49m2, year 7, summer 2023 | Penelope Cain

From 22 September 2022 to 21 June 2023 Penelope Cain will be the guest artist of the 49 square meters in the Zaartpark in Breda. Penelope Cain works at the intersection of science and storytelling, exploring how human presence inscribes the land at the end of the Holocene. Her practice draws on more-than-human systems and speculative mythologies to retell planetary narratives. Informed by residencies with EU science-arts initiatives, Cain’s recent work has imagined glaciers as historians, birds as memory-keepers, and wind as an active agent. She maps the transformed landscape as archive, question and future fiction.

Penelope wrote about her plans for ‘The Kingdom’:
The Kingdom is a starting point to consider decentering humans from the 49m2 space. What if it became a kingdom for moles, or for a willow tree, or even for a ladybird? Would this kingdom have its own flag, or even multiple flags – in that way that flags are an all-so-human signal of territory, territorialisation, and claiming land? The nature of the 49 square meters through the contract with the municipality already gives a set of rules that govern how park gardeners and council employees can interact with the territory, and how it exists uniquely within the park. What if for a little bit of time there was a formalisation of this separation, of a kingdom within a kingdom?

Landscapes in their widest definition are central to her practice. In particular the colonised, extracted and transformed landscapes of the Anthropocene and the manifest marks of humans on the land. She works with scientists, scientific data sets and concepts, and uses video, digital interaction, flags, text and public participation in storytellings about the lands of the Anthropocene and post Carbon. Originally Penelope is from Sydney, but she moved with her family to The Hague in 2022.