“Not Promising a Landfall …”: An Autotopographical Account of Loss of Place, Memory and Landscape

• Main Author: Jones, Owain
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Duke University Press 2015-05-01
• Series: Environmental Humanities
• Online Access: http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.1.pdf

This paper contributes to discussions about landscape and place and how they are practised in relation to time, displacement, memory and loss. I develop a multi-dimensional account of how landscape is generated in the moment by spatio-temporal topologies and topographies in which memory, movement and materiality play full parts. I consider absence, loss and displacement and how they operate within self-landscape practice, and how particular forms of materiality (in this case, large bridges) become charged with all sorts of emotions relating to personal history (how bridges can be psychogeographical “hotspots”). Displacement from, or loss of, home/land/place/nature—driven by one means or another (economic, conflict, environmental degradations)—can be a looming presence in everyday life. Resulting emotions and affective traces can suffuse through and cleave to materiality, and materiality patterned into landscape, in contingent, unexpected and unaccountable ways, which, as articulated through everyday affective life, are hard to represent in (academic) language. Questions are raised about the relationships between self, time, memory, materiality and place, using a non-representational, creative approach, based on image and textual collage.