A staff/student research project exhibition led by Anushka Athique and Hannah Lammin.
Stemming from a project which explores how our bodies interact with landscapes, this exhibition asks how embodied creative practices within the landscape enables us to empathise with other spaces and reinstate a more empathetic relationship to the environment.
Private Viewing Wednesday December 11, 4 – 6pm. Booking below
Landscape Encounters is a participatory-creative-practice-action-research project, which explores situated and embodied ways of engaging with landscapes through sensing, movement and making. This exhibition shares the outcomes of the first Landscape Encounter – a residential workshop at Wilderness Wood, East Sussex – in the form of photographic documentation, sketches, written reflections, and sculptural objects made and worn by participants
Landscapes emerge through entangled multi-species encounters – interactions between microscopic and macroscopic entities that are iterated across different spatial and temporal scales. Humans are critical agents in ecosystems and our cultures impact the environment profoundly, even in the ‘wildest’ of places. Yet these entanglements are so pervasive that they can be difficult to perceive, raising questions about what methods we can use to create shared models that will enable us to empathise with other beings we encounter in the landscape, and ultimately to reinstate a sustainable relationship with the ecosystems we operate within.
The project’s methodology, inspired by decolonial pedagogies, takes diverse lived experiences as a starting point for the co-production of knowledge. It is informed by Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt – the phenomenal world of an entity entailing both its perceptions of its surroundings and the effects it has on this environment. Participants reflect on the form of their own Umwelts as they move through and observe the landscape, and work together to imagine the Umwelts of other types of beings they encounter (animals, plants, fungi). They then experiment with altering their sensoria to experience inhabiting the landscape otherwise, creating bodily attachments using a selection of simple materials to amplify or occlude particular senses, or re-shape body parts to change how they affect/are affected by their surroundings. The practice engenders an experiential knowing-with, which attunes participants to the landscape’s diverse cultures through their own wildness.
Biographies:
Anushka Athique, Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, University of Greenwich, has been working with embodied methods of site analysis for 15+years in particular walking as both a dramaturgical tool and as a vehicle for engaging the community through performance and storytelling landscape.
Hannah Lammin, Senior Lecturer in Media Theory, University of Greenwich, is a media philosopher exploring affective experience that emerge through embodied interactions between people, spaces and technologies. This project is informed by her training as a dancer and aerial circus practitioner.
Participant names: Sai Mudunuri; Omiete Frank-Briggs; Mattie O’Callaghan; Hannes Aava; Lauryn Keift-Wilshere; Sneha Bapodra; Marc Hawkey
Research Workshop: Wilderness Wood: https://www.wildernesswood.org
booking
Events held at the University of Greenwich Galleries are free to attend unless otherwise stated. Booking is not required, but by letting us know you intend to come you can help us to plan our events better.