Olivia Plender, Set Sail for the Levant, 2007
Disclosures II: The Middle Ages
Laxton, Nottinghamshire,
Saturday 6 September 2008
Nottingham Castle
5 September – 5 October 2008
Terms in bold are defined in the Glossary
What is the connection between a medieval farming system and a collaborative platform on the Internet?
Disclosures II: The Middle Ages will explore the idea of ‘commons’, both in the sense of agricultural commons (the grazing of animals and growing of crops on shared land) and what’s known as the ‘cultural commons’: the shared production and free distribution of knowledge online and in culture in general. Disclosures II will be set in the unique Nottinghamshire village of Laxton: unique in that it is the last substantial surviving example of the medieval ‘open field’ system of farming in England. In Laxton farmers farm individual strips of land in shared fields, now owned by the Crown, as they have done for centuries.
Disclosures II is part of Nottingham Contemporary’s Histories of the Present, our year long series of exhibitions and events in historically significant places in and around Nottingham. Our purpose is to understand the present by examining our past and to link the local and international. Disclosures II is also a sequel: the project is a continuation of Disclosures, an ambitious international project at Gasworks in London earlier this year. For the project we have teamed up with Gasworks, in particular their Exhibitions Curator, Anna Colin.
In the 1990s, the Internet was heralded in utopian terms as a new and limitless frontier of information that one day would be equally accessible to all. Since then, corporations and governments have sought to control, appropriate and charge for content. This threat has been met with an increasingly inventive and elusive opposition, whose aim is to increase and democratise the digital commons.
To what extent does Laxton’s survival through centuries of enclosure of agricultural commons suggest precedents for the various ways cultural producers and activists seek to enlarge the public domain of today’s ‘knowledge economy’? Disclosures II: the Middle Ages spans the Agrarian Age and the Information Age through a rich and engaging day of talks, games, walks, conversations, artworks and socialising in Laxton, in parallel with an exhibition by artist Olivia Plender at Nottingham Castle. We are grateful to Anna and Gasworks for their collaboration, to Olivia and Disclosures II’s other contributors, to artist and local historian Chris Matthews, and to the residents of Laxton (particularly Stuart Rose) and our colleagues at Nottingham Castle for being our hosts.
Alex Farquharson
Director
Nottingham Contemporary
