Peninsula 2009-10 medium: mixed media: chair, balloons, string, paper tags. Sculpture

In September 2009, Bester and three other artists, Marie Snauwaert (Ghent, Belgium), Alicja Rogalska (London, UK/Poland) and Amelie Scalercio (Melbourne, Australia) participated in a six week event called This Weekend...? during which artist, as part of The National Trust and BOSarts Initiative, were asked to activate various sites along the Cornish Coastline, England, UK. The weekend of the 26, 27 September was allocated to us on the only peninsula in England, a small peninsula if compared to the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. For a period of two weeks we lived in the old mining pump house, converted to the most westerly house, the Brisons Veor, in all of England. Outside our windows the cliffs wrapped around a small cove called Priest’s Cove, and jutting out into the sea, a rock formation known as the Brisons, rises from the sea, apparently a huge Charles de Gaul lying on his back, stomach and nose pointing to the sky. Apart from this the landscape is uninterrupted except for a handful of houses, fisherman huts recessed into the slope, a slip way, five Miniature Highlanders (cows and bulls), low walls covered in blue berry bush bushes wild fig (originally from the South African West Coast), pathways carved by avid walkers through the low brush, and a mining chimney on the highest point of the peninsula. The peninsula lay like a open substrate before us each morning and the locals from the hamlet of St Just could be seen strolling around Priest’s Cove’s from miles away. Locals who we would come to know as individuals, and furthermore individuals who cherished and lived in their landscape and were once dependent either on the sea or the copper mine for their lively-hood. Every story which was told would eventually bring us back to the landscape, to Priest’s Cove, to the Brison’s. We initiated the Balloon Project during which over the weekend of 26, 27 September, the community was asked to write a message which ties them to the memory of and within the landscape of Priest’s Cove on a paper tag. The tag would then be attached to a biodegradable balloon and then tied by the individual to an appropriate place of their choice, with biodegradable string, thereby adding a topography of personal memory over the topography of this particular landscape. By the end of This Weekend...? the peninsula was dotted with brightly coloured balloons fluttering in the wind and brightly coloured anorak’s of visitors. Over 400 people participated in this event and many more came to walk around and read the tags or quietly ponder their own memories. After This Weekend..? 115 tags with or without balloons were recovered from the peninsula, packaged and posted to Cape Town South Africa. Peninsula , is a metaphor for the peninsula, in effect, a landscape study, in which remnants of This Weekend...? stages one last outpost to the memories of individuals whose memories and action activate landscape, place and time, until those too fade away.