HELSTON.- CAST (Cornubian Arts and Science Trust) announced the opening of Groundwork, a season of international contemporary art in Cornwall from 5 May to 30 September. With a focus on place and an emphasis on moving image, sound and performance, the season presents new commissions made in Cornwall, together with existing works by internationally acclaimed artists.

At Kestle Barton, Bella, Maia and Nick (from nothing to something to something else, Part I), is a new commission by Dutch artist Manon de Boer. Filmed at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, the work portrays three local music students experimenting with new sounds and rhythms, continuing de Boer’s continuing fascination with the importance of ‘open time’ in acts of creativity.

Following research at Goonhilly Earth Station, the large telecommunications site first established on the Lizard peninsula in the early 1960s, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) have developed As the World Turns (2018), a new moving image work that explores how we experience nature through the language of science and technology. Semiconductor’s work is shown with Black Drop (2012), Simon Starling’s film inspired by the 2012 transit of Venus. Both works are presented on the Goonhilly site, a place with a strong sense of its own history, achievements and future endeavours, where nature and technology co-exist.

GROUNDWORK takes the industrial, social and cultural histories of Cornwall as the starting point for a programme that brings together related histories from other parts of the world. Christina Mackie’s Judges II, an installation inspired by the rock formations of New South Wales and by ideas of geological, mythical and personal time, is presented in the Kings Room at Godolphin, a seventeenth-century estate built from the profits of copper and tin mining. At CAST, Steve McQueen’s film Gravesend (2007), exploring the mining of coltan, the mineral used in the manufacture of mobile phones and laptops, is shown in a specially constructed black box projection space.

Also opening on GROUNDWORK’s launch weekend is Sean Lynch’s ongoing video work, What Is An Apparatus, which gradually reveals the evidence of increasingly technocratic living through the artist’s seemingly random encounters with nuclear submarines, postmodern architecture, robots, scrapyards and supermarkets in Europe and North America. Including new footage shot in Cornwall, the work is presented in Helston Museum amongst artefacts relating to the town’s working history.

At the end of May, Janet Cardiff’s internationally acclaimed sound installation Forty Part Motet opens in the Richmond Chapel in Penzance, a former Wesleyan Chapel and Grade II listed building, usually closed to the public. Cardiff has reworked sixteenth century composer Thomas Tallis’s choral piece Spem in alium nunquam habui by recording forty individual male voices (bass, baritone, alto, tenor and child soprano) and playing each individual voice through its own speaker, so that the visitor can move amongst the forty speakers to listen to single voices or be immersed in the overall complexity of the choral ensemble.

Passage for Par, a new site-specific dance work by choreographer Rosemary Lee, commissioned for GROUNDWORK in partnership with Dance Republic 2, will inhabit the vast expanse of Par Beach in June. Bracketed at one end by the china clay refineries at Par Docks and at the other by the green fields of Gribben Head, Par beach is the most bio-diverse site in the whole of Cornwall. At low tide, over the course of an hour, thirty women dancers will come together as a singular form slowly moving across the sands.

At the Telegraph Museum in Porthcurno Steve Rowell presents his photographic installation Points of Presence, an ongoing investigation into the history, geography and archaeology of trans-Atlantic telecommunications sites, documenting places in Cornwall, Newfoundland and the US where the first telegraph cables physically connected the old world with the new. Porthcurno is the point at which many trans-Atlantic and intercontinental submarine cables came ashore.

In the Bickford-Smith Snooker Club at the beginning of June, Chris Fite Wassilak and Sophie Mallett introduce various sculptural and narrative elements to augment and confuse the histories that cluster around the building in Porthleven.

Also in June, CAST will present an exhibition of The Silence of Ani (2015), Francis Alÿs’s film set in the ruins of the ancient Armenian city; Adam Chodzko will explore tidal estuaries and the still waters of disused china clay pits in Ghost, an iconic wooden kayak carrying a single recumbent passenger, whilst footage from previous journeys can be seen in St Anthony-in-Meneage church and at CAST; Tacita Dean’s Event for a Stage (2015), her filmed exploration of live theatre with actor Stephen Dillane, will be presented at Falmouth University’s performing arts centre; and Laureana Toledo’s sound and video installation Orden y Progresso, exploring Britain’s colonial exploitation of the Mexican isthmus, will be presented at CAST, with live performances by cellist Natalia Perez Turner.

In partnership with Tate St Ives, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange and Kestle Barton Gallery, and supported by funding through Arts Council England’s Ambition for Excellence scheme, CAST has evolved GROUNDWORK from a three-year programme of the same name that has brought internationally celebrated contemporary art to Cornwall and invited artists to lead field trips, workshops and learning projects.