Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Jvan Yazdani
(Sapienza University of Rome)
Jennifer Clarke (Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University)
Send message to Convenors
Short Abstract:
Global-scale transitions accentuate contestations and transformations. Differing uses and values inscribed into landscapes 'move' us towards conflicting 'visions' of futures. What is the role of experimental approaches that attend to movement, temporality in reworking human-nature relationships?
Long Abstract:
Energy transition, climate change, intensive agriculture and deforestation and other global processes are piling pressure on already fraught lines drawn across soil, property, and other elemental entities. Forests are exemplary sites of conflicts arising from differing purposes, uses and values. No element escapes change, uncertainty, transformation; volumetric sensibilities have emerged that question bidimensional understandings of boundaries (Ingold 2019) and sovereignty (Billé 2020), revealing how the atmosphere can also be suddenly conspicuous and contested. Shifting perspectives towards a more decentered view of human-environment relations must also take account of contestations and transformations; which might be seen as movement that 'takes place with others, including organisms and ecosystems' (Gabrys, 2020). Movement, we suggest, might be a way of thinking with forests (Kohn 2013), or fungi (Tsing 2015, Sheldrake 2020), at an elemental and ecosystemic level. So how do forests, landscapes, seascapes, and so on, 'move'? Animate us towards a healther and more integral understanding of transformative processes entailed in large scale societal transition? What might co-created 'visions' of futures - involving diversely positioned communities, human and non-human, locals, researchers, artists, institutions, and others that begin with this, look and feel like? In what ways can experimental approaches that attend to movement, temporality, or the elements offer a means of reworking human-nature relationships? This panel is grounded in experimental anthropological practices that engage with materials, textures, atmospheres, and affects of places; it calls for contributions that engage inter- and tran-disciplinarity, and creative approaches that help understand processes of transformation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 14 April, 2023, -Jvan Yazdani (Sapienza University of Rome)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore the use of camera-mounted kites as an experimental methodology in anthropology, for gaining embodied knowledge of the atmosphere and as a resource for playfully engaging with research participants.
Paper long abstract:
My paper looks at the experimental possibilities afforded by camera-mounted kites, both as a means of experiencing landscape and atmospheres through embodied, displaced sensing, and a resource for participatory, grassroots research.
Holding the line of a kite, spooling out and in, feeling one’s weight partially lifted by the wind, adapting the pace and mode of walking, and sensing the landscape and the atmosphere are experiences that make us alert to otherwise latent qualities of the landscape.
When I first decided to adopt camera-mounted kites, my aim was to investigate – through a displaced point of view – what happens at the edges of construction sites: spaces caught between processes of ruination and development, where diverse scales, layers and infrastructural entanglements conflate.
Sailing a kite at the 'edgelands' (Star 199) / 'drosscapes’ (Berger 2006) of a construction site helped me capture diverse scales, layers, and infrastructural entanglements, focusing on what I call ‘rhizomatic’ manifestations of construction: dust deposited on trees and roads, water plumes, lines on grass and soil, footwork, traffic, fencing, traffic diversions, etc. In other words, what exceeds the established boundaries of a construction site and reaches us beyond its fences.
At the same time, the playfulness and DIY character of kites opens up possible uses to engage local communities and design participatory and multidisciplinary research, to interrogate both the aspirations of local communities and the ‘skilled visions’ of those involved in planning and construction, but also the meandering trajectories of anthropologists.
Patrick Laviolette (FSS, MUNI, Masaryk Univ.)
Paper short abstract:
Through an ethnography of hitchhiking, this paper reflects on our long-term relationship with transport infrastructures – helping to assess their impact upon both the built environment and the Earth's ecosystems.
Paper long abstract:
Is the planet headed towards self-destruction? Are cars, motorways and everything that goes along with them culpable for the end of the world as we know it? This paper addresses such eschatological concerns in the realm of vehicle and road ecologies. Hitchhiking, as a landscaped form of resistance and mobile transgression, serves as a type of serious play in the post-COVID era. There are a lot of memento mori features in auto-stopping. From vanishing hitchers, through to the uncanny aspects of fear, danger, environmental concerns and the search for liberation from social constraint through adventure – death-memory is never very far away from spontaneous roadside lift solicitation. Memento mori is about remembering, about death/eschatology and it is inherently material. An act of the embodied imagination, hitchhiking is itself increasingly memorialised as an endangered transgression and a dying out form of displacement. Hitching is thus a social and spatial memento mori for an era of the 'Carthulucene', when counter-culture wasn't commodified or as cynically narrativised. Is it thus useful to ask whether we should see the auto-stop phenomenon as a tristesse topic? The sadness here residing in that it hasn't been adequately studied in the humanities or social sciences. Not, at least, until that time when it might possibly be driven to extinction by the fear that strangers are not just potential axe murderers, but carriers of contagious viral pathogens.
Alex Arnall (University of Reading)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how human-nature relationships are being transformed due to rapid coastline erosion in North Norfolk, UK. It explores how coastal communities are adjusting to an increasingly unruly sea and the new naturalcultural discourses concerning social justice that emerge as a result.
Paper long abstract:
The arrival of the Anthropocene signals a new era in which once taken-for-granted land and seascapes are being transformed in new and unfamiliar ways. However, what these shifts mean for the underlying human-nonhuman relations that constitute such land/seascapes is less well understood. This paper addresses this shortcoming by examining the situations of coastal communities on the ‘frontline’ of global environmental change in North Norfolk in the UK. In this region, sea defences that have protected towns and villages for decades are deteriorating and, consequently, the effects of rapid coastal erosion on human settlements are becoming increasingly evident. Through the conceptual framework of ‘encountering’, I explore how human-nature relations are being reconfigured as a result and with what consequences for the actors involved. The findings show that coastal communities are becoming more and more aware of nonhuman forces as the unruly sea impinges upon daily life in various, multisensory ways. These effects not only cause people to ‘give way’ to the encroaching waters through relocation of homes and businesses but also attempt to ‘buy time’ with an active nature by extending the life of existing defences. The revitalisation of nature in coastal regions is also intersecting with long-held experiences of marginalisation and disempowerment to produce new naturalcultural discourses concerning social justice. Overall, I demonstrate how an approach that emphasises human-nonhuman encountering in the transformational era of the Anthropocene helps reveal the personal traumas and injustices experienced by different groups as well as the emergent conditions for more politically active, hopeful futures.
Savyasachi Anju Prabir (National Institute of Design)
Paper short abstract:
This paper provokes an imagination of shadowy protector figures through permeability and preservation. How do they interact with a landscape, and what could they want to protect? Drawing from the ancient myths of Rakhandars, this process weaves personal stories with the land and history of Goa.
Paper long abstract:
They say a shadowy figure walks around each village every night, keeping things in check, looking after the place and its people - guiding lost children home, keeping thieves away or straightening people who misuse their land. They take the same route around fields, forests and wetlands, meandering their way through the dark. If someone builds a wall obstructing their way, they find it in ruins the next morning.
Altodi Poltodi (This shore, That shore) is a performative paper presentation that seeks to find/build connections and bridges between the inside and outside, between the insider and outsider and between the world and its shadowy reflection. This paper draws parallels between Goan mythologies concerning the landscape and how people interact with it in the present. Goa, being a delta, is full of lakes and rivers on the one side and the sea on the other. Meandering through these waters, we attempt to meet in the middle (on a bridge or a boat) through collaborative explorations to arrive at a new form of finding a home.
This paper is a culmination and reflection of a year-long research project that led to an interactive art installation assembled at the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts for a month in April 2022. The project was supported by the Goa Open Arts Catalyst Grant 2021.
Altodi Poltodi is a collaborative project undertaken by RS (Amrita Barua and Savyasachi Anju Prabir).
Jennifer Clarke (Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the role of art and anthropological methods in a transdisciplinary project with regard to aesthetic potential of future landscapes. I argue that "envisioning" future landscapes must involve more than mapping visual elements, attend experience and feeling, understood as movement.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will present work in progress, emerging from my participation in a transdisciplinary project called agroforestry futures, funded by the UK treescapes program. An important methodological route to stakeholder and public engagement in this project are approaches which enable "visualisation" of the aesthetic potential of future landscapes, as well as economic and environmental information. However, I am increasingly convinced that the role of art and visual anthropology in planning and "envisioning" future landscapes must involve more than an exploration of varied visual elements. Key is how we might attend to experience, to feeling, and affect, here understood as a kind of movement, which necessitates going beyond explorations of what the future should look like.
This paper will discuss how this position, working with creative practices, offers new critical perspective on why people, places and nature matter, and generates outputs and methods that complement scientific understanding – exploring and challenging existing meanings and values, and creating new ones through the co-production of new knowledge and experience.
I will share recent visual research, iteratively developed through archival analysis and ‘anarchival’ workshops, co-devised and facilitated with commissioned artists, which aim to create "Stimuli" for co-production of "futures" - Speculative visual and multimedia materials to facilitate communication and knowledge exchange involving complex information.
Nathalia Brichet (University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how newly collected and exhibited objects might lead to transformations. By engaging specimens related to livestock production in Denmark as dilemma figures the paper shows how such materializations of the challenges we face in the 21st century may pave the way for change.
Paper long abstract:
Broken chicken keel bones, intramammary treatment tubes for dairy cows, and newborn piglets with dolphin-like foreheads are some of the objects displayed at a new exhibition at the Department for Veterinary and Animal Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. On the basis of my anthropological work to collect these objects as a part of an interdisciplinary research project on sustainable cattle production in Denmark, this paper explores how such artefacts can be mobilized experimentally as dilemma figures providing a common ground for discussing difficult reworkings of human-nature relationships. On display at the exhibition are both old and new specimens collected and selected in dialogue with veterinarians and animal scientists involved as researchers in animal production. The exhibition is situated in Denmark where livestock and their feed take up both the majority of arable land and account for up to 30% of the country’s greenhouse gasses emissions. These numbers make the sector – and scientists – come up with new technologies for a future animal production, most often geared to further optimizing the animal bodies and the production system. By focusing on the intended and unintended effects of such optimization the exhibition aims to creatively chart a space for transformative interventions – both for people directly involved in the curatorial practices (of collecting and selecting) and visitors to come – all of whom may grapple for new visions for healthier landscapes.
loris Rossi (Manchester School of Architecture (MSA)) Stefano Romano (Polis University)
Paper short abstract:
Through a post-phenomenological approach based on the theories of Henri Bergson and Dino Formaggio, we will explore some architects and artist's research in an attempt to trace a scenario whereby the spaces' sequence in art and architecture is perceived as an active process of effect and transformation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the concept of the void's form as a sequences of volumetric perception in art and architecture. Specifically, the effect of different physical relations happening in public space between works of art and architecture shows how to create temporalities, perceptions of space and atmosphere. We intend atmosphere as a transformative process of our understanding of reality, strictly related to the notion of time.
Time can no longer be considered an entity independent from space; hence, to calculate the time we take to move, we must also consider space as a sequence of empty atmospheres where we move in parallel. In art and architecture, time becomes a calculation made of relationships between solids, voids, materials, textures, and bodies.
Through a post-phenomenological approach based on the theories of Henri Bergson and Dino Formaggio, we will explore some architects' and artist's research in an attempt to trace a scenario whereby the spaces' sequence in art, architecture is perceived as an active process of effect and transformation.
In this frame of investigation, the relationships between solids and voids activate new urban landscape scenarios by their users, becoming the context where new possible images of the future city develop.
To explain how the urban space can be experienced in this way, we will analyze several case studies where the architectural and artistic object creates a dynamic temporal relationship with the voids inside and around them, celebrating a specific effect of a place.