The Nomadic Image – Notes from The Glasgow School of Art

An 'in conversation' event was proposed for The Nomadic Image conference which took place between artist researchers at The Glasgow School of Art and colleagues at the University of Central Asia. The conversation was partially curated and aimed to explore and open up areas of shared interest for dialogue and exploration.

The participants from The Glasgow School Art presenting papers to open the dialogue were:

· Professor Ross Birrell
Senior Researcher - Interdisciplinary Practice

· Susan Brind
Reader in Contemporary Art – Practice & Events, Department of Sculpture and Environmental Art

· Dr Jim Harold
Visiting staff member and research collaborator

· Dr Gina Wall
Programme Director, GSA Highlands & Islands and artist researcher: Reading Landscape

Presentations and themes for discussion were:

Contemporary nomadisms and transnational imaginaries, in particular through discussion of themes in Birrell’s Transit of Hermès, presented at Documenta XIV and at CCA, Glasgow.

In the paper 'The Nomadic Image: Nomadic Dialogues', Brind & Harold discuss their overarching strategy of engaging in Nomadic Dialogues as a vehicle for learning from others, using examples employed in research groups they are active within, such as the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories and Reading Landscape, to make this approach tangible. They discuss transnational imaginaries, migration, diaspora and non-visual imaging in relation to their research undertaken in the Cypriot buffer zone; using their letter works as specific examples.

Embodiment, performance and the nomadic subject emerged through the work of Wall, in particular recent practice and writing exploring trans-corporeality, photography in the more than human landscape. Earlier work by Wall explores spectrality, through encounters with landscape and photography which invokes the conference theme through its interest in ‘Confounding distinctions between arrival and departure, every return of the image is a phantom’.

Distributed pedagogies, peripatetic research seminars, seasonal schools and the rural campus. GSA Highlands & Islands has an ambition to develop innovative pedagogic research around the thematic of creative pedagogy in rural locations which fosters the development of new learning communities across distributed networks. This concerns knowing and practising from the geographies, ecologies and cultures of place. It also entails particular sensitivity to the hermeneutics of landscape and place, calling for ethical attuned ways of reading landscape.