Paper short abstract:

This paper explores creative methodologies within the ‘Agroforestry Futures’ project, engaging with film, collage, and bodywork to reimagine landscapes and ecologies. It considers how material transitions shape our senses of place, framing sustainability as an intimate, relational poetics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper thinks with creative methodologies I have woven into ‘Agroforestry Futures’ (a UKRI‘Treescapes’ project), embodied acts of thinking with matter and material. It speaks from the interstices of anthropology, art, and design, in work that attends to the shifting lives of materials, bodies and breath traversing landscapes and scales, in often unmeasurable ways, tugging at eco-social understandings.

Following an unfolding of the primacy of work - fieldwork and bodywork, as well as 'concept-work' and ‘image-work’ (El Haik), as ways of knowing and being, I consider the possibilities and response-abilitiies of art-work(s) that gesture towards breathing bodies, human and more-than-human. Two concepts settle each meeting the other in tension. First, bodywork attuning to inhaling, exhaling bodies as porous interfaces for sensation, perception, communication. Second, the ‘turbid image,’ Bridgit Crone’s rethinking of the general category of images in relation to environmental crisis. Turbidity, where murky waters or dusty air reveal the materialities of suspended, unsettled, images, challenges us to engage the material and political entanglements of sensing and seeing, revealing the technologies and politics of image-making.

This work unfolds in modes more akin to intimacy than strategy, within a relational poetics and politics that still insists on simultaneously critically examining the technologies and politics of image-work. I suggest that it is within this tension we find the stirrings of other ways of being, seeing, doing and working. As an experimental multimodal presentation, this paper also attempts to evoke tensions in transdisciplinary bodywork and image-work, nudging us toward other futures.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how diasporic artists re-contextualise handmade textiles by linking them to themes of home, exile, and the ongoing effects of the Armenian Genocide and their role in memory, activism, and identity formation.

Paper long abstract:

Handmade textiles serve as tactile media of memory and identity, especially within diasporic contexts. Used, exhibited, celebrated or forgotten, these everyday objects carry sensory and affective meanings that contribute to our understanding of concepts such as home, exile and nation. This paper aims bringing together different perspectives from art, history and anthropology to explore ways in which handmade textiles are recontextualised by diasporic artists within and beyond contemporary global art scene. By conceptualising the Armenian Genocide not as a singular event confined to the Ottoman Empire during a particular period in the twentieth century, but as an ongoing process with persistent afterlives in modern Turkey, Armenia and the diaspora, this paper engages with new materialist research on the afterlives of violence, dispossession, and displacement. Shifting the focus to the role of personal objects in actively materialising memory in the context of the genocide's aftermath, this paper aims to go beyond documenting the survival and adaptation of these objects or artefacts as ruins, but instead examines the more intimate, mundane and affective processes they evoke, as well as their potential to shape contemporary politics and activism.

personal objects, memory, diasporic art, afterlives of violence,

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the 'blue tarp aesthetic' in Turkey's Black Sea Highlands, examining how locals engage with state preservation regulations on vernacular architecture on their own terms—a form of irreverent politics, I argue.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the transformation in the vernacular aesthetic of a village in Türkiye's conservative Black Sea highlands that became a popular tourist hub after tourists from the Gulf region began arriving in 2013. It highlights encounters between the state's superficial preservation efforts, dubbed the "veneer state," and the locals' adoption of what I dub a "blue tarp aesthetic." Blue tarp enables residents to engage with the state’s aesthetic game on their own terms, which I argue is comprised of irreverent politics. My analysis details how residents perceive the state's architectural façades, designed to enhance local heritage, as mere veneers that mask deeper structural and socio-political fault lines. Often out of sync with regional architectural needs and traditions, this state-driven aesthetic exemplifies a top-down conservation approach that prioritizes appearance over substance. Residents counter these impositions with the blue tarp aesthetic, signaling temporariness and unfinishedness in response to legal, physical, and environmental challenges. This emergence of a new vernacular aesthetic reflects a pragmatic, nonchalant dismissal of official policies and asserts the continuity of local architectural practices in their pursuit of a livable life. I argue that the aesthetic choices of residents are deeply political, illustrating how vernacular architecture becomes a site for irreverent politics. This political stance does not only dismiss the state's authority to dictate the village's architectural vision, it also upends traditional assumptions about vernacular architecture and its notions of beauty and permanence, positioning the blue tarp as a signature element of the new vernacular aesthetic.

Paper short abstract:

How can residential tourists in the Mediterranean transition from a consumption-driven logic to one of landscape care, connecting fieldwork on specific materials in tourist destinations and origins. It reimagines tourism as a catalyst for ecological stewardship amid shared climate challenges

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how the logic of consumption that drives residential tourism in Mediterranean destinations might transition into a framework of landscape care. It examines how Northern European visitors, initially engaging with Mediterranean environments as consumers, often through second-home purchases, might adopt more sustainable practices attuned to local ecosystems. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with residential migrants at Mediterranean destinations through a housing design agency, the study investigates the cultural and environmental shifts required for such a transition.

The analysis extends to the tourists' places of origin, such as Aberdeen, a city tied to the North Sea’s offshore gas economy. Here, the common language of onshore and offshore reflects extractive logics similar to those driving coastal developments in the Mediterranean. By juxtaposing the North Sea and the Mediterranean, the paper highlights parallels in resource exploitation and the contrasting rhythms of their ecosystems.

Through these lenses, this study seeks to reimagine how seasonal migration, currently dominated by consumption patterns, could evolve toward cycles of care and ecological stewardship. Focusing on specific patterns of materials as water and plants, it questions what cultural, economic, and design interventions might enable this shift, proposing speculative narratives that connect the weather and social cycles of both seas. Ultimately, the Mediterranean becomes a testing ground for new imaginaries of shared responsibility, offering insights into how tourism and migration might help address the climate crisis rather than exacerbate it.

Paper short abstract:

Dealing with water, air, plants, birds, or insects as material infrastructures, and therefore subject to our design tools, allows us to discover in their continuous and creative movement, their ability to mobilize our most human obsessions, interests, affections, routines, and expectations.

Paper long abstract:

Dealing with water, air, plants, birds, or insects as material infrastructures, allows us to discover in their continuous and creative movement, their ability to mobilize our most human obsessions, affections, routines, and expectations. From this perspective, the ongoing project to 'design a place’ in the historical center of Caravaca de la Cruz, a town in the interior of the southeastern Spain, becomes a creative investigation about the possibilities design practices opens up and the methodologies required by these 'minor issues' when called upon to contribute to the making of public infrastructures.

During successive meetings with the 4.000 m2 of the intervention, we observed some enclosed landscape to which the small surrounding18th-century palaces directed their sewage and waste, where certain plants survived and cats had built their habitats. However, the divergent stories of the neighbors told us about past splendor, the need for parking, flooding issues, unpleasant odors or people who had cared for the plot for years. All these stories spoke of fragile materials that, nonetheless, underpinned their desires for a better future. And then, we began to dig and remove rubble. And then, we began to uncover small irrigation channels, sewage systems, forgotten maps, and layers of stone that had once materially supported their histories, in contrast to a town in post-industrial transition. And then, we discovered that the intervention could consist of materializing the meeting point between these controversies, helping us to understand design as the collective making of the matter of things that now matter to us.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how art reshapes rural landscapes and communities through "Art at Fuliang". Focusing on art’s spatial and temporal mobility, it examines how installations in transitional rural spaces engage locals in their everyday practices and contribute to (re)constructing a sense of place.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the mobility of art materials and their affective resonances in rural China, focusing on "Art at Fuliang", an ongoing regional art festival in a village in Southern China. This event involves contemporary artworks installed in disused houses and farmlands, which are marked by traces of industrialisation and migration as dynamic sites of transition. Artworks in these rural spaces are mobile not only in space, travelling from urban centres to rural settings, but also in time, evolving with the seasons, weather, and local conditions. As the exhibition progresses, the art becomes integral to the local landscape, transforming both the spaces and the people who encounter them while turning the village into 'a roofless art museum'.

Drawing from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the village, I examine three key examples: a large-scale outdoor sculpture on a tea mountain that gradually becomes a local landmark, a series of water tank installations that improve local homes' water storage systems, and a multimedia assemblage in an old house that reflects the village's migration history. These artworks engage both locals and visitors, becoming catalysts for collective reflection on the past while embedding themselves in the community's construction of their present and future. I argue that the affective dimensions of art are shaped not only by their materials, but by the relationship between these materials and the rural contexts they occupy. The mobility of art—both spatial and temporal—expands the fabric of affects as it becomes integrated into the everyday life of the village.

Paper short abstract:

This work challenges the hegemonic use of terms like vernacular architecture, which homogenize diverse knowledge. It seeks to operationalize the concept, highlighting its potential to interpret the mobility of local matter and explore pathways to future-oriented ancestral design.

Paper long abstract:

The historical narrative of local architectures, commonly defined as popular or vernacular, is questioned in this work due to its foundation in a binary opposition to the hegemonic Western canon of "Architecture". This approach simplifies the complexity of these practices, ignoring their potential for relational future possibilities. This text proposes thinking through the concept of vernacular architecture as a means to access the understanding of biocultural heritage, the movements of techniques, knowledge, affects, and designs that shape environments, modify soils, generate biodiversity, and build landscape infrastructures, all through ancestral practices that challenge extractivist and colonialist logics.

The concept of vernacular architecture is revisited as a category that homogenizes the diversity of architectural, spatial, and construction knowledge. It is argued that terms such as "traditional architecture," "popular," or "without architects" limit our ability to imagine possible futures. This debate is situated within a broader discussion of the “ancestral future,” led by Amerindian thinkers such as Ailton Krenak and Davi Kopenawa. These authors question paradigms of "development" and "progress" and advocate for integrating ancestral knowledge, which fosters alliances with the non-human world and opens pathways toward non-extractivist and regenerative design. Despite the difficulties of translating between worlds and scales, the aim is to explore intermediate spaces and methodologies for dialoguing between transdisciplinary knowledge, forging deep and affective alliances between peoples.

In this context, the question arises: What categories of thought, associated with local architecture, can help us establish relationships of climate mobility, ecological care, and landscape stewardship toward an “ancestral future”?

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the historical and contemporary transformations of Aberdeen Harbour, one of the UK’s oldest ports, through a comparative study of historical charts and modern plans. Tracing the harbour's development from its early development to the present day, examining how material flows have shaped not only the port but the city’s relationship with the world.

It will analyse plans to makes visible the dynamic transition of the harbour and movement of materials, from early times; the importance of trade and the fishing industry to its position of the pre-eminent oil and gas harbour in Europe, to its current transition to green energy technologies. It emphasises how these material flows, both in terms of goods and the construction materials used in the port’s infrastructure, have fundamentally transformed the city’s economy, social structures, and global connections.

The comparative study aims to show how materials moved by the harbour, such as fish, timber, hydrocarbons a now renewable energy technology, are not only products of trade but also reflect shifts in the port’s identity. These materials have continuously reshaped Aberdeen’s position within the broader global network, and by learning from past developments, the paper proposes insights for the harbour’s future role in the transition to sustainable energy-based economy. As Aberdeen prepares for new challenges, including a stronger tourism economy and a leadership role in future energies, the paper argues that understanding the historical flow of materials is essential to shaping a more sustainable and competitive future for the city and its harbour.

Paper short abstract:

How can drawing help us become ethnographically attentive to changing landscapes? How can drawing activate processes of transdisciplinary investigation requiring a shift towards bodies and matter?

Paper long abstract:

How can drawing help us become ethnographically attentive to changing landscapes? How can drawing activate processes of transdisciplinary investigation requiring a shift towards bodies and matter? These were some of the key questions of the City of Shadows workshop, organized in June 2024 in Barcelona: a workshop to inquire ethnographically on habitability in the face of extreme heat, paying attention to urban shades. We invited participants to explore drawing strategies in guided walks, with the aim of exploring moving shades and attempting to be moved by them. Besides regular ‘stable’ materials, such as pencils, markers, papers of different weights and opacities, we also explored unstable ones: such as anthotypes, a solar printing process using papers emulsified with spinach producing unstable images affording environmental affectivity to the shades of infrastructure, vegetation, and random objects. In doing this, drawing became experiential research, and a way of responding to environmental challenges: activating visual sensitivities passing through the body, aesthetic experiences of image-making processes, and a sensible attention to making. Thus moving with shades, we explored them as regions to be inhabited, or already inhabited, drawing becoming a central tool for the affective exploration of forms of living together in times of climate change.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses sonic methodologies to explore the spatial implications of mobility infrastructures in the Polish-German borderlands. Through sound, it traces the entangled histories and socio-material reconfigurations of space, highlighting the role of matter and its motion in this process.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the use of creative sonic methodologies to explore the socio-material impacts of cross-border mobility in what is now Polish-German borderland. Focusing on the twin cities of Frankfurt (Oder) and Słubice, it investigates how soundscapes reveal the dynamics of spatial reconfigurations, driven by mobility infrastructures and shaped by the region's turbulent past.

The establishment of the border along the Oder-Neisse line in 1945 brought population displacement and socio-economic upheaval, fostering a legacy of transience. Today, infrastructures linking the twin cities continue to embed these histories within the material and sensory landscapes of the border, reshaping them into spaces of negotiation between permanence and temporariness, human and non-human, local and transnational.

While the region has been studied extensively, our study contributes to this body of work by examining the spatial dynamics of the border and its affective dimensions through sonic ethnography, using methods such as field recording and sound walking. Listening to the soundscapes of transitional spaces reveals the ecological disruptions, economic dependencies, and material histories of these environments. In this context, the paper highlights how sound can deepen our understanding of the active role of matter in connecting various temporalities and shaping the sense of place. Moreover, it presents the practice of listening as an embodied intervention into the landscape, disrupting its taken-for granted structure.