Practicing Landscape – Field Guide No. 2 – Landscapes of Energy and Extraction: Landscape as Archive
Author(s): Gina Wall, Alex Hale, Michael Mersinis, with a Foreword by Susan Brind
Editor(s): Susan Brind and Michael Mersinis
Publication type digital or physical? Physical publication
No of pages: 54 pages (image and text)
Publication size (if physical): 12.5×19.5 cm
Date of publication: June 2024
Research network: Reading Landscape
ISBN/ISSN: 978-1-7385275-7-1
Description: The Practicing Landscape Field Guide series has emerged from the online seminar series run by Reading Landscape in 2021-22, under the overarching title, Landscapes of Energy and Extraction.
In the third seminar in the series, Gina Wall and Alex Hale shared their current collaborative work which explored heritage landscape-as-archive. Michael Mersinis acted as a respondent for the session and an expansion of the content of each of their contributions is published as Field Guide No. 2 – Landscapes of Energy and Extracton: Landscape as Archive.
Landscape as Archive addresses the practice of what Henk Slager calls the para-archive, provoking affective ways of thinking and making that have the potential for new intersubjective relations to manifest between the human and the world. The archaeological tropes of excavation and stratigraphy speak to the discipline’s historic concern for the extraction and archiving of artefacts, including human remains, from the past. However, to think of the landscape-as-archive is to orient our attention to the surface, and to the archaeology of the present. The contributors to this Field Guide encourage us to slip between different temporalities in order to be fully conscious.
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