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Paper short abstract

This paper addresses the landscapes and townscapes of the eastern English coastline moving anti-clockwise. Fieldwork is underpinned by analogue collage operations influenced by ideas of border aesthetics, assemblage theory, attention economy, mythogeography and the undercommons.

Paper long abstract

This paper addresses the landscapes and townscapes of the eastern English coastline during travels from south to north, moving anti-clockwise. I observe politics and materiality, the different communities, the lie of the land and the behaviour of light and weather along the coast. It is deemed to be unlucky to travel anti-clockwise, “widdershins” to use a witchy and old Scottish word. This work is underpinned by fieldwork and by notions of the operations of (analogue) collage which follow the aesthetics of the border, (Nail, 2016; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013, Schimanski and and Wolfe, Eds, 2017), assemblage theory (Buchanan, 2021, Parrry, 2022), attention economy (Watson, 2017), and mythogeography (Smith, 2010), and the undercommons (Harney and Moten, 2013). These are tactics to push for serendipitous clashes and revelation, wandering and seeking that sometimes incorporates poetry, painting and my own photography with magazine, secondhand books and found small objects and textures en-route. In this time of climate change and intense over-stimulation in media and relationships, I try to express the murkiness, gloaming and mixture of real / artificial illumination to address confusion and contested spaces and possible future imaginaries. This could be for example military / industry / ecology / tourism with various strategies such as horror or humour, sublime or cute, information made misleading through cut-up etc. Collage is a response to the sudden or smooth transitions of light and dark and relates to the human psyche as much as the landscape of travel and immersion in it.