A LAND WHERE OUR MONUMENTS BLOOM
Participatory art installation, workshop series, and short film. Cambridge University Museums, Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Pride (2025-6).
Artist, writing, direction - Alexander Augustus
Creative Producer - Polly Maunder
Special thanks to Alistair Wilson, Ian O'Shea, Youkyung Cho, The KLF, Vitamin B12, Dance Artists of Welcome Movement®, Pakana, Cambridge Museum of Technology, The Kite Trust, Jim Hubbard.
LGBTQ+ people are not afforded much permanence in our built publics. Instead, they have a rich history of creating fleeting utopias, temporary cities which pop up in a day and disappear overnight. In this condition, what role might a monument play? Might they evoke movement rather than permanence? Life, rather than death? Instead of rejecting entropy, what if it could bloom?
A Land Where Our Monuments Bloom lifts a mystical type from our ancient pasts - not rendered in steel or stone, but made from relationships: ribbons, bodies, voices, movement, and the temporary act of gathering. Through a series of maypole dance classes, art workshops, and film, local people were asked to imagine their own fleeting utopias - spaces built through volunteer labour, collective imagination, joy, exhaustion, and care.
Against the historical erasure of LGBTQ+ lives, the project asked how marginalised communities might reclaim deeper pasts and summon more expansive futures. Not just to celebrate, and not just to remember, but to make a land where our monuments bloom every day.
At Cambridge Pride, four maypoles were placed across the festival site and activated throughout the day. The maypoles were first carried through the parade by groups of celebrants, then planted at the festival ground amidst cheers, before being danced around, and eventually left still. A lifecycle from seed to bloom, left with anticipation of next year.
The project unfolded over months, through a series of free public art and dance workshops, held in local community centres, church halls and parks. In some events, local people and groups were invited to learn maypole dancing with professional instructors, and in others, they were invited to make wands, flowers, and lanterns from willow branches and tissue paper, to carry in the parade.
ART AND DANCE WORKSHOPS.
Premiere and Museum Showcase.
A Land Where Our Monuments Bloom premiered at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology - a special evening of film, conversation, and collective reflection. The screening gathered together participants, collaborators, organisers, museum audiences and locals to reflect on the labour, care, joy, and imagination behind the project.
Shown within the context of the museum, the premiere offered another kind of gathering: a moment to preserve and archive. Museum collections were open to the public in a dedicated late event, and curators reframed artefacts from an LGBTQ+ perspective, giving tours and answering questions.
