Call for participants: Indeterminacies: arts and landscapes

 

Call for participants: Indeterminacies: arts and landscapes

Two sessions: Wednesday 1^st and Wednesday 8^th December, each running 10am-12.30pm

Deadline for Proposals: Monday 15^th November 4pm.

Organising Committee: Jo Vergunst, Dee Heddon, Chris Fremantle, David Edwards, Anne Bevan.

This online event brings together the Creative Landscape Futures research network (https://creativelandscapefutures.blogspot.com/ ) with the NewLEAF Future of UK Treescapes project (https://www.uktreescapes.org/announcement-of-the-first-set-of-future-of-uk-treescapes-projects/ ). There is a shared interest in indeterminacy and the ways that it is engaged with across natural & social science, arts and humanities research in and for landscape decision-making. The event will not be a conference but rather a shared multi-disciplinary thinking space to enable ideas and research to develop with a particular focus in bringing the arts into discourse with the natural and social sciences on this important topic.

Indeterminacy (or uncertainty) is understood to be increasingly significant factor in the context of the accelerating climate and biodiversity changes/crises. Mitigation, resilience and adaptation are key challenges and understood to be critical to addressing indeterminacy. We wish to explore the values, meanings and ways of working with indeterminacy and uncertainty that a range of disciplines can bring or offer to discussions about landscape decision-making. Where landscapes are often planned and managed to create very specific results in, for example, economic production, biodiversity or visual qualities, art practice often instigates processes with flexible and sometimes unclear boundaries and outcomes that may be ambiguous or open to widely differing interpretation. Is it possible to integrate learning from what seem to be very different epistemological positions?

Specific themes that participants may like to consider include:

·      Agency: What can we learn from and with art that involves shared – and perhaps indeterminate – authorship and interaction with other living things?

·      Intervention: What is the significance of both intervention and non-intervention in arts and environmental management practices (where rewilding could be an example of non-intervention)?

·      Adaptation: How can the arts exemplify adaptation to changing conditions?

·      Inter / transdisciplinarity: What themes do the natural and social sciences offer that the arts might and should engage with?

The event will include input from NewLEAF. The focus of NewLEAF’s research is on learning to adapt to an uncertain future: linking genes, trees, people and processes for more resilient treescapes. It includes artistic research aimed at assessing what treescape management can usefully take from arts practices to decision-making and identify what the arts can learn from the understanding of adaptation for planning of treescapes. The arts work package includes the development of a new piece of verbatim theatre focused by decision making and indeterminacy as well as the preparation of a set of case studies.

We welcome a variety of contributions:

-       short think pieces, e.g. conceptual framings or specific cases (5-10 mins)

-       online viewing – participants could view online materials or resources and come together to discuss

-       feel free to propose other possibilities.

Outcomes from the event will be gathered by the Creative Landscape Futures network and documented online where possible.

To take part, please send proposals (100-200 words max including name, title, focus of contribution, disciplinary background) to Jo Vergunst (Creative Landscape Futures network / University of Aberdeen) and Chris Fremantle (NewLEAF / Robert Gordon University)

j.vergunst@abdn.ac.uk and c.fremantle@rgu.ac.uk

Deadline: Monday 15 November 4pm.