Catherine Page Harris
2017
2017
LandShape Festival, DK
North Jutland, Denmark, Summer 2015
In 2014 I was accepted as an artist for the 2015 LandShape Festival in Hanstholm, DK, for my proposed traveling project, Family Dinner Trans-species Repast Land Art in North Jutland.
Trans-species Repast is an ongoing project sharing meals with animals. Trans-species is an idea encompassing the research of psychologists such as Gay Bradshaw, looking at the similarities in human and non-human brain functions, and Post-Human studies. My trans-species work creates an experiential mode of engaging a question about what would landscape be like if we shared the planet in a non-hierarchical manner. Sharing meals with animals is a simple way to question the hierarchies and structures of human convention, created to place us outside of our mammalian heritage.
After presenting at the LandShape Festival sharing “Teatime” with local horses, my family and I travelled from from Klitmuller to Mylund. We had contacted farms through the WOOFDK network. At each site we spent a day or two working for the family as farmers, a day building a table out of materials found on site, and then shared a meal with the farm, animals and people.
We split our travel between trains and cycling. Each farm provided a different set of people, animals, and expectations. We built a strawberry bed, developed a sawdust method to manage slugs, and cooked food for many families. I also built a table from reclaimed wood from a 200 year old house, wove a table from willow branches, and pegged another one together from raw oak slabs. We shared meals with horses, chickens, and bees.
The project is represented by a short video documenting the rides and the meals, as well as a cookbook, documenting the characters, both human and animal, the meals, and the recipes for foraged and local foods in text and images.
Journey Route
Hanstholm
Klitmoeller
Tolne
Mylund
Sording
Postcards
