Key Pages
ProjectsChanges [Aug 26, 2008]
Avonmouth Severn Be...non-blog-blog
6-7 June 2008
Home
Jem Noble and Angel...
At site and behind ...
Events
More Changes...
Key Pages
ProjectsChanges [Aug 26, 2008]
Avonmouth Severn Be...
LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD 1: Text/Event/Image
23 February 2007, Department of Drama, University of Bristol
11am-5pm
The symposium touched on familiar questions about whether we're all archaeologists now (Manifesto, [link]) or all drama practitioners. Where are the spaces produced for other disciplinary practices? Are we in danger of erasing those important specificities? How do we produce collaborative practice that doesn't subsume what we do under those two powerful models? The tensions therein, the resistance of totalising narratives of practice in the face of calls for inter- and transdisciplinarity is a potentially interesting problem for us to tackle. On collaboration see[link].
A question that has arisen repeatedly is that of the boundedness of site. Where are its limits? How is site produced through human and non-human materialities. That is, through performatives.
On performance, some follow the problematic of pinpointing when (temporal) and where (spatial) performance begins and ends. That is, the limits of performance's performativity.
Where some follow human performance at site, others of us focus on things. Lefebvre talks about the house 'permeated from every direction by streams of energy which run in and out of it by every imaginable route: water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio and television signals, and so on' (Production of Space, 1991, p. 93). Latour talks of the 'networkyness' of things, while Law and Singleton talk of mutabile mobiles. How do the specific articulations of material culture, the specific configurations of stone, wood, cabling, perspex, electronic signal produce our understandings of the various emptinesses of Temple Meads?
On 13-15 October 2006, 14 people gathered at Bristol Temple Meads and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum for the inaugural workshop event associated with the AHRC-funded Landscape and Environment Network ‘Living in a Material World’. The Network explores notions of place and space - real and imagined, physical and virtual, natural and constructed, historical and contemporary - as 'performative': in other words, how the active engagement with and practising of space creates our material experiences of place. The organisers are indebted to another railway station-based workshop - the Locative Media workshop at Rautatiesema, Helsinki, organised by Andrew Patterson [link].
Emptiness... abandoned, degraded, disappeared, transitory, unmarked
Our focus engages with the ways in which landscape and environment are often valued or devalued, remembered and forgotten, enabling them to contest and complicate assumptions regarding 'empty space' as well as trace the cultural configurations that create 'emptiness'. 'Emptiness' thus focuses research questions on the specificities of the active constitution and performance of landscape and environment: the presence of absence, the plenitude of emptiness.
Findings, activities, responses...
This first symposium associated with the project brings the initial workshop participants together to discuss across a range of subject areas, including archaeology, literature, fine art, photography, screen art and performance. Panel presentations will address the modes of enquiry we explored, the ways in which the material body (animal and non-animal) was central to our enquiries and how we conceived of the present time - the enacted ‘now’ - of the emptiness of the site.
JD Dewsbury (Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol) will act as Discussant and Chair of the day and speakers include:
Question 1: What is the direction behind the enquiries you made of the site?
Is there an agenda – in terms of pedagogy, ideology, practice or philosophy – behind what you set out to do there? What do you believe in (in terms of why you investigate such sites in the way you do)?
Question 2: In what ways was the body central to your enquiries into place and space?
*the ways in which you are drawn to the affective locations and ecologies within the site
*the visceral impact of the space itself and the flesh of other bodies (including the wear and tear left on the material fabric of the site)
*the experience of the duration of the workshop (e.g. in terms of emotions and the relations with other participants)
*the perspective and orientation of the senses
*the question of animal and nonhuman presence (e.g. bricks, electrical cables, plumbing, electromagnetic waves etc)
Question 3: For your investigations on the day, what was the present time, the enacted ‘now’, of the emptiness of the site?
*Were you aware of trying to avoid the dangerous attraction of memory and the erasures enacted by remembering?
*What are you re-animating or is it more an animation of the site?
*Are there ‘present’ ghosts or traces of ‘absent’ past inhabitations?
*Are the material traces of past occupations loss or an affirmative force?
Spaces are limited to 40. To book a free space for this symposium, please email Sam Barlow, BIRTHA, University of Bristol (sam.barlow@bristol.ac.uk)
Working pages:
Biggs, Carruthers, Piccini: Symposium 1
Douglass Bailey: Symposium 1 (questions, answers, images)
