International Identities (Asynchronous)
The Road to Jigalong: An Exploration into the Effect of Altered Landscapes on Place Identity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fiona Rafferty
This paper discusses how Covid-19 impacted on a four-week creative practice field trip, conducted on a pastoral station in the Pilbara region of outback Western Australia. The intention of this field trip was to research landscapes altered by the effects of pastoralism, through creative practice in the visual arts. However, I found that the Covid-19 fourteen-day quarantine period added an unexpected dimension to the research. Through consideration of the restrictions associated with border closures, and the metaphysical isolation experienced during quarantine, this paper explores the significance of place and the effect of altered landscapes on place identity. My personal experience of being subjected to a quarantine lockdown enabled me to have an elevated understanding of this embodied difference, between my view of restricted quarantine measures and my view of unencumbered space, which has resulted in a heightened awareness of place, space, and freedom.
A Monoculture of Globalisation or an International Eco-culture: It Is Time to Choose View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathryn Nelson
The monoculture of globalisation has caused a schism between local needs and the promotion of an international cultural identity. This paradigm may initially seem quasi-authentic and even away forward to address the ever-present cultural struggle; yet the question has to be asked - who and what does this monoculture represent? Through a trans-disciplinary meta-analysis I have reviewed the relevant literature. Initially studying the politics of business and its overarching responsibility to make profit. This business ideology is often also reflected in cultural activities. The cultural web has many successful financial players including artists, gatekeepers, and tastemakers. The galleries and museums cater to audiences that want to see, touch, and be part of this monoculture of success. This led to a subsequent research question - so why is this wrong? In many ways there is nothing wrong with globalisation, or creative success, except when the environment is part of the equation. Current environmental literature highlights climate change, biodiversity loss, invasive species, over use of pesticides, pollution, and overpopulation. Culture has to change and acknowledge the local, but also be aware of the international. Instead of accepting the monoculture of profit, we must all look beyond and see a culture where the environment is put first. Artists, cultural intermediaries, and the audience must step forward to play their part in appreciating the need to preserve their local ecosystems. This in the end may be the only way forward to create an international eco-culture to save the global biome.
Negotiation in a Globalizing World: Moving Images of Contemporary Hong Kong Artists View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Phyllis Hwee Leng Teo
Entrenched socio-cultural values and traditional ways frequently come into conflict with new perceptions and practices of the global flux. The process of globalization creates substantial changes in the spatial and temporal dimensions of social existence, leading to shifting personal identities. This paper examines the work of two contemporary Hong Kong artists, Phoebe Man and Wai-kit Lam, who experiment with film and video. Their works offer rich insights into the dynamics that shape the modern-day psyche and social sphere in Hong Kong where they live and work. Drawing on their film and video installations, this paper aims to make a critical inquiry into the methodological and theoretical intersections between the moving image and contemporary art in the context of a globalizing world. As a cosmopolitan global city, the people of Hong Kong are constantly exposed to and influenced by copious images produced and constructed by media, reconciling daily conflicts in the real and digital world. Through their artistic lens, these contemporary artists observe, interpret, and subvert, negotiating issues and experiences from the world of public affairs and politics to the private spaces of their imaginations.
Cultural Contouring in the North Wales Uplands: How Visual Arts Practice Can Serve as a Catalyst for Social Resilience View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alec Shepley, Susan Liggett
This paper considers ways in which art practices can re-contour the physical and cultural landscape of North Wales and serve as a catalyst for social resilience. The paper contextualizes iterations of art practices focusing particularly on varying aspects of gesture as a spatial practice. Citing projects which reimagine sites in order to rediscover a cultural identity and artistic potential through imaginative transformations, the paper discusses aspects of art and gesture, together with the various means of encounter and speculative enquiry that artists adopt to relate or bring art to everyday encounters. The paper outlines the notion of artistic activity as a more socially engaged practice and how this seeks to occupy the field of distribution. The paper seeks to establish how such projects are part of a broader tendency highlighting the potential of creative indeterminacy to push away from ‘art’ and to restore an embodied relationship to the world. The paper examines ways in which ‘art’s gesture’ within a public space can help to disclose potential breaches in the cultural infrastructure and engage the public with selected issues within society.
A Shadow Pandemic: Documenting and Visualizing Femicide in Mexico Through Art Activism, Protest, and Occupation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kelsey Perreault
This paper examines art activism and protest in Mexico over the course of 2020 while drawing connections to the shadows of violence against women all over the world since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. Femicide (also referred to as feminicide interchangeably) refers to the killing of women based on their gender. This term also encompasses the imbalance of gender in structures of power that often leads to corruption and neglect by authorities surrounding the murder of cisgender women, transgender women, and gender non-conforming individuals. I write and research from my own subjective positioning as a queer white woman living on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg peoples (Ottawa, Canada). Drawing on queer theory, feminist theory, and theories of collective trauma and memory, I investigate feminist modes of creative revolt in Mexico City to argue for the importance of making visible gendered violence in the public sphere. Street art, memorial art, protest art, performance art, and occupation as protest all weave their way into a narrative of community survival and disruption under a state that fails to protect feminine bodies. This research is drawn from my PhD dissertation that traces visible and artistic evidence of heightened violence against womxn during a global pandemic.
Multicultural Cohesion: Architectural Aesthetic Values Give a Sense of Cultural Identity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kim Thu Le
This study examines how leadership and strategy influenced the multicultural settings in Spain, effectively changing Spain’s cultural identity from rural Visigothic in the eighth century to Islamic-Visigothic by the 15th century. This research uses qualitative methods and an ethnographic perspective to investigate how poetic approaches supported communal relationships in Spain. It examines the role of the Abd al-Rahman and his caliphates in creating a new page in Spain’s history and shaping a new cultural identity from its complex multicultural environment. The development of the cultural identity represented by the Mudejar architectural phenomenon will be revealed through Christian and Jewish architectural contexts. The paper argues that the influence of Islamic artistic expression as an aesthetic symbol in architecture and on cultural identity in a complex multicultural setting can not only assist the natural human process of connecting–but also entice people to connect–with cultures creating art of broader context and changing geopolitical alignment.
Mapping from the Edges: Voicing Inner and Outer Landscapes View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bodil Petersson
In our research we use mapping as a method to give a voice to both inner landscapes and geographical outfields and edges: physical/embodied, landscape related, global and local, independent and institutional, collective and personal. Outfields and edges are interpreted in a wide sense and as both inner and outer spaces. The effort has grown from a year-long collaboration between Irish and Swedish artists and archaeologists in a collaboration between academia and independent artists. We experiment together with the concept of heritage and its implications in the present, with the aim to voice and visualise this research effort through the use of photos, film and sound. Our points of departure are from the more peripheral parts of the European continent and from both within and outside the institutional context, as our research emanates from Irish and Swedish academic and independent contexts and moves beyond traditional borders. From our experiences we approach what might be seen as core experiences relating to the local in the global. We voice life contained in different kinds of landscapes at both micro and macro levels and we listen to its changing pulse.
Productive Polarity: Navigating the Local and the Global in a Climate Change Theatre Project View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joan Robbins
I curate an international play festival at Ohio Northern University, which in 2021 was dedicated to the subject of climate change; we teamed up with the organization, Climate Change Theatre Action, to produce several five minute plays, commissioned by writers from around the world. The theatre event provided the centerpiece for a host of initiatives, united by the following objectives: to create an artistic response to the climate crisis; to engage local and international perspectives; to connect people from varying disciplines in order to listen, learn and share ideas about climate change action; and to build community. On a practical level, we brought students, faculty, and international artists together around the act of making art about climate change. The project reinforces the theoretical proposition that art can be a valuable tool with which to move the climate change conversation forward, and falls under the disciplinary framework of Theatre for Social Change. The process included: initial dramaturgy with the student acting company, community engagement with members of the campus, and initiatives--including the final performance--that engaged the larger community. All phases entailed local and global components, and interdisciplinary interactions. Effectiveness was measured primarily by the nature and level of engagement with all parties, as well as an evaluation of the design of the project and its components. Conclusions include the firm belief that the project was unique, inspired, and completely worthy, but that it included challenges useful to contemplate for the sake of similar initiatives in the future.
