Ritual d'été/Summer Ritual

Every year for 6 years, during August, I carried out a series of ritualistic actions that confront the human position to live daily life as a tourist. There is an auto-biographical base that retraces my feelings of being perpetually caught between two identities and generally the complications of having emigrated from the UK. These actions are often aware of the specific geographies of my environment. 

The first three actions were specific to the South of France.
The actions have included, the demand for lost sunglasses in bars and restaurants in the south of the country with the use of phrase book french . Getting lost under the scorching heat and make engravings of the landscape on pairs of sunglasses. A hunt to get photos of the British flag worn as an accessory. A song about
soils in different countries. And ofcourse, tanning tattoos of French words made in Whitley Bay for ArtHouses 2018.

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Summer Ritual 

# 2

2015

5 hilltop walks/

Engravings  on sunglasses

Marseille

2 : I was accompanied for three out of five walks around the crests of Marseille. This was after the first two solo adventures. Someone had pointed out to me that I shouldn’t wear sunglasses that were too scratched because of the intensity of the UV rays that could leave an imprint on my iris? I think that’s where the idea came from to make prints in the lenses of a different pair of sunglasses for each walk I took. POTLATCH If someone was wearing them, then they could see the view from the top of the mountain. Puget or St. Cyr for the rest of their lives. It was rendered useless as a keepsake. I was accompanied by a total of four different people, I made an open call from my Facebook after the second attempt ended up being much more dangerous than I had imagined. Although I started walking at 8am, I spent a good four hours in the August sun, making every drop of sweat evaporate. I was about to have a panic attack in the middle of a desert plain when I ran out of water. A similar case of water shortage occurred on the third walk, one of the other walkers I had never seen and could never have imagined outside the urban setting. He had not brought water, socks, food, underwear or a T-shirt, I might have respected that look if he hadn’t brought half my bottle and food.