Embodied Landscapes: process and participation in filmmaking

This doctoral research project applies experimental materialist filmmaking strategies to explore creative ways of working in landscapes with human and nonhuman participants. The research defines landscapes as multi-vocal gatherings of experiences and assemblages that interact in unfinished stories and therefore applies a ‘landscape-based approach’. Comprising filmmaking projects carried out during the PhD, the thesis demonstrates how embodied experimental and material methodologies that focus on process and participation can offer insights into filmmaking-as-research and the researcher-participant relationship. It illustrates how diagrams, handmade approaches and experimental techniques are dynamic methodological tools. An ongoing emergent research practice is communicated using still and moving images, diagrams, collage and writings, all undergone in the spirit of considering ways of being in landscapes, experimentation and curiosity.

Though some of the research projects take on a ‘finished form’ through past exhibitions and published or presented papers, the emphasis is around mark making to reveal human and nonhuman agency and interaction. This idea follows Kim Knowles’ revitalised materialist film theory, where material engagement in film can promote environmental awareness and new landscape-based experiences. Sensuous knowledge (Salami 2020) deprioritises power dynamics and dualistic narratives that stem from a europatriarchal worldview. Filmmaking becomes as much a mark making process as it is a research practice, and by bringing participants into the filmmaking process, with specific attention to celluloid film tactility, can instil landscape knowledge and care.

This thesis asserts that participation through interactive process-driven encounters in landscape spaces produce sensory and embodied (or sensuous) knowing. Diagrams, experimental filmmaking methods and techniques, which I define as knowledge portals, are woven into the thesis to communicate alternative ways of knowing. Tensions occur in the research practice that give way to embodied (and sometimes jarring) encounters, produced by frictions operating between chance and limitation. Finally, the research aims to explore alternative perspectives on how it might be possible to reimagine ‘nature’, not as distinct from culture, and through a filmmaking-as-research practice that communicates experiences of human and nonhuman-entangled landscape assemblages.