This Is No Ordinary World

Blanc Sceol & Tump 39 volunteers

  1. 2023
  1. Tump 39
  • This is No Ordinary World, 2023. Photo: Three Rivers
  • This is No Ordinary World, 2023. Photo: Three Rivers
  • This is No Ordinary World, 2023. Photo: Three Rivers
  • This is No Ordinary World, 2023. Photo: Three Rivers
  • This is No Ordinary World, 2023. Photo: Three Rivers
  • This is No Ordinary World, 2023. Photo: Three Rivers

This is No Ordinary World, 2023. Photo: Three Rivers

    In the summer of 2023, in a disused and forgotten Tump, Blanc Sceol collaborated with residents, children and young people, to co-create an imaginary world and alternative environment for listening, learning, moving and dreaming.

    Using methods of radical listening, somatic explorations and sonic meditation, the artists and residents worked together to explore Tump39 as an urban wilderness, extending beyond the city's time and matter, to a space where imagination can create the possibilities to be different, other, outer.

    Over 4-months the community grounded themselves in the re-wilded environment of this former munition’s storage site, closed to the public for more than a decade, through drawing, singing, dancing and eating together, which became the beginning of a gathering of future guardians for the space.

    Finally, the group built their own instruments from sticks, stones and leaves, and accompanied Orbit, a one-of-a-kind instrument, designed and made by Blanc Sceol in collaboration with master luthier Kai Tönjes, for a final improvised performance to thank the Tump for hosting them.

    Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell and Hannah White) are an artist duo, whose practice has emerged and expanded through years of working together across performance, composition, participatory actions, deep listening facilitation, and somatic gatherings. They create performances reflecting attempts to expand themselves, through listening and sound, beyond their physical limits and to extend this personal/performance practice into the collective. Their compositions, interventions and performances express their experience of place, anchored in what is found in a landscape but re-imagined into new territories.