Short Abstract:

This lab will flip the Group Crit, a critical (if criticised) framework from creative pedagogies, to collectively assess 'fûkeiron' theory, and debate whether representations of landscape, with shifted perception, are sufficient to convey unsettling knowledges that we encounter during fieldwork.

Long Abstract:

This lab asks if and how perceptions and representations of managed landscapes can help us develop methods that make unsettling knowledge disseminable. Departing from Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi's 'theory of landscape' (fûkeiron), which suggests that turning the camera 180 degrees and filming landscapes instead of human protagonists is enough to confront the incomprehensible, we will also flip the Group Crit 180º. This critical (and criticised) framework used in creative education, will be used to assess not the contributions but the theory itself, testing its ability to reflect, reshape, and evoke challenging knowledge encountered during fieldwork.

We are interested in exploring how a roving ethnographic eye: 1. reshapes the relationship between text, image, and power dynamics within landscapes, viewed not as static entities but as catalysts for intuitive understanding and critical inquiry into social dynamics interwoven in their shapes; and 2. fosters an haptic perception in which bodies bring visual techniques to a limit.

We will probe the concept collaboratively, examining how visual representations of landscapes may reveal uncomfortable knowledge acquired during fieldwork. The lab seeks to uncover the potential of multimodal narratives of landscapes as tools for engaging with such knowledge in academic or fieldwork contexts. We invite up to 12 participants, willing to contribute unfinished, under-used or awkward materials from fieldwork understood as speculative ethnographic vignettes: images, video, sound, or fragmented text(s) representing challenging encounters in their research in this form https://forms.gle/r3HyatuCC2rJh3H78

Collectively, we will contribute creative and critical work on managed landscapes and debate whether they are enough.