Untold Skies is an artist commission for the Promenade Weekender, 15-17th September 2023

Although Untold Skies was created with Weston’s seafront in mind, it can be enjoyed from any location.

Composed by Tina Hitchens & Jen Green for a walk along the Weston super Mare seafront, Untold Skies is an immersive soundwork offering a creative perspective on the landscape and the sensory experience of Weston’s edgelands. It features the musical and spoken word contributions of workshop participants from Humans of Weston Creative Recovery Group and Weston Artspace woven with the artists’ new work. 

During the Promenade project, a workshop on the seafront involved deep listening exercises and participants made field recordings along the way from bandstand to Birnbeck pier lookout, where we talked about the old pier and did mindful writing. Tina then led music improvisations with a group in Weston Artspace, drawing inspiration from sea and seafront, and Jen led a workshop on writing about what makes Weston unique, the edges, and what the sea brings us.

A booklet with writing from the project is available digitally here: https://issuu.com/untold-skies/docs/untold-skies-booklet

Credits:

Field recordings & spoken words: Martyn, Nada, Reily
Music improvisations: Andy, Bev, Jo, Katie, Nada, Sam, Scarlett, Zena 
Writing and spoken words: Nada Magriel & Sam Francis
Many thanks to Bev of Humans of Weston and to Weston Artspace. 
Additional words by Jen Green www.jencgreen.com 
Field recordings, music composition and production by Tina Hitchens www.tinahitchens.com

Commission by Promenade for the Promenade Weekender, September 2023, and made possible with support from Arts Council England. 
www.promenadeprojects.org.uk/

Untold Skies

The fourth “China Chat” with Paul Salopek (Out of Eden Walk), Edward Wong (Diplomatic Correspondent, The New York Times), Evan Osnos (Staff Writer, The New Yorker), Kaitlin Yarnall (Chief Storytelling Officer, National Geographic Society), Neysun Mahboubi (Research Scholar, The Center for the Study of Contemporary China, University of Pennsylvania), and Susan Jakes (Editor, ChinaFile at Asia Society). This conversation took place via X / Twitter Spaces on August 16, 2023.

Fourth China Chat with Paul Salopek

Every hundred miles, Paul Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind.

Milestone 82 was recorded on day 3,559 of the Walk in Hanzhong, Shaanxi, China.

Paul writes, “A scene from the last zero-COVID autumn in northwestern China. It was raining, and we’d been trying to outwalk snap lockdowns that sprawled across rural counties the size of small European countries. A dance of fools around invisible health boundaries that would pop up with little warning. One town had run out of natural gas because tanker-truck drivers were being quarantined. We reached Hanzhong exhausted, but couldn’t stay. The city of 3.8 million was slipping into mass lockdown because they’d found one positive case at a school. It turned out to be a false alarm. But we plodded on anyway.”

Read more and explore Milestone 82 in full here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestones/2023-04-milestone-82-dance-fools#introduction

Milestone 82: Dance of Fools

Every hundred miles, Paul Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind.

Milestone 83 was recorded on day 3,599 of the Walk near Louguantai Temple, Shaanxi, China.

Paul writes, “We were making for the Daoist temple where, according to legend, the ancient philosopher Lao Tzu wrote down the Tao Te Ching. We crossed through unkempt gardens of kiwis and passed a lettuce field where a farmer had placed a hand-written sign: Steal Vegetables and Your Family Will Die. But there was nobody around to pilfer high-fiber, leafy greens of any kind. This was during the height of the zero COVID policy, and the land was as bereft of humans as if our species had never been born. The temple too was locked up. The monks hadn’t ventured beyond their walls in 10 days. Lao Tzu got around on an ox. Fed up with civilization’s moral decay, he rode into the wilderness never to be heard from again. We empathized.”

Read more and explore Milestone 83 in full here:

Milestone 83: No Human in Sight

Every hundred miles, Paul Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind.

Milestone 84 was recorded on day 3,644 of the Walk near Yijun County, Shaanxi, China. 

Paul writes, “We’d been walking gingerly for days, both of us, barely recovered from COVID. The narrow farm lanes boomed with trucks, and their concrete lanes slalomed north from the old Silk Road city of Xi’an, crossing endless hills and gullies. A land stubbled with brittle cornstalks. With scraps of snow in the leeward sides of furrows. Magpies screeched like rusty hinges in the windbreaks of Chinese scholar trees. In some fields the oldest, broken remnants of the Great Wall jutted like rotten molars. Above: a weak sun the color of wax. Everywhere lay a pale coating of macaroon dust: on the houses, on the cars, on your lunch of noodles, on your dreams. Blown loess, it was. We were crossing the famous yellow earth plateau.”

Read more and explore Milestone 84 in full here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestones/2023-07-milestone-84-everywhere-dust#introduction

Milestone 84: Everywhere Dust

Every hundred miles, Paul Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind.

Milestone 85 was recorded on day 3,722 of the Walk near Yan'an, Shaanxi, China.

Paul writes, “’I can do it myself!’ cried Ms. Fu. ‘I can do it myself! I can do it myself!’

There were four of us walking together: Luo Xin, Luo Yin, Liu Lifeng, and Liu Kankan. Ms. Fu was embarrassed that we helped load her scooter-cart with firewood. She was collecting the fuel in a dry valley frizzy with brown trees and grass that fed the middle reach of the Yellow River. Tillers were out in their limpet hats preparing the fields for corn. They turned their backs, hoeing furiously, if we came too close. But after we’d walked by, they leaned on their hoes and stared. A new highway was built, but Shaanxi’s hinterland still didn’t see too many outsiders—least of all on foot. The last famous one was Mao. He marched through in ’36 on the way to take Lüliang. But all Ms. Fu wanted was to finish her chore; to go home for a hot glass of tea.”

Read more and explore Milestone 85 in full here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestones/2023-08-milestone-85-i-can-do-it-myself#introduction

Milestone 85: 'I can do it myself!'

Every hundred miles, Paul Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind.

Milestone 86 was recorded on day 3,741 of the Walk near Xinyizhen, Shanxi, China.

Paul writes, “We climbed up from the Yellow River to the city of Lüliang, and a storm was blowing in from Inner Mongolia. The big, windy, lonely, new roads that exited the city were almost empty of pedestrians. This was not uncommon in China, where booming infrastructure often leapfrogs the presence of people. There was nobody around to talk to. But someone had left a plastic cup containing incense at the intersection, doubtless to honor some ancestor or family member for the Qingming Festival—Grave Sweeping Day. The festival is said to date back more than 2,500 years, when a servant proved his extreme devotion by feeding a slice of his own thigh to a hungry lord during a period of exile. When the lord regained power, he neglected to reward the servant. Eventually, the lord felt pretty guilty about this. So years later, he located the aged servant living like a hermit in the forest, and when the servant refused to meet and be thanked, the lord burned the servant out. The servant died. Now the lord felt extra guilty. He declared a national holiday.

I know. I don’t get this story, either.

The next day, while we hiked across the Lüliang Mountains, it snowed.”

Read more and explore Milestone 86 in full here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestones/2023-11-milestone-86-hungry-my-lord-heres-slice-my-thigh#introduction

Milestone 86: 'Hungry, My Lord? Here's a Slice of My Thigh'

Every hundred miles, Paul Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind.

Milestone 87 was recorded on day 3,751 of the Walk  ear Xinzhou, Shanxi, China.

Paul writes, “There were fields of loess where farmers were out planting onions.

We walked up over the tan, grassy gap of Shiling Guan, a strategic pass between the rich trading cities of Taiyuan and Xinzhou in central Shanxi Province, a vast upland that historically had been a buffer zone between western pastoralists and Han farmers. An ancient brick gate in a village had been built, according to its faded stone plaque, by 133 local men in the year 1587. A shrine beside the crumbling gate honored Wǔdàoshén, the Five Ways Gods who represent the five manifestations of heaven. Atop this high vaulted entryway, the Kuomintang had constructed a sloppy concrete machinegun pillbox against invading Japanese in 1937. (The Japanese flanked the position and took Taiyuan anyway.) The region had experienced many wars going back 3,000 years. So it goes.

Nightfall obliged us to shelter at a roadside inn that featured shelves of fake books used as decorations in the lobby. The titles on the cardboard spines included, in English, The Descent of Man and Anne of Green Gables. Teletubby statues stood at attention outside each room door. The Teletubbies were named Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, Laa Laa, and Po. They were of molded plastic in bright primary colors and six-feet tall. The effect in aggregate was creepy, like a hallway of leering off-world honor guards, and sleep came uneasily.”

Read more and explore Milestone 87 in full here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestones/2023-12-milestone-87-fake-books-and-teletubbies#introduction

Milestone 87: Fake Books and Teletubbies

Every hundred miles, Paul Salopek pauses to record the landscape and a person he meets, assembling a global snapshot of humankind.

Milestone 88 was recorded on day 3,767 of the Walk in near Donghenanzhen, Shanxi, China.

Paul writes, “The concrete village road was devoid of people but buzzed with sounds: Distant tractors. The cawing of overhead magpies. The faraway waw waw waw of barking dogs. Open space rang all around.

Faded old jackets and trousers—work clothes—were slung across the lower branches of elms lining the empty road. As if some lost party of sinners had stripped in haste. Had walked into rapture.

Exactly 85 years before, in May of 1938, Mao’s troops had opened a dry-goods store in the adjacent village of Donghenanzhen. The Red Army took a stab here at capitalist self-sufficiency. The communists bought 3,042 yuan’s worth of salt, paper, soap, and bolts of cloth from city merchants, hauled this modest inventory to the village on the backs of 11 donkeys—maybe along this selfsame road—and earned a profit of 800 yuan. One month later, their frenemies, the Nationalist Chinese troops, would blow up dikes along the nearby Yellow River to slow the Japanese advance into central China. The resulting flood drowned a million people. Survivors might have slogged this road too.

I was walking with Becky the entrepreneur, with Luo the historian, and He Ping, a mountaineer.

We were pounding out the final miles of Shanxi Province, pushing hard for Beijing. We were taking a breather, packs off, pacing in small brooding circles atop the leaf shadows spackling the desolate road. As if awaiting a savior. I thought: What if? And I thought: Does the power of reason only serve to deceive me? But it was just a false alarm.”

Read more and explore Milestone 88 in full here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/milestones/2024-02-milestone-88#introduction

Untold Skies

Tina Hitchens

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