Thank you for following Uncanny Landscapes. Here’s a new episode of the podcast; an interview with artist Leah Gordon. Thank you to our paid subscribers for your support, and to our regular listeners for making this so worthwhile.
The podcast (and all back ‘issues’) are also available at:
https://uncannylandscapes.podbean.com/
… and on most podcast platforms. As always, books, records and events ‘n’at here: https://linktr.ee/oldweirdalbion
Links:
Leah Gordon’s website
Images from Common People
Buy the Common People book from Bookshop.org
Leah on Instagram
Laura Cannell - Medieval Drone Society
Laura Cannell on Instagram
Leah Gordon is an artist, curator and writer whose work explores the intersectional histories of the Caribbean plantation system and slave trade, the Enclosure acts, and the creation of the British working class. She is also the founder of the Ghetto Biennale in Port au Prince, Haiti, and has championed Haitian artists around the world.
Her exhibition Monument to the Vanquished Peasant includes a number of photography works dedicated to the ideas of land usage, land rights and the working class in Britain. These works are also available in her book Common People, made with writers Annabel Edwards and Stephen Ellcock, and with work from the artist Marg Duston.
This is another episode in an arc of three concentrating on artists, writers, historians who are interested in the long legacy of battles over public space in Britain, also including an interview with psychogeographer Morag Rose and, soon, one with historian Katrina Navickas. Leah and Katrina both concentrate specifically on the impact of the enclosure movements - the acts by which, over the course of two centuries, the public’s rights to use ‘commons’ lands were eroded from British cultural life.
Leah’s work on this project has been deeply influenced by the historian Silvia Federici and her book Caliban and the Witch, a history that brings together the witch hunts and enclosure movements as part of the same arc - I’ve just begun reading this one myself, thanks to leah’s recommendations, and I can already say that Federici is not only an exciting historian, she’s a good enough writer to take extremely complicated ideas and bring them to life.
I’ll soon send out another substack ‘issue’ with an essay I wrote for the catalogue to the exhibition, Mind How You Go: Small Paintings from the Edgelands - the exhibition is ongoing in Twickenham, southwest London, and I hope you’ll have the chance to visit. Information is here. More on that soon.
