Finding my own meaning within this Abstract helps to clarify my purpose:
Cultural Geographies, Vol. 14, No. 2, 211-233 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1474474007075355
© 2007 SAGE Publications
Antarctic exposure: archives of the feeling body
Kathryn Yusoff
Geography Discipline, Open University
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What knowledge can be ‘captured’?
The suggestion here is that photography is a ‘fleeting form of knowledge production’ and that meanings beyond this lens can be lost, as “the marks that fall beyond this visual register”.
Phenomenology tell us that knowledge is experience, and not something beyond ourselves that can be grasped, like a butterfly.
What one feels moved to photograph, and how one frames up the resultant image, can suggest profound experience.
What is embodied practice?
In 2003, a workshop in Embodied Practice at Roehampton University was being offered to Arts Therapists, Psychotherapists, Body workers and performers at through the Association of Dance Movement Therapy, UK.
The workshop describes itself as:
…encouraging participants to examine and challenge their own embodied prejudices and assumptions around issues of sexuality, gender, class, ethnicity and age.
Embodied practice, then, implies the kind of knowledge informed by physical circumstances, which can determine particular attitudes.
Paul Simpson-Housley discusses the preconceived ideas that shape perceptions in Antarctica: exploration, perception and metaphor 1992. He writes of them more in terms of the skills and training that people have had prior to traveling south:
perception is a learned process, and not simply a response to a stimulus. People often see in an object what they anticipate rather than what is actually there.
His use of the word ‘perception’ suggests that it is possible to distinguish between perceptions and attitudes:
‘Perception’ is used as a generic term, and certainly it will encompass a whole range of environmental, imaginative and aesthetic attitudes. The term ‘perception’ is chosen because its general meaning is understood, and thus there is no need to create a new term.
I am interested to see how Action Man has been appropriated as a form of ‘visual mapping’ to stage another history, and geography. Embedding visual material within an article that speaks of visual mapping seems highly appropriate and potentially very powerful.
The “interplay between mark making and being marked” evokes the moments between being moved (by Antarctic landscape) and making moves (drawing or gesturing in response).
These moments have been experienced and communicated by some who have worked in Antarctica, as a release from their personal preconceptions and attitudes.
The aim of my research is to animate responses to the texts that speak of these experiences of Antarctic landscape.
What is experienced, and not necessarily seen, can be revealed through animation.
Recent workshops have begun with dancers to respond to landscape texts.
From reading journals written by the heroic explorers, I agree that we can feel how “the landscape writes through the body to disrupt the heroic narrative of a contained and purposeful body in the landscape”.
My research is showing me that the landscape continues to ‘write through the body’, in different ways for different people, and the many want to share their experiences, so difficult to verbalize.
The challenge of the animator drawing for the floating world of screen, is to evoke the force of wind and darkness in Antarctica, which mark so heavily upon the spirit.
Working with the music of Jon Hizzard, who composes with sounds from Antarctica, is helping to achieve this.
Other sounds are being made with other people, that offer different readings of the visual material.
Working with icons developed by Stephen Eastaugh, and other Antarctic artist/expeditioners, is providing the diverse palette necessary to reflect both individual and shared responses to the landscape and its texts.
Antarctica is a landscape of extremes, and people’s responses to being there reflect extremes in our individual and collective natures – from the pragmatic to the dramatic – the scientific to the aesthetic.
Kathryn Yusoff concludes that there be:
…a reciprocal dialogue between landscape and vision, one that acknowledges that vision is entangled with pain, blindness and excess as much as with a clear sighting of encounter.
On the surface, I find this tantalizingly close to my own purpose, yet am unclear of the exact meaning being expressed here.
I agree wholeheartedly that there can be pain, blindness, excess, and clear sightings, when it comes to how people respond to Antarctica.
I am interested to know in what sense Yusoff understands how Antarctic landscape and vision can have a reciprocal dialogue.
I consider the reciprocity between Indigenous lands and their peoples.
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Can dialogue between expeditioners, artists, scientists and others collectively map Antarctica through our different perspectives?
Yesterday’s visit to Christian Nold’s site of inquiry, where he is exploring Emotional Mapping of places, leads me to consider some very practical ways to approach question.