Between History and Mythmaking: A Landslide

Through 2020 Madeleine Collie initiated a research residency in a remote location near her former home in Folkestone. The Folkestone Warren is one of the most active landslides in Britain. It is also one of the most surveyed: monitored and observed for shifts in climate, erosion, geology and is said to have been one of the first geological explorations in Europe. The landslide originates 40 meters underground, an earthly reality that is controlled through terraforming projects and monitored on the surface.

In this writing the author traces a reading of the Warren that is both speculative and poetic to explore how geological imaginaries shape myths of modernity.  In 2020, with a small collective of artists, and under the guidance of Astro-cartographers Madeleine de Botet Lacaze and Thom Nobrega they performed a reading of the earth that situated the Warren and its movements in a longer story about the underground and its relationship to institutions of knowledge. The text draws on an archive of remembered performances that have taken place in the Warren with contributions from Rubiane Maia, Helen Davison and Kira O’Reilly.

The work was published as part of Free Port Institute’s publication with Geo Cinema and in Talia Linz’s edition of Art Monthly Australasia to coincide with the 2022 Sydney Biennale.