Category Archives: Projects

Bird Brained? Notes on work in progress.

I sometimes worry about my being ‘bird-brained’. By which I mean unfocused in my reading of both texts and other people’s art work. Unfocused in the sense that ‘my’ thinking moves me across different fields and areas of interest somewhat in the same way a small bird might flit from seed source to seed source or, like a swallow, hunt insects on the wing by darting here and there. What reassures me somewhat is that, like these birds, this apparently erratic activity is driven by a desire to feed.

So while it’s true that my attention seems, at least on the surface, to flit randomly from one field or idea to another, this way and that, there is I believe some sort of pattern being played out in this process.

These thoughts are prompted by the fact that I have been immersed in an extended bout of reading, one that has recently taken me, for reasons I can only half-identify, from Claude Lecouteux’s Witches, Werwolves and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages to Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think which, although I’ve only just finished it, I’ve now started to re-read in tandem with Kaja Silverman’s extraordinary Flesh of My Flesh (which I picked up on because Kohn quotes it). I suspect that what each of these texts does, each in its own very different way, is encourage me to ask fundamental questions about our presuppositions as to what constitutes ‘an individual’. So, somewhere behind this birdbrained flitting, there is I think a half-formulated desire to open myself out more fully to the multi-natural, multi-cultural polyverse I’ve been trying to engage with intellectually.

This sense of ‘opening out’ has already had a practical impact, sending me back to making object/images.

The fragment below, made up of map elements, is based on two aspects of my childhood that involve my father: a recurrent nightmare on one hand and his identification with the west of Scotland and, more specifically, with Skye, on the other. Half-way through working on the original piece from which this fragment is taken, I remembered the Marshall Islands stick charts that I used to include in talks on deep mapping because they so immediately represent a mapping ‘read’ through the hand as much as through the eye (or so I like to imagine).

In the context of my first ‘mapping’ this remembrance became linked to Kohn’s discussion of the value the people of Avila place on multi-perspectivalism (which I found resonated with my own concern with the polyverse) and, retrospectively, with Silverman’s discussion of translation, something I’ve been pondering in an art context for a while as part and parcel of conversation as an art. Anyway, the result of this process of intuition, reflection, and digestion appears below. That the occasion that this double mapping responds to is, primarily, my childhood nightmare of a recurrent meeting with an enormous wolf (see The Prelude to Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig: a borderline episode pp. 16-17) seems to me ultimately less important than the desire to bring together two distinct ways of accounting for an event in a specific place, a double mapping.

When I came across the original image of the whispering girl now reworked and adapted and included on the left hand side of this piece, it immediately resonated very powerfully with me. I now sense that it acts as a vivid analogy for the figure of the Fylgja discussed in Lecouteux’s book; that she resonates with my response to Silverman’s discussion of Rilke’s dead sister as an Eurydice figure, and that all this ‘unspeakable’ convergence of different resonances appears to have been taken up through the making process in the wing-like form of the piece above.

The danger of writing about this is that it could appear that what I am making is dependent on, or seeks to illustrate, what I’ve been reading. That’s not how I see it. What animated my reading Lecouteux in the first place was a gut feeling that, while there is for me great value in Guattari’s notion of ecosophy, what is neglected in my relationship to it – and I suspect this is not just a personal issue – is attention to it’s relationship to making in terms of the ecology of the personal, psychic, dimension. That’s to say, we may be unable to think the social and the environment differently until we can think our multiple selves differently. This thought is, it seems to me, implicit in Kohn’s call (after Ghassan Hage) for “an ‘alter-politics’ – a politics that grows not from opposition to or critique of our current systems” (the basis of so much ‘alternative’ activity in the arts and academia), but rather “one that grows from attention to another way of being, one … that involves other kinds of living beings” (p.14). And, if both Silverman and Kohn (supported by James Hillman) are correct, ‘living beings’ here also includes the dead, understood in the context of Richard Kearney’s conception of testimonial imagination.

Intellectually speaking, I am rather out of my depth here, simply feeling my way intuitively on the basis of the liveliness of an inner response to texts containing ideas I only half understand, and even that half imperfectly. So the making I find myself doing is an attempt to both ‘ground’ and ‘map’ the movement of an powerful intuition, using my own experience, in dream or otherwise, as a route into the living space these books are opening up for me. Another form of ‘deep mapping’, maybe?

Deep Mapping and the importance of ‘listening to the dead’

Introduction

Since 1999, when I began concerning myself with what I would come to know as deep mapping, I have been vexed by the question of what role, if any, the first of Felix Guattari’s three ecologies – namely the ecology of the ‘self’ – should play in such work. That question has been deepened by the work of two recent doctoral projects that I helped to supervise: Dr. Ciara Healy-Musson’s Thin Place: An Alternative Approach to Curatorial Practice (2015) and Dr. Davina Kirkpatrick’s Grief and Loss; Living with the Presence of Absence. A Practice-based Study of Personal Grief Narratives and Participatory Projects (2016). Both, in my view, point up the inadequacy of current conceptions of the relationship between ‘self’, society, environment and the past by focusing on different aspects of our relationship to the dead.

In December 2016, I gave a presentation at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference in Southampton entitled: ‘Hearing’ heritage: The Kirkyard of St Mary’s of the Lowes, in which I explored the possible relationship between two traditional ‘supernatural’ ballads and that abandoned Kirkyard. It is probably fair to say that it got a mixed reception. No doubt my failure to time the presentation accurately did not help but, more critically, one emphatic commentator insisted that it is simply academically inappropriate to ‘speculate’ where there is no verifiable historical record (e.g. written documentation) to support that speculation. In short, I was told that ballads can only be taken to be suggestive of a mentalité once they have been written down.

Although I don’t accept that assumption, believing with Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan that “ballads can contain factual truths not found in the often scanty records, and can contain certain emotional truths, the attitudes and reactions of the ballad-sing folk to the world around them” (Scottish Fairy Belief 2001: p. 5), I found this critique of my speculations dispiriting. (It was delivered with all the assurance of one delivering a scientific truth). What follows, however, is a reworking of that original presentation that simply ignores that ‘scientistic’ assumption. It is also made in the light of my subsequent reading of three texts: James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani’s Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book (2013), Claude Lecouteux’s Witches, Werewolves and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages (1992, translated into English 2003) and Richard Firth Green’s Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (2016) and attempts to address, in a limited way, the issue of the importance for those engaged in deep mapping and related activity of ‘listening to the dead’.

The updated presentation

In Archaeological Narratives and Other Ways of Telling, Mark Pluciennik argues that a more democratic approach to narrative might offer fresh opportunities to reflect on the roles and possibilities of both narrative and non‐narrative writings of archaeology. I’d want to extend his argument by linking it to Gemma Corradi Fiumara’s call that we return to a listening that attempts to recover the neglected and perhaps deeper roots of thinking. Also to the geographer Karen Till’s argument that acknowledging the historic ‘wounds’ associated with particular sites enables the memory-work needed to create healthy places, citizens and states. This, along with listening to two old Borders ballads, frames my thinking about how the The Kirkyard of St Mary’s of the Lowes might be narrated so as to evoke something of its complexities and paradoxes.

Prof. Arthur Watson – an artist, teacher, author, and the twenty-first President of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture (RSA) – has participated as a singer in the oral tradition of the Scottish Traveler community since he was fifteen. Within this oral tradition old ballads like Tam Lin have been passed down from singer to singer for many hundreds of years. Professor Watson sees that oral tradition as supported by notions of memory and authority that are the antithesis of academic thinking, in my view entirely correctly. I mention this because much of my work connected to deep or narrative mapping over almost twenty years has happened in the creative space between those two notions of what is to be taken as ‘authoritative’.

The Kirkyard of St Mary’s of the Lowes overlooks St Mary’s loch in the Scottish Borders and is situated just off the A708 between Selkirk and Moffat. It sits in the valley of the Yarrow and Ettrick Waters, a location central to a variety of ballads extending from pre-16^th century ballads like Tam Lin, through to late Seventeenth Century ballads like The Battle of Philiphaugh. In short, the kirkyard in question is situated in both a physical landscape and a highly charged vernacular songscape.

This site is currently the object of two quite distinct public narratives. The first is the on-line archeological account given by the Borders Archeology Company. Although the author is careful to make it clear that his account is provisional, it tacitly evokes the objective authority of ‘fact’ as underwritten by the academic disciplines of history, archeology and etymology. This narrative begins by citing archival evidence for the existence of the now-vanished chapel in 13th century documents and works its way back in time, citing both archeological and etymological evidence to support its provisional findings. This narrative proposes that the kirk, abandoned in 1640, once stood near an earlier ‘kil’ or cell occupied by a hermit. The name ‘Lowes’ derives from the Cumbric term for a lake. Since the site was also originally located in the Cumbric diocese of Glasgow, the implication is that the cell was Cumbric in origin and may have been established as early as the 6^th century. Archeological material in the surrounding landscape also suggests that the site may have had some pre-Christian significance.

A second narrative, provided by the Etterick and Jarrow Community and Development Company, is found at the site itself. Its wording meets the needs of a Borders heritage industry catering to those people, frequently Americans, visiting the Borders in search of their roots. Archaeology doesn’t feature here. The information board is one of a set distributed around a circular walk that starts and ends at the statue of James Hogg at the head of the loch. The board presents the site as: “a peaceful and ancient place of worship”, encouraging us to “rest awhile and let its magic work on you”. It then invokes two major heritage tropes – Scots nationalism and radical Protestant dissent. In the first case by positing a link between the site and William Wallace, in the second by drawing attention to the annual Blanket Preaching in commemoration of the Covenanters held on the site. This second reference also authenticates the site as one of enacted remembrance. A further reference to a tragic romance connected to the Douglas family – still major regional landowners today – adds local colour. I’ll come back to this reference later.

What interests me is, however, absent from both these narratives.

As already mentioned, this site is situated within a songscape dominated by what are called the “supernatural” ballads, versions of which first enter the written record in the late 14^th century. These are old, layered and fractured sung narratives that contain both explicitly Christian and non-Christian folk material. I’m particularly interested in the traces of the non-Christian medieval lifeworld, because they resonate with current theorizations of ‘a sensible materialism’ and of ecological concerns by thinkers such as Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour. I see these traces as a basis for work with testimonial imagination that might bridge a neglected aspect of the history of the psyche, current high theory, and an emergent attitude present in contemporary popular culture. Something of this emergent attitude is implicit in two verses from the song Resurrection, by the American singer Rita Hosking.

I’ll have no rebirth but I will be in the bark of trees and the breath of air

I’ll not be in a church, but in the cells of leaves and maybe I’ll see you there.

Significantly, Hosking relates her work to the tradition of Appalachian ‘mountain music’ which, among other sources, draws on the old Borders ballads.

The valley in which St. Mary’s kirkyard sits is haunted by two ballads in particular – Dowie Dens of Yarrow and Tam Lin. Before Hogg became the public figure commemorated here, he was the shepherd grandchild of Will O’Phaup, reputedly the last man in Scotland to converse with the fairies. Which is only to say that, as a child he internalized a heterodox ontology, radically at odds with the strict monotheism of Calvinism. The land-owning and professional classes memorialised at St. Mary’s kirkyard had adopted Calvinism a century before Hogg’s birth. But some of the rural laboring class resisted Calvinism, preserving a now banned oral tradition of ballads populated by transgressive women, revenants, prophetic dreamers, and uncanny figures like Thomas the Rhymer, taken by its Queen into fairyland.

I need to clarify something at this point. There is a physical location known as “Tam Lin’s Well” in Carterhaugh Wood on the Etterick, down-stream from St Mary’s loch. Sir Walter Scott indicated, and numerous people still believe, that this is where Janet, Jennet or Lady Margaret met Tam Lin – the young grandson of the Earl of Roxbrugh who’d been abducted by the Queen of Elfland. I’ve no interest in such literalism, but neither do I see the content of the old ballads as picturesque nonsense. I hear these songs as echoing a vernacular lifeworld regarded by the Christian authorities as heretical, marginal, foolish, or otherwise unacceptable; a life-world that, in consequence, is largely absent from both the historical and archeological record. Aspects of that lifeworld are now being recovered by scholars like Emma Wilby, who analysis and contextualize material common to both the supernatural ballads and testimony given by individuals accused of witchcraft, and by students of medieval literature like Claude Lecouteux and Richard Firth Green.

The information board at the kirkyard refers to events narrated in a ballad called The Douglas Tragedy. This tells the story of the elopement of Lady Margaret Douglas, during which her lover kills her father and seven brothers, only to be mortally wounded himself. Margaret then dies of grief. The suggestion is that the lovers may have been buried in St. Mary’s kirkyard. An older ballad, the Dowie Dens of Yarrow, has a broadly similar plot but differs in being both framed and fractured by the devise of a prophetic dream. In this dream a mother and daughter learn that the daughter’s lover – a plowboy – has fought with nine local gentlemen for the right to marry her. The plowboy kills three of these men, three withdraw, and he badly wounds three more. At which point he’s stabbed from behind by the girl’s brother.

The significant qualities distinguish this ballad from The Douglas Tragedy. Characters accurately foresee a future event, class appears to be substituted for generational conflict over inheritance, and the landscape itself is treaded as a participant in the narrative. To what degree this is the case depends on how carefully the original collectors of this ballad listened to what was being sung. If what was hear was the words ‘dowie dens of Yarrow’, this is best rendered in English as ‘dismal narrow wooded valleys’. However, if what in fact was sung were the words ‘downie dens of Yarrow’, the reference is to fairy hills (Henderson & Cowan 2001: p. 9), a reading that would be supported by the remains of pre-historical remains in the area. This would suggest that, rather than the plowboy lover who has defeated nine men being treacherously killed because he comes from the wrong class, that the girl’s brother stabs him from behind because he suspects that the plowboy’s prowess comes from an uncanny source. In short, that he is either a fairy warrior or, like Tam Lin, a mortal associated with the fairies. (Of course, this second possibility does not exclude the issue of class). Both the attributes of ‘dowie’ and ‘downie’ to the landscape are consistent with a mentalité vividly represented by the opening lines of the anonymous C8^th Irish ballad, Donal Og. These translate as:

It is late last night the dog was speaking of you

The snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh

It is you are the lonely bird throughout the woods

And that you may be without a mate until you find me.

However, if we hear ‘downie’ rather than ‘dowie’, then the ballad is firmly located in a liminal landscape in which the boundaries between the day and night world of dream, the human and uncanny worlds, are acknowledged to be porous.

I want to suggest that, in addition to offering an alternative context for narrating this site, the supernatural ballads also point up an alternative approach to narrative. I’ll now elaborate on this suggestion.

While Dowie (or Downie) Dens of Yarrow and Tam Lin clearly have a beginning, middle and end, they also give a powerful sense of being embedded within an oral tradition in which the strict linear sequence of past, present and future is disrupted by magic or prophesy. From this point of view The Douglas Tragedy and Dowie (or Downie) Dens of Yarrow reflect competing worldviews. Attempts by illustrators to visualize a supernatural ballad like Tam Lin by using a single visual style are always problematic because they are visually ‘monovocal’ in the sense that illustrators conventionally maintain stylistic consistency to evoke a sense of affective or conceptual unity. But the ballads themselves don’t employ a single narrative perspective, voice or affective register.

Instead they deploy a weave of several, sometimes mutually antagonistic, perspectives. In Tam Lin we can hear the Christian orthodoxy of the landowning class rubbing up against the beliefs of a quasi-pagan peasant culture. We hear exchanges between gendered and socially differentiated voices – human and non-human – that warn, defy, expose, mock, promise, and threaten from within a polyverse rather than a universe. This polyvocality unsettles linear narratives that are further unsettled by the fact that a ballad often share lines, or even whole verses, with others, suggesting their embeddedness within a larger mesh of stories. And then, of course, each ballad exists in multiple variations.

All these characteristics allow singers to inflect the meaning of the version they’re singing by hinting at variations that resonate in the listener’s memory. Consequently, the song’s meaning, like that of our own narrative identity, is kept open to question and contestation. Arguably, then, our experience of hearing such a ballad is creatively tensioned between an unstable linear narrative woven from multiple voices and a matrix of other – perhaps antagonistic – variations situated within the space of a larger songscape.

An alternative narrative mapping of the kirkyard of St Mary’s of the Lowes might amplify the provisional archeological information. Through listening to and referencing Tam Lin it might evoke the longevity of elements of a quasi-pagan life-world in the region and to its relationship to Cumbic or Welsh Christian theology. The Dowie (or Downie) Dens of Yarrow raises questions about the relationship between class, land ownership, multiple worlds. It might point us both to the suppression of the tripartite nature of the ‘self’ or ‘soul’ suppressed by the medieval church, and to a dubious history of Scottish nationalism personified by William Wallace. Wallace’s surname derived from the Old English “wullish”, meaning “foreigner” or “Welshman”. Where his family economic migrants from Wales or members of a Cumbric-speaking ethnic minority in Strathclyde? In either case, what does this say about the construction of a Scottish nationalism that takes him as a central figure? (There is a further possibility attached to this Welsh connection, which persisted through the speaking of Welsh in areas of the lowlands as late as the twelfth century. As Henderson and Cowan point out, this means that it is “just possible” that Southern Scots learned of the Welsh tale of Elixir’s journey into fairyland from such people and that it served as one source for Thomas Rhymer’s own journey).

The Covenanter history celebrated at the annual Blanket Preaching sits uncomfortably with the consequences of Sir David Lesly’s 1645 victory at Philiphaugh, on the bank of Ettrick Water. The Ballad of Philiphaugh which celebrates that victory makes no reference to the murder of fifty Irish Royalists who surrendered on being promised safe quarter. Nor to the killing of three hundred camp followers – mainly women and children – who were then thrown into a mass grave. Given that it was his army’s Covenanter ministers who encouraged Sir David Lesly to authorize these sectarian murders, local Covenanter history sits somewhat uneasily with the characterization of St. Mary’s kirkyard as a “peaceful and ancient place of worship”.

Conclusion

In referencing ballads to suggest possibilities for re-narrating or re-mapping this isolated Borders site, I’ve evoking multiple voices of the dead so as to thicken and contest any simply ‘factual’ account – whether archaeological (scientific) or touristic (popular). Roger Strand argues that we need to set aside the increasingly toxic culture authorised by “merely fact-minded sciences”; an authority that, he suggests, privileges the views of “merely fact-minded people” at the expense of values that contribute to “a genuine humanity”. Following Mark Pluciennik, I am suggesting that to evoke a genuinely democratic and humanitarian relationship to an archaeological (or indeed any other) site, we need to interweave multiple stories and images that invite individuals to listen out for and relish the evocation of our multiple heritages and conflicting interpretations. That can only happen if we are willing to both hear and ponder the voices and beliefs of the dead, including and perhaps particularly those ancestors who held very different views of what constituted the ‘self’, society and the environment to those that dominate our current culture.

The undervalued third: reflections on enacting ecosophy through ‘deep’ or ‘narrative’ mappings

It’s worried me for a while now that, although there’s some understanding of the interaction of the social and environmental ecologies among those who might claim to be working ‘ecosophically’ in this area of ‘mappings, there seems little or no understanding of the necessary psychic challenges involved. This might seem odd, given where Guattari was coming from, namely psychology, but then the last thing most artists or academics are concerned with is reflecting on the psychic processes in which they’re caught up.

Sometimes I do things that I don’t understand at the time, things that seem extreme and out of character. When this happens, it can take quite a while for an understanding to emerge of what, in the moment, was experienced as an overwhelming need to act decisively without being entirely clear as to why. Recently an example of this, combined with attending the recent Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference, has pushed me to confront the fact that, in a culture of possessive individualism, it’s only through accepting a major change in self-understanding that any genuinely creative ecosophical praxis can appear. Until that happens it’s all-too-often the case that a sophisticated rhetoric manages to mask the fact that supposedly ‘radical’ individuals are in actuality ‘sheep in wolves’ clothing’. (That is, despite their self-presentation, they continue to enact at the level of psychic ecology the given roles or stereotypes engendered by possessive individualism, to manifest ‘life as’ an Artist, an Academic, etc.).

I’ve tried to think through this issue in various ways, most obviously by developing the notion of the spectrum of positions between the individual oriented by a monolithic sense of self (‘life as’), that’s animated by the desire to be ‘best of breed’ – the radical Artist, Professor, or whatever – and what my friend Pauline O’Connell once referred to as the position of ‘compound cur’. But as the poet, artist and mytho-archaeologist Erin Kavanagh has led me to see, that spectrum is both too static and too simplistic. She writes in an email that:

“The problem to my mind with ‘compound curring’ is that one becomes a ‘bestest mongrel’ very quickly. It’s the whole ‘interdisciplinary practice becoming disciplined’ dilemma isn’t it. By doing it well we both show how ridiculous these boundaries are and simultaneously create more. It’s a conceptual ouroboros. I’ve found thus far that I have to be ‘good enough’ to hold my own in everybody’s fields in order to be taken seriously, so for me it’s a little more like being a Collie who shows, trials, does flyball / obedience / agility and will still play with the kids at home afterwards. On the plus side, we don’t get bored!”

Erin’s image of the ‘good enough’ Collie is an effective visualisation of what I’ve seen as ‘self as polyverse’ but, even as it clarifies my concerns, taken in conjunction with her recent presentation at the 2016 TAG conference, it also points up something I have failed to draw out sufficiently in the past. This is that ‘compound curring’ as I understand it is also centrally linked to testimonial imagination (seen as a vital counterweight to the ‘best of breed’ emphasis on generating novelty, difference, progress, a new or utopian vision, and so on). All of this has been thrown into high relief as I’ve read James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani’s book: Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book’. (It’s not wholly insignificant, perhaps, that Deleuze and Guattari’s A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia declares that Jung is profounder than Freud). The link here is with Shamdasani’s insistence that Jung breaks with the linear, the monomyth, insisting instead on “a serpentine path” that draws on the encyclopedic knowledge of a great storyteller, on “a plurality of myths, a plurality of templates” (pp. 88-90). This is, then, precisely not the personal or exclusive work epitomized by the figure of the Modernist artist or the lone scholar, each of whom is so anxious to guard the uniqueness of an individual creation. Instead it’s the work of testimonial imagination or, in Sonu Shamdasani’s terms, a “taking up the tasks left by the dead” so that the “present is then animated by the past” (p. 85). This is, then, quite the opposite of the (ultimately Modernist) desire to escape or overthrow the past. Rather it depends on a surrendering to porosity, to what, to borrow from Donna Haraway, I’d call a ‘staying with the trouble’, by letting it flow in all its variation and complexity through our own lives.

All of which is particularly relevant to my own concerns. Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book sheds considerable light on my fascination with the old Borders ballads as an imaginal playing out of one of our deepest psychic tensions, the “the conflict between the ancient and the modern, between the pagan and the Christian” (p. 58), seen not as belief systems but as modes of being or mentalities. What is important is not, in the last analysis, the historical veracity of the claims I’ve made for those ballads as quasi-pagan, as retaining traces of a once pervasive animist mentality. It’s understanding my own willingness to stay with an act of testimonial imagination with regard to those ballads; to listen for the dead who still speak to us through them.

Landscape Values: Place and Praxis – a personal response

[N.B. All the images are used with the permission of the person whose work is referred to].

Introduction

At the end of June I went to the west of Ireland to attend a conference – Landscape Values: Place and Praxis – organised by Tim Collins, Gesche Kindermann, Conor Newman and Nessa Cronin for the Centre for Landscape Studies at NUI, Galway. The conference was at NUI Galway because the university is a member of the UNISCAPE network, a Europe-wide group of universities concerned with landscape research, education, and the implementation of the European Landscape Convention. This gave the event its particular flavour and orientation. INSCAPE’s member institutions are drawn from across Europe, although universities in the UK and Germany are conspicuous by their absence. I’ll come back to the significance of all this later.

I have known Nessa for some time, originally through the Mapping Spectral Traces network and through a shared interest in deep mapping, and met Tim and Conor while I was working as a visiting researcher at NUI, Galway. Knowing them, I guessed this was likely to be an interesting and worthwhile event. Their thoughtfulness as individuals – and of Unescape as an organisation – was confirmed early on when all speakers were asked to submit written versions of their papers well ahead of the event itself. These appeared in a beautifully produced paperback book that was in our conference packs when we arrived. This enabling us to choose more productively which sessions we wanted to attend, without all the usual concern about missing altogether something vital by making the wrong choice on the basis of a short abstract.

What follows here is a personal reflection on the event as a whole although, I must admit, one filtered through my own interests in activities such as deep mapping. (Those unfamiliar with this cluster of practices might want to look at the Humanities Special Issue “Deep Mapping”, which can be downloaded for free and includes an article by Silvia Loeffler, whose work is referred to below).

Grounding empathetic imagination

I went to Galway two days early. I wanted to take the opportunity to catch up with my friend and former PhD student Dr Ciara Healy; also to meet with Nessa and Nuala Ni Fhlathuin – a doctoral student with whom we will be working (together with Deirdre O’Mahony). Arriving early also enabled me to unwind a bit before the event started.

Of the various presentations and events on the first day for myself the most memorable by far was the performance related to the Tim Robinson Archive: Artists in the Archive Project initiated by Nessa. This combined live music written by Tim Collins, choreography and dance by Ríonach Ní Néill, text, song, and a film by Deirdre O’Mahony. This performance provided a wonderful sensuously knowledgable counterpoint to the more general governance-oriented and other perspectives offered earlier in the day. As such it grounding my thinking back into the complexities of lived experience, lived traditions, and the tacit paradoxes that haunt the creation of the new Tim Robinson Archive, recently established in the James Hardiman Library at NUI, Galway, following his decision to return to London.

The second day of the conference extended that sense of grounding, with all conference attendees going out into the region on one of four carefully themed and structured field trips. Having an interest in bogs – practically through my friend Christine Baeumler and as archetypal psycho-geographical sites through James Hillman and others, I joined the trip to the turf bog at Lough Boora, which included a visit to Ballinsloe and the Shannon. Direct contact with several active members of the local community there, who are trying to work out a future in the face of the scaling-back of turf cutting, enabled us to get a clearer sense of the difficulties and opportunities that result from the implementation of environmental policy. In a small way it also gave us an opportunity to contribute ideas and information that might be of some use to the community.

The work that has been undertaken at Lough Boora is impressive and the dedication of those trying to construct an alternative future was as inspiring as it was humbling. The EU’s shift to restrict turf cutting on environmental grounds, still highly controversial in Ireland, has led to a great deal of innovative action by the community. My overall impression from our discussions was of their willingness to open themselves to new possibilities and of the pressing need for people in academia and the cultural sector (individuals with specialist knowledge) to listen, and try to try respond appropriately, to the needs of local communities hungry to find ways to save themselves from what is effectively social annihilation by decisions made elsewhere. Often with too little consideration as to how their impact ‘on the ground’ might be mediated and transformed into possibilities rather than what must often seem like a slow death sentence. That Conor Newman, who organised our trip, had clearly gone to some trouble to build a relationship with the group who met us was reflected in the warmth and appreciation they brought to our exchanges.

Following our visit three speakers presented in a small church in the afternoon. One was Patrick Devine-Wright (from Exeter University), whose presentation on Varieties of place attachments and community responses to energy infrastructures: a mixed method approach reinforced my earlier impressions and suggested ways in which the kind of alternative mappings that interest me might be deployed in such contexts. This set up interesting suppositions in relation to another of the presentation, by Sophia Meeres, on Infrastructural struggles: the making of modern Arklow, Ireland. This showed how architecture students working in a learning context can make use of deep mapping processes to plot a city as a changing taskscape, where the detailing of its infrastructure struggles over a two-hundred-year period become the basis of an analysis of the decisions that inform the space of a communal lifeworld.

Given the length of the conference and number of parallel sessions that I could (and could not) attend, it will be obvious that I can’t possibly comment even on those presentations I did attend. Consequently, I will concentrate on a few that particularly spoke to me in terms of my own interests – by Jacques Abelman, Aoife Kavanagh, Silvia Loeffler, Sophia Meeres (touched on above), and Eilis Ni Dhuill. (I deliberately did not go to sessions at which my friends Simon Read, Ciara Healy, Geared O hAllmhurrain, Harriet Taro and Judy Tucker and Karen Till and and Gerry Kearns presented, since I wanted to experience ideas from people I didn’t know. However their essays in the conference publication are well worth reading).

Jacques Abelman works as a landscape architect and is currently based in the Netherlands (but will move shortly to teach in the USA). His presentation – Cultivating the City: Infrastructureof Abundance in Urban Brazil – interested me both for its content and because it’s tenor seemed to me to reflect his broad education and experience. This took place in the USA, England and the Netherlands (his first degree is in environmental science with fine arts and philosophy), and he worked as an environmental artist, ecological builder, and garden designer before moving into sustainable design and landscape architecture. The presentation provided a succinct and intriguing introduction to his Urban L.A.C.E. / Renda da Mata project. (L.A.C.E. stands for Local Agroforestry, Collective Engagement, while Renda da Mata means “Forest Lace” in Portuguese), which I won’t try to outline or discuss here since it can be much better explored via his web site. However, what particularly impressed me was the way in which it built on sustained fieldwork on the ground – resulting in an impressive and well-grounded range and depth of knowledge. In a sense this project provides an exemplary model for the type of practically-oriented ‘deep’ approach to researching the basis for a socio-environmentally responsible landscape architecture of which I had a brief and tantalising taste when discussing deep mapping with landscape architect students and their teachers at Virginia Tech some years ago.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jacques’ presentation raised a number of issues around landscape democracy and questions of de-professionalism (as underwritten by disciplinarily) and given the claim that ‘citizens do not operate within disciplines’. However during the exchange after the presentation I was somewhat rebuked by one audience member for apparently suggesting a ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top-down’ model in relation to specialist/vernacular collaborations and issues of responsibility for the Commons. This led to a brief but fruitful exchange about the need to set aside supposedly ‘modernist’ and ‘authoritarian’ notions of the professional or specialist (which in my view are not restricted to the modern period but rather embedded in the culture of possessive individualism), towards notions of an ability to make authoritative specialist contributions to debate and action with regard to the Common Good. Here the example of Brexit might be seen as indicative of what happens when populist political views predicated on prejudice and outright lies gain the upper hand. Given Michael Gove’s now notorious execration of ‘experts’ this seemed a point well worth absorbing.

Aoife Kavanagh

Aoife Kavanagh is a professional musician (piano, violin, flute, and viola) and music teacher who is currently undertaking a PhD on music, place-making and artistic practice in the Geography Department at NUI, Maynooth. Her presentation – Making Music and Making Place: Mapping Musical Practice in Smaller Places – is based on the working premise that places, perhaps particularly in Ireland, may have a ‘musical ecology’ that extends well beyond performance by professional musicians and that understanding that ecology spatially, through ‘community deep mappings of of music and place’, can give a ‘voice to people in places to uncover and document that which might otherwise be overlooked’. In certain ways her approach seems to me to resonate quite closely with that employed by Luci Gorell Barns’ Cartographers of compassion: community mapping of human kindness project in Bristol, albeit in a different register. Interesting, she has built on Rebecca Krinke’s (2010) project Mapping of Joy and Pain, with it’s particular emotional focus, while adapting this approach as a way to collectively ‘map’ more nuanced and complicated ‘musical stories’. Of particular interest to me were Aoife’s comments on the challenges involved in this project, since these tend to reinforce my own views. Namely that a combination of positions – those of ‘insider’ (in her case the importance of being a musician/music teacher who understands the passions and limitations of the ‘lifeworld’ in which she is working) and ‘outsider’ (researcher/cartographically-oriented artist) – is a central aspect of this type of work. This first became clear to me in relation to Ffion Jones’ work in mid-Wales, which took her parents’ sheep farm – Cwmrhaiadr – as the focus of her PhD project. One in which this dual role was central to her concern with ‘woollying the boundaries’ between the world of upland sheep farming in Wales and academic understandings of rural life. This seems particularly important when the researcher is also embedded in the lifeworld of a particular community and so must act as a ‘bridge’ between worlds distinguished by emphasis on performativity on one hand and discourse on the other.

Silvia Loeffler

Silvia Loeffler is a post-doctoral researcher at NUI, Maynooth and currently holds an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project Glas Journal, A Deep Mapping of Dún Laoghaire Harbour, which was the subject of her conference paper. She has also published an illuminating article on the project – Glas Journal: Deep Mappings of a Harbour or the Charting of Fragments, Traces and Possibilities .which I would recommend to readers interested in this area of work.

Taken together, these two texts provide a valuable record of the project and make a useful contribution to on-going discussions about this type of chronotopic mapping work. Although her title for the conference paper – Place Values – Glas Journal: A Deep Mapping of Dun Laoghaire Harbour (2014-2016) – uses the term ‘deep mapping’, she spoke of her work primarily in terms of both ‘liquid’ and ‘tender’ mappings (with the inevitable resonance of Giuliana Bruno’s discussion of Madaleine de Scullery’s Carte du pays de Tendre in her Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film).

This seems entirely appropriate for a ‘collaborative, multidisciplinary cartography project that explores the layered emotional geographies of Dún Laoghaire Harbour, Dublin, that focuses on ‘performatively mapping the intimate rituals and everyday performances of those individuals who live and work in the harbour’. In the abstract to the Humanities article, Silvia refers to the work as ‘a hybrid ethnographic project’ concerned with ‘the cultural mapping of spaces we intimately inhabit’. She adds that by developed the project with the participation of local inhabitants of Dún Laoghaire Harbour, the project is able to explore the maritime environment as a liminal space, one in which the character of buildings and the area’s economic implications ‘determine our relationship to space as much as our daily spatial rhythms and feelings of safety’.

The project is as ambitious as it is complex. Currently Silvia is working with fourteen individuals who live and work in the harbour to produce handmade books that will constitute a record of ‘what the harbour space means to the residents based in the old coastguard station along with individuals involved with a host of other harbour related organisations and clubs. What seems to me particularly valuable about this project is summed up in relation to the richness and complexity of reference and evocation in Glas Journal Border Map (Sept. 2014) and other work illustrated above. She summarises ‘the interactions between human beings and their habitat’ as existing as: ‘a constant flux of appearance, disappearance and reappearance that may be compared to a tidal system regulating liquid states of times and places’. Given the preoccupation throughout the conference with issues of heritage this statement seems to me to evoke a powerful lesson that, in our often over-literal haste to preserve the past, we are still reluctant to take on board.

Sophia Meeres

Sophia Meeres has taught in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Planning at University College, Dublin since 2004. As mentioned above, she gave a presentation entitled Infrastructural struggles: the making of modern Arklow, Ireland. This described a long-term collaborative project with her Masters students that relates directly to her teaching at UCD, which places an emphasis on ‘resilience, sustainable design and development’ and is taught within a multi-disciplinary context and a an ‘understanding of site-specific processes’ with a focus on research and analysis ‘seen as a creative act’. The overarching concern is ‘to help uncover local opportunities and potential for future directions’, something that spoke directly to the experience of speaking with the various individuals working to create a new understanding of Lough Boora and the communities linked to it. It is indicative that an earlier paper – A Biographical Approach to Understanding the Landscape (a contribution to the Landscape and Imagination. Towards a new baseline for education in a changing world ) – proposes a biographical approach to landscape that: ‘seeks to better understand local cultural conditions, issues and circumstances, disclosed through stake-holder participation and by other means, by linking present conditions to the past physical, social and economic “life” of a place and its people.’

The aim of such an approach is to better understand a place in ways I would see as aligning to both deep mapping and to Kenneth Frampton’s notion of Critical Regionalism in that it’s focus is on gaining: ‘greater and more detailed understanding of a settlement in its milieu’ with a view to articulating ‘development proposals that respond better to place’ Sophia believes – rightly in my view – that this “biographical approach” ‘has potential in terms of practice, research and landscape architectural education’, a belief that clearly animates the work she and her students have undertaken in relation to Arklow.

Eilís Ní Dhúill

Eilís Ní Dhúill is a polymath whose research interests include storytelling, folklore and film. She has a particular interest in the use of film to present Irish-language literature, drama and culture and has published in this area. She gave a presentation entitled: Sounds of the past in west Kerry: Creating, recalling and transmitting cultural values through place-names and associated narratives. I find it hard to give a clear account of this presentation because I became fascinated by resonances in what Eilís was saying as these might relate to my interest in the English/Scottish Borders region. Her focus on the way in which Irish place-names catalyse story-telling in west Kerry led me to ask her whether these stories were in any sense gendered – that is whether men and women told different stories about the same places. It appears that they do, a point I would link to the implications of different categories of Border ballads. That said, the nature of our conversation is probably too particular to my rather idiosyncratic interests in folk lore to be of general concern.

Afterthoughts

Although at one level I found the bulk of the conference very enjoyable and rewarding, I also have a strange feeling that the conference I experienced it was probably not that experienced by the majority of attendees. This may be due to the fact that we tended to fall into rather different categories with interests that, while they undoubtedly overlapped, may have had less in common in terms of framing and orientation than UNISCAPE may assume. My experience may also have be influenced by the fact that I live in a country utterly divided socially and politically, and not just over Europe. A country whose government’s austerity measures and social security reforms have, for example, just been the subject of a United Nation’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights report that confirms these are in breach of their obligations to human rights. This gives me continual pause for thought in relation to those whose power and authority is linked to forms of cultural and intellectual capital sanctioned by the status quo – including those who represent their institutions as part of bodies like UNISCAPE.

It is significant that just before the conference opened UNISCAPE held its General Assembly (the institutional equivalent to a business AGM), an fact that no doubt ensured that many attendees were senior academics representing member institutions. In short, UNISCAPE is deeply enmeshed in the realpolitik of a resilient neo-liberal status quo and these senior academics are members of an elite that can expect to engage directly with effecting issues of planning and governance. They also appeared to be for the most part from Social Science disciplines and landscape architecture practices. They and their proteges were also the keynote conference speakers. A second, more diverse contingency was made up of people with a background in the visual arts or music and an interest in ecological and landscape issues, including those related to environmental and heritage governance. A third group crossed between these two categories, many of them landscape architects with a practical interest in the uses of creative fieldwork.

It seems to me that what the first group have in common is a professional interest in landscape research, education, and the implementation of the European Landscape Convention through reform and governance relating to landscape planning and heritage. However, my underlying sense of this interest is that it is heavily framed by a detached/’objective’ thinking about landscape (including place as heritage), rather than direct emersion in specific places as an active constituent of their own particular lifeworld. As such their interests often seemed to lack either the psycho-cultural dimensions of what James Hillman calls the ‘thought of the heart’ or the empathetic imagination that, as Paul Ricoeur reminds us, is necessary to any effective political mediation. (And this at a time when the authority and ‘objectivity’ of science – for example as practiced in the medical field in the UK – has been shown to be utterly degraded, simply a debased ‘post-factual’ science in thrall to our debased ‘post-factual’ politics).

So I sometimes had the sense that individuals in these two different groups were, often without realising it, quite simply talking past each other. There was very little transformative conversation as I understand it. This may, of course, be largely a reflection of my own prejudgements and bias. That said I sensed that, for the first group, the second were in the last analysis an irrelevance, except in so far as they enabled reflection on some aspect of ‘heritage’ as traditionally defined. The engaged arts as a living, socio-political energy is simply not something they can acknowledge. This may be to put the case too strongly but it relates directly to a conversation I had with Teresa Pinto Coreia, from ICAAM – Instituto de Ciências Agrárias e Ambientais Mediterrânicas, Universidade de Évora, after she had given a very interesting presentation called: Landscape values under pressure: tensions in the management of extensive silvo-pastoral systems in Southern Iberia.

I recognised many of the difficult issues she spoke of from my own interest in conflicted rural areas. Whether in terms of the difficulties facing farmers in upland regions in the UK, in rural Ireland in relation to small-scale family turf-cutting, or from what I know of the history of local resistance to the formation the Wadden Sea National Parks in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands and that, in Germany and Denmark, constitute the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Wadden Sea. Put simply, it is the problem of a clash between small-scale largely rural communities in which authority still largely based on specific forms of performativity in a given taskscape, and the worlds of academic research and governance which take as given an understanding of authority predicated on their own methodological and discursive sophistication as underwritten by a logocratic realpolitik. Two radically different ways of understanding and so acting in the world. Her response to my making something of the points outlined above was polite incomprehension and the view that, by working with students in the university, they would find a way forward.

The whole point of people like myself, Simon Read, Ciara Healy and others with an imaginal arts aspect to their compound practice attending the conference might be said, as I tried to explain to Teresa Pinto Coreia, to show that certain types of art practice are ideally placed to mediate between these two radically different ways of understanding and acting in the world. However, if that brief conversation was anything to go by, I certainly failed to do so. Not I believe for any lack of trying on either of our parts but because, as a professional group, those in the arts remain mentally marginalised by academic thinking, located as we are off to one side of the logocratic hierarchy that underwrites its realpolitik. (As a fairly distinct group we presented no keynote to the assembled attendees that could have facilitated such an exchange at the level of intellectual debate). Because of this institutional marginalisation the arts as an informed way of knowing the world – other perhaps than landscape architecture seen as an art – has no real role in UNISCAPE as an alliance of European institutions other than as ‘passive heritage’. This in turn reflects, of course, the marginal place of arts and music education as an alternative mode of understanding in the education system as a whole. The consequences of this fundamental lack in a culture of possessive individualism are now horribly clear in the political and socio-environmental situation of the UK.

It’s not for me to suggest how, as an international organisation, UNISCAPE might address this situation. However, if an initiative to address this were to be launched, it might perhaps be done from Ireland. There ‘cultural heritage’ in the sense of place or landscape may be somewhat less isolated from living forms of imaginative culture and thinking than in many other countries. So, while in some senses I was deeply disappointed by the situation I’ve tried to indicate (perhaps too clumsily) above, I still see Ireland as a site of promise and a source of guarded optimism, particularly now that the UK has turned it’s back on the EU project rather than trying to reform it. I also see UNISCAPE as an important international organisation with an annual conference I was more than glad to attend, if only because it enabled me to see the issues outlined above more clearly.

Between creative praxis and place governance: four examples

What follows here is the text of a presentation given at the Landscape Values: Place and Praxis conference held at NUI, Galway (29th June – 2nd July). This differs slightly from the text published by the Centre for Landscape Studies in their excellent pre-conference publication in that I felt it was necessary to respond to the situation resulting from the referendum vote that Britain should leave the EU. I will put a detailed account of my experience of the conference up here in due course.

In her novel The Telling Ursula LeGuin has a character say of her people’s self- destructive adoption of a particular idea that it was a protest: “an assertion of our God-given right to be self-righteous, irrational fools in our own particularly bloody way and not in anybody else’s”. That just about sums up what Britain is going through – the protest essentially the consequence of a massive failure of empathetic imagination on the part of the political and economic elites.

Such failure of empathetic imagination is not of course restricted to the UK. Consequently our landscapes will continue to be subject to bitter conflicts that raise difficult questions about democratic participation in planning and governance processes. New forms of compound or hybrid creative praxis are already helping to catalyse public debate and engagement regarding these processes, but they remain under-utilized. I suspect that those who frame governance debates, along with many special interest groups, often have little or no idea of what these new forms of praxis involve or how they might help them. That needs to change.

Evoking empathetic imagination is as central to democratic politics as accurate information, particularly in relation to the politics of place. Without it different constituencies quickly find excuses to stop listening to each other. Then democratic processes are likely to be perverted or undermined, perpetuating a legacy of popular resentment. Empathetic and informed engagement with issues of place requires imaginative and empathetic translation and mediation between the professional expertize that authorizes governance and the concerns of vernacular life-worlds grounded in rural place.

I’m going to touch on “creative translation” projects by Kathy Fitzgerald, Simon Read, Christine Baeumler and Ffion Jones. Each project is contingent on, and embedded in, a particular landscape and mediates between values grounded in place and a specific set of governance concerns. Although the people animating these projects are arts trained, each employs a whole constellation of different skills. For example, in addition to her training as a performance artist, Ffion Jones’ practice is equally constituted by her skills as a Welsh language speaker, an upland sheep farmer, a scholar, a young mother, and so on. However, at present the value of such constellated practices is largely unrecognized because of the dominant belief in a monolithic identity that says, for example, that someone is either an artist or a farmer. The Norfolk farmer Richard Wright says of his local Farmers and Wildlife Advisers that they have ‘a very hands-on approach’ and ‘local knowledge of farming as well as conservation’, showing farmers the two can work hand in hand’. But for this hands-on model of cooperation to be extend to actively involve the public more generally, it needs an active cultural dimension and the involvement of artists as people trained to see unlikely connections and possibilities across different sets of concerns and interests.

In Ireland severe winter flooding during 2009-10 and 2015-16 has highlighted the need to plant trees as a step towards flood prevention. Because this would involve issues of land ownership, it will require careful mediation. Cathy Fitzgerald’s Hollywood Project could offer a valuable point of departure for just such mediation. Begun in 2008, this project involves the transformation of an ecologically toxic and aesthetically unattractive Sitka Spruce plantation planted about thirty years earlier. At its heart is her forty-year commitment to facilitating exchanges between the original plantation and local people, silvicultural specialists, wildlife, timber users, artists, and environmental enthusiasts. With the wood as her focus, Fitzgerald’s eco-aesthetic concerns have catalysed complex negotiations between traditional forestry economics and the desire of local people in County Carlow to re-establish broadleaf native trees. This in turn is generating debates about the relationship between the policies of the Irish Council for Forest Research and Development and the ecological, creative, political, and educational concerns of a variety of both local and national constituencies.

Cathy Fitzgerald aims to advance knowledge in aesthetic and eco-critical terms as these relate to forest research, policy and eco-jurisprudence. This reflects the fact that she has degrees in both biology and art. Between 2004-2007 she also worked alongside Irish Green Party Cllr. Mary White, later Junior Minister of State, helping to establish the largest Green Party group in rural Ireland. She now serves on the committee of the forestry group ProSilva Ireland. In short, she is both creatively and politically involved in matters of environmental governance.

The Hollywood project is also a response to the fact that Ireland has the lowest proportion of deciduous trees in Europe after Iceland and Malta, and to the problems thrown up by an extensive forestry policy that, however, has been assembled piecemeal. As the intersection of complex networks of shared practical expertise and environmental knowledge, the project has the potential to rearticulate the relationship between watersheds, tree cover, and pluvial flooding. While Inter-Departmental Committees can initiate new national flood policy, without locally grounded creative individuals and networks engaged in transforming local attitudes to trees and forestry, the resistance to such policy is likely to be substantial. (For a better sense of Cathy’s practice see her recent post and video).

Simon Read works from a barge on the River Deben as an artist, University lecturer, environmental designer, community mediator, and ecological activist. Since 1997 his involvement with the River Debden has led to his working with the Chartered Institute for Water and Environmental Management and ARUP, with geographers through the Royal Geographic Society, and with similar organizations in Ireland and the USA. He has contributed to major workshops on flood planning and, since 2009, has served as an Executive Member of Deben Estuary Partnership in collaboration with the Environment Agency. He’s involved in mediation work with Natural England, the Marine Management Organisation, statutory Government agencies, his Local Planning Authority, and a host of local interest groups. He’s also an Associate of the Art and Environment Network of the Chartered Institute for Water and Environmental Management. Like Cathy Fitzgerald, his work involves a range of skills, knowledge and activity, that go far beyond the stereotypical view of what an artist does.

This type of large imaginative mapping – a response to governance issues relating to the fluid and shifting environments of rivers and coastlines – is now central to Simon’s work They visualize changes between land and water over time by synthesizing large amounts of predictive information from different sources. Simon retrieves, cross-references, and synthesizes this information so as to equip himself and others to engage in complex environmental planning debates about fluvial, estuarine and coastal management in governance contexts. Interacting with both governance and local concerns, it also contributes directly to current eco-social debate around the core issues of communication in relation to the implication of policy.

In addition to his visualizations of the changing local environment, Simon Read is currently worked on the Falkenham Saltmarsh Project. This aspect of his work involves making objects that address the conditions of, and potential for, marsh stabilization within the context of coastal erosion. Working with a range of agencies, including labour from a local prison, he has planned and built barriers that prevent erosion of the saltmarsh by managing tidal flow and encouraging the controlled deposition of silt. Both practical and sculptural, these are soft engineered from timber, brushwood, straw bales, and coir – a natural fibre extracted from the husk of coconuts – and will degrade back into the marsh over time.

Read has responded to the challenges of managing environmental change by acknowledging the need for, and publically working towards, more nuanced and complex solutions necessary to understanding and addressing the socio-cultural implications and dimensions of socio-environmental change. While grounded in the traditional skills of an artist, his work relates directly to a societal re-framing of our understanding of land, ownership, professional and aesthetic responsibility, and belonging.

Christine Baeumler enables a civic environmentalism predicated on ecosophical understanding and animated by a geopoetics attuned to the multiple meanings and contexts of our lived experience of landscape. Working between the production of public environmental art, teaching at the University of Minnesota, curation, and community activism, her expanded creative praxis facilitates both awareness of environmental issues and appropriate responses to them. Drawing on both art and natural science, she contests the reductive treatment of ecosystems and the loss of human experience of specific environments and the species that inhabit them. Like Simon Read she makes eco-social contexts visible so as to inspire creative solutions to environmental dilemmas by imagining alternatives to current approaches. Her ‘slow’ place- and community- based praxis considers historical, cultural, environmental, metaphorical and aesthetic dimensions of place to address pressing eco-political issues constantly in flux. She currently focuses on collective ecological restoration of urban and edgeland spaces, paying particular attention to increasing biodiversity, providing habitat for pollinators, and improving both the water quality and aesthetic dimension of sites.

The particular qualities of Baeumler’s practice appear in her role in the realisation of Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary Project.Since 1994 she has worked, as local resident and artist, on community-led ecological restoration initiatives on the East Side of Saint Paul, Minnesota. These projects have been realised through collaborations with local residents, ecologists, hydrologists, engineers, University of Minnesota art students, the Como Park Conservatory Youth program and the East Side Youth Conservation Corps of the Community Design Centre. As a member of the Friends of Swede Hollow Park and a founding member of the Lower Phalen Creek Steering Committee, Baeumler worked with community activists and City officials to transform a twenty-seven acre heavily polluted rail-yard beside the Mississippi into the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary, now a city park. An important dimension of the critical translation central to this project is her membership of Healing Place, founded by Dakota artist and activist Mona Smith, which aims to heal connections between people and places formally sacred to the Dakota Nation, of which the park is a significant example.

Chris Baeumler has also served as Artist-in-Residence in the Minnesota Capitol Region and the Ramsey Metro Washington Watershed Districts, working with these governance units on large-scale water infrastructure projects intended to raise the visibility of water infrastructure and quality issues through educational and aesthetic interventions. Her interest in water systems then led her to form the team, including an engineer and ecologist, who created Reconstituting the Landscape: A Tamarack Rooftop Restoration. This micro bog ecosystem is located above the entryway to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. This calls attention to the fragile tamarack bog ecosystem under threat in Minnesota, replicating it in miniature as green rooftop infrastructure, and led to her making Bogs, A Love Story, a documentary film about six different bog experts.

Baeumler has recently animated both educational and regional governance debates through Pollinators at the Plains project, based on a sustainable redesign of the Plains Art Museum’s outdoor campus in Fargo, North Dakota. This included a youth internship program and work with artist and horticulturist Seitu Jones. The educational focus her links directly to Baeumler’s work at the University of Minnesota teaching courses that engage students in creatively working with systems of water, food, transportation and civic engagement between art, ecology, climatology and social studies. As with both Cathy Fitzgerald and Simon Read – and in the tradition of Joseph Beuys – the educational dimension of her work needs to be seen as inseparable from her expanded creative praxis as a whole.

I want to end by paraphrasing a conversation between Ffion Jones, a representative of Natural Resources Wales, the academic and activist Dr Alex Plows, and others involved in a major Hydro-citizenship project. This took place in Taly Bont memorial hall in February this year and I’m grateful to Alex, who translated this exchange from the Welsh.

Ffion is making a film on local farmers’ relationship to water that addresses their concern about changes that challenge their sense of being primarily food producers from an environmental perspective. To do this she has to mediate between past and present attitudes to water management, dipping, run off, and so on. In the past the Environmental Agency prosecuted local farmers over dipping practices, which had produced both change and a culture of resentment. The official assumption in the discussion was that this was partly because the agency hadn’t done a very good job of educating farmers, so that “stewardship of the countryside” had become negatively associated with enforcing compliance through bureaucratic means, which simply generated resentment and resistance. This was contrasted with practices elsewhere, which had focused on respecting/appreciating farmers’ own “local knowledge”. This approach was seem as best supported by indirect mediation. This would mean that, rather than an Agency approaching farmers with a view to introducing their environmental agenda – which will then be coloured by a history of resistance – someone like Ffion who shares their values, doesn’t trigger the same reaction. The group then turned to discussing the role of the arts in ‘bridging and translating’, essentially along the lines I’ve outlined here.

What is distinct about the praxis of individuals like Ffion is that it speaks from within a rural life-world – informed by her being a farmer’s daughter, farmer and farmer’s wife but also by critical engagement as an academic and performer. By mediating between the multiple, often antagonistic, dimensions of that life-world, such work presents important insights. It constitutes an important and necessary alternative to top-down official governance perspectives – “we must educate farmers” – and to largely urban-based environmental lobbyists – by providing another informed voice.

For this to happen professionals working with governance and related agencies need to recognise that such praxes can both extend their own understanding and inform a more democratic and productive approach to the governance of place. While individuals involved in the hands-on running of bodies like the UK’s National Parks are increasingly recognizing the value of such creative translation, they often lack support from those who write policy and control budgets. But today no professional body or governance agency can safely assume that it has the ethical authority, or even the practical ability, to catalyze the informed ‘civic environmentalism’ necessary to address the increasingly complex landscape issues we face.

If citizens are to commit themselves to bettering their environment, sometimes against their own short-term economic interests, new and empathetic forms of understanding need to emerge. This can only happen if the discursive arguments of governance professionals are translated into terms more sympathetic to broader and more empathetic public dialogues. The types of praxis I’ve identified have the power to facilitate a thoughtful and deeply felt mediation between governance professionals and the places and communities that ground rural life-worlds.

Thank you.

“Edge and Shore: Acts of Doing (surveying the edges of place and practice)” – notes towards a partial translation.

(Image: Max McClure)

Preface

What I’ve written below is a partial, gappy, highly subjective ‘translation/transcription-after-the-event’ of an action into a text. Perhaps ironically, it responds to what I take to be, at least in part, two artists’ calculated move away from the cerebral analytics that make up many reflexive texts. The partiality and gappiness are inevitable. I can’t pay close attention to a complex unfolding sequence of actions involving two people over two hours plus and, simultaneously, write sensible notes. Since the action itself was a lens through which a sense of the everyday is re-visioned, and because its ‘audience’ occupied and moved within the same space, each person there very obviously had her or his unique, moment-to-moment sense of it’s numerous consecutive interactions within a layered physical and (larger, and highly porous), aural space, together with the multitude of metaphorical resonances those interactions activate.

(Image: Max McClure)

For example, I doubt whether anybody else witnessed one brief, particular and significant conjunction of bodily stances I caught a glimpse of. I just happened to be where I could catch sight of Laila Diallo unfolded from a particular posture at the very moment when a be-suited man, deep in conversation on his mobile, crossed behind her going down the short section of passageway that’s visible from the gallery. A man who was clearly absent from that space in all but the most literal sense, entirely absorbed and so wholly oblivious to Laila out on the edge of his peripheral vision.

(Image: Max McClure)

That momentary juxtaposition, between an attentive and carefully articulated bodily unfolding and a ‘being elsewhere’, an important aspect of Edge and Shore appeared in sharp relief. It illuminated the actants’ inclusiveness, their attention and openness to contingency, happenstance, and the influx of the past – for example to the effects of the previous day’s experiences, which they could not help but bring to the work. It is this apparently artless openness that, I think, helps give their work its particular qualities. Its articulating of a ‘something’ as yet unnamed, a brave opening out beyond the dominant aesthetics of exclusion into another, more generous, sociability. Here the craft and riskiness of attentive improvisation wanders its way along a fine and delicately judged path between two possibilities.

(Image Helen Carnac)

It could very easily have been a working through that, freighted with multiple mundane actions that evoke the muddle, mess and repetition of daily life, would simply leave us psychically swamped, mired in metaphorical overload and the cacophony of our own emotional feedback. Equally, it could easily have gone the other way. It could have been a merely artful formal play with the numerous properties of space, movement, and materials; a seductive but ultimately cerebrally-oriented flirting with the dangers of raw evocation and metaphor that stylishly skirted over all the deeply sedimented layers of unsettling meaning and affect latent below its artful surface. (Artful ‘dry humping’ masquerading as passionate polymorphous entanglement).

(Image Helen Carnac)

Edge and Shore: Acts of Doing

I was invited by Helen Carnac to take part in an evening conversation with Laila Diallo and herself at the Arnolfini on the evening of July 8th. So I arranged to join them that morning for the first iteration of their Edge and Shore: Acts of Doing. As I understand it, their understand their collaboration as located somewhere off to one side of performance and installation; as setting out to do pretty much what it’s title implies: survey the edges of place and practice through those ‘acts of doing’ familiar to them as an artist/maker and dance artist. (Hence my use of Alastair McLennan and Joseph Beuys’ term ‘action’ and my reference to Helen and Laila as ‘actants’ here).

(Image Helen Carnac)

When I arrived at the Arnolfini I walked through to the ground floor gallery, now set out with various materials, many carried over from Laila and Helen’s previous Edge and Shore residency at the Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh. (These included long lengths of thick, well-used looking and drawn on rolls of paper stood on end or hung, two video projections, boxes of materials of various sorts, and a large cluster of assorted overlapping photographs fixed to one wall). My arrival is noted and Laila appeared almost at once, a thin, animated figure who greets me warmly. Helen soon follows – she has been hunting for a lost box in which they have collected the sheets of A4 paper with the words they’ve used – and we talk about the qualities of the space, the assembled objects, and the floor with its rich staining of traces from previous exhibitions. They both seem to relish the possibilities offered by these traces as another, unfamiliar, set of material memories.

(Image: Max McClure)

As soon as I arrived I was drawn into the intimate tenor of the space by the projected images of hands involved in a game (some cross between Jenga and Paper, Scissors, Stone) My expectations are of play in its widest sense.

Helen and Laila quietly start to prepare the space and I settle myself on one of the low benches provided. As they begin to speak together and then move about the space I catch myself drifting into the particular analytical state of mind of my ‘inner external examiner’. I make a conscious attempt to avoid being caught by this.

Words start to appear on the blank sheets of paper the actants have distributed around the room.

SMILE

BETWEEN

TRAFFIC

LAUGHTER

NOTICING

There is at once a sense that the physical space, its current inhabitants, and its aural permeability, are all being audited, both openly and in more coded terms.

PASSING

ORANGE

AT PACE

… and so on.

Their interactions during this audit are apparently casual but, at a given point, take on a greater sense of focus as the sheets with their hand-written words are collected up and thoughts quietly exchanged between the actants. The words are then read out loud by the two of them in turn and an editing process takes place, with Laila dropping selected sheets onto the floor.

(Image: Max McClure)

There is a shift – a clear concentration – of the action. The wooden table near the wall is cleared, becomes a theatre for hands, and an assortment of wooden blocks, many of them with blue painted ends, appear (the ‘Jenga blocks’ from the video). Helen and Laila begin a process of exchange based on offering each other vertical and horizontal permutations of clusters of these blocks, with Helen’s tending to emphasise the vertical and Laila’s the horizontal. In this subtle articulation of difference between the two women words have been replaced by permutations that enact a conversational exchange. They are pushed back and forth across the surface of the table, with the proximity of the different groupings to the edge nearest each becoming increasingly resonant. (Questions like ‘whose exchange will be pushed over the edge’ are begged, and I am caught up in every nuance of exchange, bound more intimately into the relationship between these two woman).

This unfolding and sometimes noisy process of exchange crackles with the energy of a real working relationship, its moment-by-moment pulls and pushes, and distinctive characterisations appear, articulated through each gesture, facial expression, and shift of bodily stance. After a while Laila changes the dynamic, using the blocks to map the space in which her hand rests. Helen responds by building her hand space into Laila’s. There is a palpable sense that a dynamically tensioned but empathetic relationship has been established, only to be let go off shortly after.

(Image: Max McClure)

This intense, bodily, wordless dialogue now concluded, Laila moves some of the blocks to the floor. Helen, by contrast, starts another ‘build’ on the table until she, too, transfers her wooden blocks onto the floor. As if now sure of the ground of their interactions, the two actants allow their activities to bifurcate. Helen works with the blocks – as I later discover offcuts from her partner’s work as a cabinet maker- down on the floor. She is enclosing the trace of words that formed part of a previous exhibition, including the word ‘consciousness’, while Laila begins to mark out the larger space of the room itself. Her slightly erratic progress draws attention to its being full of stuff, to her use of her body for a form of ‘mapping’, to a sense of provisionality that is amplified by the fragility of her hold on the cluster of blocks in her hands.

On perhaps the third circuit – it’s easy to loose count when you’re taking notes – a woman watching (who has left Laila little space to pass), is drawn directly into the action. Squeezing past her, and seeing that one of her hands is upraised and open, Laila gives her some blocks to hold. In that instant, the whole tenor of the room changes. Those of us watching can no longer locate ourselves, however tacitly, on the outside, as passive spectators. The assumption of an invisible wall between the ‘performers’ and ourselves has been put in question. Now the entire space is an active palimpsest, is loosened and made more permeable in innumerable new ways.

Like the over-eager child at a party who is not picked to help the conjuror, I find myself unreasonably jealous of my co-spectator turned momentary actant. I want that moment of intimate shock, of immediate physical exchange.

My whole challenge now is to somehow keep in view the double process of mapping/enclosing of space and all this involves. Two counterpointed processes are emerging. Helen’s activity appears primarily oriented by her manipulation of materials, Laila’s by the use of her body as a means of marking out, ‘measuring’, the space – pacing, high-stepping, stretching out, jumping. After a while Laila collects up the blocks that she’s been using as part of her marking out and brings them back to Helen’s space in a moment of convergence.

(Image: Max McClure)

My response to this is best described in an image. A circling child returns to her mother to take assurance from ‘touching base’, soliciting approval by bringing back some small gift. This image is reinforced by the steady practicality of Helen’s sorting of the returned wooden blocks. I am quickly caught up in the mesh of resonances between the two women, now both amplified and confused by my provisional categorising of them as ‘grounded mother’ and ‘restless daughter’. But the feeling attached to this categorisation also lends a tenderness to the unfolding actions.

Emerging from the distance of my own imaginal reverie, I am just in time to catch a pregnant pause while the two actants consult together, the hushed mutter of a large orchestra between symphonic movements. But that thought in turn quickly develops it’s own trajectory. Perhaps the whole work could be read as a musical score, perhaps by John Cage. I am again brought back into the moment by catching sight of Laila starting to move on the spot in such a way as to open up a truncated gestural space through the near-repetition of movements that appear invisibly circumscribed.

Meanwhile Helen has started to methodically straighten out and roll up a long length of bright orange tape. Her preparations complete she uses this to delineate a new space, but in a way that’s quite distinct from the previous foursquare use of wooden blocks as miniature ‘walls’. This new, taped space is somehow flamboyant, almost Baroque, with its ragged, scalloped edges. It now encircles Laila. Helen starts to loop the orange tape up and pin it in short, luxurious swags on the taught surface of the hanging sheet of paper. (This has been serving as a significant edge space for some minutes). Ruched curtains and Mary’s Lorna – both child and sophisticate – comes pirouetting into my thoughts, showing off some party dress for an end-of-term dance). Each of Helen’s pinnings produces a small, densely resonant sound, like a small parchment drumhead being sharply tapped once with a hard stick. And each sounding reverberates powerfully against the background of thick aural soup that, as I now realise, almost continually permeates the space.

(Image: Max McClure)

Laila continues her singular movements, as if trying either to perfect them or else complete them despite what is, invisibly, circumscribing them. I worry that these movements are exhausting her, a concern reinforced by her lying flat and breathing heavily at intervals. It’s impossible to know whether this ‘worry’ on my part is in response to the intensity of my own, possibly inappropriate, emotional involvement – a by-product I suspect of my daughter Anna’s long, debilitating illness – or simply a legitimate response to Laila’s exertions. Perhaps it’s both.

At this point both my notes and my memory entirely fail me.

I find on reading them that I wrote: “she [Laila] inserts her body into the space Helen had enclosed earlier”. Yet according to my own narrative above Laila never left that space. Memory, shaky at the best of times, is no help here. I’m at a loss, simply unable to reconstruct what happened although, thinking back, I’m fairly sure Laila had been moving at some distance from Helen’s ribbon-space.

(Image: Max McClure)

What’s clear from what I can call to mind is that, at some point, the two actants had moved much closer to each other. Helen worked at scrapping and tracing over a section of the floor, much as one might make a brass rubbing from a tomb in an old church. Laila’s actions at this point were gradually encroaching on the particular area of floor space where Helen was working. Again there’s a slight disturbance that I quickly rationalise through an image. A child tries to attract her mothers’ attention in a roundabout way and then feels excluded because her mother misses the cue. There’s both the desire for intimacy, for a transgressing of personal space, and at the same time the fear of doing it. No sooner has this passed through my mind than Laila moves away to occupy a zone Helen had worked in earlier.

(Image: Max McClure)

As if pushed out to the extremities of the space, Laila has now located herself up against a wall near where I sit. Helen, unperturbed, continues to work with and mark the space she has occupied, hunkered down to tap or dot out her traces on paper using a block of wood. (This description is partly conjecture – and certainly inexact – since Helen’s half hidden behind a screen of hanging paper that prevents me from seeing many of her actions, although I hear them very clearly). Laila, now hunkered down by the wall, hesitantly starts to tap her thigh with the fingers of her left hand. She seems about to pick up Helen’s rhythm when it falters and dies away. Laila simply stands up and walks diagonally across the room to write a post-it note that she then sticks to the wall. From my bench I cannot read what she has written.

I am a little envious of how easily each actant seems to move between actions and, I assume, their accompanying mental and emotional states.

Laila has returned to her earlier series of truncated gestural movements but now oriented by a linear movement. Helen stops what she has been doing and moves to a bench by the wall. Again, there’s that sense of an orchestra pausing, of a silence immediately filled by the soupy background hum of noise that once again foregrounds itself.

(Image: Max McClure)

Helen crosses the room and unfolds a cloth, before laying out a variety of materials – photographs, drawings, and short fragments of text – on the floor around it. I have a sudden memory of Gini’s Stony Rises deep map – it’s palimpsest of layers, drawings and transparencies, its votive stones and miniature video screens. Laila continues her movements. Am I projecting onto her a vague sense of being increasingly trapped and uncomfortable in her movements, over there up against the wall again? And if so, why? Suddenly she breaks off, picks up a roll of paper, and joins Helen. Again that easy moving between states, that simply letting go. Helen’s layout becomes more extensive, with various repetitions of small black and white photographic images.

(Image: Max McClure)

At this point my attention got divided without my really noticing that this has occurred. While mentally I continued to observe and write notes, my emotional state (now left to its own devices), started to drop, no longer buoyed up and carried along by the flow of the action. In retrospect I think I simply got more and more bogged down in a muddle of conflicting emotional responses to what was unfolding. But I only became conscious of this when I wrote: “Suddenly Samuel Beckett comes to mind”.

Helen is now tearing words from a long sheet of paper and the two actants reconnect. The rolling out of a long line of paper then gives Laila a new direction for movement, but this somehow seems no less ‘pained’ than before, given its halting slowness. The photographer who unobtrusively stalks her across the floor suddenly conjures up the image of Laila as a wounded animal, one that is trying to drag itself to a place of safety away from the hunter who tracks it.

As if in response to my sinking mood, an angry man suddenly breaks into the space around which we’re gathered and demands in a loud voice to know if we the audience think this is ART? Thrown and irritated in equal measure, I challenge his assumptions and a short but clearly pointless exchange follows. He wants ART that offers us Truth, Beauty, History, (and for reasons that escape me, Archaeology) on a plate, but oddly the image he chooses to support this is the Arnolfini Wedding. I do NOT ask him, for reasons that should be self-evident, how or why an early celebration of a commercially motivated amalgamation of business interests in the form of a bourgeois marriage contract embodies these qualities. He leaves with his wife and child. His anger is, however, in marked contrast to their earlier responses. The mother simply expressed mild puzzlement as to the ‘rules of the game’ being played, while the child just wanted to join in by playing with the wooden blocks.

As my attention returns to the action there is a strong sense of words as stuff, matter to be manipulated, put to work, discarded.

Helen rolls up one of the long scrolls on which the gathered words have been written, while Laila circles one of the large sheets of paper on the floor. On the blackboard on the short wall next to the passage Helen writes:

GATHERING WORDS

GATHERING THOUGHTS

LAYING OUT TO THINK

Increasingly our language seems to me cripplingly inadequate, reductive, off the mark and, it must also be said, crassly abused. Why don’t we have a word for what James Hillman, following several older traditions, calls ‘the thought of the heart’, a word for heartfelt, embodied thinking? That’s the word I want to replace Helen’s THOUGHTS and TO THINK on the board. But surely part of all that I’ve just experienced tells me that we have to work with the potential of what we’ve got, at least as a starting point in the here and now?

(Image: Max McClure)

Laila has stopped circling and returns to her previous ‘on the spot’ sequence of movements. Later she will follow one of the lines of paper, a slow, hands and knees movement that feels like a winding down. A hill walker working her way up scree, the last effort before home at the end of a long day’s ramble through the high hills.

Helen meanwhile pins torn words and letters to the back of a semi-transparent hanging screen that turns one corner of the room into a darker, store-like space. This action feels like a lining, or insulation of that area, but one that’s highly ambiguous in its relationship to the words that are repositioned, even destroyed, by her actions. There is a real sense of persistence in this action that, despite its sense of inwardness, seems profoundly protective. Is a shelter being prepared, a dwelling-place, but if so for whom and, of course, against what?

(Images: Max McClure)

There is no real sense of a ‘drawing to an end’, more of a ‘circling back’. Laila has started to mark out a new space within the room using the smallest wooden blocks, some no bigger than a postage stamp. Again she is stretching and semi-falling as she does so. She then reverses the process, retracing her movements and gathering up her little wooden markers as she does so. All the time I am very conscious of her bodily exertions, of the fact that she’s been on the move for over two hours, as frenetic as Helen is calm. Laila repeats the action of marking out a space within the room, but in another, slightly more modest configuration, coming and going behind the hanging sheets as she does so.

(Image: Max McClure)

Helen has now moved from pinning to balling up the pieces of paper with their letters and words. These are formed into tight, roughly fist-sized, objects. She lays a good number of them out in careful rows behind her sheltering screen as if preparing snowballs for a fight.

Later we will sit over our food and talk, roughing out what we might say about the work during the scheduled public conversation that evening. We speak together of forms of mapping, about memory, noticing, Tim Ingold on lines, about making, habits, and accumulation. Laila, based in Bristol, must leave soon to attend to her son and our discussion of the work is now casually interleaved with talk of child-care arrangements and his grandmother’s willingness to make cupcakes for a school event.

I am immensely grateful for this seamlessness in our speaking together, this easy camaraderie in the transition from one constellated event to another in our briefly mutual polyverse. And perhaps that is what I will most value in what I take away from my day’s exchange with Helen and Laila.

(Image: Helen Carnac)

At one point, during our post-event discussions, a connection appeared to me between the underlying tenor of the morning’s action and certain old folk songs. Both it seems are in part concerned, beneath any literal ‘narrative’, with the virtues and possibilities of living with the mundane, the repetitious, the overlooked, and with inevitable failure in our lives (‘even unto death’), but also of doing so with canny attention, with a certain lightness of spirit or dark humour (depending on our temperament) and, of the utmost importance, in good company.

(Image: Helen Carnac)

Postscript.

Helen and I spoke on the phone for just short of an hour prior to the event I’ve tried to evoke here. We were happily teasing out elements of our mutual interests and following up various threads of thought as they appeared. This turned out to be an ideal preparation for what I would experience on July 8^th. A good part of that initial exchange circled around issues of attention and, having referred to Kathleen Jamie’s observations, I sent Helen this.

‘Kathleen Jamie refers to attention as follows. When asked if she had prayed for her dangerously sick partner when he was in hospital, her response was that she hadn’t. She adds, however, that she:

“… had noticed, more than noticed, the cobwebs, and the shoaling light, and the way the doctor listened, and the flecked tweed of her skirt, and the speckled bird and the sickle-cell man’s slim feet. Isn’t that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?”’ (Jamie, 2005: 109)

Without that ‘paying heed’ there can be no empathy, no sense of an aesthetic of the everyday, and without imaginative empathy no politics of nurture worth the name, no concern for the Commons. For those of us who do not want to live under the authoritarian oligarchy that currently passes for democracy in the UK, an oligarchy with its roots in the world-view celebrated by Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding, ‘paying heed’ is now a political obligation. I would have liked the courage and presence of mind to say that to the angry man. To have made clear to him that Art, Truth, Beauty, and History have now all-too-often been co-opted, empty power words. Words that are part of the armoury at the disposal of people whose every action flies in the face of ‘paying heed’, who are fully paid up members of a culture of possessive individualism that is psychically, socially and environmentally toxic.

These are, of course, my own personal preoccupations and interpretations and I have no wish to or intention of fostering them onto Helen and Laila. However, they do reflect something of what I take away from my time spent with them.

(The images above are used here were taken by and are used here by kind permission of Max McClure and Helen Carnac)

Considerations of ‘The Map is Not the Territory’: an essay

(Two detail shots from a work-in-progress provisionally called: An animist’s re-mapping of Washington and the vicinity)

“Looking up from dealing with the socks and you hear an oystercatcher – why should these things be separate”? Kathleen Jamie (from her public lecture: Poetry, the Land, and Nature)

Introduction

This essay is in part prompted by a visit to an international touring exhibition, currently at the P21 Gallery in London, called: “The Map is Not the Territory”: Parallel Paths – Palestinians, Native American, Irish and by reading the accompanying catalogue, edited by Jennifer Heath and published by Backsun Books & Arts for social and environmental justice in 2015. (My friend Nessa Cronin, who has contributed a chapter to this catalogue, alerted me to both it and the exhibition). But it is also concerned with the wider implications of the phrase ‘the map is not the territory’, particularly as these might apply to those of us who are engaged in cultural and educational work.

What follows is also prompted by a growing sense of discomfort at my own inability to address paintings within the scope of the writing I’m now doing, particularly those paintings I’ve long admired and been drawn to – works by Paula Rego, Ken Kiff, Andrzej Jackowski and Eileen Lawrence, for example. (This sense is partly because I referenced Paula Rego’s work in a talk for a conference on the Gothic in Limerick last year, which indicated that I’ve been neglecting a valuable resource). I want to find appropriate ways to think about paintings in the context of ecosophical praxis, but to date have largely been unable to do so. This now pushes me to try to find a more inclusive approach to writing. One that can respond openly and fluidly to what such work might show me about the continuous and particular exchanges and tensions within and between the fields of the psyche, the social, and the environment that constitute lifeworlds.

I think this requires developing a multi-stranded and openly narrative – as opposed to primarily analytic – style of writing. A narrative that is inclusive and stays open to the many interwoven strands of our lifeworld as polyverse, strands that are continually ravelling up and then and unravelling. I take this need to evoke a lifeworld as polyverse to be central now.

As James Hillman argued long ago, the ‘Monotheistic’ (or more simply ‘monolithic’) mentalité – the worldview that Enlightenment science inherited from the Religions of the Book – should not have survived the Holocaust. Yet it continues to dominate our culture. In one of the chapters in The Map is Not the Territory, Valerie Behiery draws attention to the cultural politics and economic power that makes it extraordinarily hard for an American curator to present a Palestinian cultural event in the USA. As she observes, any such attempt is faced – whether tacitly or directly – with accusations of being “anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda and a glorification of terrorism and murder”. (p. 34) In a global mainstream culture still dominated by the presuppositions of ‘either-or’ thinking that is the most tenacious legacy of the monolithic mentalité, it is all too easy for a powerful coalition of Republican, Christian fundamentalist, and Jewish pro-Israel interests in the US to do this. This hides, along with much else, the fact that Zionist terrorism was central to the creation of the Israeli state. Lohamei Herut Israel (Lehi – otherwise called ‘the Stern gang’ after its founder, Avraham Stern), whose former leader Yitzhak Shamir became Israeli Prime Minister in 1983, openly operated on the basis of the assumption that: “Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat”. (In He Khazit, an underground publication of Lehi, Issue 2, August 1943. No author is given, as was usual for this publication). So cultural threats enable a powerful political lobby to avoid addressing the question of why, if it was legitimate for Jews to use terrorism against the British in order to gain a homeland, Palestinians should not do the same. Particularly if they find themselves placed in a situation infinitely more oppressive than that faced by Lehi?

Yet in a ‘monoverse’ underwritten by the absolute dualism that ultimately flows from fundamentalist readings of the Religions of the Book, this question is not just irrelevant, it’s un-ask-able. In that monoverse, if you’re in America or Israel you are expected to be either for or against Israel. If you’re in a country where Isis or its equivalents are at large, you are expected to be either for or against a highly selective misreading of Islam. Two sides of the same coin, since in both instances there is nothing to consider beyond the playground question: “whose side are you on”? No room then, for the complexities of history, issues of common sense, a considerations of the millions now caught up in a murderous realpolitik, and certainly no room for compassion or fellow feeling. And this childish and ultimately murderous reductivism is, in the last analysis, the reality behind American support for Israel, behind Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians, and behind radical Islamic fundamentalism. The “them or us” question that cuts short all other, more nuanced, considerations.

So trying to think, write and otherwise act out of the reality of our living in a many-stranded polyverse is now, in my view, an absolute necessity. It gives us some purchase on the resources that allow us to resist the mentalité that continues to generate massive levels of socio-environmental destruction globally. In short, the old monolithic mappings we inherited are indeed not the territory. Indeed, their disinformation is now terminally toxic.

A day out

I went to London for three reasons: to see my brother, to visit the P21 exhibition, and to see Agnes Martin’s work on show at Tate Modern. I have had an ‘at-a-distance’ fascination with Martin’s work – I’d seen almost none other than in reproduction until my visit to London – that was first set in motion by Thomas McEvilley’s Gray Geese Descending: The Art of Agnes Martin. This was amplified by the Scottish artist Eileen Lawrence, who told me that two important influences on her work were encounters with the work of Joseph Beuys and Agnes Martin. Like Martin, Lawrence could so easily have said that she does not paint gray geese, but “the emotions we have when we feel gray geese descending” (quoted in McEvilley 1993, p. 71). (If I was asked to illustrate the chronic cultural provincialism of the Tate, it’s abject failure to properly represent British art in all its richness and complexity, I would point to its shamefully neglect of Lawrence’s extraordinary work, of which it owns a single example. Is it any wonder that so many Scots want their independence)?

Given the very different reasons behind my three excursions, I had no expectation that my day in London would develop any kind of coherence beyond doing what I’d set out to do, but this essay is an attempt to give some account of just such coherence.

At the P21 gallery

I had agreed to meet my brother at the P21 Gallery at 11.30 but it was still closed when I arrived late – I’d neglected to discover that it does not open until 12.00 – and, just as I found it, he phoned to say he too was running late. I enquired from the office below the gallery when it would open. Very shortly, I was told, and at once invited to sit and wait there until it did. The young man whose work I’d interrupted was both courteous and inquiring, asking almost at once what I made of the Palestinian situation. I quickly sensed that in this place a hospitable courtesy, political awareness and cultural curiosity were seamlessly joined. This impression was confirmed when I was taken up into the gallery foyer. I was immediately thanked for coming to see the exhibition, with thanks followed by further enquires as to my reasons for doing so as my guide busied himself with the rituals of opening a gallery. After a little while, when alarms had been disarmed and doors unlocked, I got to see some of the work. (Some I did not. It was in a downstairs room and my brother, who needed to catch a train after meeting me, had gone to another address. I could only buy a copy of the catalogue and go to the British Library to meet him).

What I saw at P21 was interesting in a variety of ways. One image of many that stays with me is Najat El-Taji El-Khairy’s The Rock of Palestine in Basel. This depicts a small island of rock in the shape of Palestine, situated just off the bank of the Rhine in Basel. There is an almost hallucinogenic sadness in the conjunction of the title and image, something amplified further by the artist’s comment that: “My land follows me everywhere … Ironic, isn’t it? To discover this little rock, shaped like the map of Palestine right were the First Zionist Congress took place in 1897, the first step in the condemnation of our people to suffering, injustice and oppression”. (p. 58). This rich and nuanced interplay of image and text, and of carefully located personal experience – this insignificant rock was discovered on a stroll with the artist’s three-year-old grandson along Sankt Alban-Rheinweg Street – with imaginative reverie, historical knowledge and the political, is indicative of the way in which the exhibition avoids a crude polemic and offers instead ways of addressing, in a number of dimensions, what John Halaka acknowledges – alongside the multiple needs for restorative justice – is the necessity of recognizing that what has been inflicted means that Palestinians “can never recreate their shattered past or reset the hands of time”. (p. 72) An observation that, although in far less extreme circumstances and with less drastic effects, constitutes an aspect of our common reality. By inviting our cognizance of that fact, the exhibition points up grounds for human solidarity rarely acknowledged by work in this vein.

In one sense, however, the exhibition had done its work even before I set eyes on it. It had created a vivid occasion for openness, for exchange, and in doing so expanded my existing felt understanding of the dynamics of a complex, conversational relationship. That conversational relationship – in which I was already a minor participant through exchanges with one of the catalogue/book’s authors, Nessa Cronin – is now woven into, and so challenges me to remember and reconsider, my existing connections to the people whose lifeworlds find echoes in this exhibition. To the Palestinian artist Alexandra Handal (alexandrahandal.org/), to my friend Mona M. Smith, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota media artist, educator and the owner of Allies: media/art , and to a widening and heterogeneous group of friends and colleagues in Ireland – perhaps in particular Nessa Cronin, Deirdre O’Mahony, Cathy Fitzgerald, Pauline O’Connell, and some of (the staff at Limerick College of Art and Design. But also to the painter Samira Abbassy (born in Ahwaz, Iran, but now resident in New York) who, coincidentally, currently has a show of complementary work in London, entitled Love & Ammunition.

All of which is really only to say that cultural experience is never either wholly aesthetic or disinterested. It is always at some level bound up with lives, with friendships (and enmities), with all the textures and trajectories of lived experience. This is, I think, what I have been trying to find ways to reflect in my writing.

Much of the work on view in the exhibition consists, inevitably in the circumstances, of reproductions of work too large or costly to transport, an obvious and striking example of this necessity being the small print of Hani Zurob’s large painting Flying Lesson no. 04. Zurob’s approach in this and other works in the series is indicative of that presented in much of other work. It flows from a question asked by his young son Qoudsi as to why his father cannot travel with his family to Jerusalem. The painting, which shows the tiny figure of Qoudsi in his toy car contrasted with the almost surreal nature of the suspended apparatus by which one enters and exits aircraft, evokes space and distance in the context of the fragility of love rather than any overt sense of political message. And is all the more eloquent for doing so. Michele Horrigan, a photographic artist, evokes something similar in her images of abandoned houses in Leitrim, one of the poorest areas of rural Ireland. This is representative of a whole body of powerful Irish work, another example being Deirdre O’Mahony’s Abandoned Clare series, a collection of 54 photographs that also exists as a free magazine, Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare .

There is much more than could be said about the various works on show, but ultimately what I took from the exhibition was a powerful sense of a collective attempt to map the un-map-able (an attempt that, in line with George Steiner’s take on the translation of poetry, is both impossible and vital if we are to avoid living in “arrogant [and indeed murderous] parishes bordered by silence”). A form of collective deep mapping of the absences that haunt diaspora and the events that give rise to it, and of the savage indifference to the basic human need to place ourselves and have a sense of being ‘at home’ in the world, to say the least. (Although, as Deirdre O’Mahony has reminded me in the course of a long and fascinating conversation in Galway, for some our ‘at-home-ness’ may need to be other than literal).

In all this I am also somewhat uncomfortably aware that, historically speaking, my people are implicated in what the dedication to the book refers to as the desecration, by “invasion, occupation and colonization”, of their “lands, cultures and ecologies”. I may have some direct experience of the powerlessness that haunts the situations to which the P21 exhibition artists refer. (The result of our many years of dealing with the authorities that seek to dictate just what can and cannot happen to my chronically sick daughter). But this cannot give me more that a distant glimpse of lifeworlds largely framed by such desecration.

On the play of differences and similarities

My brief exchange about Ireland during the opening up of P21 reinforced something of the sense of commonality shared by the Irish, Palestinians and Native Americans that the exhibition addresses and the book elaborates. However, my academic habits are such that my thinking quickly turned to differences. I found myself noting that, whatever the strengths of those commonalities, there are significant differences between the situations of each. But this way of thinking is, I suspect, an evasion of something more important. Jennifer Heath begins the book by reminding us of this by using a quotation from Immanuel Wallerstein: “We can always pinpoint difference, it is the easiest of all scholarly tasks, since everything is always different in some ways from everything else across time and space. What is harder and takes priority is to discover similarities”. It is, after all, on similarities that we can best start to built a sense of common human solidarity and compassion for all beings, human and otherwise.

Wallerstein’s observation is, I think, a profoundly challenging one. Much of the contemporary academic and cultural enterprise is based on an education that provides students with analytic tools designed to highlight difference. This is another byproduct of the dominance of the monolithic mentalité. It seems to me that there is now an urgent need to modify those tools and to re-orient their use, perhaps taking as a guideline Paul Ricoeur’s notion of a philosophy of ‘critical solicitude’. Education too is, arguably, a mapping or re-mapping exercise of sorts and, as Nessa Cronin very rightly reminds us in her book chapter, the authority of any mapping exercise always needs to be put in question, even where such a mapping is bent on “revealing, authenticating, and legitimizing a previously silenced history” (p. 95). What is essential, however, is that due consideration or solicitude is given to the lived experience and historical context that informs such mappings. It is then possible for contestation to become a conversation rather than an argument based on a taking up of monolithic positions.

That four letter word – ‘love’

As my friend the artist and academic Mary Modeen has pointed out, to speak of ‘love’ in the context of academic work is to question a taboo. In a paper given at a PLaCE symposium in Bristol in 2011”, she said:

“To those of us who are academics … love is a four-letter word. It is immeasurable and therefore by its very nature outside academic territory. It cannot be calculated, predicted or even adequately defined except perhaps normatively, as enacted by individuals, new in its manifestation each and every time. Even though it is as old as humans themselves, probably predating that which we know as human, shared (we are certain) by many fellow creatures in the animal kingdom, and known as well as ‘the force that through the green fuse that drives the flower’, it is not academic properly speaking, not to be trusted, best avoided for other less risky terms. And yet…it is the best word I can think of to discuss the ways in which we interact with our environment.”

Topophilia (the love of place) tends to be regarded with considerable suspicion in academic and cultural circles. It is (often quite correctly) seen as a smiling mask that hides exclusionary nationalistic and other xenophobic sentiments. But as Mary Modeen and, more recently, George Mombiot remind us, it is a fundamental aspect of our relationship to the world. Loving relationships to place, however understood, are in some sense essential to our wellbeing and, in the context of the present eco-social situation, also very possibly to our future survival. It is senses of this that permeates the more interesting work in the P21 gallery and, as a result, makes it possible for me to write this essay.

In a text reproduced in the catalogue to the Tate Modern’s Agnes Martin exhibition, Martin ponders matters of beauty and happiness (pp. 158-9) However, I think that in her writing about beauty “as an awareness in the mind” she comes close to evoking what I would call ‘a loving attention to the world’. I can offer no hard and fast definition of what I mean by this phrase. Instead I invoke a statement by the poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie. When asked by a friend if she had prayed for her chronically sick partner when he was in hospital, she said she’d not. She adds, however, that she: “… had noticed, more than noticed, the cobwebs, and the shoaling light, and the way the doctor listened, and the flecked tweed of her skirt, and the speckled bird and the sickle-cell man’s slim feet. Isn’t that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed. ” (Kathleen Jamie Findings 2005, p. 109).

It’s a sense of this “care and maintenance of the web of our noticing”, of “paying heed”, that I detect behind Agnes Martin’s statements and, more directly, as present in some of her work. And it’s resistance to the socio-political denial of any normal or familial context for such care and maintenance, such paying heed, that I sense unites many of the artists in the P21 exhibition. A shorthand term for this cruelly denied quality is, of course, the exercise of love. In short, one of the experiences that has been and/or is denied to the Palestinians, the Native Americans and the Irish by the cruelties of their historical situation, is an important aspect of the fundamental human need to exercise that capacity to love in its fullest sense. A specific form of love that primarily takes part in, and with the aid of, familiar or familial, places, with the ability to ‘be-at-home’ somewhere.

The relationship between this situation and some of Agnes Martin’s work is powerfully evoked by four works in the exhibition: two works from 1963 – Friendship and A Grey Stone – White Stone from 1965, and Untitled 12 from 1984. What I experienced as uniting these (and what links them to the twelve paintings in The Islands series of 1979 that forms the centrepiece of the exhibition) is that loving, attentive and care-filled engagement with the ineffable hæcceity or inscape (to borrow the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ term) of a particular ‘homely’ landscape. Agnes Martin’s term for what is produced by this engagement is ‘joy’. Looking at these paintings I can recognise the joy that, for example, accompanies the revelation of the connection between transient beauty and our mortality that occurs when the drifting shadows of small clouds move over the land landscape on a sunny day (White Stone). Or when my eye is absorbed in the mottle and granulation of a stone (Untitled 12 and A Grey Stone). In these works there is a palpable sense of loving attention transmuted into a cooly distilled painterly image that I find intensely moving. But for me the key work, perhaps because of its affinities to works by Eileen Lawrence that it may or may not have influenced, is Friendship. Here a rich, warm red under-painting shows through the incised gold leaf. The result is an icon without explicit subject or inflection, an evocation of the immanent, sensual warmth of … what? Of warm desert earth, of sunlight, of joy? I don’t and cannot know. But I am as certain as I can be that the memory of what it is that this painting evokes, and what has been done to deny the Irish, Native Americans and Palestinians certain fundamental human needs associated with that, is what the work at P21 speaks of..

George Mombiot, whose article The Pope can see what many atheist greens will not (Guardian June 17^th 2015 I read on the train on my way to London, quotes Michael McCarthy on the need for a certain closeness to nature, on our capacity to be “surprised by joy”. In terms Agnes Martin might have recognised, he quotes McCarthy’s reference to: “A happiness with an overtone of something more, which we might term an elevated or, indeed, a spiritual quality”. He goes on to put his finger on the question that I think the P21 exhibition tries to address. “If the acknowledgement of love becomes the means by which we inspire environmentalism” – or indeed any other form of eco-social responsibility – in others, how do we translate it into political change”?

I am wagering here that one why to answer to Mombiot’s question is to better understand what is necessary to acts of translation. As I’ve indicated elsewhere, I think this can be linked to forms of collective deep mapping to which Nessa Cronin refers towards the end of her chapter. These help us to maintain a fluid and open engagement with place, encouraging us to narrate and evoke it in all its temporal depth and ambiguity. Also to honour shifting connectivities and conversations between multiple voices, all against the background of an ethics that asks that we seek to live the good life, with and for others (including non-human others), in just institutions and environments.

Some visual work under way …

I’ve not been adding much to this blog for quite a while because, apart from the usual stuff noted in the last post, I’ve been trying to pull together some visual work that I began about three years ago. The sense of this project has been slow to emerge, and at present it’s provisionally called: Remembrance (Debatable Lands) and may finally turn out to be the conclusion of the Debatable Lands project that I began in 1999.

To date the material consists of a sequence of initial images – many based on on a series of drawings/installations made in the studio – along some of my landscape photographs from the Borders. Each of these square images is then given a ‘heading made up of an additional pair of images. These have been made from a combination of ‘found’ and my own photographic images. I’ve now got to the point where these have all been brought together as a series of thirty two digital collages. Each of these composite collaged images (see examples) will be digitally printed, worked over in various ways, scanned and, when this process of alteration and re-scanning is completed, “bagged” in some way – perhaps with other small objects – to form a sequence of object/images.

Deep mapping, conversation, and re-forging tools for thought

Geraldine Finn reminds us that we’re “always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us”. None-the-less we need categories to help us think. Deep mapping has been a valuable conceptual tool for me in this respect, albeit one I recently felt had been miss-used or blunted to the point of becoming almost meaningless. That, and more personal difficulties, prompted me to feel I should let go of it as a term. (I’ve noted the reasons in earlier blogs, so won’t go over my reasoning again here).

But I have now been movingly reminded that ‘deep mapping’ is, for me, rather more than just a useful (if slippery) concept. It’s also a shared praxis with a particular, albeit bifurcated and contested, history. At root the term names a shared and ongoing narrative, a story that many people have and are collectively making. One in which I’m still very much caught up. My friend and colleague Dr. Nessa Cronin, who works in the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI, Galway, has just reminded me of all this in the best possible way.

Last year Nessa and I had shared thoughts about deep mapping when I was working at NUI, Galway, and we continued to do so by email after I’d left. She has recently completed work on a book chapter: ‘The Fineness of Things’: The Deep Mapping Projects of Tim Robinson’s Art and Writing, 1969 – 1972, and kindly sent me a draft to read. Given our exchanges I was curious to see what she’d written and was delighted by what I read. (The chapter will be published later this year by Manchester University Press in a book called: Unfolding the Landscape: Tim Robinson, Culture, and Environment, edited by Christine Cusick and Derek Gladwin. I’ll return to it again briefly later).

However what I want to focus on here is not the virtues of that illuminating chapter about an exceptional man’s work, but rather my renewed sense of the whole mesh of exchanges that occasioned it and will now flow from it. Not simply for its own sake, but for what it reminds me about the real basis of shared scholarship and praxis. That mesh of exchanges includes those between Nessa, Tim Robinson himself, and his partner Mairéad; those between Nessa, myself and a host of other scholars and artists; but also, and critically, those between groups in communities in the west of Ireland, through Know your Place: A Community Mapping Workshop, run in conjunction with Lifeworlds: Space, Place and Irish Culture International Conference, Galway City Museum, 29th March 2014. This event, focused on devising a community-based mapping ‘toolkit’, centered on the mapping work and experience of the X-PO Mapping Group in Kilnaboy, County Clare, Mná Fiontracha Mapping Community Group in Árainn, and The Sliabh Aughty Community Group, with wider virtual communities, and with the workshop facilitators Dr. Ailbhe Murphy, Dr. Deirdre O’Mahony and Ms. Ann Lyons. All those exchanges will no doubt continue to contribute to this conversational weave, one in which deep mapping will be one, more or less useful, strand.

It’s in this rich and particular context that Nessa wrote to me that she always tries to be mindful of the processes of thinking, reading, and writing as in many ways collaborative work. As she points out, this is the case even if the engagement is with thinkers long since died, yet still active in our thoughts and imaginings. Thinkers with whom we have imaginary conversations and debates around the key issues they thought and wrote about, just as we might with living thinkers. It is, she rightly insists, though all such conversations that our arguments “are tried, tested and forged over time”. Forged and, when they are chipped and blunted by careless or ignorant use, necessarily re-forged so as to help us to continue in our shared work. That’s one aspect of a community of scholar/teacher/practitioners – however on occasion fractious and divided – that helps to keep the purpose and value of listening and learning alive, despite all the dogmatic managerialism that is currently choking the vitality of our schools and universities.

Cliff McLucas believed that deep mapping should be a conversation, and I now realize that it’s vitally important to hang onto that belief and, with it, to Nessa’s sense of the shared and ongoing nature of our conversational work. Questions of conceptual definition or miss-appropriation then become relatively minor and certainly secondary. At a difficult time in my life – not least because I’m about to turn sixty-five – I needed to be reminded that deep mapping is like a charged mycelial mesh, it’s energy flows where there are higher levels of conductivity to carry it’s charge, it jumps apparently impassible synapses and, of course, occasionally some of its energy will simply run to earth. That is not, however, a reason for not keeping faith with those conversations of which each of us is a strand.

Coping strategies and the art of social translation.

(photo – Gwenda van der Vaart)

The text below is from a presentation given as part of a recent workshop organised by researchers in the Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the the University of Groningen. This was called “Resilience: Just do it?!”. (See previous posts for details).

The practical examples are by individuals who, for the most part, have web sites that show the work referred to here. I would strongly advise readers who are interested to find these web sites and study that work. Many of them can be found on my ‘friends’ page.

Yesterday I was reminded that it may take a couple of years for academics from different disciplines to understand each other’s language. And here I am, trying to explain work out on the edge of current art practice that many people in my own discipline don’t really grasp to people in a radically different discipline. As George Steiner says of trying to translate one language into another, this is perhaps impossible. But as he also goes on to say, it must be attempted. Otherwise we are left in “arrogant parishes bordered by silence”.

Luci Gorell Barnes’ The Atlas of Human Kindness is a growing collection of maps made by individuals and groups in Bristol, including refugee groups and children with learning difficulties. It shows where and when they experienced kindness from people concerned about their rights, feelings, and welfare. It invites debate about how stories, memories and imaginings make and re-make place, and how fragmented personal landscapes can become less fragmented. It invites people to think about values and connections, and about what networks and community means. Like Luci I often use mapping to translate between lifeworlds – between those of artists and scientists, academic researchers and rural communities, and so between theory and the mess and unpredictability of everyday life. But this work has an ambiguous relationship to resilience.

Terms like ‘resilience’, ‘social capital’, ‘community identity’, ‘place attachment’, ‘community cohesion’ and ‘community participation’ are all-to-often concepts imposed “from outside” onto supposedly vulnerable communities, usually without much reference to their ideas or lived experience. We don’t discuss former Bullingdon Club members – who include the British Prime Minister, the Mayor of London, and Chancellor of the Exchequer – in these terms. Yet they represent the most resilient section of society. They’re experts in using networks, social participation, and a sense of belonging to enhance their resilience to the social consequences of increasing environmental disaster. They have what Elias Canetti calls a ‘survivor mentality’. Everything they do is ultimately aimed at protecting their lifestyle, which they assume to be their exclusive right. This mentality is increasingly pervasive, in no small part because of the media and advertising. Recently researchers at a prestigious US University, using MRI scans of students’ brain activity, have shown that many students, particularly the wealthiest, react to photographs of the homeless and drug addicts as if (I quote): “they had stumbled on a pile of trash”. I don’t know about the Netherlands, but in Britain this same mentality now drives official Government attitudes towards the long-term sick and very poor.

Traditionally religion has been central to what is now termed resilience – both the resilience of elites and of radical spiritual traditions concerned with social justice and compassion. At a time when religious dogma is increasingly co-opted by fundamentalism, creative ritual as a form of grassroots spiritual resilience is also growing. Largely invisible to the art world and academia, this offers a small but significant counterpoint to the dominant ideology of possessive individualism. This type of creative ritual is often focused by a need – particularly in rural contexts – to address the erosion of traditional social activities that helped sustain the resilience of rural communities but also bound them to psychosocial frameworks that, today, leave them increasingly marginalized and vulnerable.

Human beings have the ability to take risks with who they are. They can choose to risk entering unknown situations that might change them. In a very small way that’s what these people are doing by exchanging stories of joy and pain in their city with total strangers.I’m only here today because, at a certain point, I chose to risk changing a core characteristic of my identity – the idea of ‘being an artist’. The ability of the human psychic ecology to risk change differentiates it from natural systems. In ecological science, ‘resilience’ refers to an eco-system’s ability to fend off or manage threats that would undermine its core characteristics. We, however, can chose to change them. So rather than use the conservative term ‘resilience’, I prefer the active notion of ‘coping strategies’ – a phrase used by the landscape architects Maggie Roe and Ken Taylor.

What is the relationship between disaster and resilience?Between 1997 and 2013one thousand four hundred children were sexually abused in one English city alone. Today in Britain as a whole the most socially deprived areas are sixteen times poorer than the most affluent. These ongoing man-made disasters are made possible by the continuing resilience of a culture of possessive individualism. This does far more damage in the United Kingdom than flooding. But as Nigel Clark reminds us, other forms of resilience have always been an aspect of ‘traditional ecological knowledge’, which is as much about (I quote):‘coping with loss and suffering as it is about transmitting practical advice”. Perhaps, before we try to help others develop appropriate coping strategies – intra-psychically, socially, and environmentally – we should start by reflecting on our own?

After the recent flooding on the Somerset Levels, communities were promised a twenty-year plan based on the traditional strategy of dredging. This plan goes against the advice of flood experts and ignores a 40% Government cut in funding to the agency responsible. But in my view it’s actually the resilience of both local people and flood specialists that’s the biggest hindrance to developing an effective alternative policy.

A deeply resilient cultural ‘framing’ locks us into the mindset of possessive individualism. We are taught that we should each have a separate, exclusive identity and that expressing this is the most important thing we can do. This exclusive notion of identity needs exclusive, mono-ideational explanatory systems to support it. We may choose a professional discipline, or eco-scientism, a regional tradition, the economic bottom line, or even fundamentalist religion. But in actuality our lifeworlds – like the causes of flooding – are complicated and multi-layered, a shifting, unstable weave of causes and effects; a poly-verse rather than a mono-verse. Mono-ideational explanatory systems are comforting because they support the idea of exclusive identities and reduce cognitive dissonance. They also blind us to the complexity, paradoxes and contradictions of life in a polyverse. A polyverse is the world envisaged by Felix Guattari’s ‘ecosophy’, a world where the “thinking together” of self, society and environment – taken as both discrete and linked dynamic fields – allows us to open to change and risk in relation to a future we can never accurately predict.

Eco-scientism treats Guattari’s three ecologies as identical rather than both related and distinct. Practices like ‘deep mapping’, on the other hand, try to evoke the ways in which those three ecologies are interwoven. Evans and Reid analyze the social consequences of the reductivism of eco-scientism in their Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. But in a sense they miss the point. As I’ve said, our most fundamental problem is one of psychosocial framing. We have internalized what Barbara Ehrenrich calls the ‘smile or die’ culture of ‘positive thinking’ that helps sustain possessive individualism. Increasingly, our institutions require us to be positive and proactive at all times. So valid criticism becomes ‘personal negativity’, oftenpreventing us from attending to the ideas and experience of others who, through no fault of their own, are caught in negative and disabling circumstances.

So what should we do? We certainly need to understand the realpolitik behind mono-ideational explanatory systems – including exclusive, disciplinary thinking. But more fundamentally we need to ask on what authority we speak about others’ resilience– particularly, in my case, in rural taskscapes. Researchon Swiss farmers supports my own view that authority in such taskscapes flows from, and is largely validated by, degrees of embodied, collectively valued skill. This differentiates it from the authority of professional discourses. Unless we understand this difference we add to the kinds of distrust that Nick van der Voort and Frank Vanclay identify in relation to mitigation measures around gas extraction in Groningen.

The projects I’m going to introduce are based on experiencing the world as polyverse. They work with both professional and lay understandings, different types of authority, skills, perspectives, and affective narratives. Their approach is similar to Sarah Whatmore and Catharina Landstrum’s work around ‘knowledge controversies’, ‘competency groups’, and ‘pre-figured categories’. This includes ‘slowing down’ expert reasoning and so creating opportunities to generate new knowledge opportunities and gather new publics. This helps build mutual understanding and greater trust by translating across very different, sometimesantagonistic, lifeworlds.

People in rural taskscapes develop coping strategies out ofembodied, place-specific, collective practices learned ‘on the job’ – on a smallholding, a hill farm, in a kitchen, on a fishing boat, at a quarry, a guest house, a small-scale industrial unit, a village shop, a timber yard, and so on – places where discursive, disciplinary authority usually appears largely irrelevant.But rapid socio-environmental change means that there’s an increasing need for trust and exchange between those who inhabit rural taskscapes and those with professional knowledge. This needs both groups to start to re-fashion the framing narratives that underpin their identity and sense of authority. Otherwise, as socio-environmental and governance disputes increase, they will simply continue to retreat into what Paul Ricoeur calls: “incommunicability through protective withdrawal”.

Creative translators, people who can work across the similarities and differences between lifeworlds, can facilitate this process. They may be trained as ‘artists’, but the ability to translate across lifeworlds relates primarily to their conscious awareness of lifeworlds as polyverses rather than to the business of ‘making art’.

Ffion Jones’ doctoral project included performing in a sheep byre on her parents’ farm in a remote Mid Wales valley. Her project aims (I quote): “to use ‘insider’ knowledge (lay discourse) as a way of exploring and extrapolating experiences of place within a rural farming family that confirms, contradicts and combines with academic discourses about our farming lives. As a researcher/farmer, I bridge two lifeworlds; my work seeks to look at a farming family’s attachment and experiences of place from the inside-out”. Ffion’s work bridges lifeworlds usually assumed to be distinct ‘worlds-unto-themselves’. She acknowledges and works both with what’s valuable in her given regional lifeworld but also with external ideas and possibilities, creating conditions that facilitate the possibility of new strategies for coping emerging from inside the community into which she was born.

Ffion’s work flows from the skills and understanding of a performer, daughter of farming parents, scholar, musician, tenant farmer, mother of a young child, and so on. Through staging their interplay she opens up new ways to relate to place as a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’ in Doreen Massey’s sense. Her work doesn’t reinforce a given identity or set of skills, a given understanding of community, or a fixed notion of self. Instead it invites us to take up the unending task of negotiating and re-negotiating between positions that are usually assumed to be fixed or given. This, in turn, lays the groundwork for developing new collective coping strategies.

Pauline O’Connell’s work questions normative assumptions about identity and land ownership in rural Ireland. Since 2012 she’s completed two projects based on a historical Tug O’ War competition. These are part of a larger project using vernacular history and trace memories to publically explore the changing conditions of community and social identity through the medium of a community-owned field. The geo-social position of this field enables her to engage local people in debates where community isn’t simply assumed to be something given, a norm and the guarantor of an established ‘position’. Instead it can appear as an ongoing experiment by individuals coming together – however temporarily – to cope with the shifting psychosocial and environmental dynamic of a place.

Simon Read,who lives with his partner on a barge on the River Deben, works as an artist, teacher, environmental designer, community mediator, and ecological activist. He’s been involved with local people and official bodies on saltmarsh restoration projects since 1997. His large map drawings relate to, and frequently inform, management strategies for fluid environments by delineating specific locations in terms of projections of their probable future condition. He retrieves, cross-references, and synthesizes large amounts of data from different official sources so as to equip himself to facilitate debate around environmental planning and management. Simon’s concern about the erosion of the Falkenham Saltmarsh led to him design and build barriers to manage tidal flow and encourage the controlled deposition of silt. This provides a material context in which environmental and other officials, the local community, and inmates at the local prison all play a part. Simon’s intervention responds to environmental change by creating a working local context that acknowledges and addresses the practical and cultural implications of changes in our understandings of land, ownership, responsibility and belonging. It does this in a rapidly eroding physical environment that tends to polarize farmers and those responsible for implementing environmental governance. To address this polarization he is currently exploring how farmers could be encouraged to support carbon-absorbing salt marsh – also a vital protection against coastal erosion – through a carbon credit system that compensates them and benefits the environment.

Cathy Fitzgeraldtrained as a biologist and now works as a forester, artist filmmaker, blogger, green political activist, and writer. She lives in a small wood in County Wicklow, Ireland, which is also the focus for all her activities. Cathy is facilitating the transformation of a Sitka spruce plantation into a sustainably managed mixed species wood. She works in the space between official policy – which neglects, for example, the roll of trees in flood management – and grass roots interest in broadleaf native trees. This interweaves the normally distinct lifeworlds of silvicultural specialists, local communities, timber users, artists, and environmental enthusiasts. Her aim is to realign eco-cultural, scientific, economic and green policy concerns locality, across Ireland, and even internationally. Her work is simultaneously ecological, creative, political, and educational, with her own public self-education as a forester providing the context for dialogue between innovative forestry practice, new conceptions of the nature/culture relationship, and a rethinking of community and environment.

Antony Lyons trained as an environmental and geo-scientist, sculptor, and landscape designer and engages with tidal, estuary, catchment, and other water environments.The Lovely Weather project in Donegal used a multi-constituency approach to challenge normal conceptions of inter-disciplinarity by involved scientific specialists, a local postman, and teachers, parents and pupils from the locality on an equal footing. This created non-hierarchical interactions between scientific weather measurements (rainfall, humidity, temperature, pressure, wind speed, wind direction), the local weather lore held by the village postman, and personal weather-related material from Antony and members of a small volunteer observation team. Local peat bogs and their role as carbon sinks were central here, raising questions about the complexity of climate and its changes in a local context. These questions now feed into debates about the Irish Government’s interpretation of European environmental legislation.

Deirdre O’Mahony was born in the rural west of Ireland, left to develop a career, and later returned to work there. She often works by recognizing and using the transformative potential of anomalies in conventional situations and narratives. The situations she then generates loosen up habitual narratives and positions, helping to change protective withdrawal into outgoing social action. The X-PO project is typical of this process. The anomaly here was the life of a man called Mattie Ryan – that’s his portrait on the right. I don’t have time to go into detail here but it’s all on the web site. The project inspired a local research group who then challenged an authoritative anthropological account of rural life in the West of Ireland in the 1930s, written by two Harvard scholars. This challenge highlights the unequal power relations embedded in traditional academic fieldwork, and so raises questions about the inequality of other, more immediate, power relations. X-PO also provides the basis for SPUD, a many-stranded, ongoing international collaboration brings together the traditional Irish agricultural knowledge of local farmers,and individuals and cultural institutions internationally. Its purpose is to value local knowledge, facilitate ability to cope with threats to food security, and raise levels of self-sufficiency.

In different ways and in different contexts, each of these projects works to facilitate new coping strategies by making space for the empathetic imagination necessary to shared ethical action – including political action. They do so by translating across lifeworlds normally assumed to be insular ’worlds-unto-themselves’, by listening out for then anomalies that might allow people to re-narrate those insular worlds in other, more open and empathetic ways. They invite exchange between global knowledge and local understanding, between professional practice and lay skills, between all the multiple elements of lifeworlds as polyverses. If they facilitate resilience, it is a shared social resilience that collectively chooses to face, rather than resist, radical change.

Iain Biggs

educator / artist / researcher

Category Archives: Projects

Bird Brained? Notes on work in progress.

Deep Mapping and the importance of ‘listening to the dead’

The undervalued third: reflections on enacting ecosophy through ‘deep’ or ‘narrative’ mappings

Landscape Values: Place and Praxis – a personal response

Between creative praxis and place governance: four examples

“Edge and Shore: Acts of Doing (surveying the edges of place and practice)” – notes towards a partial translation.

Considerations of ‘The Map is Not the Territory’: an essay

Some visual work under way …

Deep mapping, conversation, and re-forging tools for thought

Coping strategies and the art of social translation.