“Bringing together contributions by artists, writers and theorists, ‘Fieldwork for Future Ecologies’ addresses the role that art practice and art-based research plays in expanding notions of fieldwork. At once a handbook for research and practice and a philosophical speculation, this book offers the unique opportunity to explore ways of working within vastly diverse climates and terrains using image, sound, movement and other sensing technologies. It also offers more creative and speculative interventions into the idea and location of the ‘field’ itself.
Focusing on a range of projects from across different geographic locations and situations, the book highlights the crucial contribution that art can make to environmental and climate studies offering a valuable intervention into current discussions of artistic practice and research. ‘Fieldwork for Future Ecologies’ presents a series of propositions and speculations … radical practices for radical times.
Contributing authors: Angus Carlyle, Alliance of the Southern Triangle/AST (D Bauer, F Grodin, P M Hernandez, E Kedan), Bianca Hester, Bridget Crone, David Burns, Henriette Gunkel and Eline McGeorge, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Julie Gough, Kate Pickering, Kreider + O’Leary, Kristen Sharp, Melody Jue, Nicholas Mangan, Philip Samartzis, Polly Stanton, Ruth Maclennan, Sam Nightingale, Saskia Beudel, Simon O’Sullivan, Susan Schuppli, Therese Keogh.“
The Chorography of Place: Mapping new ecologies of landscape, memory, history and visual culture.
This PhD by practice aims to explore chorography’s relevance as an organising principle in contemporary artistic practice and critically address the historic yet neglected role of chorography in the documentation of place. Chorography, or place writing, is the artistic representation of a regional map which originated in Classical Geography (c.149AD). This field-based approach and detailed descriptor of place takes region as it’s lens and qualitatively maps characteristics of the locale by examining the constituent parts of that place. If a sensory physical mapping of place occurs prior to representation where is the body in the process of chorography?
There is a need to distinguish this act from its documentation and re-presentation to provide new theories, forms and applications by addressing the political implications of the embodied in the act of representation. To provide a contemporaneous account the performative relations between the body, mapping and place; the mobile, embodied and situated are therefore central to a contemporary interpretation of chorography.
To enact these relations sites chosen for their historic, symbolic or mythological significance include Brontë Country which straddles West Yorkshire and the East Lancashire Pennines, the Devil’s Bridge in Wales and St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall. Applying chorographic methods in artistic practice I aim to realise a historically grounded exploration of place by performing and documenting embodied, visual, textual and symbolic mappings. These mappings will form the basis of artworks, critical and performance writing, book works, performance and installation which will translate chorographic methods and the physical act of mapping into artistic practice. Combining historic method with contemporaneous form will enable a renewed understanding of the chorography of place not just artistically but physically, contextually and historically.
View from the ascent up Skiddaw, Bassenthwaite, Lake District
How shall I most freely cast a bridge between inside and outside?’ – Paul Klee[1]
She needs a framework, a basic conceptual structure, fixed yet fluid, a suture, a space of exchange. Invitingly provocative, she explores how it feels to be confused and insecure. Breathing deeply, exhaling freely, searching for the clarity of an image rendered in the act of moving. Finding in the rhythmic structure of move[me]nt a series of progressive events where an uncertain smile gropes in the dark for a sub-conscious memory. She is making a spectacle of herself but she cares not, she has surrendered herself to the moment, falling softly like a feather into a chasm where chance dares to hope, to dream, to tremble at the merest prospect of touch.
She tried this dialogue with Mondrian but became depressed when she ended up goose-stepping at right angles, her body locked in an alien rigor mortis. She abandoned this course of inaction and went back to the drawing board so to ‘act in such a way that I can speak to you.’[2] Slowly she traces his gestures with the pads of her fingers trying to get a sense of the performance, allowing the movement to find its own course.
The relationship with her body is inverted as this extremity becomes the locus of all sensation; her entire body now sits on the tip of her finger. This minute spot is suddenly electrified with an ‘intimate immensity’[3], ‘signing on the body body longing.’[4] Self-consciousness is elsewhere, she invests herself with a forensic energy looking for the cameo, the secret, the victim, here a perjured parrot under the skin looking for the ballad and the source. ‘Her hands, autonomous, pick out some refrain buried deep within her core.’[5]
Somehow he knows her even before sheknows herself. Somehow she knows him evenbefore she knows herself. She recalls the story of Butades, a miniature love story where a young woman distressed that her love was going away traces in outline on the wall, the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp, a substitute for the absent object of desire. This process of extraction is like drawing poison from a wound. ‘He takes hold of her and attracts her, drawing her out of her presence.’[6] Hidden in plain sigh[t] privately she makes an appearance speaking from a place where she is not, where she knows not. She remembers The Diary of a Nobody with all those Cummings and Gowings on the threshold. Is she coming or is she going? [Pull yourself together! She disobeys this command; she likes the way it feels to be confused and insecure.] Is she drawing, writing, dancing or speaking? She can no longer tell the difference, she is not herself but poetry in motion, black milk in human form. Now his drawing is etched into the whorls of her finger, it feels like a mutiny in the air with no objective. She hovers like a woman uncertain of his convictions, unsure of herself, a shadow soundtrack of whispering grass kicking the air.
‘Are you the figure or are you the ground?’ [o! Is that how his story goes?]
You might as well ask me if I am the wave or the sea.’[7]
‘To write’ he said ‘is not to set in black but be yourself the black where words sit.’[8] She is unsure whether this is what he had in mind. This is how poems come to be, they are written in the blood, tiny corpuscles passing through arteries where oxygen flows.
‘You tap a message into my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my heartbeat. I had a steady heart before I met you, I relied upon it. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm, you play upon me, drumming me taught.’[9]
Language has us all dancing in the diamond room. It shoots, we jive. Rapid acts of teasing your desire gesture toward the sensual. As if submerged in water like a wet fish on velvet, it excites appetites. This subterranean muscle orders appearance, an anthropological analysis of bodily actions. Something stirs in the deep like a fish wriggling on a hook shooting like an arrow for the surface. A subcutaneous striation transforms into a red weal upon her face.
‘When suddenly she realized . . . words were coming …imagine…words were coming a voice she did not recognize…at first so long since it had sounded . . . then finally had to admit . . . could be none other . . . than her own.’[10]
[5] These are selected extracts based on the screenplay by Steven Spielberg, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Great Britain: Sphere Books Ltd, 1978). Due to the nature of the book (it is a ‘Fotonovel’) there are no page numbers given. I have changed the word him to her.
[4] Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, (London: Vintage Books, 1993), p.89.
[3] Bachelard, Op.cit, p.183. This is Bachelard’s term for our imaginative capacity to inhabit a landscape internally
[2] Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, Trans. John Gregg, (USA: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p.5.
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