The place Mynydd Epynt

The project - [link]

We take as a starting point Walter Benjamin's observation that 'When
 someone goes on a trip she has something to tell about'.

We are
 interested in what we might bring to site as well as *read* from it, and 
focus on how we produce place through creative research.



Remembering place:


* What strategies might we individually prepare in advance?

• What might be 
achieved at site?
• What strategies might we develop to remember the place
 afterwards?
• If we plan to use them, what might be the performative roles of
 recording technologies?
• Alternately, what might be achieved without record
 or archive?

Telling place:


For others, elsewhere.

• How might emptiness and desertion be brought into
 modes of exposition?
• Is this *representation*, or a more mobile 
performative production of place through various means?
• What tactics might
 we use for engaging with emptiness: edit, montage, stutter, silence,
 waiting, erasure, inscription, and so on.

The core objectives of our network are:


* to draw on established research practices in individual disciplines in 
order to develop cross-disciplinary methodological approaches to
 understanding landscape and environment via performativities of place and 
space;


• to develop cross-disciplinary investigations of landscape and 
environment as they pertain to 'emptiness', specifically those materially
 rich locations that are seen to be abandoned, degraded, disappeared,
 transitory, unmarked;

• to investigate how location-based research into emptiness and non-space 
may inform material understandings of landscape and environment that avoid 
constructed binaries between urban and rural;


* to produce new perspectives on 'place and space' vis-a-vis landscape and 
environment that can inform collegiate research practices and foster 
knowledge transfer within the cultural industries and public sectors;


• to foster collaborative research practices across institutions and
 sectors in southwest England and in Wales, drawing on a core team of 
University of Bristol participants in the Performativity/Place/Space 
research theme.



A] Friday evening after tour:

Please recall:

• the most memorable thing you heard
• a complete sentence
• a gesture
• what would you have remembered had you gone there without a camera

Now please:

• write one sentence to describe the experience
• write a postcard from Epynt, describing the place with five words
• write a text of 50 words describing one place you remember
• write five things that would make this place better
• draw it: direction, scale, symbolism
  • what is included?
  • what is left out?
• reproduce the tour for 5 minutes in words and actions
• develop two dramaturgical ideas to reproduce the experience elsewhere
  • Tschumi: reciprocity; conflict; indifference
  • inappropriate or indifferent approaches to landscape that make no attempt to decorate or re-enact the site/past.

B] Saturday daytime: projects

Personal

• strategies - to be enacted at each location
• reflection/recording/intervention/action

Remembering place: 
What strategies might we individually prepare in advance? What might be 
achieved at site? What strategies might we develop to remember the place
 afterwards? If we plan to use them, what might be the performative roles of
 recording technologies? Alternately, what might be achieved without record
 or archive?

Group

• discussions - to be held at each location
• activities – at each location
  • take 2 Polaroid photos to represent this place
  • recover one object
  • think about a collective remembering/mapping – perhaps using body as a unit of measurement to map: pace, voice, orientation
  • write ten words to describe the place

C] Saturday evening: mapping project

• Choosing one site:
  • describe what happened; where it occurred; who was involved; what kind of sounds were happening; what kind of smells
  • show what happened

• Choosing one site:
  • make a representation
  • n.b. direction, scale, symbolism
  • how and what to map
  • politics: what it includes and what it leaves out;
  • deep maps – historical dimension
  • that can be reproduced at different scales elsewhere
  • performative maps

• Chose a topic such as landscape
  • chose a number of keywords related to the topic in order to open an analytical space
  • discuss the topic as historical narrative (where does the term come from?)
  • discuss its ethnographic usage (who uses the term? to whom does it have meaning?)
  • discuss differentiation (what terms are similar?)
  • discuss prescription (why/how/by whom should it/should it not be used?)
  • in developing the material, how would you use quotations? from whom?
  • what plurality of voices would you use?
  • could you assign certain material to prose and certain to poetry?

D] Sunday: final session

• begin a story with the words "When I was in...'
• describe/demonstrate/reconstitute Epynt
  • prepared from someone else’s notes/material
  • collectively