A Living Land - Programme

A Living Land: Landscape, Place and Care GSA – UCA Research Symposium, Thursday 9 November 2023 9.00am-12.00noon GMT // 3.00pm-6.00pm KGT Zoom link: https://gsa-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/98091694911?pwd=OWpjK1N6RmhaM1dkSUxJOHN2Sk9GUT09 Meeting ID: 980 9169 4911 Passcode: 771305

A Living Land: Landscape, Place and Care is a research symposium co-organised by staff and faculty at The Glasgow School of Art and University of Central Asia, Naryn, Kyrgyzstan.

The symposium continues the collaboration between GSA and UCA including participation in UCA’s Nomad conference and festival in Naryn, and GSA’s Winterschool at the Highlands & Islands Campus in Altyre. The title of the symposium ‘A Living Land: Landscape, Place and Care’ builds upon the focus of UCA’s Nomad 23 festival ‘A Living Land’ 22-24 September 2023 and includes presentations from staff from both GSA and UCA. *Please note that the Symposium will be recorded*

9.00am-9.10am: Welcome and Introductions Dr Gina Wall (Programme Director of GSA Highlands & Islands Campus, Altyre, Forres); Dr Soheil Ashrafi (Chair, Communications & Media, Associate Dean, School of Arts & Sciences, UCA, Naryn); Prof Ross Birrell (Senior Researcher, GSA) 9.10am-9.15am: Setting the Scene: Dr Soheil Ashrafi (UCA): Landscape, Place, Care 9.15am-10.00am: Paired Presentations 1 (Chair: GW) 9.15am-9.30am: Dr Usha Sundar Harris (UCA): The Place of Folk Media in Building Community Resilience 9.30am-9.45am: Lesley Punton (GSA): Below, the rocks plunged into darkness (*video link) 9.45am-9.55am: Q+A Short Break (5min) 10.00am - 10.45am: Paired Presentations 2 (Chair: SA) 10.00am-10.15am: Dr Elena Kolesova/Altyn Kapalova (UCA): Urkun: in search of a safe land 10.15am-10.30am: Dr Amanda Thomson (GSA): Living, Lived-In Landscapes: Multi-Modal Approaches 10.30am-10.40am: Q+A Short Break (5min) 10.45am-11.30am: Paired Presentations 3 (GSA/UCA) (Chair: RB) 10.45am-11.00am: Dr Soheil Ashrafi/Dr Michael Garbutt/Sehar Janani (UCA): Aesthetics on the periphery of the everyday self / Life in a mountain village 11.00am-11.15am: Dr Dave Loder (GSA): Land of Lunacy 11.15am-11.25am: Q+A Short Break (5min) 11.30am-12.00noon: Plenary Session

Presentation Outlines and Notes on Participants Paired Presentation 1: Dr Usha Sundar Harris (UCA); Lesley Punton (GSA) Dr Usha Sundar Harris (Visiting Faculty, Communications & Media, UCA) Place of folk media in building community resilience Communication has been identified as the single most important link during emergencies and for future planning against natural disasters caused by climate change. In Central Asia awareness of climate change is severely limited. What communication models can we use for effective collaboration and whole-of-community participation in building community resilience in the face of these challenges?

Participatory Environmental Communication is a process-oriented approach by which communities share knowledge, create awareness, and take action on environmental issues using their unique perspectives and intimate experiences of the places in which they live. Resulting from her work with Pacific communities, this author has developed the DNA model (see Harris 2019 Participatory Media In Environmental Communication), which has three key attributes - Diversity, Network and Agency – or the DNA essential in the healthy functioning of both natural and human environments. Collectively diversity + network + agency open a dynamic space for dialogue and collaboration by engaging communities in participatory processes to catalyse the agency of ordinary people towards collective action.

The proposed research topic could look at how communities’ knowledge and engagement in folk media can assist in raising their awareness of climate change and associated risks.

Dr Usha Harris Is an environmental communication educator, researcher and advisor. Her expertise is in environmental communication and communication for development and social change with a focus on Pacific Islands region. Usha’s current work aims to enhance education and awareness of the environment and build climate change resilience in affected communities using participatory environmental communication.

Lesley Punton (Head of Fine Art Photography, School of Fine Art, GSA) Below, the rocks plunged into darkness This body of work continued my exploration into rural landscape and a consideration of how we experience, encounter and inhabit wild spaces. I’m interested in how the prolonged gaze, and an active, physical engagement with place might alter and deepen our relationship with the land.

Much of this work was concerned with the stretching out of two different experiences of time – lived-time whilst walking where an awareness of time passing, twilight, and the rhythms of the seasons are made tangible; and the deep time of geology where time stretches out in ways difficult to imagine on a human scale.

The title “Below, the rocks plunged into darkness” comes from WH Murray’s book Mountaineering in Scotland. Whilst in a German prison camp during World War II, Murray secretly wrote his memories of climbing in Scotland. In the first chapter, he recalls spending twentyfour hours on the Cuillin mountain range where he describes the sublime beauty of a cloud inversion at dawn, climbing the ridge and the sensation of body moving in perfect harmony with rock, and wild swimming in Loch Coruisk - these riches mentally sustaining him during his capture.

For me, landscape isn’t simply a thing to passively view and admire; it’s something to be with, to be a part of. That we might begin to understand ourselves and the land we occupy through an embodied knowledge attained through a slow, quiet attentiveness, respect, and care for such places seems to me to be of great value.

Lesley Punton is a visual artist working across media with an interest in text, photography, film, painting and drawing. Her work is centered around how we experience (and translate our experience of) landscape, and much of her work emerges through the act of walking and spending extended periods within remote places. *‘The Hide’ is available to view on Lesley’s website: https://www.lesleypunton.com/work/the-hide-1 Paired Presentation 2: Dr Elena Kolesova/Altyn Kapalova (UCA); Dr Amanda Thomson (GSA) Dr Elena Kolesova (Visiting Faculty, Communication & Media, UCA) Altyn Kapalova (Research Fellow, Cultural Heritage & Humanities Unit (UCA) Urkun: in search of a safe land Nomadism was at the core of life for Northern Kyrgyz. In the late 19th century Kyrgyz nomads followed their herds along the planes and rivers of Semirech’e (now divided between south-eastern Kazakhstan and northern Kyrgyzstan) through the Tian Shan mountains (Celestial Mountains) that passes into China. Smooth, continually shifting spaces provided a sense of belonging and shaped the concept of home for the Northern Kyrgyz tribes. The forced migration of Kyrgyz people to China (Xinjiang region) in 1916, called by Kyrgyz people “Urkun”, or forced exodus, distracted their nomad life. This was not the usual seasonal flight of nomads through their land, but an escape from the brutal prosecution by the Russian Imperial army and Cossacks. Urkun resulted in the deaths of thousands of men, women and children and brought considerable distraction to the lives of Northern Kyrgyz for generations to come. It also destroyed many families and left massive emotional trauma for those who have survived on both sides, Kyrgyz and Chinese.

In this presentation we will discuss the effect of Urkun on the collective identity formation of Kyrgyz people using the concept of postmemory and the development of the concept of homeland.

Dr Elena Kolesova is Faculty of Communications and Media at the Naryn campus. Her research crosses cultural studies, media studies, intercultural communication, education, cultural anthropology, and history. Her research topics include ethnic media and multiculturalism in New Zealand and East Asia, diaspora studies, refugee studies, and popular culture.

Altyn Kapalova, is Research Fellow, Cultural Heritage and Humanities Unit (CHHU) UCA. Altyn’s curatorial expertise covers visual arts, theatre, and creative writing. Altyn leads the CHHU Central Asian Museum Development Programme directed at creating new decolonial narratives in museums and engaging the local community in museum activities. Altyn also has been creating experimental art products, combining science, art, and politics.

Dr Amanda Thomson (Lecturer in Painting & Printmaking, School of Fine Art, GSA) Living, Lived-In Landscapes: Multi-Modal Approaches Amanda Thomson has a particular interest in our natural worlds and our relationships to and within them, and incorporates multi-faceted ways of working that take into account places as experiential fields of investigation. Her work draws on and interweaves social and natural histories, human and cultural geographies, anthropology, ecology, literature and the poetic, and her writing, in particular creative non-fiction, is a core element of her practice, sometimes becoming the work itself. Amanda will talk about her published books and exhibitions that each incorporate the practice developed from her PhD, which involves exploring places and their complexities from a variety of different registers, taking into account place as multi-sensorial, multi-layered and complex. She will discuss

how a slow approach to place and making, ideas of becoming familiar and what that might reveal, is a vital component to her work.

Amanda Thomson is a writer and visual artist who lives and works in Strathspey (in the Scottish Highlands) and Glasgow and is a lecturer in the Painting and Printmaking Department at GSA. Amanda completed her arts practice-based, interdisciplinary PhD about the forests of Morayshire and Abernethy in the Highlands of Scotland in 2013, incorporating an ethnographic approach as part of her fieldwork.

Website: www.passingplace.com Paired Presentation 3: Dr Soheil Ashrafi/Dr Michael Garbutt/Sehar Janani (UCA); Dr Dave Loder (GSA) Dr Soheil Ashrafi (Chair, Communications & Media, Associate Dean, School of Arts & Sciences, UCA, Naryn); Dr Michael Garbutt (Communications & Media, UCA); Sehar Janani (Media Team, School of Arts & Sciences, UCA) Aesthetics on the periphery of the everyday self/Life in a mountain village: a multimedia narrative and exhibition Aesthetics on the periphery of the everyday self This paper extends our phenomenological-hermeneutic account of “everyday aesthetics”, a muted, fleeting experience of the Other, the seamless and ceaseless succession of the parts that constitute the totality of engagement with the world. The account emerges from our Beyond the Art Museum Project (Ashrafi, Garbutt, Kapalova 2023), which decouples aesthetic experience from designated aesthetic objects. Adopting an experiential method (Mindful Eye, Playful Eye, Smithsonian Books, Washington DC, Feb 2024) for encountering the “Other” through contemplative, somatic, and embodied practices informed by the concept of play we explore the relationship between the self and Other. As we will argue, this relationship is grounded in the cultivation of a sense of inner truth, unconcealed when the sensing agent experiences itself through being sensed. This transformative understanding as “extended self,” is also evident in many Indigenous traditions, including those of Kyrgyzstan where the fieldwork we will report on has been conducted. Our research design involves collaborations with Indigenous people of the Tian Shan (The Mountains of Heaven) region of Kyrgyzstan, whose everyday aesthetic experiences of the fourfold of the earth, sky, divinities and mortals represents a rich site of participatory enquiry. In an unstable region, where conflicting values and beliefs often result in indifference or hostility such understandings of aesthetic experience also provide the common ground for dialogue, empathy, and compassion.

Life in a mountain village: a multimedia narrative and exhibition Life in a village follows a linear trajectory of time and space. It is a mono-dimensional movement of lore that predetermines and characterises what must follow on from the preceding state. Waking up early in the morning, participating in the ritual of family breakfast, followed by the intense toil of wrangling and feeding the cattle, making bales on the cropland, gleaning weeds, ploughing the land, sowing seeds, interspersed by brief moments of drawing breath and rest until the last meal of the day no later than early evening and hitting the sack shortly afterwards. This is how life seems at first sight in an endless pedestrian repetition.

The land is marked, so are perception and memory. The furrows in the land and mind crisscross, and in doing so they open up a space for a non-linear storytelling. The distinctions between past, present and future collapse to render possible a deeper story of human toil, myths, hopes and despair in the interconnected context of life and nature.

The life in a mountain village narrative and exhibition aims to sketch out the aesthetic intricacy of human movement under the ever-changing moods and lights unfolding, surging up, manifesting before the camera in the village. How text, sound, film, and music can collaboratively draw up a picture that can challenge our outsider views and present the village in its entirety and wholeness. A fleeting smile bursting close to the blushes of a face; a horse rider fading away against a backdrop of elusive clouds; frolic kids in the playground; an approaching car with faintly visible yet decisive faces in it; countless haystacks pinning human life to the land; all of which are narrated in a free-flowing multimedia production.

Dr Soheil Ashrafi is Chair, Communications & Media, Associate Dean, School of Arts & Sciences, UCA, Naryn. As an academic, explorer and essayist at the intersections of art, culture and philosophy, Soheil’s reflections include hermeneutics of change, phenomenology of alternative realities, and 'transcending the given' through which humans embody their ontological agency in transforming themselves and their lifeworld. More specifically, his attention has lately been turned to ‘everyday aesthetics’ as a way of being, seeing and communicating. On occasion he also writes for the press on political, social and cultural issues.

Dr Michael Garbutt is Visiting Faculty of UCA and is Senior Lecturer in Art, Design & Architecture, School of Art & Design at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Michael is a writer, artist, documentary maker and experience designer with qualifications in architecture, literature, and discourse analysis. The main focus of Michael’s current research is on aesthetic experience in museums, galleries, natural and urban environments.

Sehar Janani is Communications & Digital Media Officer at UCA (Media Team, School of Arts & Sciences. Sehar is an as a marketing and communications specialist, specializing in social media, campaign strategy, and brand identity. Sehar is also an artist, graphic-designer and former editor of Yellow Spaceship the University of Central Asia Student Newspaper.

Dr Dave Loder (Lecturer in Interior Design, School of Design, GSA): Land of Lunacy Dave will present an overview of and current insights into long-term practice-based research of the land reclamation that underpins the historical and ongoing development of the City of Belfast.

Proposed as a “hyper-object” (Morton 2013), the proto-geological artefact of ‘reclaimed land’ is contextualised by the Anthropocene and exemplifies an imperialist impulse at the intersection of geology and capital. Dave’s research inquiry focusses on the threshold between land and sea, to explore, imagine and reconfigure habits and rituals associated with the tidal plane as a nomadic and fluid territory. The research to date has developed a series of artefacts, (counter) maps and (counter) monuments that speculate on alternative ontologies and the inhabitation of spaces in excess of non/linear imaginaries.

Dr Dave Loder is a spatial practitioner working fluidly across installation, interiors, architecture, landscape and sound. His research practice is contextualised by feminist ‘worlding’, focusing on the overlapping technological and infrastructural conditions through which we spatially engage with and are structured by the world.

Website: https://www.daveloder.com/