Caravanserai

Annie Lovejoy & Mac Dunlop

Caravanserai

Caravanserai is an arts residency project initiated by Annie Lovejoy and Mac Dunlop at Treloan Coastal Holidays a caravan and camping site on the Roseland peninsula in Cornwall. In partnership with the campsite owners, Pete & Debs Walker they are working to promote sustainable tourism through hosting creative activities that engage with, and celebrate the local environment and culture.

The interdependent relationship between local residents and visitors, between village and campsite, and between the many local networks and societies provides fertile ground for creative exploration. As such, artists, writers, academic researchers and post-graduate students, have been invited to be in residence within the Caravanserai project to explore and respond creatively to this unique context.

These residencies have triggered numerous participatory, inclusive, performative and experiential activities such as intimate fireside poetry and music sessions, film screenings, wild food walks, shared meals, poetic artworks encountered in the landscape and hands on skills sharing in regenerating an overgrown willow coppice, hurdle & charcoal making, and raft building for Portscatho’s Regatta day. Informed by the experiential complexities of place these generative processes, encounters, activities and participatory observations are a ‘do tank’, a ground of events within which to investigate how responsive practice might offer an enhanced experience of place.

An online web resource (https://fieldsite.wordpress.com) logs the development of the activities taking place and provides info & links to local interest societies and groups, producers and practitioners involved in arts and ecologies initiatives.

Documentation of the project activities will form the basis of a publication that creatively maps, celebrates and promotes the local – a poetic and functional ‘guide book’. An outcome that is conducive with the aspirations of the campsite owners to achieve sustainable targets and provide visitors with an engaged and enhanced experience of thelocality that is grounded environmentally, socially and culturally.

The Caravanserai project was the focus of a recent paper presented by Annie Lovejoy and Prof. Catherine Brace at the Royal Geographical Society / Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference (Manchester 2009). A limited edition artists book (1500) insites – a notebook based on the project was also produced for the RGS/IGB conference in collaboration with geographer Dr Harriet Hawkins (University of Exeter).

Caravanserai was supported by:
Activities Programme: FEAST, Cornwall Council, Arts Council England
Post-Graduste placements & publication: University College Falmouth, RANE and ESF (European Social Fund)