Treading Time – An Investigation into our relationship with land

The piece explores how our high speed living serves to disconnect us from the land. In towns and cities our lives are necessarily divorced from the actual land – we connect to a ‘ground’ but rarely to the earth. We make decisions without pause or time to reflect, lives and decisions abstracted from any holistic sense of the world we inhabit. The pace of development is having a potentially irreversible impact on the planet as we endlessly consume. We are disconnected from the system that sustains us – nature, soil, earth, planet.

Through walking we mindfully aim to connect our bodies to the ground, through the ground we connect to the soil and through the soil we connect to the natural systems that sustain us. Given a voice, these natural systems might ask us to slow down and tread lightly.

By moving in a consciously slow, exaggerated way, we are required to be self aware, in control and careful – these are the qualities that we are aiming to highlight.

We performed this at Tot-Hill Street, also known historically as ‘Beacon Street’—the highest spot around Westminster, where solemn proclamations were once made to the people. We understood it to be a place where news and opinion were broadcast.