Demons Land is a multi-media event – film, play, paintings, sculptures, soundscapes, digital drama – in which a beautiful, violent, hallucinogenic poem comes uncannily and alarmingly to life. The form of each Demons Land event can morph and mutate in response to its specific occasion or location, as we uniquely combine and recombine the project’s core elements of installation, screening, and performance.

Our inspiration is the greatest, guiltiest epic poem of the English Renaissance: Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-96). Written in the service of religious fundamentalism and cultural genocide, it is poem of idealism, temptation, ravishing gorgeousness; but also a poem of coercion, prevention, and rape. Spenser’s vast, conflicted work becomes the seminal text of the unfinished modern world. Demons Land is a dark allegory of colonization: as a political and racial act, and as an expression of sexual desire and imaginative speculation. The poem has come true over and over; it is coming true now, even as we speak.

Demons Land is a collaboration between Simon Palfrey (writer), Tom de Freston (artist), Mark Jones (filmmaker), Jethro Cooke (composer/sound designer), Luke Lewis (composer) and Stephanie Greer (actress).