Falling Moor
Performance from a series by John Sturgeon
Symposium Moor 1992.
b&w PHOTO CREDIT: Photo credit: Jim Zielinski
Falling Moor was one of several works Sturgeon executed as part of Symposium Moor 1992, an international festival of performance & site-specific work on the Wittemoor. The Wittemoor, Germany is part of a larger complex of moors (bogs) that stretch across northern Germany and The Netherlands. This month-long festival gathered European and American artists, to live on, investigate and then respond to environmental issues evoked by the delicate ecology and unusual geographical-archaeological sites on the Wittemoor.
Falling Moor was a series of short performances, documented in both video and black and white photography. This performance record was produced with the initial intent to serve as segues between video segments for Sturgeon’s production of the symposium’s comprehensive video document of the ten international participating artists in Symposium Moor 1992 recorded and edited by John Sturgeon.
Sturgeon’s performances consisted of variations of the simple act of falling into, or onto the Wittemoor at a variety of different locations and situations (from a tree, from a bohlenweg, from the edges of the ‘torf’ excavations, etc.). In actuality the surface of the moor is relatively soft or permeable, though appears to be solid ground. These short often-humorous performance gestures (or theatrical asides) reference attempts at initiating a deeper understanding of the moor…. a symbolic breaking through the unconscious, as a barrier to communication.
