place

PhD Synopsis

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To my knowledge this is the first PhD by practice to explore Chorography’s relevance as a methodological tool 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 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 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.

Currently Reading

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“Placeways is a philosophical and historical interpretation of the experience and meaning of place. Searching for a way of knowing and living in the world that does not fragment experience or exploit the environment, E. V. Walter explores the way people in other cultures and other times have experienced place. The book develops Walter’s theory of topistics – a holistic way of grasping a place as the location of shapes, powers, feelings, and meanings. Exploring the common ground of such diverse fields as philosophy, history, urban planning, classics, cultural geography, architecture, sociology, and environmental psychology, Walter provides theoretical resources for readers who want to rescue the human environment from the loss of feeling and meaning. Walter discusses a wide variety of places, from prehistoric caves, the Australian desert, and classical Greece to medieval towns, Renaissance cities, and modern slums. He examines the changing realities of expressive space and reveals the nonrational, symbolic, and intuitive features in our experience of places – elements taken for granted by archaic peoples but discounted by modern civilization. The current crisis of environmental degredation, according to Walter, is also a crisis of places. For the first time in human history, people are systematically building meaningless places. If we are to comprehend and reverse the ruin and dislocation of our cities, we must develop another way of understanding the built environment and the natural landscape. True renewal, Walter says, will require a change in the way we structure experience and a return to an ancient paradigm for understanding both the natural land and the constructed world.”

Text and image reproduced from https://www.amazon.co.uk/Placeways-Theory-Environment-V-Walter/dp/0807842001 (accessed 01/10/22)

Chorophilia – choros and topos

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Antigone by Frederic Leighton, 1882

“To differentiate certain special features in the experience of places many Greek writers used two separate words – chora and topos – as distinct verbal representations. Ptolemy’s perspective, which assigns to chorography the “quality” of places includes the oldest significance of the term chora. The word, the prefix of “chorography” meant place, and in different contexts it also signified region, or country, or space. The word topos, prefix of “topography,” also meant place, but the subtle and changing relations between choros and topos makes an important chapter of intellectual history. Chora stands out as the oldest Greek word for place, appearing in Homer & Hesiod. Topos emerged initially in the work of Aeschylus, that is, not until around 470 B.C.

In antiquity a writer could say chorophilia for love of place but never topophilia. In the classical language, topos tended to suggest mere location of the objective features of a place, and Aristotle made it into an abstract term signifying pure position. The older word chora -or sometimes choros– retained subjective meanings in the classical period. It appeared in emotional statements about places, and writers were inclined to call a sacred space a chora instead of a topos […] Sometimes the two words appeared together.

For example, in the opening of Sophicles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone and her blind father, Oedipus, stop at a resting place, and she says “As for this choros it is clearly a holy one.” He enquires where they are. She replies she does not know the choros, but also asks him if she should go and find out what topos it is. Later in the play, he tells Theseus that he will show him the choros where Oedipus must die, but warns Theseus not to reveal the topoi in which it lies. Here, topos stands for the mere location or the container of the sacred choros, the grave.”

Walter, E,V. (1998) Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, USA: UNC Press Books, pp.120. Chapter 6, The Energies of Places. Image Antigone by Frederic Leighton, 1882, reproduced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone (accessed 03/10/22).