ABSTRACT
On 10 October 2000, at around 10:30am, four of us stood by a waterlogged bog in the windswept uplands beyond Blaenycwm in west Wales, on the border between the two counties of Ceredigion and Powys. We had come here to search for one of the sources of Afon Ystwyth, the small river that links the outer edges of the hills of mid-Wales with the town of Aberystwyth (‘The Mouth of the Ystwyth’) on the Irish Sea. Among our small band of travellers were Rachel Rosenthal, performance artist from Los Angeles, and Wales-based movement artist, Simon Whitehead. The two had been brought together by the Centre for Performance Research's Mapping Wales project, which paired artists from within Wales with those from without for a series of performative excursions into the Welsh landscape. This was uncharted territory in many ways: Rosenthal and Whitehead had never met before, and neither knew the area they were about to map. They were accompanied by American film-maker Kate Noonan and myself as documenters of their joint journey.
