Dear all, 
 
(Apologies for cross-posting)
 
Next Wednesday 27th April (4.30-6.00pm UK time) we have a presentation from Dr. Sage Brice, from Durham University. She will be presenting her talk ‘Animating contested landscapes: violent identity-formation and the materiality of the image in duration’. Please see below for a full abstract for this exciting talk. 
 
Sage is a cultural geographer interested in the politics of nature, particularly in relation to queer and trans ecologies of identity. Alongside her research and teaching, Sage’s contemporary art practice forms a key part of her work. A former PhD student in the Geography department at Bristol, Sage is currently an Assistant Professor (Research) at the Geography department at Durham University. 
 
It would be lovely to see some of you at the talk, and I’m sure Sage will put together a presentation that speaks to diverse research interests!
 
The event will be online. To be sent the Zoom link details, please register through our Eventbrite booking link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/literary-and-visual-landscapes-spring-2022-hybrid-tickets-260903648837. 
 
Looking forward to seeing some of you next week!
 
Best wishes,
 
The LVL team
 
Abstract: 
What would it mean to approach landscape not as a layered place but as a living ecosystem of ideas in which both human and non-human animals are actively implicated? This paper reflects on practice-based research in the Huleh wetlands in Israel-Palestine, where recent encounters between humans and Eurasian cranes activate enduring political tensions around the themes of identity, displacement and belonging. The project of which this paper is a part examined concepts of gender, species and nation as they pertain to a politics of land use, identity, and representation in the Huleh valley. In examining these concepts, it developed an argument that ideas have a life of their own, operating as fragments of story-image that move across apparent boundaries such as those between species or nations. This paper develops that concept of the story-image in conversation with Bergson’s (1911) theory of duration. In duration, the image is animate; it persists, circulates and evolves through a process of ongoing, iterative transformation. The works discussed in this paper mobilise Bergson’s concepts of 'duration' and 'interval' through a series of experiments with animated drawing which involve a sustained material encounter with collected bodies and ideas. The animation incorporates a range of ‘found materials’ - including both a collection of archival images and the medium of peat soil, collected at the research site and used as a drawing pigment. Rather than reproducing representational conceptions of landscape as a layered palimpsest (Massey, 2011), the medium of the peat evokes a sense of temporality in which pasts are always immanent. Through examining the spaces of possibility opened up in the breakdown of fixed states and frames, the concept of duration draws out a sense of the violence implicit in processes of identity-formation, such as those attendant upon structurations of gender, species, and nation.

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