Demons land: a poem come true

*Demons Land: A Poem Come True* is a collaborative scholarly and artistic project that explores what it might mean to build a world or a life in the image of a poem, or to understand history as being structured like a poem. That poem is Edmund Spenser's *Faerie Queene* (FQ), perhaps the single greatest work of the English Renaissance. We make a multi-media exhibition telling the story of an island in which FQ comes beautifully and terribly to life.

FQ is a hallucinogenic masterpiece, erotic, ravishing, strange, and frequently very savage. Inspired by militant Protestant zeal, the poem was written in Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s, when Spenser served the English crown during the most violent years of the Elizabethan conquest. It presents an unbuilt world, and asks on what principles we might create a virtuous person and a reformed society. Spenser's mission in Ireland failed. His poem both reflects and tries to redeem this failure, offering a model of the necessary future as much as a diagnosis of the present. Hence the imaginative premise of our project: that subsequent global history, a repeating mission of conquest, education, and colonization, can be understood as a tale of this poem coming differently, imperfectly to life. It has long been understood that FQ, in its claim to change or to model lives, is an exemplary Christian humanist poem. In our project, FQ becomes the text of unfinished modernity.

The questions we ask are very basic. We are all familiar with the idea that a poem might reflect or record history. But what if it predicts history? What if history is itself structured like a poem? And we can extend these questions to life itself: what if lives happen as they do in poems, where they only have existence if they are seen, or only matter if they are sympathized with? What if each individual life is not a self-sufficient experience, but an allegory of something other? What if metaphors are true, or life is organized in rhymes, stanzas, endlessly repeating rhythms? The question becomes: what does it mean (for society, or history, or a life) for a poem to come true?

Questions such as these cannot really be tested in conventional scholarly forms. They need a correspondent creative experiment. The only way to achieve this is through knowledge exchange, exploring how different crafts and disciplines - poetry, painting, film, music, masks, puppetry, and creative literary criticism - can combine to embody a poetic vision.

First, we translate FQ into a new story called Demons Land, told in the first instance in a critical fiction by Palfrey. This is the story of the Collector, a Romantic who around 1800 vowed to remake an island at the bottom of the world into a poetic utopia. Demons Land becomes a shadow history of Britain's most notorious colony, the prison island called Van Diemens Land. Like Spenser's mission in Ireland, the Collector's dream failed: not because his world failed to be like the poem; but because both the poem and the land were other than he thought. They had indigenous energies, lives, untapped implications that his discipline hadn't imagined.

We then animate this story through the arts of film, painting, soundscapes, music, prose, and puppetry, which come together in an exhibition/installation telling the history of the experiment.

As well as an online version, we will exhibit in locations whose own history speaks to our project, adapting our narrative to each host. The first showing will be in the gardens and temples of Stowe National Trust, designed in the early eighteenth century as an architecturalised Faerie Queene - like Demons Land, a place made in the image of the poem, as an act of political critique and fantastic idealism. The second showings will be in Scotland, in the Gothic Mount Stuart house on Bute - another monument of beleagured idealism, and an island whose semi-disappeared history mirrors that of Demons Land - and in Glasgow, the great port of empire.

This project already has footholds in several communities - academic, artistic, poetic, theatrical, musical, educational, heritage - founded in the collaborators' everyday environments. The project will encourage innovative new interactions, and offer models of working practice for secondary school students and teachers of art, literature, history, and film.

Follow-on Funding will ensure the success of exhibitions in both UK and Australia. The debut exhibition will be at the NT Gardens and Temples of Stowe in spring/summer 2017, the property's busiest period (60,000+ visitors), forming the centrepiece of Stowe's 2017 theme, "Lost Worlds", with a constellation of smaller exhibits and performances; and be the focus of Stowe's contribution to the National Trust's *Eight Great Properties*, showcasing the country's most unique heritage properties. They anticipate visits from 20+ schools. Stowe will produce a new map of the grounds, a souvenir pamphlet, and host a parallel interactive exhibition for children. The exhibition will be widely advertised via the National Trust, and in *The Conversation*. The second host is Bute's Mount Stuart House (July-Aug 2017), in tandem with a major site in Glasgow (being negotiated). The exhibition will be at the heart of the House's 300th anniversary celebrations, publicized by a £250,000 campaign and linked to coterminous artistic residencies. Visitor numbers should increase 50%. They will advertise the exhibition among local and mainland schools and literary/artistic communities.

The principal impact here will be in the form of increased understanding of, and imaginative engagement with, both the specific sites and the heritage sector more broadly, opening up their histories to renewed awareness and scrutiny, and revivifying their contemporary relevance.

The exhibitions and related publications will be widely publicised through partner websites (eg TORCH, National Trust, Bloomsbury's *beyond criticism* series, Stowe, Bute, participating museums and universities). We anticipate considerable press and radio coverage. There will be a sophisticated digital iteration of the installation, funded independently, ensuring continuing worldwide access to the project.

AHRC funding will facilitate public impact well beyond the period of the funding. In Oct/Nov 2017 the exhibition will travel to Brisbane, Sydney and Perth as part of Palfrey's ARC Distinguished Visitor Fellowship. It will tie in with a major 2017 exhibition in Brisbane on the History of Ecstasy. There will be interviews/features on ABC Radio National. With sound producers Overtone Productions, we will make a submission to Radio National's Radiotonic and Soundproof programmes.

We are negotiating about 2018 showings at Sutton House, Hackney; Strawberry Hills House, Richmond; and the Ashmolean. We wil approach MONA museum in Hobart, tailor-made for our project. We will use Tom de Freston's 2016 Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University to explore exhibiting at RSC's Other Place. In the longer term the exhibition should find a permanent home in a suitable museum.

An important pathway to impact of the project (although not specifically funded by any award) will be its two major book publications. Bloomsbury will publish a critical fiction by Palfrey, marketed as a crossover title between trade/academic (following Palfrey's forthcoming novel, *Macbeth, Macbeth* (Bloomsbury, 2016). We are talking with Faber's Matthew Hollis about a *Selected FQ*, the aim of which is to find new readers among schools, colleges, and the general public. The books will be sold/advertised at the exhibitions, and the exhibitions publicised through the books.

Tom de Freston's paintings will be exhibited separately at Breese Little Gallery in London.
The project film will be entered into short film categories at appropriate festivals (eg Sundance, Tribeca, Berlin, SXSW, BFI London, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Norwich, Leeds).