Practicing Landscape Field Guides are a series of publications that Reading Landscape has developed from a series of online seminars run during academic year 2021-22, entitled Practicing Landscape: Landscapes of Energy and Extraction.
Field Guide No. 2, 'Landscapes of Energy and Extraction: Landscape as Archive', has been developed from the original seminar to form the first in this series of publications. As a result of participating in the online seminar, Gina Wall, Alex Hale and Michael Mersinis continued their dialogue offline, discussing lingering questions that the seminar had prompted for them. The resulting publication reflects the subsequent expansion and consolidation of their ideas. These essays also pick up on where both the 'Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation' online symposium (2020) and the 2021-22 seminars concluded: drawing out the tensions and legacies between landscapes that are inherited and the historeis that lie beneath their surface.
In the Foreword Sue Brind provides a context for consideration of these ideas, teasing out how the various guises of landscape throughout the history allows the re-alignment or re-attachment of objective and analytical modes of categorisation to our subjective, poetic and imaginal worlds.
In the Afterword, Michael Mersinis explores the history and custodianship of burial places and traces symbolic and ritual conventions to the present tense.
Landscape as Archive addresses the practice of what Henk Slager calls the para-archive, provoking affective ways of thinking and making that have the potential for new intersubjective relations to manifest between the human and the world. The archaeological tropes of excavation and stratigraphy speak to the discipline’s historic concern for the extraction and archiving of artefacts, including human remains, from the past. However, to think of the landscape-as-archive is to orient our attention to the surface, and to the archaeology of the present. The contributors to this Field Guide encourage us to slip between different temporalities in order to be fully conscious.
