Aberdeen seminar 6-7 Feb 2020

Our first network meeting took place at the University of Aberdeen on 6-7 February 2020. Here is the schedule and a report on what happened.

Thursday 6 February

Meet 1-2pm, Sir Duncan Rice Library, ground floor cafe.

2.00 - Seminar room 224, Floor 2 Sir Duncan Rice Library: Welcome and introductions from Jo Vergunst and Anne Bevan. First thoughts from the whole group.

3.00 - Richard Irvine will present a 'full length' seminar that is also part of the Department of Anthropology's weekly seminar series:
'Time horizon: Biographical geology on the West Shore, Stromness, Orkney'

5.00 - Post-seminar drink at the Machar Bar on campus, followed by dinner in town at 7.00: La Lombarda, 2-8 King St, Castlegate, Aberdeen AB24 5AX.

Friday 7 February

Meeting room 1, Floor 7, Sir Duncan Rice Library.

9.30: Scope and scales - locating landscape decision-making. Presentation from Dave Edwards and group discussions.

11.00: Break

11.15: Presentations: Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, Hayden Lorimer, Alec Finlay, Carol Cotterill

12.30: Lunch and off-campus drift.

1.45: Presentations: Malcolm Combe, Helen Graham, Colin Shepherd, Alex Hale

3.00: Break

3.15: Planning our network activities. Group discussions.

4.00: End

Report on the workshop 

1. Introduction

The plan for this workshop was to introduce network participants to each other and begin to explore the range of research and practice that participants are involved with. It also aimed to work towards future events and themes that participants would be interested in pursuing.

This report summarises the presentations, discussions about future events and a number of issues that arise. All network participants are welcome to add, edit and comment on it.

2. Presentations

The workshop began with presentations from PI Jo Vergunst and Co-I Anne Bevan. Jo described the background to the AHRC funding call, the objectives of the network and the proposed series of network events. Anne described her art practice through examples of her work focusing on the marine and coastal environment in Orkney. These were followed by brief introductions from participants: interests ranged from access, heritage, contemporary archaeology, communities, local democracy and planning, art, ecology and climate change.

Richard Irvine presented a paper ‘Time horizon: Biographical geology on the West Shore, Stromness, Orkney’. He argued that deep time (geological timescales) forms the material condition of human existence, even though it is beyond individual human experience. Along the Stromness shore three materials – sandstone, uranium and concrete – are connected to different time horizons and different episodes of community as well as geological history. These included the Orkney community coming together to protest against the potential mining of uranium in the 1970s, raising the question of what kind of responsibility communities today have for the future of their landscapes.

The second day began with a presentation from David Edwards of Forest Research, outlining current approaches to environmental management, and in particular the ecosystems services approach which holds a utilitarian view of nature. A cultural ecosystems services model might better capture how identities, experiences and personal capabilities relate to the environment. A model of co-produced (human-environment) benefits might also be possible. Dave drew attention to a news article in Nature on different conceptions of biodiversity amongst UN scientists: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05984-3. In the discussion we talked about the role of art practice here, the possibility of the artist as healer, the possibility of arts and humanities opening new questions and conversations, the significance of relational as opposed to intrinsic values of landscapes.

We followed this with group discussions around the key issues, scope and scale of our network themes. Jo will add photos of sheets.

Points noted included:

- Institutions often have ‘churn’ of people, in contrast to the arts.

- The importance of connecting with hidden or forgotten groups

- The possibilities of working with small-scale local politics to respond to cynacism towards democracy.

- Intergenerational and children’s / young people’s involvement in landscapes.

- Expanding the idea of what we think about as a ‘landscape decision’.

- Responses to catastrophe / emergency situations.

- Allowing ‘consensual conflicts’.

Further presentations took place as follows:

Tim Collins and Reiko Goto

Tim and Reiko presented a commissioned Deep Mapping project in Ireland. The landscape comprises of raised bogs that were the focal point of industrial extraction of peat as fuel for national energy production. In 2002 a sculpture park emerged which celebrated industrial extraction, informing amenity development of cutaway peatlands. Deep Mapping reveals a narrative of conservation, restoration and regeneration as the basis for a proposed integrative arts and ecology centre in the region with potential to shape emergent public land use.

Hayden Lorimer

Hayden presented an exploration of the Archaeolink heritage site in Aberdeenshire, through the themes of abandonment and ruination. Here a site designed to portray and describe the (prehistoric) past had itself been abandoned. It raised questions around the ways in which the past can be commodified and used for economic development, and culturally how the values of the past are present in the contemporary landscape and may be codified and shared in distinctive ways. Questions of time and temporality came up here.

Alec Finlay

Alec presented the background and current activities to his ‘Day of Access’ project, which aims to allow people with constrained walking to access ‘wild land’ in Scotland with the support of landowners and other institutions. Drawing on his eco-poetic placename and landscape research in Upper Deeside, the project makes a connection between ecological restoration / rewilding and a positive response to personal constraint /  disability.

Carol Cotterill

Carol described the ‘Landscapes of the Mind’ network which is funded through the same programme as ours. It will explore connections between geosciences and the arts, specifically through a partnership with Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh and Jupiter Artland. Part of the idea is to commission and exhibit art works developing from the network. There is also an interest in local planning and processes for conversation and consultation on landscapes (e.g. Community Councils).

Over lunch we held a short psychogeographical walk on the theme of familiarity and unfamiliarity in landscape – attempting to find a place within about ten minutes that none of the participants had been to before (we managed for all apart from one).

Jane Downes

After lunch Jane showed us her website about Rapa Nui / Easter Island, designed with Google Arts and Culture on the theme of landscape and climate change:

https://artsandculture.google.com/project/heritage-on-the-edge-rapa-nui?hl=en

Malcolm Combe

Malcolm described the legal status of the public’s right to access land in Scotland through the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 – covering nearly all of the outdoors of Scotland apart from the curtilege of buildings, growing crops and a few other exceptions. He noted that access is allowed if the access-taker is learning about cultural or natural heritage. There is also a duty of responsible management for access that land owners / managers need to follow.

Helen Graham

Drawing on a previous AHRC project ‘How should decisions about heritage be made?’ Helen made the case that the ‘decision’ itself is just a small part of a processes of working together, often when a moment of conflict emerges. She presented her work from York that explored creative responses from the local community to the formal heritage of the city, based on the development of new kinds of conversation and models of local democracy. One aim was to expand the field of the political – involving recognising how history, heritage and community development are all political processes.

Colin Shepherd

Colin presented a series of methods by which archaeologists are able to explore past landscapes, with examples from north east Scotland. The methods included Lidar, field survey, historical research, excavation, soil survey and pollen analysis. He argued that many methods are amenable for use by communities and are not necessarily just the preserve of heritage professionals. Partnership working can also be beneficial, as shown in the Bennachie Landscapes Project in Aberdeenshire. 

Alex Hale

Alex talked about a network funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, ‘Scotland’s 3^rd Millenium Archaeology’ which brought together people with an interest in contemporary archaeology in Scotland. It included creative and collaborative practice, was focused on process as well as formal outcomes, and worked both in digital and analogue spheres. They also developed a critical angle on ScARF – Scottish Archaeological Research Framework.

3. Future events

We then discussed the shape of possible further events. In the original proposal we listed the following workshop events (with hosts in brackets) that would take place between March 2020 and March 2021 – here we can begin to expand and specify so please add any further ideas or details. These can of course be completely re-thought too. Jo will add photos of the workshop notes.

- Cultural values, temporality and landscape decision-making (Hale, Historic Environment Scotland). A suggestion was made to host this event in Motherwell and to connect with specific landscape and community issues there.

- Climate change, energy landscapes, and land / sea interactions (Bevan, Orkney College)

- Rewilding and ecological restoration: interdisciplinary perspectives (Edwards, Forest Research)

- Participation and ethics in landscape decision-making (Trotman, Scottish Sculpture Workshop). This could be a two-stage event, firstly a seminar and then the field visit / project described below.

- Legal frameworks and policy relevance at local and national levels (Glass, SRUC). Jayne Glass has proposed hosting an event at SRUC (Scotland’s Rural College) in which the Scottish Parliament Rural Policy Group could hear about work that has taken place not just in our network but in the two others that have Scotland as a focus (Annie Tindlay on community empowerment and land reform, Anna Hicks on ‘landscapes of the mind’ / geosciences and art).

We also have some money to support field visits or small scale project work. Ideas for this put forward so far are:

- Scottish Sculpture Workshop to host an event with Simone Kenyon on gender and walking in the Cairngorms.

- Alec Finlay to host a ‘Day of Access’ event for people with constrained walking at Bennachie.

- Colin Shepherd to work on a case study of pre-modern land use management and associated decision-making paradigms in Aberdeenshire, to inform a viable contemporary rural re-populating strategy.

4. Issues arising

a. Themes of the network

The following seemed to emerge as themes from the presentations and discussions:

·     Heritage, communities and democratic participation – developing a critique of contemporary heritage practice, exploring the means by which communities could be enabled to take part in heritage processes, and in so doing have a greater say and role in landscape decision-making.

·     Art practice, climate change, ecological restoration – exploring the role of the arts not just in contributing to existing debates but in developing new questions and distinctive practices in the landscape.

·     Expanding access to the outdoors – working to understand constraints and possibilities for access to the outdoors, including the extent to which the ability to be involved in decision-making processes about landscape is related to experience of the landscape.

These are by no means the only connections between the various presentations and discussions at the workshop, and they are also not mutually exclusive – developing new connections and sharing practices would be very worthwhile. Other points may also be useful (e.g. a point made near the end that the European Landscape Convention has not been brought up so far, plus discussions on ‘values’ of nature, landscape and so on). However, it will be useful to have a sense of how the network will develop over the next two years and what both participants and our wider audiences will gain from it.

b. Community involvement and further participants in the network

In discussions near the end and following the workshop, we noted that it would be good to involve a wider range of people and groups, including:

- Communities and people living in and around the landscapes we are interested in.

- Early career academics including postgraduate students.

- Potentially further artists including early career artists also.

c. Collaboration, sharing and future work

- We still have an issue about how to share thoughts, working materials and information in the group, ideally avoiding email as far as possible. Basecamp is probably not going to work as it is too expensive to get the full version. Storage space is an issue with Dropbox. Google Docs and Calendar may be an option. Any other ideas are welcome.

- It is probably inevitable, and completely fine, that some people dip in and out of the network or decide it’s not for them after all. At the same time it would be good to have people who stay around and can contribute to thinking about outcomes (events / practice / performance / writing / exhibition...). For those interested in the longer term network, perhaps we should each consider what our contribution could be in these terms. For example, is there a research project or other practice you are already involved in that could be a case study or exhibition piece at some stage? Would you like support to put on an event, field visit, workshop etc, whether or not it was part of the original plan? Could a report, a piece of collaborative writing, an art work, or something else entirely, emerge from it?

d. Planning events

As well as the longer timeframe we should hone our ideas for the next few months for workshops and events. Please think about this, develop some conversations and when we can get a decent online space hopefully we will be ready to share things.