An installation/performance/journey across international landscapes punctuated by site-specific installation, performance and ritual.

An exploration of the physical, ecological and mythical landscape experienced through our relationship with the horse: vehicle, working animal, companion, and avatar of the spirit of the land.

Horse Nation is an international collaboration between artists, anthropologists, archaeologists, geologists, ecologists, land managers, riders and horses inspired by the uninterrupted history of the Mongolian horse as sacred animal, and by its place in the dialogue between nomad and landscape.

A voyage following ancient routes across the land incorporating installation, sound, performance and horses, to take place in the landscapes of Mongolia, southwest America, Britain and Europe.

Horse Nation celebrates the historic journey of horse, tribes, and cultures across the globe through a series of journeys creating a single metaphorical narrative from east to west, celebrating the landscape and the people formed by those landscapes, beginning on the Mongolian steppes and the Sussex Downs of England.

Horse Nation explores the response elicited by the shape of the land and the changing nature of our relationship with the landscape. Focusing on the Mongolian people who stand at a crossroads between traditional nomadic life and modern urbanisation, Horse Nation addresses environmental issues around changing land use and ownership, and the predicament of the nomad in the contemporary world.

RED EARTH: HORSE NATION RESEARCH

Horse Nation would be created in collaboration with Mongolian and British artists, introducing Mongolian performance and culture to a UK audience. Red Earth will also research the involvement of Navaho horse riders and artists, and a Horse Nation in the American southwest. The first performances would be created in Mongolia and on 80 miles of the South Downs Way ­ a series of ancient pathways following the chalk escarpment of the South Downs on the English South Coast. This distance would be the benchmark for all other Horse Nation journeys. The first Horse Nation could take place in either Mongolia as part of the Roaring Hooves Festival in 2008, or the UK in 2007.

Horse Nation is inspired and informed by lead artist Simon Pascoe’s unexpected journey with American academicians in Mongolia in 2004 enabling access to isolated Bronze Age burial sites and to archaeological and contemporary evidence of the horse as a sacred totem. Horse Nation combines these experiences with established Red Earth research and practice regarding journeys, boundaries, the geology and archaeology of a landscape and the animist/shamanic response to the contemporary environment.

Concept R&D would explore:

The horse as interlocutor between humanity and nature: the baseline experience: interpreting the landscape as an animal via the horse/rider relationship.

Rituals of communication between human, animal and nature.

Cartographical and mythographical interpretations of the traveled landscape: human and animal response the shape of the land.

The uninterrupted history of the Mongolian horse as sacred animal, and its place in the dialogue between nomad and landscape.

Links between Mongolian, European Bronze Age and Native American horse culture, and contemporary environmental experience.

Parallel migratory journeys: of the horse and Asian people, west into Europe and east across the Baring Straights to the American continent.

Social and cultural implications for nomadic life in the contemporary landscape.

Possible partners/host organisations and sites

Professor Sandra Olsen, archaeologist, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh University USA

Doctor Amelie Schenk, anthropologist specialising in Mongolian shamanic practice.

Contacts in the Mongolian Arts Council and the UN in Mongolia.

Roaring Hooves International Arts Festival (Professor Bernhard Wulff)

South Downs Joint Committee, The National Trust, English Nature.

Horses/riders: R&D would follow up established Mongolian, UK and US contacts, focusing on natural horse training and specialists in inter-species relationships.

Artistic collaborators

Red Earth will establish key collaborators eg horse specialist, anthropologist, geologist, archeologist, natural scientist, working with a small team of international artists. Contemporary and traditional performers, visual artists and musicians from each country could be involved in the project. The core team will work on site with artists, riders and horses indigenous to each country.