unmow’d

A walk down Mead Way. A quest. A fertility ritual. A storybook. A birthday. A cold shower. A folktale.

A kindred spirit to Eostrefeld, this project seeks to peel back everyday perceptions of the Mead Way hillside, inviting the innate strangeness and magic of the place to flourish. The hillside’s ecosystem usually gets “mowed” by lawnmowers, leafblowers, and insidious institutional ideals of immaculacy. This process took up the task of “unmow-ing”, to borrow a phrase of Walt Whitman’s, by exploring rewilding, embodiment, and folklore. This culminated with a performance in which two questers traverse the landscape and encounter different entities, attached to different parts of the landscape, learning about themselves, each other, and the land they inhabit along the way.

On the day the public was invited to witness “unmow’d”, there was a torrential downpour. A few dozen folks braved the storm to follow us down Mead Way, and many joined us afterwards for a hot cup of tea. Thus, this performance escaped photographic and video documentation. The photographic ephemera of this work presented on this website was composed by photographer Malaika Braverman, who joined us in a couple of rehearsals.