Friday 21st May 2021 to
Saturday 12th June 2021
The Thames Estuary is home to some of the most overlooked landscapes and river vistas in the UK. The aim of Estuary has always been to encourage an exploration of these landscapes along with gaining insight into their history and significance.
Estuary 2021 has commissioned a broad and diverse range of artists to respond with different disciplines and working practices to various sites along the South Essex and North Kent estuary coastlines.
Programme announced to date includes: -
SILT will be a site-specific performance conceived by Arbonauts, artists Helen Galliano and Dimitri Launder. Imagining a dystopian future of rising sea levels, it will be performed in the water of the distinctive tidal pool at East Beach in Shoeburyness at the very eastern reaches of Thames Estuary. The work will feature local open-water swimmers and students from East 15 Acting School, part of University of Essex.
Writer Robert Macfarlane, theatre maker Zoe Svendsen and sound designer Carolyn Downing are collaborating to stage a re-imagining of Robert’s book, Ness (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) written in collaboration with the artist Stanley Donwood. Set within the ex-MOD site, Gunners Park at Shoeburyness, the GPS sonic work will be experienced through headphones and will invite audiences to listen to the landscape reveal its past, as we witness the physical remnants of that history being reclaimed by nature. Working in close partnership with Essex Wildlife Trust and Southend-on-Sea Borough Council.
A walk across the Isle of Sheppey with writer Patrick Wright and artist filmmaker Shona Illingworth, exploring the story of Uwe Johnson, one of Germany's greatest and most-influential post-war writers, and how he came to live and work in Sheerness in the 1970s. The walk will be broadcast from the Isle of Sheppey.
Wat Tyler Country Park is 125 acres of natural landscape at the tip of Vange Creek, one of many estuary tributaries and channels. The park is named after the infamous leader of the Great Rising (also referred to as the Peasants' Revolt) of 1381 which started in the nearby Essex village of Fobbing. For Estuary 2021, 18 artists will respond to the landscape and layered histories of this site drawing on stimulating parallels with the contemporary themes of the festival. Of those 18 artists, we have announced thirteen: Shaun C. Badham; Angela Chan (Worm: art + ecology); Jo Fong, Sonia Hughes, Lisa Mattocks and Andrew Wrestle; Andy Freeman and Samantha Penn; Harun Morrison; Morgan O'Hara; Helen Prichard, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting (Underground Division).
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award winning filmmaker and artist whose engaged practice calls for a profound re-imagining of the relationship between people, place and ecology.
Andy Freeman has produced digital and visual artworks and interventions since the late 1990s.
Arbonauts create bold site-specific performance, challenging the meeting point between theatre, dance and installation.
Bernadette is a working class author, storyteller, artist and activist.
Carolyn Downing is an award-winning sound designer working in a variety of fields.
Eric MacLennan has been making avant-garde performance work for over thirty years.
For over two decades Fiddian has been fascinated by the creative application of digital technology in the physical domain.
Jack is a writer, director and deviser working principally in live performance, but also across a range of audio, visual, online and analogue media.
Jonathan Wright makes sculpture, installations and drawings, he observes and subverts functional structures that support and service our everyday lives.
Laura Daly is a multi-award-winning artist who creates site-specific and site-related artworks that range significantly in scale.
Luke Branch is frontman and songwriter of the band Asylums and founder of Cool Thing Records.
Mary Mattingly founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in New York City to circumvent public land laws that make it illegal to pick food on public land.
Andy Delaney is a filmmaker from Leigh-on-Sea who set up Newartfilms.com to focus on artists, art institutions and schools.
Rachel Lichtenstein is a British artist, writer and curator who is internationally known for her books, multi-media projects and artworks that examine place, memory and identity.
Rees Broomfield is a freelance recording engineer, producer, musician and owner of SS2 Recording in Southend on Sea.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of bestselling and prize-winning books about nature, people and place.
Sophie is a theatre and film director staging productions in unusal spaces and places.
When not walking, reading or writing, writer, Tom King tends to his hilltop garden, overlooking the Thames Estuary
Zoë Svendsen directs the performing arts company METIS making participatory theatre performances and installation works.
