The Landscape Image in the Anthropocene

This talk introduced my practice and research within the context of the workshop's stated themes:

Earth Humanities engages with urgent issues of climatic and environmental change. We are particularly interested in the challenges posed to Arts and Humanities researchers by the concept of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene recognises the power of humankind as an agent of geological transformation. Our past, present and future relationship to the subterraneous realm is therefore a matter of urgent enquiry. Mining earth and rock has unprecedented impacts for human and other-than-human life-worlds underground, on land, in water and air. Working in conversation with artists, historians, poets, writers, geologists, miners, archaeologists, metallurgists, environmental scientists, activists and practitioners we explore together the complex and unequal processes of extraction in the world today. We consider the work of mining and industry on landscapes and ecologies across multiple, interacting spatial and temporal scales. We also trace the narrative and representational frameworks that have given shape and justification to extractivist thought. Originating in the European Enlightenment and now merged with modernity’s belief in continued progress and economic growth, many societies of the West and Global North have become distracted, disconnected if not ignorant of their roles in perpetuating colonial modalities of extraction.

New imaginings of the subterranean are urgently required if we are to find ways to better care for the earth on which human and non-human life depends. How can we make visible the other-than-economic value of the subterraneous environment beneath our feet? Earth Humanities sets out to ask questions of human and more-than-human relationships with the underground in a creative, collaborative and imaginative space to find ways to be more caring, less violent, and connected to the underground.

The Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities with the Earth Humanities Global Partnership, University of Exeter.

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