Farrago is a group of artists that work collaboratively and whose work tends to explore areas such as identity, social construction, language and ideology. Two of Farrago's artists, Marina Velez and Russell Cuthbert, have merged their cultural backgrounds of origin to create The White Hart.
This mixed media work installation hopes to explore the realities in rural regressive Britain as seen through the eyes of an outsider. In this piece Marina and Russell have revisited the country public house in the idyllic and completely fabricated village of Nestling. Not all is well in the village, which has been rocked by the planning proposal for an Anaerobic Digester factory to be built on the nearby Nestling airfield. Its only surviving pub, The White Hart, is also, much like the fauna that strives to survive in the surroundings, under threat of extinction. The pub is now owned by the merciless 'Corporate Sludge' brewery, which is completely profit driven and not helping out. The pub faces a dilemma: to change and adapt to the times or to die. The inhabitants of Nestling share with us their issues and preoccupations covering topics such as fox hunting and tobacco ban, European Union regulations on farming, holidays, village gossip, illnesses and their forever growing fear of traditions being lost, jobs being taken by foreigners and their identity being threatened by The Other. This is mainly reflected in the sound part of the piece which is based on actual dialogues that the artists recorded live in countryside pubs. The artists approach these themes from the same angle as the viewers do. They are, just like the viewers, mere outsiders looking in.
