Dispatch: a few notes on being of body and landscape

How does landscape feel in the body?

Sensing, body landscape, landscape as bodies/beings/values

Slinko invited us to respond to an artwork on her homeland, the Donbas, Ukraine, in her workshop and presentation, The Object of Value. Exploring multiple dimensions of sensing, positioning, Slinko expresses persistence and absence in war – the damages to elements of our lifeworld and to our memories. In Slinko’s spoken-word piece I feel the hurt on flowers, vegetables, soil. We feel it viscerally in our bodies. It is shared between us, across the distance, the plants are bodies, and we are landscape.

Breathing, documenting enduring impact without flattening understandings

Jill Jarvis’ research on the 17 nuclear bombs detonated in the Algerian Sahara between 1960 and 1966, and discussion of the film, 24°3’55”N5°3’23”E Traces by Ammar Bouras (screening on IMMA’s 'Living Canvas'), explores expressions of land, conflict, and body in relation to power, control, memory, and environmental injustice. Bouras’ film structure relates physicality to conducting nuclear bombing, and for each of the men featured in the film we learn of their activities and their distance/proximity to the violence that occurred. The photographic imagery of the site shows what is left from the 1960s, and is layered with the sound of the men featured, recalling memories, and fuses past and present. We learn how they feel now about the nuclear bombings, and hear in their voices and words a mixture of emotions (‘That’s it! It’s over, OK!’ – from one). The experience of watching the film on the lawn at IMMA extends the temporal and positional structure of the film – to our positions, in Dublin in 2025 – we reflect on the radioactivity released and consider Jarvis’ question, ‘when is the “post” of nuclear violence?’

A love of land

Odessa Warren, in her presentation, 'Landscapes of War and Resistance', shared the film Bayyaratina (our groves) by Suha Shaman. The film shows a relation of the land as body – land and its life-giving elements hurt through years of systemic violence. A Palestinian family whose ancient farms, lemon trees, beehives, palms, water wells and irrigation, are systematically destroyed by Israeli occupational forces. Shaman’s family’s love of land is their love for their family heritage and history, health, pleasure, and personal identity. War flattens landscape – physically: leveling plants, trees, buildings, and symbolically: reducing its visibility. Flattening textures, variety, flattening qualities and livelihoods, flattening perceptions. Warren calls upon us to counter the idea that there is ‘permanent war in the Middle East’ and instead to focus on persistence of life. ‘We cannot rely on colonialist structures to manifest change and justice.’ O. W.

What can an image do / words, murals, memorials, film, visuals / what can aesthetics do?

Positioning, land, language, value, trauma, molecules

Clare Bell’s presentation on the Irish language as a divisive symbol – showed ways typography and letter forms mark boundaries of landscape and identity. Letters physically inhabit and create space. Of materials, situated, experiential. Bell’s collaboration on the design of a variable typeface which creates hybrid letter forms based on the position of a participant – blurs identity boundaries, blends perspectives and mark making.

Conceptualizing, expressing through time, bodily engagement

Amanda Dunsmore’s presentation and workshop brought us to our body via music, food, hands-on working with paper. Dunsmore discussed duration and responsibility in artistic practice, and shared an example of holding onto materials for years before using in an artwork – resisting the urge to immediately produce – and instead waiting until the public was ready. Protection and patience are present in Dunsmore’s durational project – doing a drawing weekly until the referendum on the Shared Island initiative is resolved. Dunsmore shares value through works of durational study and ‘dedicated bodily engagement’ – the aesthetics are her lived experience.

Resisting, finding counter-balanced movement, action together, and trusting our weight, touch

In Léann Herlihy’s cooperative workshop, 'On the Ropes', we gathered on Croppy’s Acre, north of the Liffey – a mass grave site of Irish rebel casualties of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Herlihy presents self-defense acts of resistance, and resistance is distinct from resilience. In one group exercise we pull a rope on opposite sides, and the point is to create – with resistance – an equilibrium. This (rope) line drawn on the landscape persists in my mind. I hold onto it, doing daily sketches as an extension of Herlihy’s workshop ideas, and of the many points of the Summer School research – keeping it closely felt and present.