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Critical Writing
Paper Abstract: Excavating the Ephemeral through Performative Archival Practice: Fact, Fiction and Fieldwork, AAH Symposium, Cambridge 2026
Contemporary artists are increasingly challenging the boundaries of the archive and authorship through fictional strategies and non-traditional materials. This paper offers a methodological reflection on the use of fictional personae as narrative interlocutors within my practice-led PhD research, demonstrating how non-traditional archives can challenge, extend, and reimagine art history’s archival practices. I argue that the strategic adoption of fictional personae forms a critical methodology for reimagining archival practice and opening historiography up to the speculative. Here, fictionalisation functions as ‘de-archiving’, investigating silences, absences and contested narratives within memory and history. Drawing on theoretical perspectives such as Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation, and Hayden White’s conception of historiography as poetic and philosophical, I demonstrate how fictional personae developed in my project Letters to the Landscape, 2025, through the pseudonymous artist duo Vale & Howlette facilitate a performative, polyphonic engagement with a physical archive assembled from eBay. These materials instigate embodied fieldwork as détournement and processes of archival reinvention, challenging what constitutes an archive and whose histories are preserved. My approach resonates with artists such as Erika Tan, Walid Raad, Susan Hiller, and The Otolith Group, who use found or fabricated archives to critique dominant histories. By asking how using fictional personae and digital archives like eBay can reshape narrative and memory in art history, I argue that integrating fictional methodologies with non-traditional archives constitutes a form of critical, speculative historiography, one that not only reimagines narrative, memory, history and identity but also offers a transferable model for artistic and scholarly enquiry.
Overview of Practice
This research is grounded in an interdisciplinary, practice-led approach that stages chorography as both methodology and mode of inquiry, privileging process, embodiment, and creative experimentation. In practice, this approach is realised through a body of work spanning moving-image, sound, photography, installation, site-specific intervention, and performance writing, all situated at the intersection of embodied fieldwork, archival play, and speculative narrative. Through these forms, I interrogate how archival fragments, textual, visual, and artefactual, can be (re)collected, reinterpreted, and reanimated via sensory gestures, narrative slippage, and acts of embodied citation. Central to this practice is the activation of dramatis personae who act as narrative interlocutors, structuring devices and speculative figures that enable a slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. These rhetorical figures operate as explorers, (mis)guides, and mnemonic surrogates, enabling a mode of fieldwork that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. Through them, the archive becomes a vehicle of resonance, resistance, and reimagination, staging historiographic instability and opening up space in the archive for embodied speculation, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded. In doing so, my work reframes the archive not as a static repository but as a haunted, migratory space that moves across media, bodies, and temporalities where landscapes, bodies and narratives converge.
A significant aspect of this approach is the construction of a vernacular archive sourced from eBay, whose algorithmically curated collections of letters, postcards, and photographs stand in deliberate contrast to institutional archives. This contingent, everyday archive both initiates and shapes the fieldwork, foregrounding the fragmentary, ephemeral, and unpredictable nature of memory, collection, and research. Through a performative archival practice, walking, (re)collecting, re-enacting, writing, re-citing, reciting and remembering, the landscape is activated as a mnemonic terrain and the archive as a live site of negotiation, resonance, and resistance, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored. This project is situated in Brontë Country, West Yorkshire, a landscape dense with literary, historical, and affective resonances. Here, I privilege fragment, rupture, and affective encounter over any claims the archive might have to institutional fixity or control by adopting a methodology of situated refusal, a way of inhabiting the archive without claiming it. This approach foregrounds the politics of memory, whose stories are told, whose gestures preserved while advancing chorography as a feminist, performative, and practice-led methodology for reimagining place, history, cultural memory and the performative construction of identity.
Research Context & Background
This PhD by practice explores chorography’s significance as a methodological tool in contemporary artistic practice, critically re-examining its historic yet neglected role in the documentation of place. Originating in Classical Geography (Ptolemy, c.149AD), chorography, or “place writing”, is historically understood as the detailed description and mapping of regions. This field-based approach qualitatively maps characteristics of the locale by examining its constituent parts. Historically, it has functioned as both a field-based method of qualitatively mapping and as an artistic or literary mode, linking events to landscape through pictorial and textual representation. Chorography was rediscovered in Renaissance Geography and British Antiquarianism in the 16th-17th centuries. Historically William Camden’s Brittania (1586) is an encyclopaedic approach to a geographic, “topographical-historical” (Mendyk, 1986, p.459) survey of the British Isles, which has been identified as a classic exemplar of the renaissance of a chorographic work “connecting past and present through the medium of space, land, region or country” (Rohl,2011, p.6). Britannia was part of an epic attempt to map the nation and give people a sense of cultural identity and belonging. British Antiquarianism retrieved chorography and recreated it in an expanded field of writing, reinterpreting its legacy, ensuring its survival, restoration, and continued communication.
While chorography has traditionally been seen as a representational tool, recent scholarship in cultural studies, archaeology, and performance has renewed interest in its methodological richness and interdisciplinary potential (Pearson, 2006; Shanks & Witmore, 2010; Rohl 2011, 2012, 2014). Yet there remains an absence of synthesis between these fields, and a lack of attention to gendered, embodied, and performative approaches, which this research addresses. Although chorography is pre-disciplinary, Shanks & Witmore (2010) claim that a genetic link underlies contemporary disciplinary approaches across heritage management, tourism, archaeology, historical geography, and contemporary art practice. They argue for a genealogical understanding of interdisciplinary practices concerned with relations of land, place, memory, and identity to understand present practical and academic positions. It is this link I am trying to follow and establish in contemporary artistic practice and research.
Central to this project is a critical re-examination of chorography in contemporary artistic practice, moving from documentation and representation to performance and embodiment. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (Butler, 1999), the research investigates how the body, particularly the gendered and mobile body, serves as a site of historical crossing, memory, and meaning-making. This shift has profound implications for who and what is remembered or forgotten, and for how places are re-collected and re-presented. Brontë Country, straddling West Yorkshire and the East Lancashire Pennines, has been chosen as the primary site for this investigation. Valued for its literary, historic, and symbolic significance, this landscape is both an active shaping presence (as in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, 1847) and a locus for contemporary artistic engagement. The region’s legacy of travel, narrative, fiction, gendered relations (a feature of their writing which is also lacking in chorographic history) and the literary imagination, compounded by the Brontës’ own use of pseudonyms, a strategy adopted in the practice research, renders it an exemplary terrain for rethinking chorography through a feminist, performative, and practice-led lens. This project approaches chorography not as a static or descriptive tradition, but as a speculative, embodied, and interdisciplinary methodology. Artistic practice, including moving image, performance writing, installation, and critical-creative text, serves both to enact and to interrogate chorographic methods: mapping not just physical terrain but also the complex intersections of place, history, narrative, cultural memory, gender, and the performative construction of identity. By combining historical method with contemporary form, the research aims to renew chorography’s relevance, to understand place not only artistically, but physically, contextually, and historically, and to open new possibilities for artistic research in and through place.
Chapter X Mapping the Territory: Situated Cartographies of Method, Memory, and Material Trace
So I’m really struggling with the writing since I have so many drafts, edits and supervisor comments, I’ve gone a bit word blind so I will periodically be posting the writing here so I can see how it scans in a publishing space. This is either the Introductory Chapter or it could possibly be a Literature Review or Methodology Chapter. I just thought I should write an introduction to give myself a framework and set the scope of the chapter.
Synopsis for Thesis
Chapter X establishes the conceptual and methodological foundations for the thesis, positioning chorography as a dynamic and speculative tool for contemporary artistic research. Tracing chorography’s genealogy from its classical origins through Renaissance and British Antiquarianism to its re-emergence in performance and archaeology, the chapter reframes it as a site-responsive, feminist, and performative practice. Organised around four thematic clusters, Cartography and Representation; Regional Histories, Literary and Experiential chorography; and Spatial Representation and Deep Mapping, it provides a framework for analysing how artists collect, narrate, re-present, and perform place. The chapter critically engages with figures such as William Camden, Daniel Defoe, John Macky, Walter Scott, and Emily Brontë, as well as previously marginalised women, to outline a literary and artistic lineage informing the thesis’s approach to landscape and cultural memory. It argues that chorography, when resituated within artistic practice, offers new ways to stage landscape, perform memory, and construct cultural identity. It introduces key methodological and theoretical terms such as performative archival practice (as a practice-led methodology), positionality (Alcoff 1988), and speculative feminist historiography, an emergent analytical lens that the practice research performs or gestures toward. These approaches will be enacted through a range of methods, including moving image, performance writing, script, installation and multimodal practice. The chapter also identifies gaps in the literature, notably the exclusion of female chorographers, and advances chorography as a ‘travelling concept’ (Bal, 2002) capable of crossing disciplinary and temporal boundaries, setting the stage for the practice-led explorations that follow in the thesis.
Chapter X Mapping the Territory: Situated Cartographies of Method, Memory, and Material Trace
“Reflecting eighteenth-century antiquarianapproaches to place which included history, folklore, natural history, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the discursive, the sensual, the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might want to say about a place”
(Pearson & Shanks, 2001, pp.64-65).
This chapter establishes the contemporary relevance and methodological potential of chorography for artistic research, particularly in relation to the core themes of the PhD: landscape, cultural memory, history, performativity, and identity. This excavation is not merely historical; it is methodological and speculative. Rather than treating chorography as a purely historical practice, I reanimate it as a site-responsive, feminist, and performative mode of inquiry, one capable of excavating overlooked narratives, reanimating vernacular memory, and creating symbolic resonances. By tracing chorography’s layered genealogy from its classical origins (Ptolemy, 149 AD), through the Renaissance and British Antiquarianism (Camden, 1586), to its re-emergence in contemporary discourse, I highlight its renewed significance in the work of Pearson (2006) and Rohl (2011, 2012, 2014), who explicitly engage with chorography, as well as in the collaborative work of Theatre/Archaeology (Pearson & Shanks, 2001) and contemporary Archaeology (Shanks & Witmore, 2010), where chorography becomes a means of mapping memory, materiality, and narrative within landscapes While Pearson and Shanks (2001) do not always explicitly invoke chorography, their interdisciplinary practice, particularly through the development of deep mapping and the performative investigation of place, exemplifies many of its core principles and demonstrates its potential for mapping memory, materiality, and narrative within landscapes. I therefore position chorography as both a conceptual lens and a methodological framework. This approach enables a situated exploration of artistic, archival, and embodied engagements with landscape, mapping the entanglements of place, narrative, and cultural memory.
The history of chorography spans centuries and encompasses a range of definitions, practices, and disciplinary interpretations. Given the scale and complexity of the field, often reflected in encyclopaedic and multi-volume works, a comprehensive account is beyond the scope of this thesis. To navigate this density and complexity, I have identified four thematic clusters drawn from a close reading of the literature. This chapter is therefore organised around: Cartography and Representation; Regional Histories, Literary and Experiential chorography; and Spatial Representation and Deep Mapping (Heat-Moon, 1991; McLucas, 2015; Roberts, 2016; Biggs, 2014; Bodenhamer, 2015). Unlike conventional mapping, deep mapping engages with place through a process that is dynamic, iterative and performative. It treats the landscape not as a static backdrop but as a multilayered tapestry of stories, memories, and events, revealed and reimagined through the act of mapping. Deep mapping is the contemporary analogue of chorography (Pearson and Shanks 2001). These clusters elucidate chorography’s methodological richness and interdisciplinary flexibility, and offer a manageable, conceptually coherent framework for approaching chorography within contemporary artistic research. Structuring the conceptual field, they offer a basis for analysing how artists collect, narrate, re-present, and perform place. This research also draws on the chorographic approaches developed in the epistolary and tour writings of Daniel Defoe (1724) and John Macky (1714) (Connell, 2015), as well as on the contributions of marginalised women whose performative, epistolary, pseudonymous, and collaborative approaches have yet to be recognised within the field, but whose work this project argues has the potential to reshape chorographic practice. Emphasising practices of fieldwork, correspondence, first-person narration, and collaboration in their work, reframes chorography as a speculative, dialogic, and performative methodology for mapping landscape and memory. Critical engagement with figures such as Scottish novelist, poet, historian and ‘literary’ antiquarian Walter Scott, particularly his poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and English novelist and poet Emily Brontë, who was influenced by Scott, enables the tracing of a literary and artistic lineage that informs this thesis’s approach to place-making and narrative construction. While Scott’s historical novels, such as The Heart of Midlothian (1818), construct landscapes as mnemonic archives, spaces where fiction and history coalesce to produce a vernacular sense of place, his poetry exemplifies an early chorographic impulse: to map cultural memory through storytelling (Shanks & Witmore, 2010).
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), by contrast, presents a gothic landscape where the moor becomes a site of affective intensity, feminine resistance, and narrative fragmentation, using letters and nested narratives in ways that anticipate later feminist reimaginings of terrain and memory (Rose, 1993; Massey, 2005). Their works, along with those of later 20th-century writers such as W.G. Sebald, provide historical and speculative precedents for the methodologies developed in the practice-led research that follows. Clarifying the conceptual terrain this chapter introduces key methodological and theoretical terms such as performative archival practice (as a practice-led methodology), positionality (Alcoff 1988), and speculative feminist historiography, an emergent analytical lens that the practice research performs or gestures toward. These approaches will be enacted through a range of methods, including moving image, performance writing, script, installation and multimodal practice. It also identifies gaps in the literature, notably the exclusion of female chorographers, and advances chorography as a ‘travelling concept’ (Bal, 2002)capable of crossing disciplinary, temporal, and epistemological boundaries. This chapter proposes that, when resituated within contemporary artistic practice, chorography becomes a method to stage landscape, perform memory, and inscribe oneself into the terrain of cultural identity by drawing on Cosgrove’s (1984) exploration of landscape as a cultural and symbolic construct and Massey’s (2005) theorisation of space as gendered, dynamic, inherently social and key to the formation of identity. Chorography is positioned not just as a representational tool, as it was historically practised and understood, either as a pictorial map (Renaissance geography) or as a written text (British antiquarianism), but also as a performative and speculative methodology.Here, place is not just represented, but actively inhabited, enacted, and reimagined, setting the stage for the speculative, feminist, and practice-led explorations that follow. The thesis explores this through embodied fieldwork, archival gestures, and the creation of fictional personae who traverse the moorland landscapes of Brontë Country and beyond.
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