This year's Beacon project was entitled 'no place, like home' , in which the interplay of the possibilities of home being a specific location or a state of mind were explored.
Inherent in the act of travelling is the notion of being away from home, but what does it mean to be away from home. In order to understand this we must first ask ourselves what do we mean by home. In 'no place, like home' the interplay of the possibilities of home being a place, a specific location or a no place, a state of mind are explored.
By necessity a community finds itself working in another country, how do they relate to this new place as home?
As a specific location the church is the focal point of a rural village, when it is closed down what does that mean to the village inhabitants?
Both communities become isolated but does home signify the same thing for the migrant community as for the indigenous community?
In both communities the migration of a people and the closing of a church pulls the rug from beneath their feet, creating potential for the rupture in the fabric of that community.
As the audience travelled from site to site, the Beacon coach excursion forefronted the temporal experience of travel and of being away from home. The audience were itinerant and displaced, becoming part of another, albeit, temporary community; experiencing the individual narratives constructed by each of the artworks they encountered along the way. These narratives were then used by the audience, both individually and collectively, to construct another narrative, their own, which was itself framed by the time taken to travel from site to site.
Access to the art and sites was through the Beacon coach excursion, but this year the act of transience was highlighted by some of the artists projects, which themselves were not fixed or located in a particular place but moved to different sites during the course of the project.
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