Usual apologies for cross posting, I hope this is of interest to some members of the list
Mike
Call for Papers:
Portable Landscapes: Environments on the Move
Centre for Visual Arts and Culture
Durham University,
9-10 July 2014
CALL for PAPERS
Landscapes are ways of framing and shaping the environment for aesthetic, social, political and economic purposes. In their ambivalent configuration, they stand for both an actual tract of land, crafted by nature or human intervention, and its visual or verbal representation. Within this framework, recent scholarship has turned the attention toward the production of material landscape objects that make environments physically move through time and space. The mimetic gesture that transforms a given environment into a ‘landscape object’ dovetails with a multifaceted range of emotional attachments, mnemonic associations and symbolic attributions that allows us to possess a place imaginatively and creatively. In their radical reduction and vernacular configuration, these objects provide us with worlds in miniature, able to exercise their own agency – objects that we can put in our bags, stick in our pockets or hold in our hands. In crafting, collecting, displaying and sharing landscape objects, we create landscape communities figuratively pinned on a physical or mental map.
In order to explore the material and symbolic functions of these portable worlds and their multiple affective configurations, the Centre for Visual Arts and Cultures (CVAC) at Durham University is hosting an interdisciplinary conference in Durham on July 9-10 2015. We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words addressing issues relevant to the role of landscape objects in our cultures and societies. Shifting our outlooks through the realms of canon and cult, we are particularly interested in the ways in which objects are produced to brand landscapes institutionally and conventionally, but also in the idiosyncratic ways in which the symbols attached to them can alternatively instil contrasting feelings of desire and fear, curiosity and disgust, pride and shame, joy and pain – objects, therefore, to collect but also reject, to defend but also attack, to revere but also dismiss. We welcome submissions from a generous range of subject areas, which include art history, photography, visual culture, design and performance studies, but also anthropology, sociology, political sciences, geography, literature, theology and philosophy, among others.
Please send titles and abstracts of up to 300 words, with an indication of your current affiliation, by 1 March 2015 to Prof Jonathan Long ([log in to unmask]) and Dr Stefano Cracolici ([log in to unmask]).
Topics may include but are not limited to:
• postcards and stamps
• souvenirs and ephemera
• travel kits and illustrated guidebooks
• tourist photographs and movies
• collections of sketches
• posters, flyers and adverts
• exotic ingredients and cookbooks
• board and virtual games
• mounted animals and hunting trophies
• relics and sacred objects
• maps and 3-dimensional landscape models
• mineral and geological specimens
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