This page showcases my doctoral thesis, foregrounding the images – collages, photographs and diagrams – that comprise it. I have included extracts of writing from my conclusions to give additional context.
Process-driven arts-based research hinges on sensory embodied experience for knowledge generation as a series of encounters. This refocusing from goal-oriented outcomes to emergent poetic understanding is what Minna Salami puts forward in Sensuous Knowledge (Salami 2020). What I have gleaned from my work is that in order to allow the experience of jarring or knowledge sparks, I have had to step back from the work and immerse myself in process, handing over conscious control to techniques that invite other (human and nonhuman) actors. I have also had to do what I have encouraged human participants to do in the Moving Landscapes project and Keskorra experiments, which is to be in landscapes and find ways to learn about them in hands-on, bodily ways.
Landscapes are made up of intersections and multiple temporalities that are in a constant state of change (Massey 2006). It is necessary to expand an engagement with landscape and place, to acknowledge Western humancentric positions that render landscapes as static settings for human activities, where a perception of “the setting sun” is actually the earth turning by its own force (Massey 2006: 43). An unsettling (Massey 2006) or jarring (Woodward 2020) of perspectives is needed to evoke new imaginings and experiences of landscapes so that we can “learn to be affected” (Latour, cited in Massey 2006: 43). Understanding landscapes as sensuous assemblages that can be communicated through direct or handmade filmmaking techniques is one way to learn.
I have endeavoured to carefully and sensitively follow approaches and techniques that decentre the human from landscape-based work to make it possible to imagine other conversations that do not follow a linear single-perspective trajectory. The possibility to artfully, or sensuously, tend and reflect has come from imagining landscape spaces as opportunities to make multiple connections across disciplines and temporalities.
I discovered that diagrams are sensuous knowledge portals, capable of transcending paradigms and disciplinary boundaries. I experienced the potential for diagrams and collage to mediate the limitations of language and contribute to my own knowledge, and in addition, I can see their potential to communicate and inform other research projects. Aside from working towards building a community of practices, I am also exploring different forms of filmmaking that are cyclical, away from linear human-centred approaches. My sense is that to profoundly build a filmmaking research practice that is landscape-based, participatory and embodied, all sorts of spaces, knowledges and rhythms need to be explored. “Landscapes enact more-than-human rhythms...” and so we need to find new ways of communicating those rhythms (Gan, Tsing, Swanson and Bubandt 2017: 12). Cyclic rhythms could provide a structure to further explore being in and embodying a landscape- based sensuous practice. Landscape-based filmmaking tools and techniques can transcend perceived boundaries and filmmaking formulas, building communities across humans and more-than-humans and bringing landscape experiences closer, into the body.
