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.