MLA Design Portfolio Alan Gillingwater 2021

MLA Design Portfolio ALAN GILLINGWATER

DESIGN PORTFOLIO; or, some retroactive notes towards landscape

Graffiti comes and goes, in my corner of suburban North London, like some strange successional ecology. As ruderals colonise the disturbed, then forgotten, soil leftovers of various constructions and movements, so tags populate disregarded or inaccessible walls. Like strange cousins, awkwardly formed across imagined yet heavily fortified human/ non-human taxonomic walls, these suppressed surpluses seem destined to forever chart cycles of removal and renewal.

Tags and ruderals. Both are repeated elements, forged without editorial oversight, and both too have the same bipartite strategy of survival: invisibility and inaccessibility. Once noticed, by administrative systems, caring citizens or unhappy property owners, if vulnerable to access, their game is up. At least for the time being.

‘Ways’ is the most recent species of pioneer tag I’ve spotted as it attends to the crumbling brickwork and walls peppered with millions of microscopic carbon particles and peeling with flaking layers of slowly disintegrating house paint. The banality of ‘ways’, seems to trace the arbitrary and pointless territory of a bored yet restless disposition. It might be disregarded as just another ‘signature without a document.’1 Yet the ‘document’ here is the landscape itself, and you can begin to read it from any point. *** In the present portfolio I hope to document some of the ways into landscape that my previous design work offer. This is an attempt at searching out some retroactive lines of flight: emplacing antecedent interests into a current concern for landscape. My own sketches,

photographs, exhibition commentary, etchings and various book cover illustrations - covering the disparate themes of place, poetry, public transport, the film industry, wicker construction, the Anthropocene and ontology - are placed in productive tension with an initial preparatory reading of landscape architecture. In this attempt at a contrapunctual composition, design work is re-rendered through a new lens; looking back provides resources to make connections forward. As such, hopefully some of these images can be successfully employed as aleatory springboards helping me forge out and express a few exemplar theoretical and representational thematics that could be further explored during the MLA. The following sections can happily be read as independent commentaries; each meander glanced at in isolation, dipped into, or skimmed over as they reference the images.

Framing landscape More or less codified, landscape is always framed, never immediately given. We all carry with us those imagined landscapes most imprinted into our memories. They form a reservoir of emotions and ideas, usually reduced and idealised. Perhaps an integral part of identity formation: we don’t know who we are until we know where we are. In England, the ‘Picturesque’ became a distilled rendering of this reservoir. So reproduced, the Picturesque has become part of the popular imagination of the English countryside.

The way landscape is the result of various power ridden processes of cultural invention has been 1

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afforded by this slow and traditional process.

The copperplate is coated with a ‘ground’ usually a compound of beeswax, bitumen and resin. The plate is then exposed to nitric acid which corrodes the areas of plate unprotected by the ground. For the aquatint, in the controlled environment of a resin box, thousands of resin powder particles are blown into the air, slowly falling onto the plate. A flame is then used to fix the tint particles into place. The fine texture produced reminds me of Geoffrey Jellicoe’s (in) famous dotted pen work.

Drawing genius loci

1. ENGLISH LANDSCAPE (Etching and aquatint)

well examined: landscape is always a ‘way of seeing,’ never complete but always entailing various absences or even deceptions.2 Perhaps we even deceive ourselves with nostalgic landscapes, from our childhood for example, that we hold protected from new information or other views.

The ENGLISH LANDSCAPE (1) presented here offers a version of this lens. The scene is framed by a square format, allowing the spatiality of the valley itself to frame the image rather than the traditional ‘landscape’ format. Almost Russian doll-like, even in this simple image many levels of framing process are easily discerned. The frame of my own perception or phenomenological experience of the English countryside; the frame of the tradition of the Picturesque view; the valley as element of the spatiality represented; the square format chosen. There is also the framing present in the landscape depicted itself. The land is carved up by the hedgerows crisscrossing the agricultural fields enclosed. Whilst the social history of the famous Enclosure Acts offer yet another framing.

The media used is copper plate etching and aquatint. I enjoy the tactility and materiality

If we read into landscape via various framings, then an attentiveness to the genius loci of a place might help us read out of landscape.

Sketching is an important way of allowing a site to speak for itself. When we slow down our perceptions and allow them time to rest on a site, previously uncovered details and ideas will inevitably emerge. The pen drawing, a view in St. Pancras Gardens looking south towards THE HARDY TREE (2), is an attempt at such an attentiveness to site. The complexity and layering of the place is irreducible. The roots of the common native tree Fraxinus excelsior clamber over and through the awkwardly piled up tombstones whilst in the distance a Victorian train embankment gestures towards the massive new Francis Crick Institute. A multiplicity of temporalities are bound together in an instant, or ‘dialectical image:’3 more than a century of tree growth; the Norman period of church building; weathering processes on the stones surfaces; the intriguing biography of the famous writer Thomas Hardy; the Victorian spatial reorganization of the Capital; the ebb and flow of lichen growth as index of air pollution levels; and the new cityscapes of contemporary urban redevelopment.

We might ask: what or how is this multiplicity held together as a unified thing? New approaches to ontology by post-Kantian philosophers in the speculative materialism current, such as Graham Harmen, offer the interesting prospect of the answer lying in a new ontological definition of landscape. One might posit landscape as ‘the constant background for constant changes in detail.’4 In this sense, landscape is like a ‘wormhole’ linking different temporalities and classes of objects, organisms and perceptions.

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2. THE HARDY TREE (pen)

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Walking, drawing and the social production of city space

by Alan Gillingwater Curatorial Assistant C4RD

“Body and things correspond to each other as the two halves of an orange” Merleau-Ponty

The spatial, as object of study for the geographer, has been subject to some thorough re-conceptualisations in the last few decades. Once, space was simply a container, where human activity took place. The scientific geographer peered at it, like the technician peers at a microscope slide in a laboratory, from some unspoken view from nowhere. Space was understood in geometric terms; rationally deduced values ascribed differentiation.

More recently, geographers have liked to understand space in more dynamic, colourful terms. Understandings of social space have been forwarded, whereby the subjective nature of the human experience of space is taken seriously. Here, human activity and its material surroundings become seen as more interlaced and co-constitutive. Space, rather than simply container, is actively produced and given meaning through human activities, and, in turn, in a kind of dialectic or feedback loop, the spaces produced frame further human activities. This is what is meant when geographers talk about the ‘social production of space’.

If google maps are the heir to the throne of a traditional Euclidean geography’s conceptualisation of space, how then can more socially and experientially based conceptualisations be imagined? Bringing the experiment of walking as drawing and the idea of the social production of space into communication with each other may offer some glimpses.

The art collaboration AS, during their residency at C4RD, has explored the practice of drawing as informed by the imagined and embodied experience of walking in the city. The art created can be understood as emerging through the challenging idea of walking as drawing, which I like to think of as a radical yet playful literalization of Paul Klee’s famous aphorism that ‘drawing is taking a line for a walk’. Whilst the objective mapmaker places him/herself outside of the frame of vision to survey the spatial, the artist as walker is subsumed, in amongst the unfolding life of the city, part of the continual processes of humans producing the spaces that they are part of. Rather than envisaging the city as a to-be-known entity ‘out there’, the city is reexamined through the senses, imagination and body as a place that has been, is and will be. Sides to the city usually occluded by mapping ‒ the magical, secret, uncanny, spiritual or occult ‒ are given voice. Seeing and being seen, touching and being touched, the artist here is very much part of the social production of space and as such, perhaps something of the process can be expressed from within it.

The objects, images, writing, artefacts, maps, memories and lists compiled by the AS residency point to drawing as a nonpictorial kind of mapping out of space alive to its social production. As such, certain issues emerge. Whilst the traditional map claims an objectivity exterior to the world it contends to represent, drawing as walking would seem to present its conceptual antonym ‒ an exploration of subjectivity in the social production of space. However, can we ever leave the objective reasoning of the Euclidean mapmaker behind completely? The walker, if he or she is to move through the city in any intentional way, relies on (conscious of it or not) abstracted spatial knowledges whether it be estimations of metrically measured out distances; loci of urban features; codings of transport networks; or locating the places referred to in imaginations or memories. Walking must involve a subtle distribution of objectivities and subjectivities together, where, at once lost and found, we oscillate between experiencing and knowing the city.

Centre for Recent Drawing

2-4 Highbury Station Rd LONDON N1 1SB +44 2032396936 Charity No.1123530 Wed- Fri 12-6pm

3. WALKING, DRAWING AND THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF CITY SPACE

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Making space: background action, scale and metaphor The Hardy Tree points to the impossibility of designing static places. Unlike the architect, the materials landscape architects work with are living, perpetually in a state of flux. Creating place sensitively requires an attentiveness to the accretion of meaning of a site over time. Whilst sculpture, architecture or painting can content itself with a fixed, atemporal outcome, landscape design must always look both into the future and past.

However, landscape architecture is also about working within the three spatial dimensions.

This aspect is perhaps heightened in the current epoch of a highly networked global urbanized civilization. In 1967, Michel Foucault famously and presciently contrasted the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with history with a present ‘epoch of space,’ elaborated as: an epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side by side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.5

Much theory in social science and design disciplines in the last few decades might be understood as an attempt at reconciling with this critical insight. Formally, this has been labelled the ‘spatial turn’ and has cast a spotlight on spatial theory developed in geography, instigating a departure from the positivist notion of space as simply a neutral container in which action unfolds. Instead, space is understood as active, produced, relational and co-implicated with time - ‘a simultaneity of stories-so-far’.6 The short essay WALKING, DRAWING AND THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF CITY SPACE (3) is a brief attempt at bringing such spatial theory into dialogue with an art practice that exhibited at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD).

Spatial theory is an important resource for understanding and designing landscape architecture. Indeed, it might be argued that landscape architecture experienced its own ‘spatial turn’ with OMA and Tschumi’s paradigmatic competition entries for Parc la Villette, Paris in 1982. Both entries marked a shift from the primacy of the view to a ‘horizontal field of infrastructure’ whose spatial

purpose was to facilitate a more or less planned programming. This concern for the strategic ‘operationalisation’ of landscape as urban space has greatly influenced the contemporary current of ‘landscape urbanism.’7 It is not just landscape architects who programme space. Inspiration might also be taken from industries such as film or logistics.

Le Corbusier once quipped that ‘to design well, you need talent, to make a beautiful programme, you need genius.’8 The sophisticated flexibilization and subtle manipulation of space demonstrated on film sets provide an example of the complexities involved in a kind of micro scale reprogramming of landscape. The repurposing of TILBURY FORT (4+5) for Mike Leigh’s historical epic Peterloo, for example, demonstrates the intense transformation for what may be considered a meanwhile use. A parade ground in a Napoleonic fort in Kent is transformed into a public square in nineteenth century Manchester. Water is sprayed on the gravel before each shoot to reduce glare and extras are ordered to run back and forth to kick up atmospheric dust. Building façades are erected and scaffolding constructed to create new vantage points for cameras. Meanwhile, twentieth century chimney towers are hidden behind hoisted green screens or later deleted virtually in post-production. All is attention to spatial detail.

The action that unfolds on set is organized on two distinct planes. The primary landscape of props, extras, set designers and builders, technicians or ‘sparks,’ makeup artists, stunt people, horse trainers, actors and various other structures and workers are choreographed in order for a second, reduced, visualised landscape to be created. This is the landscape transmitted to the monitors, viewed by the director, and later, the audience of the film. The way a landscape like Tilbury Fort is mobilised and activated by the film industry points to a definition of landscape as a verb - as something we do.9 Understanding landscape as a verb can help bring into focus some of the hidden logics through which space is made. The experience of working on a film set as an extra gives you a keen sensitivity to the discontinuity between the laboural and infrastructural aspects of space and their rendering on screen. When working as an extra, the action of the sets is naturally foregrounded rather than the acting. It becomes apparent that a film ‘only functions as a contextual framework of substantially more 6

4. TILBURY FORT (Photograph)

interesting background action.’10 We can discern a parallel here in the production and representation of city space.

The infrastructural and working aspects of landscape can be seen as a ‘desert of the real’ lost in a visual maelstrom of superficial branding, place-making marketing, starchitecture, globalised product simulacra and the virtual overlays of a highly selectively Instagrammed and Google Mapped world.11 The foregrounding of ‘background action’ might be a useful modus operandi for landscape designers to not lose sight of what exists beyond the visualised.

made by the cartographers in Jorge Luis Borge’s famous fable may be recreated. The idea of a map of a territory so detailed that it ‘coincided point for point with it’ satirises well the impossible desire for a total mapping.12 Interestingly, even at a 1:1 scale, seemingly so intimate, the horizontality of view still carries with it the same problematics of any ‘view from above.’ Horizontal representation might be seen as maintaining the illusion that as human beings we live on the surface of the Earth. But climatology, pedology and geology all point to the verticality of our inhabitation of Earth: we are not on the surface of the Earth but in it. The 1:1 quadrat fails in representing the messy, networked ecologies of what has been termed the ‘wood wide web’ - the networks of roots, fungi and bacteria that underpin visible flora.13

Zooming into different scales of landscape might be considered a useful tool in exploring the complex spatialities of ‘background action.’

Making a 1:1 SCALE DRAWING (8) is an interesting exercise. Such drawings avoid the normal convention of scale as a representational abstraction by simply making the measured and the represented numerically equal. Drawing at this intimate (non)scale of representation will always reveal details otherwise missed. The 12 metre patch of garden drawn here reveals the struggle between different species of grasses and Ficaria verna in establishing dominance in a seasonal succession.

A tiny patch of the life-size map of the world

6. O LIVRO DA PERDA

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5. TILBURY FORT (Photograph)

The spatial can also be employed in more metaphorical ways in design.14 The illustration work for a collection of Portuguese poetry O LIVRO DA PERDA (6+9) (Book of Loss), plays with the spatiality of the book format. The illustration is an etching based on the 15th Century Spanish sculptor, Pedro Millán’s work Christo Varón de Dolores displayed at Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla. The sculpture is an exploration of absent presence through a Christian renaissance aesthetic. Jesus is accompanied by two angels mourning his death - the simultaneous presence and loss of Jesus, central to Christian theology, is expressed in a singular form. I have reconfigured this arrangement into the spatiality of the book format. The two angels are recast as anonymous figures, isolated and separated on the front and rear of the book. Their hands clutch at an absent presence that is implied in the space between - symbolising the text as a space of loss.

useful experience in the formal politics of policy and planning in local councils.15 Transport data from the UK Census, passenger surveys and Freedom of Information requests were analysed in order to try and build a picture of how well different cities provided for alternatives to the car, whether it be walking, cycling or public transport. The cities were thereby ranked, attempting to underline examples of best practice to encourage their emulation.

The research illuminated how landscapes are the product of political decisions layered over time. For example, cities built at low densities with the primacy of cars in mind present intrinsic difficulties for providing other options.

However, policy was clearly important in shifting these patterns over time with investment in infrastructure and more effective organisation.

The advocacy of the benefits of devolution in transport planning to Combined Authorities,

Politicising landscape Landscape is a political terrain; how it is framed, shaped, produced or enacted is always the result of a struggle between different actors. Coproducing the CAR DEPENDENCY SCORECARD (7) for Campaign for Better Transport was a

7. CAR DEPENDENCY SCORECARD

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8. 1:1 SCALE SKETCH (pen)

that has been so successful in London, is still of pressing relevance.

Imagined landscapes can also be used to address the political. The drawing, ISLAND (10), responds to the theme of the ‘right to politics’ as explored in the collection of critical essays, RECLAIMING DEMOCRACY (11).16 The image recomposes contrasting landscapes. A skyline montage of skyscrapers from various corporate landscapes in the ‘alpha-city’ world (as often used in marketing material for the Financial

Times accompanied with the caption ‘We Live in Financial Times’) is recessed behind castle-like fortifications.

The advertisement imagery is subverted, placed into the context of a landscape of protest suggestive of the 2011 ‘Occupy’ movement with its discourse of the ‘99 percent’ against a global financial elite. However, on closer appraisal it is clear that the financial sphere is retracted and the signs and symbology of the protesters are faced outwards, performative and 9

9. O LIVRO DA PERDA (Etchings)

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10. ISLAND (Pen with some basework in Rhino)*

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11. RECLAIMING DEMOCRACY: JUDGEMENT, RESPONSIBILITY AND THE RIGHT TO POLITICS

self-referential. The disconnect between the elements points to the more structural problems of technocratic ‘escape’ from a genuinely democratic deliberative realm.

Landscape in the Anthropocene In recent years, the Anthropocene has gone from esoteric geological term to one of the major organising concepts across social science, the humanities and design disciplines. It is proposed that we are leaving, or have for some time already left, the Holocene - the epoch that harboured the rise of Homo sapien civilization. A new epoch, defined by the global and significant impact of humans on geology and ecosystems, has been proposed. The consequences of leaving this civilizational home of the Holocene and entering a new epoch has had ramifications far beyond geology conferences. Not limited to the natural sciences, the Anthropocene concept has precipitated a cascade of new questions and challenges to old epistemic foundations.

The study of international relations is one such discipline that has engaged with the Anthropocene. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE (12+13) is a watercolour illustration proposed for the first major textbook dealing with this engagement. The idea was to throw markers of international relations - the States that are classically seen as making up the world system - into the strata of an old geological diagram to produce an unsettling, fantastical image. The labelling is largely arbitrary, I was mainly interested in creating a surreal, disorientating effect - visual metonymy is the mode here.

The image is intended to work as an apparently literal yet surreal response to the title. The image is based on an old stratigraphic diagram

by Alexander von Humboldt. A visual reference that seemed appropriate considering his recent reappraisal as perhaps the first major theoretician of the Anthropocene, developing anthropic theories of climate and geophysical processes from as early as 1799.17 His understanding of nature as an extensive network of interactions between living organisms seems to inevitably anticipate the inclusion of human activity in global environmental processes.

Meanwhile, his understanding of nature as an interconnected web that, rather than frozen in a static equilibria, entailed a great chain of causes and unpredictable cascading effects, clearly prefigure contemporary concerns of positive feedback in climatology.

Geological imagery is also a gesture towards the idea of the Anthropocene as a distinct geological period discerned in our stratigraphy.

The Anthropocene, both as contemporary process characterised by ‘hyperobjects’18 and as geological record based on observation of strata, is difficult to perceive from one place. Metaphor and speculation can seem like the only adequate visual response to this problem of representation. IR as discipline is unsettled, disorientated, thrown up in the air and re-articulated in the ground of the Anthropocene where traditional ontological/ liberal presumptions no longer hold firm or are ‘made strange.’

Working with an early 19th century aesthetic also places the debates around IR and the Anthropocene in a longer unwritten intellectual history, a liberal epistemic regime that goes back much further than the discipline’s official history. In this sense the image also plays with time: is it a geological diagram from the future looking back at the age of the Anthropocene or is it a retroactive future, showing that IR has always already been in the Anthropocene before it was even officially born as a discipline?

Landscape architecture’s disciplinary history presents a different kind of engagement with the Anthropocene. Whether explicit or implicit, conceptual and philosophical debates about the ‘nature’ of nature and humans place in the world have always been a perennial part of the thinking and practice of the discipline. The trajectory of the influence of Humboldt’s own work through the discipline is an exemplar of this. Humboldt’s wordview of the earth as an interconnected living organism and nature as a dynamic web of 13

12. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE (Proposed cover mock up)

life led to an ecological understanding of flora in landscape. The new science of plant geography tied plant communities to specific climatic and geological zones. This led to the practice in botanical gardens of arranging plants according to their habitats.19 The influence of such an approach has woven its way through landscape schemes right up to contemporary ‘naturalistic’ approaches.20 If landscape architecture is the intentional orchestration of nature understood as a complex ecology embedded in environmental systems inclusive of human activity - then theorisations of the Anthropocene would seem to be home territory.

Work such as Ian McHarg’s may be considered as powerful antecedent attempts at defining the landscape problematics presented by the Anthropocene - the environmental damage caused by human activity ignorant of ecological processes. Indeed, progenitor of the Anthropocene concept Paul Crutzen’s demand for ‘planetary stewardship’21 is little different from McHarg’s original conception of designing with nature.22 However, in understanding the Anthropocene as a condition we are in rather than just a set of external environmental problems, we break into new philosophical grounds fundamental indeed to human species identity. The externalization of a nature beyond the human domain is deeply embedded in, as Donna Haraway puts it, the ideas which think other ideas.23 The repositioning of humanity within the system of nature and the breaking down of human/non-human dualisms present fundamental challenges to how we should best conceive of, and design, landscape. In this frontier, the wealth of new work on the Anthropocene across social science and the humanities may offer reflections and resources instructive in radical reconceptualisations of landscape and help to inform the disciplines continued shifting self-understanding.

Now that human activity has become embedded in Earth history it is impossible to return to a naive idealisation of an external Nature. As you tube botanist Tony Santoro puts it, ‘nature isn’t really nature, it’s just the world’24 and, as Buckminster Fuller deduces, ‘the opposite of natural is impossible.’25 The challenge today is to take responsibility for this world in which we have become a geohistorical actor. Responsibility implies the need for an intentionality in design beyond parochial economic incentives that are blind to the outcomes of the net accumulation of the consequences of our actions such as climate change. In such a context, landscape architecture’s horizons rapidly expand beyond the tiny percentage of explicitly designed landscapes, to a consideration of the wider bioregions that make up the Earth system.

Such an expanded horizon points to the importance of landscape design knowledge and technology. Beyond the limits of landscape architecture as official profession - largely confined to wealthier and more temperate parts of the world and nurtured by a Western university based knowledge system - there are other more quotidian, vernacular landscape design practices and paradigms. Julia Watson has documented the lo-tech design and traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous communities from the Philippines to Kenya to Iraq, tracing a very different pattern of latitudinal co-ordinates to the usual temperate world dominated precedent project roll calls.26 Such (landscape) architecture without (landscape) architects may offer modes of sustainable design more adequate to the challenges of the Anthropocene.27 Vernacular landscape practices are not limited to indigenous communities. In the UK for example, Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI’s) are often, despite their mandate being defined solely in biological terms, reservoirs for the continuation of traditional landscape practices. A year of intermittent lockdown restrictions precipitated an exploration of SSSI’s around Barnet and Hertfordshire. Rather than conserving wilderness, SSSI’s are often about maintaining anthropic succession states like meadows (Frogmore Meadows), heaths (Hertford Heath), or coppiced woodlands (Northaw Great Wood), and the unique habitats they provide. Once tied to important economic imperatives, such as harvesting hay for horses or removing wood for fuel, these practices are now continued simply to maintain the distinct flora and fauna of these ‘novel ecosystems.’28 14

13. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE (Watercolour and ink)

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Across Hertfordshire Carpinus betulus or hornbeam woods have been coppiced for hundreds of years. Amidst Quercus robur standards, Carpinus betulus trees, are cut back close to the ground leaving a stool to regenerate, for the process to repeat in cycles of around twenty years. The product would have been directed to a multitude of uses: charcoal, firewood, bean poles, pea sticks, fences, tools, or even coach wheels. Now the wood is more often simply removed or left in situ as woodpiles.

Extraordinarily, this essentially extractive practice can extend the life of trees, with some trees in coppiced Carpinus betulus woodlands being over 500 years old. This sylvicultural practice might be understood as a kind of biopolitical ‘making live’ - where intervention is aimed at extending the life of selected species, whilst letting others die.29 The WILLOW LIVING COMPOSTER (14) was inspired by the cyclicity of these local synergetic sylvicultural traditions. A Salix or willow was pollarded, and the wood was used to make a woven wicker composter placed at the base of the tree on a platform left from a previous felling. A kind of coracle shape was used to try to achieve the metre square suitable for a composter in the unusual space between the trunks of the tree. The verticals were drilled into the base to give a more robust living structural framework (inserted in January the verticals are already giving green growth a few months later).

The intention is to make a closed material loop of biological growth, human use and repair. As the wicker composter becomes worn and starts to disintegrate, a new harvest of wood from the very same tree will be ready to provide material for repair or replacement of parts.

Designing with living processes in mind heightens a sense of the agency of matter. In a sense all design is co-creation, the product of a collaboration between imagination and the exigencies of materials and processes.

Levi Bryant has pointedly drawn equivalence between woodwork and ‘the constraints of writing a haiku or in iambic parameter lead[ing] to surprising invention of language.’30 Perhaps this metaphor for a ‘poetry of matter’ could be applied to the design of landscape at any scale.

The domestic recycling of materials in a compost to produce nutrient-rich humus itself provides further metaphorical resources. A consortia of microorganisms, food scraps, plant material, grass clippings and so on are materially composed and decomposed together.

The orchestration of this messy process of

unexpected collaborations and combinations requires care and acceptance of the irreducibility of all the elements in their sympoiesis. Donna Haraway takes composting as a marker of practices of ‘multispecies becoming-with’ as an alternative to more anthropocentric modes of being in the world.31 Composting becomes a strategy of living in the Anthropocene. Rather than attempting to ‘fix’ or preserve Nature by evacuating the human world from selfregulating environmental processes, or at least minimising its impact, Haraway is concerned with ‘staying with the trouble’ - accepting the always already complex and mixed-up times we live in, entwined in myriad unfinished configurations. Or, more optimistically, embarking on the making of a new epoch, the ‘Chthulucene,’ where human and nonhuman are linked by tentacular practices of makingwith (sympoiesis) rather than self-making (autopoiesis).

How then might we ‘compost’ landscape theory and design? Perhaps, rather than designing with nature, landscape should be designed with the trouble in mind. After all, as the failure of modernist systems of concretised river scaping from New Orleans to Jakarta have demonstrated so catastrophically, when designing landscapes in the Anthropocene, if you don’t stay with the trouble, the trouble stays with you.

Landscape ontologies One of the most influential philosophical trends that has arisen in recent years, in step with the Anthropocene concept, has been the return to ontological inquiry. New ‘object-oriented’ approaches to ontology have attempted to rip down the taxonomic wall of Heiddeger’s metaphysics, that exiled the non-human object world from the thinking human realm of being.32 Instead, a ‘flat ontology’ is posited where no a priori divisions are rendered between different classes of things in the world.

Thus lending formal ground to the project of rebuilding a unified metaphysics in the Western philosophical tradition - ‘parts of our knowledge must ultimately hang together in some fashion, because the world itself hangs together in some fashion.’33 The drawing, ONTOPOLITICS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE (15), is an attempt at bringing these ideas into the visual register of an imagined urbanism. The city and Earth are enmeshed as vortex falling through geological 17

14. WILLOW LIVING COMPOSTER (Wicker)

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15. ONTOPOLITICS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE* (Finetip pen)

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time. I was inspired by the way landscape has often been mobilised in art history, marking the different ontological assumptions of the societies from which they arose. The painting, Wanderer Above the Fog (1818) by German painter Casper Friedrich, is perhaps the most iconic representation of the modern subject’s relationship to, and place in, the world. A man stands confidently atop a rocky precipice, overlooking a dramatic mountainous landscape beyond wreaths of fog. The subject rises above, surveying a separate, sublime Nature. This is the idealised European Enlightenment subject; a rational mind turning Nature into external object to be measured, conquered and admired.

What happens to the landscape aesthetic when the rug is pulled from under the Enlightenment age ontological assumptions of this Wanderer figure? The figure falls into the onrushing Anthropocene, reduced to the absent presence of a negative space, indiscernible from the geological vortex itself. Ultimately the image is still that of a landscape but the perspective is defined by distortion - a Hitchcockian ‘vertigo effect.’ The aesthetic register has moved from the sublime to the weird (the strange within the familiar) or, perhaps more accurately, the eerie (a disturbing obtrusion of something from the outside in).34 These may seem to be obscure academic debates limited to philosophy. However, ONTOPOLITICS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE (16), makes the startling claim that the same ‘ontopolitical assumptions of the Anthropocene’ that have powered new work in speculative philosophy have already also embedded themselves in status quo modes of governance.35 The neoliberal advocation of selfregulating systems has moved beyond rational man and market price signals to include nonhuman objects and processes whereby big data allows correlational modelling so detailed that traditional causal theorisation can be jettisoned.

The obvious need for critique of such modes of governance - the injustices, inequalities, arbitrariness etc - points to the limits of the affirmation alone of new ontological modes.

It might be investigated how current trends and projects in landscape architecture interface with the kinds of governance identified above.

Some contemporary work by landscape architects might be seen as a kind of ontodesign corollary to ontopolitics. The emphasis on auto-poeitic systems, the breaking down of nature/culture divisions, designing ‘resilient’ spaces, ‘augmented landscapes,’36 valorising

16. ONTOPOLITICS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: AN INTRODUCTION TO MAPPING, SENSING AND HACKING

‘urban voids’37 and ‘wildscapes,’38 activating environmental processes, protecting the postartificial autonomy of ‘the third landscape,’39 rivers recast as degrees of wetness,40 ‘living systems’ technology,41 designing from the perspective of natural elements etc, seem to re-sound the ontopolitical imaginary of a knowing subject that is ‘drawn into the world itself, following the world, being drawn into it, rather than acting above it.’42 Furthermore, projects emerging from a landscape urbanism school, may be seen to be aligned to large scale redevelopment schemes that are tied in a more concrete way to these emergent new forms of ontopolitical governance based on notions of resilience, the ‘smart city’, bioadaptibility etc. The form of these new alliances should not be held beyond critique. It might be summarised that engagement with the ontological consequences of the Anthropocene is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for designing 21st century landscapes.

References 1 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Penguin, 1997), 1.

2 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 2008).

3 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge Mass.; London: Belknap Press, 1999), 473.

4 Brian Davis, ‘‘On Landscape Ontology: an Interview with Graham Harmen,’’ Landscape Archipelago, accessed May 08, 2021, https://landscapearchipelago.wordpress. com/2012/07/01/on-landscape-ontology-aninterview-with-graham-harman.

5 Michel Foucault, ‘‘Of Other Spaces,’’ Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22.

6 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005),

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7 Charles Waldheim, ‘‘Landscape as Urbanism,’’ in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

8 Andrea Smith and Val Warke, The Language of Architecture: 26 Principles Every Architect Should Know (Beverley, Mass.: Rockport, 2014), 43.

9 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Landscape and power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (London: Chicago University Press, 2002), 1.

10 Krassimir Terziev, Extrawork: Taking the Figure of Extras in Cinema Production as Metaphor (SofiaStuttgart: Akademie Schloss Solitude, 2008), 77.

11 Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002).

12 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘On Exactitude in Science,’’ in Collected Fictions (London: Allen Lane, 1999).

13 Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures (London: Vintage, 2020); Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate (London: William Collins, 2017).

14 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).

15 Campaign for Better Transport, Car Dependency Scorecard 2014, accessed May 08, 2021, https:// bettertransport.org.uk/sites/default/files/pdfs/ Car_Dep_Scorecard_2014_LOW_RES.pdf.

16 Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai, Eds., Reclaiming Democracy: Judgement, Responsibility and the Right to Politics (New York: Routledge, 2015).

17 Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015).

18 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2013).

19 Jan Woudstra, ‘‘The Changing Nature of Ecology: a History of Ecological Planting,’’ in The Dynamic Landscape: Design, Ecology and Management of Naturalistic Urban Planting, eds. Nigel Dunnet and James Hitchmough (London: Spoon Press, 2004), 26.

20 Nigel Dunnet and James Hitchmough, eds., The Dynamic Landscape: Design, Ecology and Management of Naturalistic Urban Planting (London: Spoon Press, 2004).

21 Paul Crutzen et al., ‘‘The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship,’’ Ambio 40, no. 7 (2011).

22 Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (New York: Natural History Press, 1971).

23 Donna Haraway, ‘‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’’ Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (2015): 160.

24 Tony Santoro, ‘‘Tony Santoro’s Botany Crash Course’’ Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t, accessed May 08, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MTsAFpSXj7Y. 25 R Buckminster Fuller, public lecture at Columbia University, Spring 1965.

26 Julia Watson, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (Cologne: Taschen, 2020); compare for example with Meaghan Kombol, 30:30 Landscape Architecture (London: Phaidon Press, 2015).

27 Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964).

28 Richard Hobbs, Eric Higgs and James Harris, ‘‘Novel Ecosystems: Impilications for Conservation and Restoration,’’ Trends in Ecology & Evolution 24, no.11 (2009).

29 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76 (New York: Picador, 2003).

30 Brian Davis, ‘‘On Landscape Ontology: an Interview with Levi Bryant,’’ Landscape Archipelago, accessed May 08, 2021, https://landscapearchipelago.wordpress. com/2011/11/06/on-landscape-ontology-aninterview-with-levi-bryant.

31 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (London: Duke University Press, 2016).

32 Graham Harmen, Object-oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2017).

33 Brian Davis, ‘‘On Landscape Ontology: an Interview with Graham Harmen,’’ Landscape Archipelago, accessed May 08, 2021, https://landscapearchipelago.wordpress. com/2012/07/01/on-landscape-ontology-aninterview-with-graham-harman.

34 Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016).

35 David Chandler, Ontopolitics in the Anthropoecene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (London: Routledge, 2018), 78.

36 Smout Allen, Augmented Landscapes (NewYork: Princeton Architectural, 2007).

37 Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, A Glossary of Urban Voids (Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2020).

38 Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan eds., Urban Wildscapes (London: Routledge, 2012).

39 Gilles Clément, Manifeste du Tiers Paysage [The Third Landscape Manifesto] (Saint Germain sur Ille: Edicions du commun, 2016).

40 Dilip da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent (Philidelphia: University of Philidelphia Press, 2019).

41 Liat Margolis and Alexander Robinson, eds., Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture (London: Springer, 2007).

42 David Chandler, Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (London: Routledge, 2018), 205. *The images ‘Island’ and ‘Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene’ were collaborative drawings with architect, Daniel Lauand.

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