LONDONFIELDWORKS

Super Kingdom, King's Wood
Photography: London Fieldworks 2008

SUPER KINGDOM can be viewed as a social engineering experiment for animals - a new community in the making referencing despot's palaces, gated community developments such as Alphaville in Brazil and the fortified exclusivity afforded to the wealthy and super-rich - all designed to keep urban reality at bay.

London Fieldworks propose SUPER KINGDOM as a series of site-specific interventions within the ancient woodland environment of Kings Wood, Challock in SE Kent for exhibition in autumn 2008 and will include the construction of show homes for animals. The show homes will be available for animal occupancy and will also function as a film set for a new video and animation work to be shot over winter 2008/9 for exhibition in spring 2009.

Considered as an enclave, a demarcated and protected area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, King’s Wood is an environment surrounded by encroaching urban development. Desire for new housing and increased local infrastructure is pitted against fears that the Stour Valley will be ecologically damaged by the unprecedented growth planned for nearby Ashford. The environmental ramifications of massive new development in the ecologically sensitive Thames Gateway are also a concern. This contention has focussed interest on the parallel story of changing habitat and shifting animal populations in King's Wood, within the larger context of mass migration, porous borders and current speculation that for the first time the world's urban population is about to outnumber its rural one. .

SUPER KINGDOM is a Stour Valley Arts commission supported by Arts Council England, Henry Moore Foundation, Arts and Humanities Research Council and London Southbank University in collaboration with Consarc architects, Webb Yates Engineers and Setsquare Staging Limited.