Adam Chodzko’s The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads is a science fiction audio walk carefully leading its audience on a special route in and around Northfleet. It’s a journey of strange inward and outward transformations through a place in an intense state of change. Diggers are busily reshaping Northfleet’s landscape, erasing the last traces of its cement industry and mutating the identity of its community.
Leading you through this unsettled landscape, The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads ‘augmented reality’ soundtrack guides you to perceive new relationships between place, mind and body through its composition of vocal narration, instructions, music and sound.
The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads is a revised, updated and restaged version of The Return of the Fleet Spring Heads – a work originally commissioned by Cement Fields as part of Estuary 2021 and presented during the festival in May and June 2021.
Both iterations of the work are an attempt to preserve what is disappearing by enhancing collective memory – each participant becoming a custodian of the soul of the Northfleet landscape. Every experience of the walk is unique as the radical transformations of landscape escalate hour by hour. Many of the narrative’s visual references, once true, are now buried under piles of rubble, as the bulldozers work to alter the audio’s truths, turning them to fiction.
The Mysterious Return of the Fleet Spring Heads was commissioned by Cement Fields and presented as part of Ebbsfleet Citizen Archive – Cement Fields’ community-led project capturing and preserving the varied stories and histories of the people and places of Ebbsfleet, Greenhithe, Swanscombe, and Northfleet as the area goes through a significant moment of change.
Ebbsfleet Citizen Archive is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund and supported using public funding by Arts Council England. With additional support from Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, Gravesham Libraries, Dartford Museum and Libraries, and Kent Archives.
All the materials gathered through the project can be now be accessed via ebbsfleetcitizenarchive.org, where you can also upload your own contributions.
Adam Chodzko is a visual multi-media artist, exhibiting internationally and living in Whitstable, Kent. His work creates a ‘sci-fi proposition’ suggesting new forms of human relationship and new encounters between us and the world we inhabit. Weaving together documentary and fiction, he’s previously created assemblies of owners of a particular jacket, a late-night parade of nocturnal animals to the Frieze Art Fair, the offering of ‘perception-changing footwear’ for gallery visitors to wear at Bologna’s art museum, etc.
Adam’s recently had solo exhibitions in Rome and Kuala Lumpur and is currently exhibiting in Pasolini in Chiaroscuro at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Closer to home in Kent his permanent public sculptures can be found on Folkestone seafront and on the façade of The Amelia, Tunbridge Wells’ museum and library.
Previously, Adam has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions since 1991, including: Tate Britain, Tate St. Ives; Raven Row, Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna; The Benaki Museum, Athens; Istanbul and Venice Biennales. Commissions include Creative Time, NY; Frieze, and the Wellcome Trust. Awards include: the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art – New York, AHRC Research Fellowship, DACS Art360.
His recent book Ah, look, you can still just about see his little legs…explores his artistic practice in relation to a 16th C Pieter Bruegel painting.
The Dreamshare Seer, Adam’s major new project to visualise the Isle of Sheppey community’s collective nocturnal dreams, using Artificial Intelligence and Malaysian indigenous dreamwork, is also the focus of his practice-led Fine Art PhD at Leeds Beckett University.