Living in a material world

 

Aims and Objectives

This series of experimental, location-based workshops will engage with a range of disciplines, arts and community organisations in order to provide an arena in which approaches to landscape and environment can be compared, combined and placed in critically reflective relationships.

For more details please go to the project summary document

Progress and Highlights

Year 1

• The network's had a weekend in the military firing zone on Mynydd Epynt at Sennybridge, Wales working towards the goal of how to ‘tell' others. Participants were from the academic disciplines of Performance Studies, Historical Studies, Literature, Religious Studies, Film Studies, Fine Art, Geography and included artists, film directors and the MoD.

• As the inter/trans-disciplinary aim of the network is essentially dialogic the symposia have been designed as associated with the working weekends to follow a similarly dialogic format.

• Steering away from a conventional presentation-paper format for the Temple Meads symposium loosely structured panel discussion was invited to reflect interests in the performative moments of emptiness.

• For the Epynt symposium all participants were invited to offer a 2-minute snapshot of a memory of the weekend, creating a collage from the group's experience that attempted to avoid any framing ‘description' of the site. It was noticed that certain words or things 'haunted' the weekend. Etymologies — the ways in which words and things 'place' us — were discussed and also the ways ingrained histories, dispositions and visualization practices drive our responses and experiences.

• To date the clearest methodological finding was the importance of transdisciplinarity across a range of disciplines, rather than ‘conversations' between one or two areas of work. By setting a group of people clearly defined directives we can begin to observe how ways ahead are to be worked out, and ideas and approaches changed over the course of a weekend. Once the idea that we might be able to produce a totalising notion of what ‘emptiness' might mean has been jettisoned, then the group begins its work towards emptiness.

Year 2

• This year the project's final two workshops (Mynydd Epynt and Avonmouth-Severn Beach Littoral), two symposia and national conference took place.

•  Mynydd Epynt workshop. Seventeen researchers and artists gathered at the SENTA training centre at Sennybridge. The practised relationships between the contested landscape of Mynydd Epynt and our own diverse, overlapping and colliding practices forced us to engage with an ethics of place. Multiple relationships to questions of nation and community highlighted the entanglements of landscapes and bodies, entanglements that require of us a burden of care and refuse any easy assumption that place is somehow distinct from our attempts to ‘know' it.

•  Epynt symposium. Outcomes included performance, radio play, papers, video, visual arts practices. Where the Temple Meads symposium had focused on a conversational method, here we emphasized the relationship between individual and group responses.

•  Avonmouth-Severn Beach workshop. From Mynydd Epynt we took the structure of exercises, expert presentations and small-group activities. Unlike Epynt, this workshop placed us at the heart of everyday communities and thus made us confront to an even greater extent the political, ethical and philosophical implications of considering emptiness. Specifically, the appeal of material trace that we experienced at Epynt was productively complicated at Avonmouth in that its problematic exoticizing was brought to the fore. We were forced to question where the emptinesses were, and our own roles in an ‘emptying out' of the present of these landscapes.

•  The Avonmouth symposium allowed us to reconnect with the dialogic mode first introduced at Temple Meads . Ika Willis acted as discussant and ensured that as a group we tracked between academic discourse and art practice, exploring their intertwinings, rather than reifying any false distinction between those modes of research.

• The implications of the Network were realized at the final conference. Of particular value to the Landscape and Environment project is the way in which the multiple voices and practices facilitated by the Network produced new understandings of the potential of emptiness as a conceptual and methodological framework. The Network and participants in its events came to see ‘emptiness' as a particularly useful way to think about and work with landscape.