Until fairly recently I really hated Ipswich. I grew up there across the 1970’s and 80’s and pretty much spent most of my time hiding my errant sexuality, running away from rough lads, and taking lots of drugs in the absence of anything else I could find to do. I came from a materially comfortable enough working class family where I didn’t ever go cold or hungry. But distracted and unharnessed I failed at school and left with no qualifications. I certainly didn’t know what being an artist was and had no cultural role models outside of the punk women I worshipped: Siouxsie, Poly Styrene, and (hangs head in shame) Toyah. These were my creative guides, and fairly swiftly they led me out of Suffolk and on to the metropolis. But two years ago I moved back to Ipswich.

Now aged 44 and having spent the best part of the last 20 years travelling the world as a performance maker, setting up the SPILL Festival of Performance, and being involved in some truly radical projects along the way, I found myself increasingly thinking about ‘home’ – what the term meant, where it might be, and how I could investigate it to artistic ends. And for this I needed to make a commitment.

I am a childless man in a long-term queer relationship. As things currently stand my also childless lesbian sister and I are the end of our biological family line. It stops with us. So in starting to think about notions of home I also began considering issues of heritage and history particularly in relation to the future and to legacy. Wondering what this might be and whom it might serve. What, if anything, could I nurture and tend to be of value in years to come? Was this too grand a task to set oneself, or too full of self-importance to even be useful? I suppose what I really had to ask myself was how much did I dare to even try?

This summer Pacitti Company is presenting a series of live public events, which also become a feature film, made with and for people living in the east of England. The project is called On Landguard Point and is part of Artists Taking the Lead – a major project at the heart of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, funded by Arts Council England. On Landguard Point explores notions of home across the six diverse counties that form the east of England (Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex) a region that is home to 5.2 million people. On Landguard Point seeks to address the questions I set myself around legacy and the future.

An Edible Compass. Photo: Caroline Guthrie

There are lots of interconnected strands to the project, from writing A People’s Encyclopedia For The East Of England, to large and small scale live performances in public space around the region; from staging 205 archaeological digs in domestic back gardens (with Carenza Lewis from Time Team), to evolving a visual lexicon of 205 symbols that become both silver charms and large stitched flags; from commissioning composer Michael Nyman to write a soundtrack for the film, to curating a range of local, national and international artists to make site and theme specific artworks and performance. On Landguard Point is also a feature film and this element alone already directly involves hundreds and hundreds of people, many of whom are non-professional amateur groups, troupes and bands taking part in front of the camera in a myriad of ways.

In short, the project is a collection of interchangeable activities through which members of the public can take part in the work on their own terms. More technically, it is a system of models for empowerment. But these did not just arrive fully formed and out of nowhere. They build on extensive work undertaken by Pacitti Company over many years, through which we have been putting together processes that enable inclusion in our work.