Mobius Artist Event: Marilyn Arsem Field Work Applications Due October 31 2025
Field Work, is an intensive residential workshop in the Eden Valley, Cumbria, UK with Marilyn Arsem and Anne Bean from July 28, 2026 through August 3, 2026
The Field Work residential workshop explores collaboration in and with landscape. Spending a week immersed in the beautiful and evocative Eden Valley, we will consider the role of site in performance art, exploring multiple approaches for being with place and working with the land as an active collaborator.
Co-led by Marilyn Arsem and Anne Bean, this unique collaborative workshop has emerged from the artists’ shared interest in site-responsive performance work. While they approach performance art from different geographies and trajectories, their distinct practices share a spirit of openness that informs the way they encounter places and histories.
This openness is about listening and making space for the place to speak, about treating it as an active collaborator and approaching it ethically. It is about seeing what emerges from the meeting of body, time, memory, weather and land, rather than imposing a work on (or in spite of) the landscape. In this way the landscape is not decorative, supportive or metaphorical, but ‘emerges as a full character’ (Glissant).
Field Work takes place in the Eden Valley, a beautiful, rural place situated between England’s North Pennines and Cumbrian fells. Aligned with the seasonal festivals of Lughnasadh and Lammas, the Field Work residential workshop marks a time of harvest and transition — an occasion to meet the landscape (and each other) as teacher, interlocutor, and collaborator.
This is a residential workshop, meaning we will live together for the week. We will be based on a four acre private campsite amid biodiverse land. From this base we will walk to and spend time with evocative sites in the area, including ancient monuments, forests, fields, rivers and former industrial sites, now overgrown. Wherever we are, the landscape will guide and shape our work.
The programme will balance collective and solo practice. Our explorations will involve small group sessions, conversational exchange, individual and collaborative tasks, devising performance actions, evening sharings, practices of listening, and periods of silence.
We invite you to arrive without preconceived ideas about how you will relate to these places, and without firm notions of how you will be in this landscape. Rather, we ask that you bring openness, questions, and a willingness to somehow dislodge fixed notions as we encounter both outer and inner terrains.
Submit an Expression of Interest (deadline October 31, 2025)
Contact: producing@futureritual.co.uk
Long Meg and her Daughters - "Another view of this standing stone." Photo by Humphrey Bolton, 2006.