Their residency now complete, and their digital quest leading places where people shared stories that have helped the artists to make new ‘weirded’ maps of County Durham, spanning history, questioning reality, collecting local myths, unexplained experiences and enabling people to tell uncanny stories they might have kept quiet, until now.

Their path ahead was unknown, but now you can explore the pieces of maps they have made to discover new paths across our county… with cartography still to explore with you.

David Blandy & Petra Szemàn who have exhibited and produced work internationally are now joining forces to work collaboratively on a symbiotic programme across County Durham.

We’ll be sharing updates as their work progresses, but for now here’s an introduction to where the compass is pointing.

Residency prompt: “What defines “digital” as a place and how does that relate to our physical place of County Durham, in the wider context of the world?”

► David Blandy (he/him)
— Link to David’s residency gamespace

“Working in collaboration with Petra, I want to bring together a digital community around a shared quest, to create an online encyclopedic map of an alternative future County Durham. I want to encourage disparate and often left behind communities to think about the places around them, to question the normal and to listen to diverse stories - to highlight the fact that we all inhabit different internal worlds even though we might live in the same physical space.”

► Petra Szemàn (they/them)

— Link to Petra’s residency gamespace (coming soon)

“A real-life place can take on a virtual quality in multiple ways. One may see the place in a film, or know of local legends and mythologies tied to it, or a place may simply evoke a dream, or a memory of a different time. I envision these versions of “place”, different layers of multiple parallel realities, twisting and merging together, becoming a sprawling archival output. This shared quest aims for establishing an alternative future County Durham.”