian, Welsh and Portuguese: ‘Across Europe people are killing each other over different meanings of home – What is Home for you? Is there a place you love above any other? Is this your home? When you think of home what do you see or hear? How much is your home built of memories? Where are you most at home? In your street? Your town? Your region? Your country? Your continent? Where do you feel you stop belonging? How often do you think about the future of the place you call home?’ PLATFORM would initiate conversations using these questions … (Source: Heim 2003, p.189-190).

… [with] project workers and translators and begin what could sometimes be a one or two-hour dialogue (Source: Platform 2013, np link).

… about love, home and ecological interdependency (Source: Heim 2003, p.183).

The discussions were carefully structured (Source: Marriott 2008, p. 212-3).

We started by asking people to explore their notions of home by drawing representations of the places or times in their lives when they had felt most sense of belonging (Source: Platform 2013, np link).

Then we talked with the visitor about the drawing. ‘What does home mean to you?’ ‘Where do you feel you stop belonging?’ or ‘How often do you think of the future of the place where you live?’ (Source: Marriott 2008, p. 212-3).

The conversations had two stages: the first, directed by the printed questions, elicited a narrative. In the second, PLATFORM introduced questions and information about environmental interdependence, responding to that narrative. … The public were given a map of Greater London photocopied onto tracing paper and asked to mark the boundaries of their home territory, or a place that was special to them. They were invited to draw or write representations of home on small squares of paper using coloured pencils and pens. People were offered a light-bulb in a carton and told its narrative, tracing its production and entry into London. Further inside the pantechnicon, backing the terrace and bathed in light, was a mock house with pitched roof, painted white. On the door were the words: ‘HOMELAND. MINHA TERRA. SZÜLOFÖLD. FY NGWLAD I.’ The house was divided into a two room installation. Inside, the public were invited to photograph one of their hands, resting on a tray of earth, palm upwards. The side walls of the first, the ‘Home’ Room, were honeycombed with rows of hundreds of small squares. The transparencies of hands and the drawings of home were hung over these and back-lit. Each drawing and hand was anonymous, but numbered, identifying it with a numbered conversation tape, which was available at a desk, along with the marked maps and documentation from PLATFORM’s preparatory research. The dividing wall between the two rooms was a lapped wooden fascia with a door simulating the exterior of a house. On the door were the words: ‘THE FOOTPRINTS OF YOUR HOME STRETCH ACROSS A CONTINENT.’ This ‘Land’ Room was darkened; as the public stepped over the threshold, they activated the room light. Three walls each had a mock door, with two back-lit panels of glass, one at eye level behind which ran a video of an opened hand, and a lower panel onto which a poem was etched, recounting the journeys of copper, coal and the lightbulb, and eulogizing the hands that mined and made them (Source: Heim 2003, p.189).

If the person agreed, the dialogue would be recorded but kept anonymous. The length of each recording was limited to ten minutes, but the conversations found their own lengths, from a few minutes to several hours (Source: Heim 2003, p.189).

There was no fee charged, and of the people who entered, about half were passers-by, a quarter from the designated buildings, a quarter from the Festival audience (Source: Heim 2003, p.190).

In addition to those who watched from the street and those who did not speak, the work consisted of more than 300 conversations, or 300 events, mostly without witness. There are material traces but there is no one coherent performance to recall (Source: Heim 2003, p.190).

Platform is quite exceptional in the field of activist art (Source: Heim 2003, 183).

According to Dan Gretton PLATFORM started with an urge to bring together the energy of activism with the imagination of theatre and performance (Source: Illukka 2014 p.70-71 link).

I co-founded Platform with James in 1983 when we were at university and involved in political activism, particularly the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s. Platform started with our wanting to bring together the energy of activism with the imagination of theatre and performance (Source: Gretton in Cohn 2003, np link).

[Question]: I’m curious, how did you choose your name? [Marriott]: It came out of the first thing Platform ever did, which was a kind of group gathering. A whole range of people interested in the idea of political theatre came together. One person said, ‘Let’s call it Platform.’ It was a mixture between a political platform and the stage. It’s funny, people have often asked us why we don’t change our name, but I think its ambiguity has acted in our favor because people don’t know what we are. Some people think we’re an oil research organization focusing on platform security (Source: Cohn 2003, np link).

I started out in theatre. But I became disillusioned by what I would say was the problem of representing change or revolution, or acting in change or revolution. There was a whole culture in the 1980s doing very radical plays, but the only change that happened was on the stage. That became, for me, a real conundrum. I found myself wanting to see whether it’s possible to make theatre in a way that is actually engaged in real life, so you can balance the poetics of the stage with the pragmatics of the change in the human being in real space (Source: Marriott in Cohn 2003, np link).

I’m the newest member of the group. I met Dan [Gretton] at university, in 1983 … He knocked on my door because I played the violin and had a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badge. He figured I was some sort of politically motivated musician. He introduced himself and asked me if I wanted to join this group called Platform. He told me all about it, and I said, ‘Absolutely not. You’ve got the wrong person.’ The basis was quite agitprop, very bold work – in the street, public-space-type of work – which I admired, and still do – but I just didn’t think it had anything to do with who I was inside. But after five hours of me saying no, we became friends … and eight years later I became involved with Platform (Source: Trowell in Cohn 2003, np link).

I shifted away from theatre toward visual arts; I went back to college and trained as a sculptor. I draw my understanding quite a lot from the essence of sculpture, which is the forming process — the idea of trying to create form, trying to create structures — images — which give form to things which have hitherto been formless. Studying the works of certain artists, like Joseph Beuys, has also been important to the work Platform does because of his ideas about sculpture and art’s relationship to politics, and how politics itself could be made into a sculptural form (Source: Marriott in Cohn 2003, np link).

Deeply inspired by Joseph Beuys, the form and content of Platform’s work fuse the political with the personal (Source: Cohn 2003, np link).

Platform … was a fusion of … the imagination of theatre or art with the action of politics toward change (Source: Marriott in Cohn 2003, np link).

Creating spaces or routes for public conversation has long been [their] key concern (Source: Pinder 2008, p.732).

Student politics of the time tended to focus on the issues of ‘elsewhere.’ The invasion of Grenada was a big example of this. But we were interested from the very beginning in what is happening right here on this street, in our place. We wanted to create works that, right from the first instance, were involved in the immediate, in the local; to use that as a lens through which to see wider issues. It’s there that you can involve yourself in change. All the people involved in the work right from the beginning had a real commitment to what they were doing. I think this has remained important to the present (Source: Marriott in Cohn 2003, np link).

[So] PLATFORM works in and about London and the tidal Thames Valley, but its methodologies and strategies travel far beyond Britain’s capital (Source: Association APSOLUTNO 2006, p.222 link).

The key themes in PLATFORM’s works have been local identity, ecosystem interconnectedness, the oil issue, remembering, and creating utopias to provoke change (Source: Illukka 2014 p.70 link).

Utilizing conversation, storytelling, and walking to envision solutions to social and ecological problems, their work is motivated by an optimistic belief that changes for the better are possible (Source: Cohn 2003, np link).

What we’re trying to do is to find ways to provoke democratic change, ways of improving the relationship between humanity and nature, making a more ecological balance. The technique to do that is by using lots of different disciplines and forms (Source: Marriott in Cohn 2003, np link).

PLATFORM was formed in 1983 as a place for artists and activists to act together on social and environmental issues. … We have experimented with new methods and tactics and engaged in artistic and political movements … to deepen the expression of our core values (Source: Platform nda, np link).

Since 1984 PLATFORM has established itself as one of Europe’s leading exponents of social practice art, combining the talents of artists, scientists, activists and ecologists to work across disciplines on issues of social and environmental justice (Source: Association APSOLUTNO 2006, p.222 link).

In order to explore the complex nature of environmental and human rights issues the collective works multidisciplinarily and orients itself also outwards, to collaborations, in order to develop shared visions. Therefore, Platform is not merely an artistic group, but a collective of activists, artists, educationalists and researchers, who share an interest also in other than art-specific paradigms. They find essential those ideas, experiences and possibilities, which come out from this interaction and their way of furthering important issues (Source: Illukka 2014 p.68 link).

Trowell describes their work as ‘intimate acts of exchange and trust, proposal and re-imagining’ …. Conversation is a method of PLATFORM, a medium and skill developed through practice within the collective and ‘listening’ actions. Each project develops its own form and timescale, and brings together its own interdisciplinary team (Source: Heim 2003, 183).

The process of creating an idea – of coming to an understanding and thinking, ‘how can we create something that provokes change?’ That’s the real work… to the point where we’ve churned it over enough that out comes a form, and the form looks like, say, a newspaper. Or the form looks like a performance, a piece of hydrotechnology, a score of contemporary music, or a performance in a dark space for five hours with eight members of the audience. The forms are just the outward expressions of this stuff that we’re working on. The essence of this is democracy, ecology, and interdisciplinary creativity (Source: Marriott in Cohn 2003, np link).

‘We blend the power of art to transform with the clear goals of campaigning; rigorous in-depth research with the visions of alternative futures.’ Influenced by artist Joseph Beuys, amongst others, the collective has manifested that all these various acts can be seen as art – the process of moulding form – ‘all focus on physical and meta-physical change, change both in the tangible space of the material world and the intangible space of people’s hearts and imaginations’ (Source: Illukka 2014 p.68 link).

Jane Trowell has described [PLATFORM’s] method: ‘It’s part debate through the arts, part political agitation, part very personal, which I found interesting because a lot of activism in the 1980s was about mass culture. There was a fusion between personal issues and political issues that I admired’ (Source: Illukka 2014 p.70-71 link).

Platform[‘s] … consensus model … is extraordinary. It shouldn’t be extraordinary, but it is. It was like dog-eat-dog in the 1980s in England. It still is a brutal environment for active democratic models. So when I started working with Platform I was amazed at the idea that people can sit around and discuss their concerns, and not take a vote, which always used to alienate me about other politics (Source: Trowell in Cohn 2003, np link).

In their early years, the group created street-based interactive performance work, which provoked debate and awareness on a variety of issues from supporting services, which were to be privatized … to intimate performances exploring notions of personal locatedness, responsibility and belonging (Source: Illukka 2014 p.70-71 link).

In the late 1980s, Platform immersed itself in environmental politics and travelled to Germany to learn from the growing Green and Direct Democracy movements. We were particularly influenced by artist Joseph Beuys’ ‘Social Sculpture’, Green activist Petra Kelly, and writer/dissident Rudolf Bahro. Their influence can be seen in projects during the early 1990s such as ‘Still Waters’ which proposed the digging up of London’s buried rivers and the re-establishment of valley communities, and ‘Delta’ which generated hydro-power from the River Wandle to light a nearby school (Source: Platform nda, np link).

In 1992 PLATFORM won the Time Out Award for ‘Still Waters’ which proposed as common sense the recovery of the buried rivers of London (Source: Association APSOLUTNO 2006, p.222 link).

HOMELAND [was created by] Gretton, Marriott, and John Jordan, … was commissioned by the 1993 London International Festival of Theatre … (Source: Heim 2003, 183).

… received funds from the Gulbenkian … and [was] produced by ArtsAdmin (Source: Marriott 2018, np link).

[It was a collaboration between] Nicky Childs- ArtsAdmin, Gabor Batoni – Hungarian translator, Roberta Fox – Portuguese translator, Dan Gretton, John Jordan, James Marriott, Gwen Pritchard – Welsh translator, Nick Robins – environmental economist; Production assistants: Debbie Murdoch and Paul Sutcliffe (Source: Platform ndb, np link).

[It] tackled issues of resource justice and transnational trade. We introduced the public to the relatively new concept of the ecological footprint through a participatory project looking at how the all the elements of a single light bulb come to London (Source: Platform nda, np link).

After the 1992 Earth Summit, more and more people are grappling with a new concept, a new image, of ecological footprints. London requires a footprint of 120 times its own land area to feed its appetite for resources and deal with its wastes. We would need tens of planets if all the world’s peoples consumed at such a rate. An urgent question for europe is how to grapple as a culture with the reality of this footprint. We have an optimistic vision of London’s ability to pioneer new forms of lifestyle and livelihood that can be enjoyed by all the world’s peoples and not just a limited few. We reject the siren calls for imposing barriers between us and the poor south. Rather, we aim to develop a vibrant democratic culture that places our currently cold commercial relationships with distant far-off places on a basis of respect and sustainability: from the Valley of the Ephra to the copper mines of Nevishkova, from the Wandel Delta to the oil fields of the Niger Delta (Source: Platform 2013, np link).

In the wider context, in 1993, the Balkans were at war. Europeans were killing each other over nationalist and economic claims, and to achieve ‘ethnic cleansing’. Against this background, PLATFORM were asking the public to disperse their concepts of home, to de-territorialize the spatial identifications of home, to blur the emotional marks which limit their extension of belonging (Source: Heim 2003, 185).

[So] Homeland … addressed issues of Home and of identity with expatriate communities in London amid the conflicts which tore apart Yugoslavia (Source: Trowell 2009, np link).

[It] was a way of theatricalising and performing that sense of periphery (Source: Marriott in Lisiak 2023, np link).

Arising from … local work [Like ‘Still Waters’] we felt a need to think again about wider relationships what of those places far beyond the city’s political boundaries upon whose resources we draw and about which we know so little. In Homeland we really went back to our roots in as much as the first work we’d ever done in Platform years ago … focused on trying to create links between different communities of people who were in a sense invisible to each other. The question we posed to ourselves was whether it was possible to connect people not just across a town or a city but across vast international trade systems. What is the connection between our home and other people’s land? Whose lands do we depend upon for our needs to be met? In homeland we would try to make the invisible world of trade visible, to recognize the human hands and faces behind the label of ‘producer’. Only when people can see and believe in others’ existence can you begin to talk about empathy (Source: Platform 2013, np link).

We chose to focus the project on the story of how light comes into our city. Light a most intangible substance. Yet, by breaking down its components into copper wire, bulb and electricity itself, we managed to trace the points where these materials were extracted or manufactured to three sites in Europe. We spent months building up contacts with the Portuguese, Hungarian and Welsh communities in London (Source: Platform 2013, np link)

With the Homeland project we worked with [environmental] economist [Nick Robins] who did research for six months (Source: Gretton in Cohn 2003, np link).

[This] … identified three junctions in the provision of electric light: 1) the quarrying of silica sand and the manufacture of lightbulbs at General Electric’s factory in Hungary; 2) the mining of copper ore for electric cable by Rio Tinto Zinc in Portugal; and 3) the mining of coal by the then British Coal in Wales (Source: Heim 2003, p.189).

And we used those places [in Wales, Portugal and Hungary], we worked with those places to try and engage the audience in London to understand how light came into their lives (Source: Marriott in Lisiak 2023, np link).

The methods for declaring and realizing PLATFORM’s intentions were to offer to the public face-to-face questioning, open-ended conversation, symbolic objects and contemplative actions. These methods place HOMELAND within the loosely associated, international family of art works and actions known as social practice art, social sculpture, littoral art, dialogic art, new genre public art (Source: Heim 2003, p.185).

As instances of activism, … [these arts works and actions] can be without displays of provocation or demonstration. They are without the collective, festive suspension of quotidian norms which are evident in some protests. They seldom present a narrowed issue against which a clear sense of resistance can be achieved (Source: Heim 2003, p.185).

In HOMELAND, the public moved through and activated new combinations of elements and activities … The elements were ordinary; the activities were creative: drawing and mapping your territory on paper, reading poems, opening doors, touching glass, photographing your hand on earth to be added to the shrine of transparencies. Mingling with the tangible were the overheard snatches of other conversations, the recollection of your own, and the ambient traffic. This layering of light, hands, earth, homes, landscapes and voices could be read as an undefined connection between strangers, a temporary proximity, an enlightening. PLATFORM set the atmosphere, the texture and range of combinations, but the connections and symbolic resonances were left radically open, undirected (Source: Heim 2003, p.193).

[Here, the PLATFORM] artist is a threshold through which transformation may happen, and that change is undergone without shock, Brechtian verfremdungseffekt, or spectacle. The allure and the provisional trustworthiness of the artist can draw one into the pleasure of an ethos of listening, and into feelings associated with care and friendship. To become attracted to, even imitative of, their comportment and tone can be a transformative experience. To bring about that experience requires more than an empathy on the part of the artist towards the participant, or the artist’s negotiation of disparities in social and dialogic skills and differences in cultural power. It requires making the occasion, the event, in which each person can begin with the knowledge they have, including that of how to act and of what constitutes character, and then move to a questioning of that knowledge. The ethical matrix is more than simply a check on fallaciousness; creating the experience of that matrix is method (Source: Heim 2003, p.197).

[A]ctivists and campaigners in general don’t (yet) sense that working with artists can be a crucial element in the effectiveness of the work. The situation is related to the urgent speed which can characterise environmental and social justice activism, pushed by the need for a ‘critical path’, an achieveable set of goals and outcomes that the ‘campaign’ or actions can be measured against. This culture can militate against values that are common in other fields, processes that Wallace Heim has called ‘slow activism’. Furthermore, we are still a long way from the public at large readily associating the word ‘artist’ with a person who is concerned with ethics and who might contribute to social and environmental change, a perception that can act as a deterrent. …[It’s important] to create a context where artists wake up and activists slow down, together (Source: Trowell 2005, np link).

In rhetorical works like HOMELAND, it is not so much the performative identity of the artist, or their iterative ability to instantiate and modify that identity that matters – as in some performance art and liveart. Nor is it so much the enactment of chosen virtues projected onto a situation, or articulations of an ethical theory [-] as in some theatre. Rather, it is the ability to create the experience of that ethical matrix, an occasion of character. That experience will be particular, somatic, and transient – and one which is mutually ‘performed’ between the artist and participant (Source: Heim 2003, p.196).

PLATFORM’s intentions … were to enable connections to be made, firstly between one’s sense of ‘home’, and the imagined sense of ‘home’ by someone in a distant country. That possible projection of feelings outward, from the nearby and familiar to an unknown person in a distant country, could be extended to a feeling for the land on which London rests, to the lands on which the city depends, and for the possible damage to other homes and lands which that dependency could incur. The urban home’s inseparability from other landscapes was shown through an explication of the manufacture of a lightbulb, tracking the city’s dependency for its functioning and liveliness on the extraction of minerals from other landscapes, on the processes of energy production, manufacturing and transport which cross political boundaries. The unseen provision of electricity, the ubiquity of artificial light, the everyday habits of turning on the light-switch were to be made apparent and the effects of those actions made intimate and visceral through their connection with feelings of home, belonging, land and responsibility. Those feelings were to be extended through connecting one’s narrative within a pattern of other, imagined, emotional territories (Source: Heim 2003, p.185).

This is slow activism. The slowness refers not only to the duration of the event and the drift which can be momentary or extend over years, but to its temper. There is a resistance in slowness which responds to the reductive aspects of haste and frenzy. The locus of change is one person at a time, in a process of communication which is dependent on finding enough common meaning between the artist and participant to sustain a dialogue (Source: Heim 2003, p.187).

[T]he speaking is the ‘art’, and with some, there is the intention and possibility that the conversation set loose will carry its contents and manners adapting and drifting into the future. The artist initiates an exchange which ‘works’ not only in the immediacy of the event, but could ‘work’ in unforeseen situations … [because] the public participants … have … mutually created the event. It is an experience which makes further experience possible (Source: Heim 2003, p.187).

Some works continue to have effect beyond the event, reverberating in the stories about it, passed along like a slow contagion (Source: Heim 2003, p.184).

Had sufficient funding been available, HOMELAND would have travelled to Hungary, Portugal and Wales, then returned to London (Source: Heim 2003, p.190).

From my experience, the tacitly communicated ethos, and the gestures, voices, and presence of PLATFORM, create the feelings that whatever is spoken will be welcomed and questioned, and that in this process, one is carried into surprising thoughts and ideas … [and] there was the potential to reason together about human actions within unpredictable worlds (Source: Heim 2003, p.197 & 196).

… what emerged was not the anticipated public response. Most people talked about home and their sense of place; most conversations were nostalgic. The careful piloting by PLATFORM evoked recollections of protection, abandonment, childhood, identity, happiness, isolation, homelessness. Their tact may not have had enough force to critically interrogate the public about their concepts of belonging and territory, or to introduce novel ideas (Source: Heim 2003, p.197).

Not everyone spoke. Some people passed through, read, drew, mapped, photographed, or just listened (Source: Heim 2003, p.190).

The drawings and conversations were multiple and varied, some lasting ten minutes, some over an hour (Source: Marriott 2008, p. 212-3).

The [tape-recorded conversations] show the range and fluctuations of narrative modes: confessional, argumentative, reminiscent, curious, confused, obdurate, intimate. As the conversations progressed through questioning, the give-and-take became more like a form of reasoning than an exchange of stories or information (Source: Heim 2003, p.195).

What, if any, connection do you feel to the miners of Neves-Corvo who mine the copper in the electric cables you use here? Or to the Hungarians who manufacture many of the light bulbs you use? (of course for the vast majority of people the answer was ‘none’ – we are (mostly) completely defeated by the complexity and enormity of international trade to feel such connection) (Source: Cartiere 2003, p.91 link).

[Participants] began to describe the emotion and numbness behind transnational global trade (Source: Platform ndb, np link).

[The recorded conversations show] a journey through people’s very personal stories to questions of how they might relate to the people in Portugal, Hungary and Wales they depended on for their light (Source: Platform 1995, np link).

[But] it seems that environmental interdependency and tracing an artefact’s manufacture were unfamiliar to most participants; answers to those questions were not already rehearsed, the information about them not easily exchangeable, the re-figuring of one’s habits was not already justified. Starting with ‘home’ weighted the conversations towards an intimate sphere of strong personal emotions. This may have limited any projection to other ‘homes’. But that framing also meant that the questions, when considered, required bringing the emotional force of unidentified prejudices into the domestic and familiar. It also meant that the ‘footprint’ outwards was recognized not only as the tangible effects of manufacture and capital, but as the differences in the patterns and qualities of love and care as they extended beyond one’s immediate spheres (Source: Heim 2003, p.198).

[T]he metaphor of light seemingly was not strong enough against the feelings of home to carry the intentions of the work. Electricity and the lightbulb were too distant from the body, too cold, too invisible to come into play. Those ‘natural’ constituent elements in everyday artefacts did not have the immediate agency, liveliness, or comfort of a buried river, of food, of a pair of trainers – objects used in other art works and media documentaries (Source: Heim 2003, p.198-9).

[B]eyond the beauty of the installation that hundreds of people had helped create – like ‘seeing people’s souls displayed’ as one visitor put it – the real artwork was the often remarkable dialogues and exchanges that took place. Out of so many, it is hard to select. But two stay in my mind. A young woman suggesting that London could once a year have a festival of light where, for a few hours, there will be no electricity; where the absence would highlight just how much we take the people who create our electricity for granted. And a Hungarian woman in her 80s who, after an hour of dialogue, looked up with a mischievous glint in her eye and said ‘but, if people had to know exactly where everything came from – as you’re suggesting – and who produced it, well, it would make capitalism unworkable, wouldn’t it?’ (Source: Platform 1995, np link).

One of the drawings that particularly stood out, depicted a neatly drawn planet Earth with a red heart hanging beside it. An American working in Hammersmith, a senior marketing executive in the GE corporation, made it. That drawing illustrates exactly a sense of corporate ‘placelessness.’ Yet transnational corporations are themselves communities – not communities of place, but communities of intent or action. What are these communities several hundred thousand strong like? Who are they? Can we work with them? Can they be encouraged in one direction or another similar to more ‘traditional’ communities of place? (Source: Marriott 2008, p. 212-3).

[The geographer] Doreen [Massey drew] … on the innovative performance art of PLATFORM to provide a vivid example of the ways in which London’s wealth is dependent upon environmental and human devastation caused in other parts of the world (Source: Wills 2013, p.140).

[HOMELAND] was smack bang in the way of Doreen’s thinking [see her 1991 article ‘called a ‘A Global Sense of Place’]. I think she went: ‘Oh, that lot, they’re up to tricks,’ you know. … And we just got on immediately (Source: Marriott in Lisiak 2023, np link).

[Marriott to Massey:] You somehow came across our Homeland project in the mid-1990s. I think you were drawn to the fact that we too were trying to grapple with the questions of globalisation and geography, and to find ways to explore them through the arts. We had the odd exchange until Platform participated in a performance and seminar event organised by Alan Read at the LSE in 2002 called Civic Centre. From then on, we became allies and you wrote about Platform’s work and participated in events such as a Gog & Magog performance in 2004 and the launch of the Remember Saro Wiwa Living Memorial at City Hall in 2006 with Ken Wiwa, Angela Davies and Ken Livingstone. Indeed, it was typical that you were the one who built the link between us and the then Mayor of London. Later, it was through you that we were invited to contribute to the Kilburn Manifesto, a commission that resulted in Platform’s collective essay ‘Energy Beyond Neoliberalism’ which has become a foundation stone for our ongoing work. You have been such a generous ally and knowing that you are there wishing us well gives us strength and comfort (Source: Marriott 2022, p.694).

[Massey] regularly worked closely with Platform … [and] supported their efforts to push major museums, including the Tate, to break sponsorship deals with ‘big oil’. … James Marriott, told me what happened at that event: … ‘And of course, who turned up, was very happy to do it was Doreen, you know, and again, I just love that naughtiness of her. Because now I understand that, you know, there were lots of other academics, bless them, who would go well, I can’t be involved in this kind of, basically pirate thing, squatted the main gallery, and they’re gonna get kicked out and into, because if I do that, then I’ll be struck off the list of being a proper, you know, Tate talker person and she, you know, she done lots of stuff for Tate, big stuff, you know, but no, no, no, Doreen, because she was basically badly behaved a lot of the time, was great. She’s like, ‘right, let’s do this.’ And in she marched and bang, she held you know, just I loved her for that, really badly behaved’ (Source: Stone et al 2023, np link).

Over the years, through visiting my friend in Virginia, and with echoes of Platform’s Homeland project in my mind, I have tried to track the journey of this black rock [coal]. In a pick-up truck, I’ve followed rail lines winding into the Appalachians, the land of the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Mingo First Nations. Through the steep-sided valleys, sometimes barely wide enough for the parallel paths of railroad, river and road, to the likes of Blackfoot Mining Inc. near Laeger in McDowell County, West Virginia. There are long running campaigns in this area, protesting against the ecological brutality of mountain tops entirely removed in the search for coal, by diggers whose buckets would carry three Greyhound buses, dragline cranes that are twenty-storeys high. The endless coal trains rattling across Virginia, through Roanoke, Lynchburg and Petersburg, carry the rock to the east coast at Newport News. At Lambert’s Point Terminal I’ve seen the coal wagons covered in snow, inching toward the piers where colliers, like the MN Istanbul and the MN Hunan Capetown, were waiting, bound for Shanghai, Bilbao, or Rotterdam. Beyond the oceans their holds disgorge great hills of carbon onto the quaysides of docks such as the Europoort in the Netherlands. I’ve gazed at the coal coasters lumbering up the wide Thames estuary, between Foulness and Sheppey, to be unloaded by cranes on the jetties at Tilbury Power Station on the Thames and Kingsnorth Power Station on the Medway. And from the house where my partner and I live, we have watched the smoke rise from the power station chimneys, the rocks of Appalachia in the Kent and Essex air, and seen the pylons stretching to the horizon bearing electricity to London and beyond (Source: Marriott 2013, np link).