Laura Burns

C E R E M O N Y H O U S E

The Ceremony House is a body of artistic research undertaken during my PhD, stemming from an encounter with the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire in 2015. The project asks how humans might engage with the already happening politics of more-than-human collectivities.

In 2015 I began working closely with the river Wyre and its river stones in Lancashire, UK. Working with somatic, choreographic and perception altering physical practices, I explored how body and stone co-remembered his/herstories embedded in the land. I subsequently found the site to be where the infamous Pendle witch-hunts, where twelve “witches” (nine women and two men) were accused and ten executed in August 1612.

Performance and site-specific practices are used to both travel to sites of historical trauma whilst unearthing possible new futures out of the reparative potential of collaborating with river and stone. Speaking with the river through voice, ceremony, prayer and silence, is a way of communicating with water and all it propels.

The Ceremony House is a future vision of a ceremony house built underground, a new/ancient re-memory of a place of devotion to the more-than-human.

It is an ongoing process, physical build, porous site, performance installation, underground ripple. In one version, the house is built by a group of womxn who had once been stones, whose listening to the land emerges a political structure of ceremony, sound, rhythm, listening, being. They move and re-shift the world through this attendance to earth.

The project situates itself within ecological discourse, questioning the role of orality and vocalised song in communicating with place, and queer feminist ecologies of care within practices spanning material and immaterial engagement with the nonhuman. It resists the politics of recognition between indigenous and settler culture in settler-colonial states, and the continued enclosures of land, bodies and ways of being which overwhelmingly affect people of colour, indigenous and marginalised communities.