ISBN 978-94-93148-91-8 Onoinatopee 225
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Fieldwork
for Future Ecologies
Radical Practice
for Art and Art-based
Research
:EDS. Bridget Crone, .
Sam Nightingale & Polly S~anton
Introduction
EDS.Bridget Crone,
Sam Nightingale & Polly
Stanton
7
Introduction
This book explores art-based pr~ctices _of
fieldwork. It examines what artists, writers and
other researchers do in the field.
How to begin, we ask. And so, we begin with '~ow; for this
question is very much at the centre of our proJect. Not Only
'how to begin,' as we have just wri~ten, but ~lso '~ow to
practice' and 'how to research, write, ex~mme, h~ten, see,
feel and pay attention to ... '. T~ese questions ~otl~ate much
of the discussion in the following pages, ~ommatmg our own
thoughts and those of many of our contrtb~tors. Yet ~here is
also another 'how' that we must grapple with, and this is one
that is signalled by our title Fieldwork for Futures Ecologies-
how and why might we work with such concepts of 'fieldwork'
and 'future'? This book presents a range of practice- and
research-led responses to these questions, and towards a
broad possibility of what fieldwork might be and what it might
enable us to do. These are important questions for us because
not only are these 'hows'-how to work, how to practice, and,
indeed, how to begin-very much centred on the ways that
artists and others might work within a changing world, but
they also explore responses to places that are important to
Indigenous life present, past and future. Asking 'how' causes
us to step back from certainty, opening us to uncertainty so
that we might stop to see, to listen, to sense and to engage in
ways other than those already habituated. Asking 'how' brings
forth the possibility that things might not be as they seem.
In our project, 'fieldwork' as a term and
practice is re-shaped to reflect diverse ways
of working across, in between and outside of
disciplinary bounds. This approach is grounded
in the field as an open situation shaped by
dynamics and forces that in turn shape us. It is
a space where co-production might take place.
Fi~ldwork is thus a process, a verb-fieldworki~g.
It 1s a process grounded in and shaped by the site
or situation that the artist or researcher works.
An image comes to mind of the term 'fieldwork' as it appears
in our title as being rather like an old shop sign that hangs
creaking, looming above us and threatening to fall at any
minute. But perhaps this fall-this action of falling-is the whole
purpose of our sign? What if, in our case, that weighty wo rd
8
(or 'sign') of our title-fieldwork-is broken apart and remade
as a verb ra~her than a noun? That is as field working wh · h
we suggest is a process, a possibility for doing that ur'i.rix;~
shifts and remakes its possibilities. Fieldworking is a term 'th t
Polly Stanton further delves into in her chapter to describe t;
process of making her film-based artwork, Indefinite Terrainse
(2?19,> and w~ere fieldworking is al~~ys a process of 'making
with. 1 We might, then, suggest that fieldwork' is our swinging
sign, something that is itself activated and transformed into a
hinge, a proposition, a question for and how to practice or to
work. The fieldwork that we evoke in the title Fieldwork for
Future Ecologi,es is a threshold that shifts outside of the bounds
of the methodologies established by and for the social sciences,
environmental science, anthropology and archaeology (though
many of us might use aspects of these disciplinary practices).
This is not to throw out these methodologies of fieldwork but
instead to draw on them, transform them and make them anew
for radical art practice.
The experimental work that artist-researchers do in
the field recognises the 'field' itself as something that is
forever undergoing processes of change and formation. One
of our contributors, Therese Keogh, suggests that this is not
so much about interdisciplinarity as the 'undisciplined desire'
for what discourse and practice might do when liberated
from disciplinary binds. It might also be understood as a
practice that involves 'methodological provocations from
other domains', as Susan Schuppli (who also contributes to this
book) has suggested, speaking directly to the impact of other
disciplinary practices upon her own art-based investigative
research. 2 Fieldwork, then, for us, is a process that is not fixed
but very much situated within material conditions, material
processes and their urgencies such that it cannot be presumed
in advance. The post-colonial scholar and theorist Gayatri
Spivak claims this as 'open-plan fieldwork'; fieldwork that is
formed and informed by the shifting contexts, dynamics and
power relations that affect not only the formation of the field
3
itself but also the researchers within that field.
Our book not only considers questions
regarding practice, embodiment and immersion
in the field, but also questions how to practise in
the midst of things, and it recognises the field
itself as a dynamic and shifting space.
When we began working together on this book, we became
interested in the idea of the burrow and specifically the action
of burrowing for the way in which burrowing remakes our
relationship with a site. 4 It does this by undoing the fixity of
established knowledges (or assumptions) and reorienting us
within a series of unfolding processes that are revealed by the
9
Introduction
ground itself. Imagine you are making a burrow: the direcf
the depth and width of your burrow depend upon the cond~t~n,
. texture, re1attve
of the ground (tts • moisture,
• 1 ions
e1evation, lllineral
consistency and so on); as you move, yo~ do ~ot know where
you might end up and gradually your orientation and sense of
space relative to the ab_ove-ground changes. Burrowing
is therefore working with the materiahttes of the site, and as
we descend deeper and deeper, we let go of what we think we
know and open ourselves to the unknown. A burrow unfolds
according to the ground within which it is established, as such
it is implicated within that ground becoming through and
conditioned by particularities of geology, terrain, water tables
incline and other lives lived in relation. The burrow acts as an'
interface between worlds, contexts and times-a labyrinthine
place of encounter that undoes and remakes (and confuses!) our
orientation. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe it-the
tunnels within the burrow operate as 'underground intensities'
where movement and vibration lead the way. 5 The burrow
and act of burrowing tie fieldwork to the process of orienting
and reorienting within different conditions, and it suggests
fieldwork as a process within which we are immersed. Crawling
on our knees, burrowing underground, we must remake
relations with the dirt, its molecular components, its animal and
insect inhabitants ... to discover, as Laura Tripaldi suggests, that
'the intelligence of materials' have their own stories to tell. 6 And
so, we might ask ourselves, how do we sense and learn from the
burrow and from fieldworking as a practice of burrowing?
Working in the field raises complex
questions regarding the ethical dimensions and
implications of working in relation to contested
sites, sites of extraction and the climate crisis.
These are sites brimming with hidden tensions,
complex histories, and unstable futures. How
artists work in these spaces is an essential and
continuing theme for us.
The notion of working from the midst of things, from being
immersed within the conditions of a site or situation, coul~.
be considered as a particularly watery or liquid concept .. 1 15
extends our notion of burrowing away from the terre_stna1
plane towards the fluid and to what writer and theons_tnk
Melody Jue has termed a 'milieu-specific analysis! 7 Thi
about diving or swimming underwater-as a body en!ers
the water being submerged necessitates a new experience
of the world, and a reorientation (and disorientation) away
10
from what we think we know. For Jue, this 'milieu-specific
analysis' is the process of working through the conditions-the
positionality-of a body immersed in a particular environment,
such that how and what is seen and felt is the specific result
of this immersion. 8 Imagine the blue that you see underwater,
its particular hue is a result of your own way of seeing but
also your relative depth, water pressure and perhaps also
water temperature, light, location and so on. As Jue suggests,
in her contribution to Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, as you
descend into the ocean: 'you too will discover the ways that
you notice' become 'a little bit more amphibious.' 9 Working-or
fieldworking-from this process of a bodily immersion into
site (whether liquid, oceanic, or otherwise), leads Bridget Crone
to explore the notion of 'turbidity' in her chapter. For Crone,
the 'turbid image' proposes a way of understanding images
that translates the material conditions of a site into an image
10
that is itself not only a visual but a sensory phenomenon.
Our project emerges from a series of
continuing and evolving conversations between
artists, writers and researchers based in Australia,
the US, UK and Europe who illuminate the vastly
different approaches they take to fieldworking and
the myriad of ways it informs and enfolds their
practices. Their projects expand across a range of
geographic and speculative locations in relation to
the field's open and complex character and affirm
the speculative, experimental and investigative
possibilities of artist fieldwork by exploring an
expansive array of sites and geographies-from
megachurches in Texas, troubled urban spac.e s
in Belfast and the disaster zones of Hurricane
Katrina, to the vast deserts of Australia and
Namibia, the frozen fields of the Russian Arctic,
the sonic-scapes of Loch Ness and the watery
worlds of the North Pacific Ocean. Each of these
contril?utions seeks to renew and reveal the
ways in which artists approach and engage the
multisensory space of fieldwork to experience the
world otherwise. Between what we might think we
know and what we might imagine.
11
Introduction
This is the 'radical' in our title-it refers to practices that don't
quite fit into discrete disciplines but whic~ borrow fr~m many
and, in doing so, radically alter the potent~al for practice.
Radical practice is also always a~out pushing at ~xpecta~io~s
in order to imagine and to expenence the world otherwise.
As artist and writer Lola Olufemi writes: 'To understand the
value of a life, one must create the conditions that enable us to
defend it and then to flourish. Isn't this the most imaginative
task of all?' She asks: 'Isn't the real Ethico-Political Bind the
tussle between what is and what could be?' 11 This is the site of
the 'otherwise', this tension between 'what is and what could
be:12 This is a space that Olufemi invites us into-to fall into
together but also to fall out of and ~to unkno~g_; that is, .
into not assuming to know. For us, like Olufemi, this otherwise
is not a horizon to aspire to or an unknown to conquer (and
it is important to note that in this sense we are not returning
to a colonialist notion of fieldwork as masterful discovery)
but rather, it is the radical possibility of the unknowable that
dis~pts and estranges possibilities of knowing. It is, therefore,
the otherwise of knowing, the otherwise that enlivens and
estranges the possibility of knowing and of experiencing.
Investigation, experimentation and art-
based research are critical elements of how the
artists in this book approach sites along with the
active cultivation of relationships that are imperfect,
troubled and full of discomfort. Working in
concert with these complicated situations requires
approaching practice as a situated and experimental
response, where artwork is often co-produced with
the multiplicities of the environment rather than just
merely observed and recorded. How artists do this
and what they confront in their work is an ongoing
discursive element that expands throughout the
book. As a body of work, our project explores the
submerged histories and political agents embedded
in the field through the practice of burrowing
within its rich and storied worlds. But what is
required for better fieldwork relations? What are
the shared ethics, reciprocity and care that we are
bound to, both in the field and in practice?
12
>
For those of us who are guests within unceded territories,
art-based research requires an acknowledgement of the
rel~tionships formed between Indigenous peoples, colonial
nation-states and the more-than-human. Attuning to these
complex connections requires attentiveness to how we work
and move in the field. Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough in her
chapter 'Bearing Witness', draws on these entanglements by
adopting the eucalyptus tree as a silent marker to a profoundly
troubled past. Traversing through Lutruwita/Tasmania, Gough
creates a memorial tracking 35 eucalyptus or gum trees as
living witnesses to the ongoing effects of settler erasure. By
bearing witness to these field sites and attuning to their hidden
and violent pasts, Gough attends to Country by acknowledging 13
the submerged histories and unsteady futures of the field.
The artist D Harding, of the Bidjara, Ghungalu, and Garingbal
peoples, works with the materialities of their ancestral lands
in Central Queensland by directly enfolding material from
Country into the work itself by collecting and using resins and
14
pigments in their painting, glass and sculptural work.
In Fieldwork for Future Ecologi,es, the term
ecology is no longer simply bound to environmental
concerns, but rather it demands attention be paid
to the enmeshed interdependencies of the human
and the more-than-human-lived, technological and
computational.
We address the future ecologies, not of some distant place
or a time to come, but the futures we find already enfolded
in the present (for example, the increasing bushfires and
flooding in Eastern Australia, the omnipresence of wildfires
in the US), which haunt, estrange or rupture the familiar. This
rupture lurks unseen within the materialities of anthropogenic
change. Working with what they call 'prototypes for untested
futures', the collaborative group Alliance of the Southern
Triangle (A.S.T.) mobilise, in their chapter, a kind of strategic
speculation in order to position the future 'reality' of flooded
Miami not as a distant imaginary but as within the imaginable
present. 15 Here and in other contributions, the future is also
approached as the space and potential for action, for grasping
the possibility for action and for learning to encounter the
world differently (and here re-embracing the 'otherwise').
As one of our contributors, Imani Jacqueline Brown, writes:
'The history and future of our planet can be read by re-
membering the severed lines of relation that connect us with
our wider ecological bodies?16 For Brown, this is about 're-
membering' long lines of connection that define ecologies as
the interlinking of bodies with bodies with bodies (human,
microbial, and otherwise-relations are reconstructed rather
13
Introduction
than dismembered). It is also about the dense .
1
Past within the present and future that reposi;~ ation of the
as an 'expansive horizon
. . . and reIons the. fUture
of remtegrat1on
.
Parat1ons.' 17
As our title suggests, 'future ecologi· ,
and their connection. to t he vita
. 1scope of thees
past and pre~ent is an _importa~t framework for
this book. This future is not a distant horizon
but unfolds and is shaped through the predictive
force and impact of past and present actions. It is
in this way, the acknowledgement of the essential'
connection between reparative justice and climate
futures. We also position 'future' as a threshold
space of potential that reimagines the field as a
vibrant stage for encounters and co-becomings.
Attentiveness to more-than-human worlds and
timescales are a necessary aspect of working in
the field, along with the interrogation of colonial
domains and material cultures. How artists
approach these subjects reveals the complex and
expanded capacity of artistic practice.
What kind of material imagination brings together different
worlds and ecologies and different times and temporalities,
and how might we develop practices to attune and navigate
these complex fields? This is equally a question of how
to .~ake sense of the world around us, and as such, the .
original task of aesthetics-that of sensing and sense-makmg.
Immersive, materially-led processes of working through
materials and through the 'lines of relation that connect
us' (as Brown has suggested) find connection in the method
of 'material wayfinding' that artist Nicholas Mangan has
proposed~ where an unbound or 'undisciplined' process of
research 1s led bf and through material forms narratives
and conditions. Mangan's script Letter to Raf (
1
)
included in Fieldwork for Future Eco/ocnes dem 2020t ' t thi's
method of materia . 1 wayf'm d.mg, d rawing• to, eth ons ra es
•
of materiality, value and belief in relation t; er questions
extraction and histories of colonialism in th r;so'!fce
region. In a different way, Sam Nightingale e aci 1c
a method for working through what he call althso ?evelops
s e spectral
14
and material realities of the present! 19 In his chapter,
Nightingale proposes 'cinematic cartography' as a method of
fieldwork that brings into constellation social, cultural and
environmental forces that bridge the past, present and future
through the history of cinema reception in rural Australia as
a means to map changing terrain and land-use.
Art's capacity to sit comfortably with
unknown and uncertain terrains unfurls
throughout this volume, and as a response, this
book has been designed as a field guide for the
indeterminacies and unpredictable movements
of creative practice. The focus on doing not only
highlights our interest in art and art-based research
as generative procedures for acting and being in the
world (and the conditions for that activity to take
place) but also informs the diversity of formats to
be found in the following chapters, ranging from
the essayistic to creative or artistic projects.
Mapping, navigation and attunement-how we move ·
through the field (or the burrow or the body of water, to echo.
our earlier conjectures)-are mobilised as questions in both
a
a conceptual and formal way through Fieldwork for Puture
Ecologies. Formal considerations of text and writing itself
are explored in several chapters hot only as a means to show,
descn'be or write with a situation but also offering a means to .
enact something of its feeling, shape and texture in the structure
of the text. Both Bianca Hester and Saskia Beudel enact various
forms of note-faking and note-keeping in their respective
chapters in order to take us into the field itself. Others weave the
structural limits of the fieldnote and field recording into their
text, as Angus Carlyle does, for example, offering.us a series
of fieldnotes all 100 words in length and thus ~eking the
limitations of an analogue film strip or piece of magnetic audio
tape. These considerations are similarly intricately develQped
in the work of poet and architect Kreider + O'Leary, whose
chapter, a text that they describe as being constructed as if
it were a series of bricks, evokes both the material actuality-
the 'thereness'-of the Belfast peace w~ and the process
of researching their history and engaging in consultations
regarding their future.
Here writing is a method and a practice that models the
field as much as it describes or evokes it, just as for a number
of our contributors, sound offers a means to navigate through
the field as well as enacting that field. In his chapter, Philip
15
Introduction
Samartzis traverses the sonic-scapes of Loch Ness and maps
its hidden world of hydroelectric power and electroacoustic
process. Employing an array of microph?ne placement
techniques and creative listening strat~g1es, he explores the
field as a transgressive space awash With sonorous events and
mutable occurrences. As an accompaniment to this project, a
number of field recordings can be simultaneously streamed
and listened to as a response to different sections in the text. 20
In this way, the field is engaged a~ an unpredictable and
unfinished body, a site of generative correspondence that is
open-ended anlboundless. As contributor Kristen Sharp notes
in her chapter: 'the "field" of fieldwork not only occurs in a
geographic site, but it also extends across material, social and
symbolic spaces'. 21 Simon O'S~van e,xtend~ this f~~ei: in his
chapter in which he engages WIth the practice off1ct1orung a
pilgrimage,' a practice of journeying or performance following
the hallucinatory fields of William Burroughs or the fictional
map of Russell Hoban (which maps onto recognisable, existing
areas of Kent in South East England), and where the actual and
the imagined give way to the act of journeying in one's head. 22
In the pages that follow (and certainly not
all our contributors have been accounted for in this
brief introduction), we approach fieldwork as an
unfolding assemblage of practices-or practising-
as the chapters' titles suggest: learning from,
collapsing, wandering, fieldworking, witnessing,
weaving, fictioning and writing. Despite our claims
for unbinding, unmaking, unfixing, we claim these
as modes of investigation that have a stake in the
world. For some this research has very specific and
significant 'real-world' outcomes and for others
the outcomes are more aesthetic but (we would
argue) significant in their possibility for remaking
our relationship with art-based research and the
c~an~ing environmental, social and political
s1~t1ons that urgently demand our attention and
action ... and this is their radical potential.
16
1. Polly Stanto~, 'Indefini~e
14. For a description of D's
Terrains: Fieldworkmg as Makmg- work see in this volume Bridget
With' in Bridget Crone, Sam Crone, ' Turbid Images and
' Bodies
Nightingale and Polly Stanton (eds.), in the Field' in Bridget Crone Sam
Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: N~ghtingale and Polly Stanto~ (eds.),
Radical practice for art and art-based Fieldwork for Future Ecologies,
research (Eindhoven, Netherlands: 491-522
onomatopee, 2022), 96 15. Alliance of the Southern
2. Susan Schuppli, 'Unpacking Triangle (A.S.T.), 'Scenes from the
the Processes of Artistic Knowledge' Coastal City' in Bridget Crone, Sam
(Lecture, Sonic Acts Academy, Nightingale and Polly Stanton (eds.),
Amsterdam 24 February 2018). Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, 465
3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 16. Imani Jacqueline Brown,
Death of a Discipline (New York: 'Ecological Witnessing' in Bridget
Columbia University Press, 2003), 36. Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly
4. Our activation of the burrow Stanton (eds.), Fieldwork for Future
draws in particular on Gilles Deleuze Ecologies, 46
and Felix Guattari's 'burrowmachine', 17. Ibid.
where the burrow is a site with 18. Nicholas Mangan, 'Letter
multiple entrances that confuses fixed to Rai' in Bridget Crone, Sam
interpretation and instead lays a claim Nightingale and Polly Stanton (eds.),
to the importance of experimentation Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, 419
and expression. Gilles Deleuze and 19. Sam Nightingale, 'I followed
Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a an image ..: in Bridget Crone, Sam
Minor Literature. Nightingale and Polly Stanton (eds.),
5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, 287
Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor 20. www.boleskine.philip-
Literature, 13. samartzis.com
6. Laura Tripaldi, Parallel Minds 21. Kristen Sharp, 'Open Fields:
(Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2022). Fieldwork as a Creative Process' in
7. Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale and
Thinking through Seawater (Durham: Polly Stanton (eds.), Fieldwork for
Duke University Press, 2020), 3. Future Ecologies, 52
8. Ibid. 22. Simon O'Sullivan, 'Fictioning a
9. Melody Jue, 'Scuba Diving Pilgrimage (or Fieldwork on the Fiction
Praxis: A Field Guide for Underwater of the Self)' in Bridget Crone, Sam
Orientation' in Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton (eds.),
Nightingale and Polly Stanton (eds.), Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, 410
Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, 460
10. Bridget Crone, 'Turbid Images
and Bodies in the Field' in Bridget
Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly
Stanton (eds), Fieldwork for Future
Ecologies, 492
1l Lola Olufemi, Experiments
in Imagining Otherwise (Maidstone:
Hajar Press, 2021): 89.
12. Ibid., 89.
13. The term 'Country' with its
capitalisation refers to the ancestral
lands of the Indigenous peoples of
Australia. It is used as such to recognise
the unceded nature of this land within
the ongoing colonial project and the
deep, ongoing ties of belonging.
