Living in a Material World
Summary:
Angela Piccini, PI, in collaboration with Jo Carruthers and Prof Martin White (University of Bristol); Prof Mike Pearson, Roger Owen and Heike Roms (University of Wales Aberystwyth); Carol Stevens Claire Doherty, Paul Gough, Iain Biggs (University of West of England)
Creative and critical responses to landscape and environment have emerged from across and beyond the Arts and Humanities, yet collaboration across the disciplines remains rare and methodological approaches disciplinary-bound. 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.
The Network responds to discussions held between participants in the emergent Performativity | Place | Space research theme at the University of Bristol (led by Professor Martin White with RCUK Fellows Dr Jo Carruthers and Dr Angela Piccini) and colleagues in the southwest of England and in Wales. Participants in the research theme, drawn from a range of disciplines, explore notions of place and space – real and imagined, physical and virtual, natural and constructed, historical and contemporary – as 'performative': in other words, how the active engagement with and practising of space creates our material experiences of place. Understanding place and space through performativity highlights the active, multiple and ever-changing nature of 'location' through time. For the Network, we are specifically interested in investigating the relationships between debates around space and place and those that have characterised landscape and environment.
To that end we have devised a series of location-based workshops to foster cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding ‘landscapes’ as networks of practised places. In particular, we focus on ‘emptiness’, specifically locations that are seen to be abandoned, degraded, disappeared, transitory, unmarked yet which are materially rich. This focus engages with the ways in which landscape and environment are often valued or devalued, remembered and forgotten, enabling them to contest and complicate assumptions regarding ‘empty space’ as well as trace the cultural configurations that create ‘emptiness’. ‘Emptiness’ thus focuses research questions on the specificities of the active constitution and performance of landscape and environment.
Workshops will provide scope for combining research methods across the disciplines represented, from philosophical enquiry to empirical investigation and from creative cultural interventions to traditional fieldwork. Higher education, professional arts and public-sector community workers will all be represented. Using source materials circulated before events, participants will use the three two-day workshops to investigate landscape and environment through the performativities of place and space.
The workshops will be paired with symposia in order to bring together individuals and groups to provide an anchor-point for workshop findings. Individuals will share areas of expertise with the specific aim of questioning disciplinary and methodological boundaries as they pertain to landscape and environment. Although provisional and speculative, activities will be discussed as they are formulated, facilitating transferral of practices, perspectives and outputs. The symposium events will culminate in collaborative presentations that aim to evidence the potential of cross-disciplinary approaches and highlight areas for further work. Each workshop and symposium pair will result in an appropriate form of dissemination, from the production of a website, exhibition, pamphlet or performance to demonstrate the fruits of multidisciplinary interface.
Friday 14th September 2007
MYNYDD EPYNT/SENNYBRIDGE - performativities of emptiness
Friday 23rd February 2007
LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENT NETWORK 1: Text/Event/Image