A still from Promised Lands. Courtesy FACT
Liverpool’s FACT showed performance and sound exhibition, Promised Lands as part of the city’s Black Atlantic Season, a series of exhibitions and events exploring connections between cultures and continents.
The exhibition is a metaphor for the migrant experience told through music, words and images. Shown on the 30th January 2010, this was a thought-provoking piece developing and contrasting the connotations of the phrase Promised Lands.
Devised by internationally profiled sound artists Edward George and Anna Piva (Flow Motion), they display their ongoing project Promised Lands through songs and texts gathered from a multicultural archive.
The songs and instrumental music they have collected span a 400-year history of migration from the 1600s to the present day. Their project includes material from the birth of English hymnody to African American slave songs - as well as work from Bob Marley, Abaqondisi Brothers, Mahalia Jackson and Barry Brown.
The artists delve into and find narratives that range from the birth of jazz and social freedom, to house music that brings people together through dancing. The developing narrative is that the Promised Lands can be right where you are.
During the show, images on the screen echo and mirror the feeling of the music we hear, creating a vivid audiovisual experience.
Promised Lands offers many narratives and insights into the people involved with migration and the songs and instrumentals that have developed as a result of their search for the promised lands.
Flow Motion have also created a website www.promisedlands.info which includes a vast collection of the material used to create one hundred textual narratives accompanied by visuals.
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