Roan/M

We are excited to announce that the exhibition Roan/m by Sarah Le Quang Sang (SLQS) opens at MOMA Machynlleth next weekend and runs 22nd April/10th June 2023

Supported by (Arts) Territory Exchange

Roan/m investigates rights to roam, land rights and diversity in the rural landscape and the equestrian world. Roan/m is the coming together of three series of works made by SLQS, some of which were created and inspired by two research periods in Machynlleth over 2021-22. 

Image credit Sarah Le Quang Sang (SLQS) 2022.


Read more here Roan/m at MOMA Machynlleth

Submissions are also open to submit to the accompanying symposium on June 4th - see below.

Street Road - Un-boxing!

Our exhibition at Street Road curated by Emily Arminian and a variety of participants was a wonderful collaborative affair! All of the unboxings and curatorial reflections can be viewed as videos now on their website - so take a dive in!


Residual Encounters: intra-placemaking in Opening to the Other - India Boxall.

Residual Encounters: intra-placemaking in Opening to the Other.


A reflection on the long-term collaborative postal exchange between the artists Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir and Rhona Eve Clews. India Boxall.


Water is a conduit and a mode of connection. 

- Astrida Neimanis

Rhona Eve Clews Photographing a Geyser. Image credit Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir 2020.


I am wading into a reflection on Opening to the Other after experiencing the artists present their collaboration at the recent Arts Territory Exchange symposium “Iceland: Mobility, Spatiality, Virtuality”. The event held space for artists and creative researchers to share how their creative practices have been informed by Iceland's geologic, ecologic, and symbolic resonance. Despite their distance, Iceland provides a multitude of ways into site specificity for these practitioners. I recall my own desire to travel to Iceland upon seeing the apparent closeness of its silvery mass to my home in Scotland on Google maps. Travel restrictions in pandemic-realism nullified this desire, but I can visit Iceland via the fibre optic cables pulsing on the floor of the North Sea. My awareness of the thick waters churning the distance between us has become palpable. I travel to Iceland in my head and online and via the symposium and my body stays here: I become a wave. 

Berglind was born in Iceland and Rhona dreamt of Iceland as a teenager living in an English suburban town not so far from where I grew up. Though the sea wasn’t far away, the proximity to the City and engine of London beckoned. For me, this proximity germinated a longing for a denser and more engulfing sensation of the sea and its accompanying weather 

(problematising London comes easily when dreaming of Reykjavik). 

Berglind and Rhona began their epistolary exchange in 2018, reaching to each other across land mass and gaping sea to collaborate on material encounters. Anchored to Iceland as a vital source for generating new material knowledges, Opening to the Other holds space for both artists to contemplate their prerequisite ties to the country. Berglind and Rhona both have practices with roots in photographic and performance-based processes, employing analogue techniques that speak to residual encounters between mediums. In 2020, as lockdown engulfed Europe, the artists were well-equipped to respond to long distance contact, collaboration, and friendship. In the unprecedented light of pandemic-realism, Opening to the Other became a practice in mapping-in-response-and-in-relation-to precarious and uncertain conditions. 

What is true of the map is true of the device it resides on, as it is of the broader category of networked technologies to which both belong [...] equipped with (these) devices, we’re both here and somewhere else at the same time, joined to everything at once yet never fully anywhere at all.

- Adam Greenfield

The body pinned to the virtual map is chartered in real-time. In this inexplicable enmeshing of the subject of human body with an objectified, or codified, notion of place, the binary dictating the two comes apart. What is revealed? It depends on whose bodies are mapping or being mapped. Mapped through surveillance, all bodies are chartered and divided; but it is the marginalised and/or female-identifying body that is dense mapped with cultural and political marks, predominantly by colonial and patriarchal supremacies in the system of neoliberal capitalism. 

Image credit Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir 2020.

The virtual realm deals with bodies via algorithmic pathways and structures of code that allude to a technocracy hinged to the same supremacies/systems. In light of climate-chaos-pandemic-realism, we have witnessed certain bodies being disproportionately affected, due to a myriad of oppressions and traumas, such as climate migrancy and the global monopoly on Covid-19 vaccination. In this epoch, the interbeing of self and place is more prevalent than ever, yet our technopolitical systems do not seem to have caught up to the fact. As I type, a microscopic virus is moving across the borders of skin and land at an alarming rate, revealing that the intersections between these actors have yet to be reckoned with. 

According to geographer Doreen Massey, a map is “a presentation of an essential structure” - the human body, the body of the Earth, the bodies of water that frame continents, are essential and contingent structures that continually rearrange themselves in relation to each other. Virtualising the map via software flattens this ontological web and points to affinities that go beyond strictly dichotomous ontological codes. 

Could this be what feminist quantum theorist Karen Barad speaks of when they employ the term “intra-action”, “to replace ‘interaction,’ which necessitates pre-established bodies that then participate in action with each other. Intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably.”? Recognising self and place as intra-acting and dynamic agents affords a fluidity to the mapping of such a self/place. Fluidly mapping places-in-relation-to-self requires us to imagine a chorus of encounters rather than a fixed and static reading of place and self as separated entities. Place-making in lieu of the virtual realm becomes more about contingency rather than accuracy: we’re both here and somewhere else at the same time. 

In reference/resonance to fluidity as a position of ontology, and the enmeshing of place and self, Opening to the Other speaks to contemporary feminist philosopher Astrida Neimanis’ deep and intuitive writing about watery subjectivity and relational placemaking. In her essay Hydrofeminism: or, on becoming a body of water (an inspirational text for Rhona, Berglind, and myself), Neimanis shifts the calcified ontology of the anthropo, liquidising the canon of Eurocentric knowledge to allow a hydro-logic to pool in. Speaking to our soupy origins, Neimanis asks: “What if a reorientation of our lived embodiment as watery could move us, for example, beyond the longstanding debate among feminisms whereby commonality (connection, identification) and difference (alterity, unknowability) are posited as an either/or opposition?” Identifying as watery affords human subjectivity a space beyond the strict ontological and epistemological binaries that have underpinned politics, ethics, cultures and societies since the European Renaissance. Neimanis’ hydro-logic encourages relationalities between alterity and ontology in the narrative of species and planet, in recognition of the critical and necessary importance of the human’s relation to the more-than-human-world.

The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities: what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge.

- Donna J. Haraway

Visiting Iceland via the internet, I found devastating statistics regarding the rate of loss of the island’s glaciers. The ice that gives the country its name is melting into water at a rapid rate. In 2019, the country held a symbolic funeral for Okjökull, its first glacier lost to climate change. This moment is remembered with a plaque, both dedicated to Okjökull’s memory and in grim admission to future generations. It reads: “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” This epistolatory call to a future Iceland without ice needs no response: the reply laps in the island in the form of snow-capped waves, melting abnormally quickly into newly formed lagoons. What binds these processes together is water: a conduit for messages from within and beyond. 

Opening to the Other operates through the density of distance in order to provoke unique subjectivities and modes of interbeing that chime with Neimanis’ call for hydro-logic. The combined practices of friendship and material exchange reorientate the artists’ human selves towards a position of watery alterity, gesturing a recognition of the complex continuities and discontinuities laid out by feminist scholar Donna J. Haraway. 

The task of reimagining ourselves in relation to place within the context of climate-chaos-pandemic-realism, (a term I have been using for the Anthropocene), is pressing and urgent in new ways every day. As an ongoing act of collaborative placemaking in what has been described as the “neoliberal anthropocene”, Opening to the Other presents the importance of intra-placemaking between all subjects, including the place itself, in response to climate catastrophe. A fluid mapping of place permits the artists to lean into disrupted versions/visions of place and meshes/messes of self: acknowledging the relational and unfixed ontology of place in the context of climate could allow us to orient our responses better and more coherently to assist in its survival, and disrupt those who continue to undertake and/or promote its depletion.  


Iceland’s letter to the future symbolises the often-paralysing nature of climate-chaos, now operating in tandem with, and in relation to, pandemic-realism. Reaching beyond the present to speak to climate-critical futures requires a notion of place-making that is intra-acted and residual, reckoning with the places of now and places of futurity in the site of the self/ourselves: is this place-making in, or in alterity to, the neoliberal anthropocene? 




Source materials:

Hydrofeminism, or On Becoming a Body of Water - Astrida Neimanis (2017)

https://spacestudios.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/hydrofeminism_or_on_becoming_a_body_of_water.pdf

For Space - Doreen Massey (2005)

https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/massey-for_space.pdf

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life - Adam Greenfield (2017)

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene - Donna J. Haraway (2016)

https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4374763/mod_resource/content/0/Haraway-Staying%20with%20the%20Trouble_%20Making%20Kin%20in%20the%20Chthulucene.pdf

More information on Iceland’s glaciers:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/02/24/walking-on-thin-ice-how-global-warming-is-threatening-iceland-s-iconic-glaciers

More information on intra-action:

https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/i/intra-action.html



India Boxall is an artist and creative researcher interested inspeculative material feminisms; autotheory; transcorporeality; psychogeography; and spiritual ecology. https://www.indiaboxall.online/bio


For more on ‘Opening to the Other’ the collaboration between between Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir and Rhona Eve Clews see HERE.

 Curatorial Reflections on Un-boxing.


 Curatorial Reflections on Un-boxing at Sainte-Croix-de-Mareuil by Jane Linden.


The single square box stands as a provocation in the middle of the gallery floor; its address/import labels revealing nothing of its contents. What to do with it? Who is best placed to split open the box and let its contents spill out, who indeed should take responsibility to un-wrap, un-tie, un-ravel - to un-do – each parcel; and how far should that ‘revealing’ be taken? What end do we seek here? What elements of this process of disclosure might we select as the kernel – the ‘end’ product to be ‘exhibited’ for others to confront and enjoy? And how much licence might we have to place one object against another…to create further resonance or narrative, to communicate with and to embellish……

One of the most significant aspects, of this project, conceived by Gudrun Filipska et al, shares the grounding values of the aTE initiative which seeks to engender dialogue between artists and their locations – to identify stark contrasts and shared ground, and to generate new material through collaboration and participation. The ensuing material serves as a dynamic multidisciplinary archive inviting further contemplation and interaction both directly and online. 

The Un-Boxing project further explores these notions of the democratic in art production and consumption through its fluxus-like invitation to interact with and add-to, thus blurring all those boundaries between artist, curator and consumer. Moreover, further challenges are evoked on ideas about what actually constitutes an artwork, and in what contexts it could be acknowledged as such. To be invited to ‘un-box’ such evidence of engagement, then, affords, and indeed encourages, further participatory agency such that the pleasures of revealing by whomsoever and wheresoever serve not just as part of a shared curatorial process but also as a deeply creative and reflective one. So it is then, that these ephemeral documents drawn from solid locations each with their own physical, geo-political and cultural characteristics, resonate in a number of different ways leading us to further trains of thought- lines of enquiry – flights of fancy.

As we excavate, absorb, and reflect here, on some the issues that may be made explicit or lie buried amidst the layering of these materials, as active participants, we are compelled to consider our own experiences, localities and environments. Our sharing of these may come in different ways – through the telling of stories, reminiscences and a plethora of physical, found and factured responses and interventions. Oh, the sheer joy of it!

/

…..the absorbed and careful unwrapping of delicate handmade paper generates a story of art student days with abortive attempts at papermaking from cow dung. There is also talk of natural pigments, antipodean red earth, plant juices and memories of hand dying wool and cloth with onion skins and lichen. Synthetic dyes and water pollution…..

…..someone moves deliberately across the gallery space to place a miniature wooden chair in a fleeting shaft of sunlight….

…..Is this a letter to someone…..should I be reading it?

…..a film shows abandoned slate quarries in Snowdonia, the soundtrack reminiscent of the curious noise the tile-cutting machine at the chateau makes when switched off after a day of preparing locally quarried limestone travertine slabs for the new kitchen…..

…..There are many maps here, and documents and accounts of journeys describing a coming together, a meeting, an exchange of territory…..re-worked boundaries…..transgressions, inclusions and intrusions… “If I see you on my land again I’ll shoot your horse”…..

…..objects are taken out in to the open- set against trees and piles of leaves, against the sky, a hole in a wall…..sometimes juxtaposed - life against death, dark against light, blue black slate against ivory white limestone, the ‘real’ against the documented, your location against mine…..Othertimes blended and integrated in shared existence. Despite our differences, things can be the same the world over…..

…..And now we hear the distinctive sound of the migrating cranes returning to their breeding grounds and wonder at the spectacle of their formations - seemingly endless strings of dots coming wave after wave, the lead arrowhead occasionally dispersing and forming others as energy ebbs and flows– up to a kilometre high. They come from southern Spain, flying over France (sometimes in just a day) to settle and breed in northern Europe. Can you hear them? Can you see them….?

…..We drink coffee and eat cake made from locally grown walnuts whilst fabricating origami cranes from discarded wrappings and newspaper - our final contribution. It is time to pack up…..to retrieve, to sort-through, re-order, re-wrap, re-fold and re-box…..Curious to think that such a small insignificant brown cardboard box can contain so much…..


Jane Linden is a curator who runs La Vieille Closerie, Aquitaine. See more on Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/lavieillecloserie/



Special thanks to Robert and Marion Hadaway – proprietors of the Chateau Gallery.

SEE MORE ABOUT THE UNBOXING EXHIBITION HERE >

Profile - Hannah Stageman. 

Hannah Stageman is an Arts Territory Exchange member, artist and curator who lives in Essex UK. She graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Colchester School of Art in 2011, and a Masters in Art History and Theory in 2014 from the University of Essex. Stageman draws upon the history of landscape, using drawing to help her explore nature, the natural sciences and attendant social histories. She is interested in the idea of the index, the trace, and her physical interactions with the environment. She records her experience through a ‘drawing’ practice which has evolved to encompass printmaking, photography and installation. Stageman has been paired up twice as part of the aTE Residency by Correspondence, firstly with the Alaska based artist Katie Ione Craney with whom she created a body of work and then with Dutch artist Roelant Meijer. Through these exchanges she has further expanded her interests in botany, geography, cartography landscape, wilderness and walking as research practice.
Photograph from ‘Evening walks’ series - curtesy Hannah Stageman.

Photograph from ‘Evening walks’ series - curtesy Hannah Stageman.

Much of Stageman’s recent (pre-lockdown) work has been made in response to her daily commutes, the routines becoming part of a mobile sketchbooking process through which she calls into question the pre-supposed ‘non-relationality’ (Auge 1995) of the transitional spaces inhabited by her and other commuters and the particular forms of looking which emerge from the mise en scène of a moving train window.
Sketch book documentation - image curtesy Hannah Stageman.

Sketch book documentation - image curtesy Hannah Stageman.

The artist says:
 ‘The retaking of photographs, and the multiple retracings of lines – power cables, floor markings, industrial structures – speak of the repetitive nature of commuting and sometimes the onlydifference is the weather. I haven’t decided what will become of these images, but I keep beingdrawn towards making books (working in a library, somehow it feels apt/inevitable). This work hasbeen put on hold for now as lockdown has meant my studio is closed and my train journeys haveceased. Instead, I have been making work from my “daily exercise” and exploring the local.’
Stageman has throughout lockdown produced a series of photographs based on the rigid routine of the daily walk, a practice which she documents on Instagram.
Photograph from ‘Evening walks’ series - curtesy Hannah Stageman.

Photograph from ‘Evening walks’ series - curtesy Hannah Stageman.

On her experience of lockdown and daily walks, she says:
 ‘It has caused me to re-examine my relationship to landscape painting and photography and the location in which I live. Many peopledislike the “boring” landscape of East Anglia, its flatness and seemingly unchanging environment – ittook me a long time to appreciate my home. I have always lived on the edges – I grew up on theedge of a rural village, then a large town. A 10-minute walk from my home can feel like I’m in themiddle of nowhere, but I can still hear the A12.’

See more on the artists website.

Refs :

Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity - Marc Auge, Verso (London, New York 1995).


Everyday Recently, 2020. 

I live on the coast of Washington, and on February 1st, I started a daily practice of going to my local beach every day for a month, and photographing it at the same time, and same spot. It was about taking the time to look at something from the same perspective every day at the same time. First I went between 9 and 10 in the morning, and then at sunset. It began as a way to document the changes on the beach, but than it expanded. I have a strong relationship to nature which has been deepened by this global crisis. Although I'm an interdisciplinary artist, photography is the medium I wentto first.
The quarantine is not dissimilar to my daily life as an introvert, in terms of isolation and social distancing, but there's now a heightened sense of anxiety and depression because it's affecting so many other people. On March 24, when our quarantine started, I had to move out of my trailer in the state park I was living in/working at called Cape Disappointment, and rent a beach cabin further up the Peninsula. My daily photographic practice has now deepened to become about being in the same place everyday at the same time, as a way to provide structure, stability, calm, hope. I've noticed it sometimes feels like I'm in 'clean' nature vs 'unclean' nature: which may be a psychological reaction to the virus. Being in nature, devoid of other people feels different now. These kind of changes in the world feel important to document through my art practice.
I've been organizing the images for online presentation on my senseofplace LAB.com site; an on-going public art platform since 2008 in San Francisco. I'm presently interested how these images are seen collectively, so they are arranged very tightly together as a composite of each month. This grid has come to represent other aspects of our life now; a cartoon, a calendar marking time, the Zoom format of our human interactions, window panes, an inventory, a list, a catalogue, buildings seen only in our minds.
Laura Brown is an intra-disciplinary artist presently based on the Washington coast. She has worked internationally, and as senseofplace LAB - which has become mobile and nomadic, with a primary relationship to arts education. Her present work incorporates influences such as place, Buddhism and Arte Povera: the 1970’s Italian movement focused on using found materials to reflect the cultural landscape.

 www.laurahalseybrown.art  + www.senseofplacelab.com

aTE Sound Library in collaboration with MUCK (Must Use Critical Knowledge). 

MUCK (Must Use Critical Knowledge) and aTE have collaborated to bring together a number of textual prompts to instigate questions around the possibility of the Earth’s recovery, the inevitability of man’s eventual demise, connectivity, hope and isolation. Artists from around the world are invited to provide accompanying sound works reflecting on their own territories, the fantasy of other places and the exitements and restrictions of proximity and distance. To submit a sound work refecting on any of the texts, your current socially distant sittuation or anything else you find experimental or soothing please e mail a sound file under ten minutes to Gudrun@artsterritoryexchange.com 
Read selected texts here.
Detail from front cover of Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (S.F. MASTERWORKS edition)

Detail from front cover of Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (S.F. MASTERWORKS edition)

Arts Territory Exchange Sounds Archive will also become part of Transcultural Exchange’s Hello World project; an international project where artists and organisations throughout the world have submitted art works to share with all of us as gestures of goodwill and solidarity in these Covid times. http://transculturalexchange.org/activities/hw/overview.htm

virtual tours and 3D field trips

Feverish city: Presence, remote-ness and adrift-ness in the urbanlandscape - India Boxall 


'Feverish City' is the first in a series of experimental  texts written in response to a walking workshop held in Glasgow in 2019.  Interspersed with a concrete poem about the beach at Irvine. 'Feverish  City' is constructed in such a way to represent sediments and structures within the urban and coastal environments that the writer inhabits and moves between, as part of their creative research practice. 
Photograph from the Workshop ‘Fieldnotes on adrift-ness’ Glasgow 2019. Image Courtesy, India Boxall and MUCK Space.

Photograph from the Workshop ‘Fieldnotes on adrift-ness’ Glasgow 2019. Image Courtesy, India Boxall and MUCK Space.


———————————————————————————
Small mountains form and drift along slicked earth
As I push hair behind my ears and let the melodic crash steer my body

Remote-ness can be a motive for cohesion
and co-habitancy that does more to encourage flourishing rather than disrupt it. Living
spaces, ones dense with biodiversity and
worldings, are lacking in abundance where I stay.
As a city dweller
it becomes apparent that concrete and brickwork curate my ambles, twisting my routes to fit
the overarching urban plan.
Much of the buildings in this particular city are being demolished,
and new fabrications poised to be positioned in their wake. Wrenching, hauling, drilling; an
orchestra of
matter being pulled apart, collected, ground up and used as rubble to create foundations,
paired with the shouting of the neon-clad
workforce who carry out these practices. Areas of construction become territories planned to
a meticulous level. They have destinies.

Building sites transform into sites of experience, thus becoming sites of memory. Sites that
act as hosts to memory exist within
remote and non-remote environments, however remote-ness lends itself to the more-than-
human other and lends itself to notions of
distance, remote-ness and adrift-ness within the urban landscape.

The mapping of a city is a political act. Cartographies are politically imbued things; they
illustrate borders and territories whilst
telling us where we have not yet been. The colonial acts in our ancestry knot us to the way in
which we attempt to divide and share
the blocks of land, making up streets, squares and passages. The land is planned, with non-
beautiful yet necessary objects like pipes and cables
buried in order to keep the appearance of effortless functionality. It is only when the earth is
dredged up that you can see the
mud-covered guts of the structured world and remember that you are standing in a forged
landscape.

Remote-ness feels near impossible within these heavily designed boroughs. It is something
out of reach, a bus or train ride away, over the horizon towards
what Rebecca Solnit describes as the ‘blue of distance’;. Remote-ness is an escape from
reality, a dream that performs to unburden us from
metropolitan life. Once experienced, the city dweller leaves remote-ness behind and starts
saving up time to visit there again. Back to
the endless scroll of beach and field that falls under the ‘escape’ hashtag on Instagram,
locked into a screen in the palm of your hand.

Scrambling up sanded banks with toes spread
A nod to the webbed feet of herring gulls gliding over quaking and soft dunes

Can remote-ness be useful if it is performative? Recently, artist collaborator and friend
Shona and I and lead a silent walk to a derelict park in Glasgow.
The silence was ‘informed’ in the sense that we made a conscious decision to use group
silence to support our inner thoughts and our
interactions with the places along the walk. Silence became our bond, with the act of walking
an important counterpart to the lack of sound.
We endeavoured to produce no human sound until we got to the park, where, as a group,
we prized open our silence with chatter about
walking, wastelands and to what significance did it have that our group was comprised
entirely of womxn? We spoke of the park itself,
which is made up of uneven slabs of grassland overlapping each other and connected by
steps that have been carved out of the earth. The park
has a stage-like appearance to it, evoking the spatiality of an ancient theatre, whereby urban
melodramas had played out. Looking around,
we could see relics of these social fissures across the horizontal plains: areas scorched
black from fire, with smashed glass pieces
dusting the uneven surface of the ground like confetti. A marriage had taken place here,
between a landscape cast to the category of baron space,
and the people who seek the forgotten land-facets of urban dwelling in order to socialise,
become intoxicated or perhaps for somewhere to sleep in the warmer months.

The park is surrounded by a part panoramic view of hill and mountain side, stretching North
towards the Cairngorms and the edge of the sky, the
point where the eyes can hardly reach, causing the brain to make up the rest of the picture
using snapshots from memory and imagination. Our group stood with this backdrop
cradling us and as we prepared to return to the city centre in silence, we spoke of one last
feeling that had been induced by the experience thus far: presence.

Presence is sought on a scale previously untold, as we seek the event horizon of experience
whilst living our on-line and on-screen lives. Our group’s
joint silence, paired with the physical act of walking and the sense of the air becoming
fresher and
as we rose
from the motorway-clad city to one of its highest points in altitude. Presence, a state adrift
from our schematic comprehension of life, is the antithesis
to remote-ness within linguistics. However, here, presence became remote-ness, as our
united silence informed us of how stifling urbanisation can be, not only
physically but metaphysically.

Biting my thumb nail,
Sand gets in my mouth and I crunch down on microscopic shell all the way home

When I think of remote-ness, I think of states of adrift-ness and being that are tied to land as
drama is tied

to a stage. In the city, more-than-human events do play out in the bad-lands, the edges and
corners of the amphitheatre of life-worlds. However, these symbiotic interactions are ever
swallowed by a lattice of steel and concrete. Presence, remote-ness and adrift-ness could
be defined
as existing in the areas of lack in the urban landscape, the non-curated gaps in a city that
evoke un-tidiness and unwanted-ness as they do not meet the aesthetic planned by
developers.

Thus, these areas of lack can inform creative practice. A creative practice that seeks to
reside in the interstitial, the precarious and
divergent is a contingency to the Western neo-Capitalist and Neo-liberal manifolds that
trickle into socio-economic placemaking.

Visiting a body of water as a body of water
Cold seeps
Wet infinity
Feverish city

————————————————
India Boxall is a creative researcher who resides in  Glasgow. Her practice, comprised of critical art writing and visual  art, is rooted in prizing open situated knowledge using an ecofeminist  perspective. India is the co-editor of MUCK (Must Use Critical  Knowledge), a fledgling library currently existing online that promotes  text dedicated to untangling hegemonic claims to knowledge. 
Instagram:
@demfeelinz
@muck_space
Website:
indiaboxall.info
muckspace.info

Interview with Dawn Scarfe// 

Dawn Scarfe is an artist working with sound installation and performance, she is based in London. Her work explores ideas of resonance, natural and manufactured.
She works with soundCamp to organise Reveil: an annual crowd sourced live broadcast which tracks the sound of the sunrise around the world for 24hrs. Her work has been aired on BBC Radio 3 and  Resonance FM. She has exhibited at ZKM Karlsruhe, Q-02 Brussels and New  Mart, Seoul. Residencies include Sound and Music’s Embedded programme  with Forestry Commission England, MoKS Centre for Art and Social  Practice, Estonia, TOPOS Exeter and Octopus Collective with Cumbria Wildlife Trust at South Walney, Cumbria.
Interview below with Gudrun Filipska:
GF: Your sound work focuses often on the relationship between movement and place often through the recording of repetitive actions as in 'Etchings', you seem to use recording sound as a kind of research  method...in that sense to you consider your self to be a 'Sound artist'  or is the mode/medium of your exploratory practice potentially  interchangeable...? 
DS: With ‘Etchings’ I was interested in the aura of the Old Dairy building and I found a long stick outside that turned out to be a good instrument to explore it with. Swingng the stick at different speeds I felt that I was cutting the air, making impressions in the atmosphere that were reflected by the walls of the room. An ongoing concern of mine is using devices to extend the senses. Influences here include Rebecca Horn's 'body extension' works like 'Scratching both sides of the wall at once' and Robert Hooke's acoustic experiments. I'm most interested in devices that produce or capture sound as they allow me to work with ambience.
‘Etchings’ Performance documentation. Dawn Scarfe.

‘Etchings’ Performance documentation. Dawn Scarfe.

GF: It strikes me that there is an interesting slippage between what is performative and what is documentary in your sound work...the subtle  interventions that go into some of your works, like 'Tree Music' where  you fitted small speakers to the branches of trees, were the actions themselves considered part of the piece?  You also conduct more  formal performance pieces such as 'Rounds: Smeaton's Lighthouse' how do  these practices differ for you and how does the mode of collaborating  with other musicians and performers change the process?

DS: Making ‘Tree Music’ involves listening under a tree, making a drone based composition in response which extends and repeats some of the sounds heard, and then playing the sounds back through small speakers that hang from the ends of the branches (like the seeds of the London Plane tree) and move in the wind (again subtly changing the tone of the sound). So  I'm interested in blending documentary and live elements. I'd like  people to be unsure at times whether or not they are hearing the work or  the environment.
‘Tree Music’. Dawn Scarfe. image courtesy the artist.

‘Tree Music’. Dawn Scarfe. image courtesy the artist.

Working with other performers making Rounds involves sharing immediate responses to the atmosphere of a place. The experience of playing acoustic instruments and live is different and a bit more of a challenge for me personally as I'm shy. Players stand on the top level of  multi storey buildings (Smeaton's Lighthouse and the Radcliffe Observatory), so although the 'intervention' is more obvious than in Tree Music, when visitors enter the space from the lower floors the performers are concealed. Unlike a formal concert people are asked to wander in and out while the piece evolves, and the concern is with heightening the atmosphere of the buildings rather than making music to be recorded and taken anywhere else.
GF: The work also often seems like a process of collaboration between human and more incidental forces of nature – intense sonic observations which make me think of scientific field studies...however there is something in your work which suggests you are making a critique of the (pompous male?) ethnographer through your playing with the same vernacular (you name one of your pieces 'Field notes' for example) and arranging your sound pieces into very conscious archives) what are your thoughts on this?

DS: The works are a series of observations or experiments. I'm interested in what can happen differently with each iteration. There's usually room for improvisation from human performers or the  influence of changing environmental conditions. I like to explore what  people notice about their surroundings and ways of tuning into certain details such as the pitch of insects wings as they fly by and what that can tell us about the speed of the vibration (‘Bee Strings’). I'm inspired  by histories of listening and things like Goethe's theory of Colours: a compelling archive of seeing, containing case studies that can be repeated with materials found around the house. I'm drawn to types of  experiments that would be rejected by modern physicists.
GF: How  was your Forestry Commission(Forestry England) residency, were there  any parameters put in place as to what you would explore or where you  would go?

DS: The great thing about the residency was that it was an open invitation to explore any of the FC sites in England, so I embraced that and tried to visit as many as possible. 

GF: I am interested in your Bivvy Broadcasts work; The idea of camps, semi-permanent, transient structures are fascinating.'Wilderness' survival  and field studies as traditionally very male and colonial practices---yet the digital nature your work and the idea of the broadcast seems to have an egalitarian air which circumvent these ideas of grounding in place or taking ‘possession’ of place (or its sounds)...There is also something interesting about the tenuousness of the signals – the idea of  you out there in the woods trying to broadcast, with interruptions and glitches, a futility which sets itself nicely against the qualitative research methodologies of traditional observational field techniques...there is something about the idea of reaching out through a broadcast which sets your work apart from many 'traditional' sonic  artists...

DS: Setting up a Bivvy Broadcast is about sending a signal - I'm out there somewhere...and making a connection to people listening in from elsewhere. There is a kind of anxiety around the drop-outs, when the signal dies that connection is lost. It is as much about opening a channel to other people, as it is about listening to a particular place. I position the mic close to where I sleep, so I can sometimes be heard shuffling around in the sleeping bag or breathing in the mix. 

I don't reveal the location until after the live stream finishes, this was encouraged by the FC and WFC for my own safety. Stealth and darkness are a big part of the work. I carry all the kit I need in a small rucksack, travel by train and public transport to places I've not been to before, arriving late evening as darkness falls, and stream through the night from 11pm to 7am. I ask remote listeners to  keep vigil over the stream but I don't expect them to stay up all night.  I like the idea that people tune in and then fall asleep, maybe catching a small segment in the morning as they wake up. However I find it quite hard to sleep, being hyper-aware of unfamiliar sounds and often disturbed by the slightest rustle of a leaf.
Wooler bivvy. Image courtesy Dawn Scarfe.

Wooler bivvy. Image courtesy Dawn Scarfe.

GF: There is still a very much gendered ethos around even recreational  camping/hiking, backgrounded against the long history of the male  explorer. Setting such a project as 'Bivvy Broadcasts' in managed and  controlled forests such as Thetford, or urban woodland sseems to make a  clever and (somewhat ironic?) statement about this type of camping – as a  women possibly also regarding parameters of safety...? Was the gendered  nature of exploration and 'camp making' on your mind when you made  Bivvy broadcasts? And what are yourt houghts more widely on the  complicated connections between sound recording practices and travel cultures? 
DS: In the introduction phase of forest visits I went to Kielder and Hamsterley, places I'd been to as a kid. What has seemed like vast ‘wilderness' then now felt more like tree farms, with my eyes drawn to the clear fell sections and planting in rigid rows. We visited new woodlands on former landfill sites such as Thames Chase, and foresters explained how even sites like the New Forest are carefully managed and controlled. Camping overnight isn't permitted and one of the biggest concerns was coming into contact with other (unofficial) human visitors, rather than wildlife. The impulse to access these places out of hours came from the fact that they are normally off limitsin the dark - particularly to women and girls.
I think it is becoming harder to justify using air miles to capture exotic sounds. I work with Sound camp, a collective whose aim is to encourage people to share live sounds of their local environment with a network of remote listeners over the internet. This network involves artists, radio enthusiasts, birders, conservationists, activists and others. In order to be sustainable over the longer term the microphones need tobe embedded in a particular home or community and this type of arrangement feels moreappropriate and meaningful at the present moment than a project with top down structure.



Translation, language and the Ocean. 

Arts Territory Exchange participant Georgina Reskala  lives in Santa Monica California. Her practice consists of photography using large format and pinhole cameras, She also works with found images  and family photographs.
Using long exposures, Reskala takes the  ocean and Santa Monica beach in particular, as her subject, she prints (on archival paper or linen) and re-shoots the images many times over.
Untitled -Pinhole Camera photograph of the Ocean, Santa Monica. Georgina Reskala

Untitled -Pinhole Camera photograph of the Ocean, Santa Monica. Georgina Reskala

She is interested in creating a process of constant translation echoed by her bilingual Mexican/American heritage  and her frequent movement between the languages of Spanish and English. Learning to live in a state of translation is a motif which heavily  informs the work and the sea is symbolic of this process for Reskala, she says ‘The ocean is an endless palimpsest and a daily reminder of  my life in another country…I make a conscious effort to make images of  the ocean in Spanish and translate them into English. Edit, translate  again and go back and forth’.
Untitled - Pinhole Camera photograph of the Ocean, Santa Monica. Georgina Reskala

Untitled - Pinhole Camera photograph of the Ocean, Santa Monica. Georgina Reskala

Reskala admits to being obsessed by repetitive processes - something she sees as akin to swapping between  languages, looking for the point at which understanding or recognition begins to dissolve, becoming, in her words ‘like a story written from left to right and read from top to bottom’.