The starting point of the project was the desire for a critical deconstruction of the concept of landscape which is still very dominant especially in Western cultural understanding, but it is no longer capable of representing complex, crisis-ridden ecologies. Based on the text Zero Landscape by Timothy Morton, there were various forms of exchange between a group of six artists, curators and theorists who work primarily with methods of artistic research in the field of critical environmentalism. The group was made up of people from the circle of friends and collaborators of Yvonne Wilhelm and Francesca Brusa. This was intended to generate an intense atmosphere of trust and understanding.
The strategies and methodologies of the collaboration were not fixed in advance and were to be developed by the group itself. The collaborations were mainly conducted online, since many of the participants practice translocal living and working concepts. The aim of the submitted concept to find a glossary for the search for alternative definitions for an inadequate concept of landscape was put forward but not communicated as an inevitable requirement.
Implementation:
Three online meetings of two hours each were arranged in advance. During these meetings, further forms of exchange were agreed upon, such as: 1) Newsletters that were sent irregularly by email to all participants and shared references, ideas, quotations, sound files and work results. 2) Individual interviews with the participants and people from the extended environment specifically on the topic of critical artistic-oriented analysis of the concept of landscape. 3) Sonic Stratafications: an idiosyncratic remote online format, 30 minutes long, in which everyone records their thoughts, reflections, imaginations and contextualisations of the environment in which they are physically located or to which they are currently imagining themselves, using sound technology. These sound tracks were then layered and the surprisingly dense polyphonic result shared. All materials were made accessible to the participants on a google drive.
Francesca Brusa and Yvonne Wilhelm accompany the project without being an active part of the cooperation, with the aim of channeling the not clearly defined methodology. The central question is how artistic research with artists and cultural workers is possible, when it does not entail the explicitly exchange of factual texts or image production but rather conceives aesthetic-research formats that above all make being in an environment (more than landscape) tangible and shareable. Since the participants know each other or are relatively familiar with each other's ways of working and thinking, moments of attunement, reasoning and mutual affection quickly arise. Francesca and Yvonne identify shared topics (climate change, extractivism, land grabbing, natural rights, etc.) and the associated critical practices, which they implement with strategies of poeticisation, fabulation, speculation through sound, voice and noise. In the process, one term in particular came to the fore: ‘landscape literacy’, which originally comes from the environmental sciences and cultural anthropology to activate the narrative potential of an environment. The competence to read more-than-landscapes and to read out their historicity but also their narrative potential is definitely an artistic research strategy. In the intense moments of simultaneity and the experience of remoteness that arise in the project, a material, fleeting articulation emerges, which we will refer to as a working concept as ‘oraliteracy / oraliture.
There is a website for the project that makes the collective Sonic Stratafication collaborations accessible. But the individual contributions and transcripts and excerpts from the interviews are also published. Francesca and Yvonne will outline their thoughts on More-than-Landscape Literacy as research-based artistic practices. A visual contribution that recombines all the audio material and interweaves it with the accompanying thoughts and insights of Francesca and Yvonne is in the works. The participants are very interested in further collective moments on the topic, and other formats are planned.
Reflection:
For us, it was very important to create a situation in which artists working in similar ways could come together with specific practices without wasting too much time on project presentations and the search for a common language. The decision to invite only people we know well proved to be very fruitful for such a short project. The situation of trust and mutual openness is something that Yvonne has not been able to find to this extent in previous research projects.
The open structure made it possible to respond to suggestions from the participants (the format of Sonic Stratafication came from Aio Frei) and the existing trust enabled intensive collective collaboration. The original conception of the glossary proved to be too narrow and the definitional approach completely contradicted the intention to deconstruct the concept of landscape in order to make room for something more complex, resistant and multi-layered. The desire to immediately turn this conception of a more-than-landscape into something conclusive was counterproductive.
The resulting products are very sketchy and are due to the short time together. But due to the professionalism of the participants, we are still very pleased with the result.
The decision to carry out the collaboration remotely for cost reasons was correct, but it would have been nice to carry out an on-site sonic stratification. That is, to examine a sensitive environment together in terms of its narrative potential and to work it out through more-than-landscape oral literacies.
Team: Yvonne Willhelm, Francesca Brusa, Aio Frei, Pablo Torres, Margarida Mendes, QANAT (Francesca Masoero), Suza Husse, Christian Hübler