Emanuela Cusin & Sarah Wood
Open: 11-5pm
Co-commissioned and presented as part of the Platforma Festival (October 2025) produced by Counterpoints Arts.
Back to Where We Came From is an installation made in response to St Peter’s, Cambridge – an ancient church whose history is rooted in the idea of sanctuary. The church was not only a site of welcome for travellers arriving in the north of the city but was also, until the early 17th century, a site in which a fugitive could temporarily rest, immune from arrest, a space apart from the legal process of the state.
Now in a time of closing borders, when the idea about who belongs and who doesn’t is at the forefront of the world’s right-wing ideological preoccupation Back To Where We Came From will inhabit this historical space to ask how sanctuary today can operate to provide containment and enable reparation in the wider world.
Taking the artist Gustav Metzger’s aesthetic response to the aftermath of WW2 deportation as a shared starting point artists Emanuela Cusin and Sarah Wood will create an installation that will offer visitors not only the space to imagine future possibilities that counter exclusionary political rhetoric but also to consider how art itself can model hospitality.
Key works:
BREAKING POINT
Emanuela Cusin
Mixed media, 2025
In a time characterised by economic crises, political conflict and natural disaster, we find ourselves caught in a prolonged state of anticipation where anxiety about the future is born from our seeming inability to prevent further catastrophes.
Breaking Point not only mobilises but also critically interrogates this dark presentiment and perceived powerlessness. Taking inspiration from the ever-changing nature of materials exposed to physical and environmental processes, Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive art manifesto and trauma studies, the work creates a visual and poetic parallelism between the physical and psychological impact of destructive events.
emanuelacusin.com
LAND OF THE FREE
Sarah Wood
Multi-media installation, 2025
Almost 3000 years ago the Assyrian empire deployed the policy of deportation for the very first time. 4,000,000 people were forcedly resettled over 250 years, in the service of colonisation.
Fast-forward to the 21st century. In a time of spluttering political soundbite deportation continues to be the most common form of immigration enforcement across the world. It’s a policy that couples a fantasy of origin with the idea that resettlement is an action without consequence for the world’s settled populations.
Out of sight, out of mind? Land of the Free – will bring into focus the ethics and aesthetics of this economy of visibility/invisibility. Using family archives, lessons from history and contemporary stories of forced removal, Land of the Free will offer viewers the space to think about a process more usually elided from wider cultural view.
Thank you:
Andrews Nairne, Guy Haywood, Tom Noblett and all the team (Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge)
Karen Moore (Churches Conservation Trust)
Tom Green and all the team (Counterpoints)
Ruth Campbell – Ekins and Sarah Steenhorst (METAL, Peterborough)
