land lines Residency with Syndikat Gefährliche Liebschaften, Schöppingen, Germany

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about the residency

The ‘Land Lines’ residency was commissioned by the Centre for Literature based near Havixbeck in North West Germany, and hosted by the Kunstler*Dorf (artists’ village), Schöppingen, about 15km from Havixbeck. Six creatives were commissioned to spend 2-3 months come up with a ‘performance’ in the form of a (4 x repeated) bus tour between Havixbeck and Schöppingen in September 2025.

I was invited to spend 5 weeks (April/May 2025) working on the Land Lines residency, thanks to a Cyfnewid Cultural Bridge Exchange between Dyffryn Dyfodol and Syndikat Gefährliche Liebschaften (the Collective of Dangerous Liaisons). The Syndikat, which was commissioned as one of the artists for Land Lines is a performance collective who use clever engaged processes to create place-based interventions in rural areas.

It has been a fantastic experience to share this residency time, exploring our different approaches to working creatively, and in engaged ways, with rural communities.

Methodology

How the Syndikat works

The Syndikat have a set of pretty clear ‘steps’ that they use in all their work.

They start with research/ finding topics (red on our diagram) of interest. Through:

-             internet research

-             walking around/visiting places

-             finding people to talk to, starting by asking the people who commissioned us, who they would recommend

Micha and Marleen are incredibly active and willing to just phone people up, go in and meet people. So pretty quickly they find oodles of people to talk to. They don’t worry too much about what exactly we find out, but they do have questions that gradually change as the exploration develops. On the train from Berlin, Micha and I came up with this initial list of questions:

-              What is a landline? (past, present, future)

-              What do you think of this place / the other place (Havixbeck/Schöppingen)

-              What’s your favourite place the most confusing place?

-              What’s getting less, what’s getting more?

-              What will/want this place to be like in 20 years?

-              What movement of people (NATO? Refugees)?

-              Where are the cracks?

-              What link to Wales?

-              Where’s the sheep/potatoes

-              Who else should we talk to?

All this is in order to:

-              Create connections and insights linking to this place, to the rurality of this place

-              Create the frame for the performance that they will create [in this case in September]

-              Find people locally to work with on that performance

-              Provide raw material that can be used to create scripts etc

The Syndikat particularly like finding frames that are a reworking of something traditional, or something that happens but that hasn’t been explored or questioned before, and turning it into something that will bring out different ways of thinking/new relationships.

The Syndikat ends up with a generous offer to the place in which they are working - a mirror to the place, cleverly and insightfully framed and inspired by the Syndikat’s research and engagement. Of course people in a particular place are interested to find out how they are, to see themselves in the mirror. And the Syndikat ADDS insight and humour and drama and questioning, as well as involving people (and often Associations) in the resulting performance.

I wondered about the focus of our work, or the Syndikat’s approach, in terms of how much effort/focus is placed on a) the research/finding people to create with, and then b) doing that creative work… and c) how much is on the performance.  The ‘frame’ seemed to emerge quite quickly, or it did this time, after a week or so, and then the details are filled in through more engagement and research. Plus, crucially, perhaps with more of a ‘dramaturg/political’ eye than I would usually do?

Research

Embodied research

This is the first time I’ve worked ‘away from my milltir sgwar’. I found myself drawn to the land (this is Land Lines after all), - heavy clay soils, sandy springs, calcium pearls, pollarded and neat everythings. Its one hundred and something metre ‘mountains’ with far, far views, are covered in huge straight ploughed fields, aerials, windmills, shrines and warblers. A place where you are (although probably only if you are over 50) a ‘clay person’ speaking Clay Platt or a sand person speaking Sand Platt, or a refugee or a migrant worker in the huge dairy or aberttoir, speaking all sorts of languages and a lot younger.

I found myself making Sand Socks and Clay Clogs, digging the materials from the fields and streams. And because I had use of an exhibition space, I made an impromptu exhibition for the ‘open studio’ (well, for the window viewers at least)

I was also really struck by the industrial agriculture and the Hochset - ‘high seats’ in the fields, which seem like anachronistic remnants from an older time. They could be for bird watching and taking in the view, but are actually places for hunting, at the edges of fields, near woods and hedges.

What else early on?

Finding a focus

After just a week a focus emerged. Micha was very struck by Annette von Droste’s (a well known author who lived Burg Hulsoff, where the Centre for Literature is now based) interest and documentation of spontaneous ‘visions of the future’, known as Spökenkieker /Vorkeiker/Second Sight in the area . There seems to be a particularly high concentration of people here in Münsterland who could (can??) do it. Could this be a way into thinking about the future?

So our focus became to explore three ‘key questions":

-              Why would Westphalia be a place where so many Spökenkieker (Second Sight) people would appear?

-              Over whose left shoulder do we have to look today? [this was a way of picking up the Second Sight skills!]

-              Where/who are the cracks/confusing places that might help us gain Second Sight for the future?

continued investigations

With our new focus in mind, we carried on meeting people and seeking out confusing places and cracks including:

Visits to sandquarries

Frühlingsfest - SAND-KLEI-TOMBOLA: surprises – exchanges – prizes!

This was the first time we ‘went public’. We had a nice combination of the Syndikat’s methodology (a tombola - prizes donated by local shops and ‘payment’ simply to answer a question), and my Sand-Klei experiments.

Amateurfunk

Spökenkeiker for Future

And at the same time, our thoughts about the ‘bus tour’ performance were that maybe it could be a 3 stop thing, where we work with the participants with props, costumes, experiences (including sound/different languages) and suggestions to see if they can pick up messages from the future and then interpret them together.