BREADROCK

BREADROCK is a new film and sculptural installation for PEER, by artist collective
Fourthland (Louise Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter) and artist and filmmaker Rosalind
Fowler. Reflecting on a ten-year collaboration with the diverse communities of Wenlock
Barn Estate in Hackney, East London, the work is a visceral homage to cultural history,
memory and universal myth. Melding experimental and ethnographic filmmaking, the work
presents a series of staged vignettes drawing on the rituals and artefacts of the Estate’s
Bangladeshi, European, Kurdish, Serbian, Turkish, Ugandan and West Indian communities,
to create new kinships and myths.

Shot on 16mm film against the artists’ makeshift stage sets of textiles, paintings, and
objects in a public garden on the Estate, BREADROCK manifests the inner worlds of
Wenlock’s inhabitants: a Bangladeshi woman wearing her wedding dress buries a symbolic
‘umbilical cord’ in front of forty guests to mark her son’s birth; a West Indian man channels
his deceased grandmother through an old-fashioned telephone and a cosmic donkey;
another man surrounded by sheet music conducts an invisible orchestra and symbolic
ancient rock, inspired by his love of geology; and others slowly process and gesture,
holding bowls and plates aloft. The soundtrack is a composition of raw sounds improvised
from domestic household objects found in a resident’s flat.

Close to the large-scale projection of the film in PEER’s street-facing space, pieces made by
the artists - inspired by their exchanges with the Wenlock community - and objects
belonging to residents, form an assemblage of quasi-mystical sculptures.

Fourthland have been working with the residents of Wenlock Barn since 2008, on projects
connecting the land and people of the Estate, including micro-allotments, foraging spaces,
a salad-growing scheme, an orchard, a wheatfield and a series of public gardens, each with
its own distinct cultural identity. By introducing traditional crafts such as wool spinning,
breadmaking, carpentry, bricklaying, music making and herbalism, Fourthland have
revealed the hidden sources of knowledge and skills owned by the Estate’s diverse
community of residents. BREADROCK is their first collaboration with filmmaker Rosalind
Fowler, known for her explorations of the politics and poetics of place and belonging in the
contemporary English landscape.

PEER has worked on several projects with Fourthland throughout the ten-year collaboration
with nearby Wenlock Barn Estate, including Everything Happens on The Street, Handling,
Repairs and Alternations Studio (2015), a series of 'street acts' and 'street scenes'
involving passing members of the public. The project, which took place during PEER’s relandscaping
of the public area at the front of the gallery in 2015, resulted in a new garden
and seating area, situating the street as a place where home, work and public sharing
dissolve into one another.