Key Pages
ProjectsWe take as a starting point Walter Benjamin's observation that 'When someone goes on a trip (s)he has something to tell about'.
We continue to be interested in what we bring to site as well as 'read' from it, and focus on how we produce place through creative research.
Welcome and introduction of discussant, John Wylie (Geography, Exeter)
Brief individual presentations that consider how our memories of the weekend inflect, extend, complicate or respond to site. The aim is to build up a picture of Epynt for symposium delegates - how we tell place to someone who wasn't there.
Three groups will focus on a specific place in Epynt. Groups will consider the various activities (recording, representing, analysing, performing) they engaged in and will aim to recall such things as sounds, gestures, images. What methodological opportunities does such interdisciplinary group work present?
Reading of T. C. Thomas' 1959 play about Epynt
(provided)
Individuals presentations, including papers, video, artworks, performance.
Moira Gavin & Carol Stevens: 'Mynydd Epynt'
The groups gather again to discuss what has arisen out of the weekend in terms of considered, creative-academic outputs
John Wylie will conclude the day with some thoughts and provocations
Symposium participants include:
ARTISTS Richard Huw Morgan, Ivor Davies, Moira Gavin
MoD Lt Col Chris Sernberg, Carl Salmond
U WALES, ABERYSTWYTH Prof Mike Pearson, Heike Roms, Roger Owen, Margaret Ames, Peter Merriman
UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL Tim Cole, Peter Coates, Angela Piccini, Jo Carruthers, J D Dewsbury
UNIVERSITY OF WEST OF ENGLAND Carol Stevens, Iain Biggs, Jim Dixon
Posted at Sep 20/2007 04:08AM:
John Adams:
place, space and ceremony
My engagement with the symposium was securely rooted in a heightened sense of absence from the weekend at Mynydd Epynt, from which I had to withdraw at short notice. So I came with an informed curiousity (given that I had done some preparation) tinged with a real sense of loss or, more specifically, of lost opportunities to make work in new circumstances with new people in an evidently contested place. The tellings and retellings at the symposium were for the most part fascinating and provocative, at times inevitably flirting with anecdote and banality ... these notes are a fairly immediate and unmediated response
The visiting group of artists and academics seemed to share an intense, reflexive focus on the material and aesthetic qualities of place whilst the military seemed equally focused on space – a site of configurations designed to shape modes of being from which thought is absent …
However, taking a cue from Angela’s opening observations on the imperfections that characterise disciplinary approaches to structuring ideas and experience, I’d like to link the themes of absence, tripping and telling with questions of methodology …
As with all good travel stories, the tale of a physical journey connects with an inner journey that, in the research context, perhaps needs to be mapped and directed with a certain rigour. One strategy suggested by various comments, might focus on a site-specific sense of ‘being in place’: a developmental evocation or rehearsal of the destination site < > foregrounding within the home site points of departure < > decisions on what to take, what to leave behind < > route planning and scheduling. All focusing a sense of apprehension, a desire to engage with wild desires and impossible aspirations caged within discourse (‘absence’), uncertainties about process, performance and outcomes… But still with some idea of the baggage in the guise of generic or site specific knowledge, disciplinary dispositions, politics, and so on.
The outward journey was evidently a substantial experience, with plenty of accounts evoking the visual and visceral experience of travel, to landscape transitions and boundary crossing, and to various inconsequential rites of passage … a sense of the physicality of moving through place (walking, driving) as part of the strategy, the preparation for close encounters …
Arrival –a site of past event and events yet to be … there were a number of reflections on questions of desire and belonging (longing-to-be): How to come into being in that place? How to be present? One strategy would embrace the ritual dynamics of narrative that require guise and disguise, the assumption of site-specific roles as embodied rites of legitimisation: outsider, tourist, guest, … In short, orientation: ways in which the self is centred or reconciled with place through the kinds of reflexive and reflective micro-ceremonials mentioned by many participants: of seeking refuge, of entering and leaving, of scrutiny and inspection, of unpacking, re-arranging, walking the bounds, discovering one (micro)place in relation to another. This as a preparation for observing, identifying, categorising, recording the myriad ways in which material become time, and time becomes flesh, dissolving into the fingers of an outstretched hand, or furrows in the earth, or contour lines on a weary map … and embracing the desire (or obligation) to apprehend, a suspension of place within and beyond time through the rituals, technologies and conventions of making work.
The ceremonies of departure…
..and on to the rituals of telling: logging, picture and sound editing: selecting, reflecting, ordering as a means by which to re-/ discover revelations, insights, narratives, values within the data. Here experience condenses into audio-visual signs and material, determined by ethics and aesthetics... with the reject material evicted from the realm of representation, consigned by trash or gash to a semiotic black hole …
In short, my sense of performative method arising from the symposium points towards a dialogic and semantic approach to a sensibility shaping and shaped by embodied, temporal and site-specific practices… What is method other than ceremony, form in the guise of substance?
Posted at Nov 02/2007 08:38AM:
iain biggs: Since the symposium I have been working on the temporary map piece (of which Angela now has a proper large-scale digital version) with a view to taking it into another field. This has led me to make what is in effect my first large-scale digital print. For further information see my personal "folder".
