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Gardens Always Mean Something Else (a site-specific performance at A la Ronde in Devon, UK)

This performance, created for the National Trust property, A la Ronde in Devon (UK), was situated within the overlapping contexts of Smith’s development of situationist practices of dérive and détournement and his ongoing performative interventions in heritage sites. It was a further development of his performance research at the same site in 2007, reflected upon in a book chapter entitled ‘A la Ronde: eccentricity, heritage and the end of the world’ (Smith, 2010). Gardens Always Mean Something Else, made in collaboration with Rakeen Silawi and Francesca Falchi-Pereira, explored the possibilities of combining hyper-sensitized and recuperative approaches to a site of performance through ambulatory practice. By deploying theatricality, visual performance, narration and an ironic use of the conventions of guiding, visitor ambulation and address, it challenged A la Ronde’s dominant narratives of dreamy or domesticated eccentricity. The performance aimed to resist the commercial and bureaucratic homogenization of space and to draw attention to the traumatic narratives (mainly centred around women) that remain hidden in the official discourse of the property. By handling the materials of the nineteenth century female occupants’ recreational labour (sand, seaweed, shells, feathers, lime, glass, mirrors), audience members were encouraged to embrace a restorative interweaving of performance elements into a narrative that finally recognised how the traumatic experience of natural disaster became a source of economic opportunity in the 18th century, the profits of which were used to build A la Ronde. This dramaturgical process of dis-assemblage and re-assemblage, which draws upon Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s criticisms of ‘paranoid style’ and her counterproposals for a ‘depressive’ method, is discussed in an article for Cultural Geographies entitled ‘Gardens always mean something else: turning knotty performance and paranoid research on their head at A la Ronde’ (Smith, 2011).