Welcome to promisedlands.info.

Promisedlands.info was created during an artists research residency at the International Institute of Visual Arts [Iniva] in 2008-9. On this site you will find one hundred pages of images, music and texts exploring the theme of the promised land in historical and contemporary accounts of migration.

With this website we offer a transformation of the idea of the promised land from a geographical space of nation and region, singularity and sovereignty, into a multiplicity of zones, located as much beneath as above the land, as present in the soul of the song as in the will of the state, and whose identities and locations shift and change over time.

We propose a creative rethinking of the idea of the promised land through which the mythologies and histories, tensions and contradictions, the terrors and pleasures of the journey, the new knowledges born of exile, arrival (or return), the imaginary, the material, the sacred, the secular and the scientific nature of the lands themselves, their past and possible futures, are brought into play.

Promisedlands.info was the subject of performance presentations at Iniva in October 2008 and the International Symposium on Electronic Art [ISEA] in August 2009. Performance presentations will take place at Iniva in Autumn 2009 and FACT/Tate Liverpool’s Black Atlantic season in 2010. Please see the news page for details.

We would like to thank Gary Stewart @ Iniva and Helen Sloan @ Scan for their support, and Trinli Gauder for his technical assistance.

Edward George & Anna Piva
Flow Motion