The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads    (2024)

 

 

The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads    (2024)    

Existing in two different forms:

(I)
An audiowalk (via audio player and headphones) set in and around Northfleet, Kent, UK.
Stereo sound, with performers and props.
1 hour 13 mins

listen: The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads

(II)
A video.
4K video
1 hour 13 mins

watch (a low resolution reference version): The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads

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The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads is a science fiction audio walk carefully guiding its audience, one by one, on a special route in and around the unique community and industrial and residential landscapes of Northfleet, Kent, bordering the River Thames. It’s a journey of strange inward and outward transformations through a place in an intense state of change. Diggers are busily reshaping its land for new build estates, erasing the last traces of its cement industry and mutating the identity of its community.

Leading you through this unsettled place, The Mysterious Return… ‘augmented reality’ soundtrack guides you to perceive new relationships between place, mind and body through its composition of vocal narration, instructions, music, sound effects, props and performers.  Every experience of the walk is unique as Northfleet constantly ‘does its own thing’ as we roam around it. Often there are also more radical transformations of landscape escalating hour by hour. Many of the narrative’s visual references, once true, are now buried under piles of rubble, as the bulldozers work to alter the audio’s truths, turning them to fiction.  Moving backwards and forwards through time The Mysterious Return… suggests that our recent collective experiences have shifted our sense of reality;  We have become more highly tuned! We now perceive our networks of relationships with greater clarity! This is a rare moment ( sadly, it might pass! ) that we have been given (as a gift!) to explore. Let’s create this exercise, this meditation, in a unique place. The only place where it can evolve: Here!  As we try to head out into the world again The Mysterious Return... attempts to re-calibrate us for this exploration. Discovering in the collective imaginary a ‘cement-ality’ evolved through – or in spite of  – shared experiences of the pandemic, economic downturns, the impact of industrial scale property development and land banking, and now channelled through the earth beneath this landscape, The Mysterious Return…  attempts to create a utopian garden-city of new consciousness.

The Mysterious Return…  is a revised, updated, revoiced and restaged version of Chodzko’s The Return of the Fleet Spring Heads – a work commissioned by Cement Fields as part of Estuary 2021, presented during the festival in May and June 2021.
The first third of the route taken for this original guided walk, including a long public footpath down into the old cement works by the side of the Thames, was removed to build a Bellway housing estate.  This new 2024 version acts as a resistance to this destruction, mapping out a new way of navigating the area whilst including a large section of the previous version to give testimony to what traces remain, and what slips out of vision.  Compare the 2021 and 2024 videos of this work for evidence of how the apparently incidental and aberrant can stubbornly remain whilst other elements are ephemeral.  Both iterations of the work are an attempt to preserve what is disappearing by enhancing collective memory – each participant becoming a custodian of the soul of the Northfleet landscape.  Through attempting to weave a mythology that reveals the inherent beauty, wonder and mystery of a place – its ‘character’ – rooted in its strange and fluid realities it creates a form of resistance to the massive property development project surrounding it; Ebbsfleet Garden City, new-build ‘communities’ currently sorely devoid of character.
Through attempting to combine multiple empathic attentions into a single guide for very different bodies and minds The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads is itself made up of the appearance of a single (female) voice that is constantly changing its place and time.

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Credits:
Voice:  Leanne Henlon 
Sound editing: Tim Barker, (Radio Obscura)
Music: Steph Horak  SheIsRevolting. https://soundcloud.com/sheisrevolting
Thanks to: Northfleet Big Local (Mandi Knight and Julie Collins).

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The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads was commissioned by Cement Fields.
Presented (8th and 9th June 2024) as part of Ebbsfleet Citizen Archive, Cement Fields’ community-led project capturing and preserving the varied stories and histories of the people and places of Ebbsfleet, Greenhithe, Swanscombe, and Northfleet as the area goes through a significant moment of change. The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads culminates a series of walks that have explored these locations over the last 9 months.

Trailer for: The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads on Instagram.

Thanks to Samuel Taylor and Rob Harris for additional photos.

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Similar to Ghost, and O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix, and The Valley Unfurls its Song  as a flow of bodily movement guiding sensory perceptions of place and time The Myterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads, ( like Deep Above and Thru hole I blind/O/Thru hole oui see ) speaks of reorienting the viewer’s consciousness.  The script is also partly created from a series of detailed navigational instructions (cf: Better Scenery and Plan for a Parade with Two Masks etc ) and advice about a potential appearance of place (eg: Nightvision ) and encourages methods of preparation* prior to the event’s apparent beginning, in order to enhance perception (see also M-path) and residual activities and challenges ‘post encounter’  (such as “..we won’t do it now but…maybe, when you get home, search online for ‘Python found dead under a fallen tree, Wallis park’ ” ).

*(eg: Information sheet  handed to the audience by a steward, prior to the walk beginning, upon their arrival in Northfleet assures them,  “We assure you that, after a while, you’ll be in sync.”, while the specific audio instructions frequently point out things to look at, when to stop and continue walking, feelings to be felt, and likely transformations of consciousness  taking place for each person taking this journey.)

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Related works:

The Return of the Fleet Spring Heads  (2021)
A Place for ‘The End’    (1999)
Better Scenery   (2000 – )
Deep Above  (2016)
Ghost     (2010 – ongoing)
Guide for a Parade with Two Masks   (2004)
M-path      (2006)
Nightvision    (1998)
O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix  [live]        (2020)
Spare Room    (2014)
Thru hole I blind/O/Thru hole oui see     (2020)
Yet    (2005)