Scarred Landscapes

Abstract

This thesis offers a contribution to ongoing attempts to rethink human inhabitation of the earth in light of the Anthropocene. Adopting an autoethnographic approach to research as a process, the thesis takes its reader on a journey that begins with a recognition that we’re living on a damaged planet and ends with the idea of scarred landscapes. Through a 3-day field encounter with Ithaca, Greece, I reflect on the problematic idea of landscape as a wellspring for identity, arguing that understanding landscape as a site of existential inhabitation offers an impossible promise of a recovery of a primordial self. I find the experience dissatisfying and question the role of sentimentality in landscape research. I use this field encounter as a springboard to build the scarred landscapes concept from three ingredients: (i) rupture, (ii) suture, and (iii) scar. I argue that research interested in embodied landscape practices must consider the question - how do you find direction when no direction makes sense? Drawing on my fieldwork training in aerial arts for 5-months, I consider ideas of verticality and embodiment as one response to this question. I argue that the practice of intentional falling provides insights into how to survive“moments of crisis. Thinking through ideas of lines and holes, I show how we might move-with and through descent and how we might learn to co-exist with decline, precarity and the challenge of not knowing”