Dan Pearson Studio

Artevents work with artists, thinkers and innovators to create artworks which discuss the nature and values of contemporary society. On the last weekend in January they had organised a weekend of events at Aldeburgh's Snape Maltings which took W.G. Sebald's influential 1995 book The Rings of Saturn as its departure point.




The weekend started on Friday evening with a screening of the film Patience (After Sebald) by acclaimed documentary film maker, Grant Gee, which features interviews with Rick Moody, Robert Macfarlane, Tacita Dean and Christopher Woodward, amongst others. The film was an intriguing and emotive evocation of a man's life, writings and history, all told via a retracing of the Suffolk walk on which Sebald hung the narrative of The Rings of Saturn.




Speakers at the Saturday symposium included Rachel Lichtenstein (talking about the psychogeography of Brick Lane), Richard Mabey (questioning Sebald's intellectual engagement with the natural world) and Robert MacFarlane introducing a screening of his poetic BBC film The Wild Places of Essex.  A concert given by Patti Smith that evening was well attended, but the size of the venue somewhat overwhelmed what should have been an intimate remembrance of Sebald and his writings.




The highlight of the weekend was a guided walk of the National Trust's Orford Ness. This internationally important nature reserve is the largest expanse of vegetated shingle habitat in Europe and, as such, supports a variety of flora and fauna. The Ness was occupied by the military for much of the 20th century and the shingle is littered with the remains of buildings and bomb test sites, which now take on a sculptural quality. The tension between the natural and the manmade, and the eerie atmosphere created by the oceans of pristine shingle is reminiscent of Dungeness, although here there are no houses and no inhabitants, apart from hares and sea birds.