Award 36: Lammas Land

500 blank placards. 500 doorsteps. One city. One week. And a question: can people who disagree about almost everything find common ground in defending the right to disagree?

Lammas Land is the launch project of multidisciplinary international artist collective WeLoveYouVeryMuch.

It is a participatory city-wide artwork whose outcome rests on the willingness of residents to join hands across the divide and stand in peace together against the erosion of our protest rights – even when that means defending the freedom to demand what they themselves despise.

Lammas Land was a form of common ground dating back to Anglo-Saxon times. But over the centuries, what once belonged to the many became the property of the few. Stolen by the rich and powerful from under our feet by five thousand acts of enclosure – along with millions of hectares of common ground we can no longer remember was once ours. Lammas Land asks whether we will notice before it’s too late that the same thing is happening right now to our freedom of protest. Or whether, while we fight each other, we will let the rich and powerful take this too – so gradually that we only realise what we’ve lost when it’s already gone?

Lammas Land starts at dawn on a late November morning, when 500 households across a city wake to find a gift from WeLoveYouVeryMuch waiting on their doorstep: a blank protest placard and a marker pen. On the back, a letter invites recipients to write a non-violent message to the world: a demand for change, an unbearable injustice, a lament for things lost, a worry that steals their sleep – the thing they would shout from their rooftops right now if they could do so anonymously.

They are told that when they are done, they are free to place their placard in a drop box at a discreet location – to be gathered together with those of nameless strangers from across the city and planted on open ground for the public to see. Provided, that is, they are able to meet Lammas Land’s one condition:

That the freedom of peaceful expression they claim for themselves, they are willing to grant to the other 499 strangers who woke to a placard that morning – no matter how much they may dislike what some of them have to say. 

The placards of those who agree are joined across a week by those of visitors who feel moved to add their own, creating a growing lawn of contradictory, furious, frustrated, angry, uplifting, passionate things this city needs to say – to itself, to those in power, to anyone who will listen.

At the week’s end, as the sun sets, the piece arrives at its final act. Every person who submitted a placard is invited back to form a symbolic protective ring around the field, not knowing whether the hands they hold belong to the authors of words they love or hate. Only that they too understand that the greatest threat to freedom is fear – of the state and of each other. As day becomes night, each participant is asked to choose a placard at random, pull it from the ground and take it safely home – whatever it says. And as the lawn of furious, frightened, pleading, passionate words loses its voice, Lammas Land reveals what it was all along.

Not the angry evidence of a country hopelessly divided against itself, but proof that peaceful common ground can still exist – and cause for hope that we may yet be able to stop the rich and powerful stealing our right to protest while we fight each other on the battlefields they created.

"This is not a description of what will happen during the week of Lammas Land. It is what we hope will happen. That strangers who would normally never agree on anything will unite in peace against the erosion of our protest rights. And in so doing, give us reason to be optimistic we may yet claw back what’s already been stolen. Whether that hope proves to be well founded or tragically naive is a question we will all know the answer to by the end of November. Watch this space."

At Artcry we're thrilled to be supporting this artwork to be created, which also marks the launch of a new collective with a mission to make change through art.