Are You My Mother? Art, anthropology, and ontologies of place: a speculative enquiry
Channel: ANU TV
Date: 2014-11-10

‘To imagine other places that are sustainable, we need to know what our imagination is like…’ (Paul Carter, 2010 Ground Truthing)

In recent years a conjunction of technological, social, political and environmental processes have been distinctively shaping the ways persons relate to places. Among these we highlight three major influences: firstly, the proliferation of technologies that recast how we visualize and travel through and between places. Secondly, the global effects of environmental degradation wrought by over-exploitation and the spectre of climate change. And thirdly, the large-scale movement of people between places through forced or voluntary migration, or hyper-mobility. Paul Carter distils one of the implications of these developments when he describes places as doubled in our imagination: ‘the physical region is shadowed by dreams of a destination never reached and fears of an unsustainable future on the ‘horizon’. Such doubling is also identified as a characteristic of modern imagination and image making by others including John Berger, who suggests that every drawing of a place is ‘both a here and an elsewhere’. 

While recognizing that technologically mediated engagements with place are by no means new, this conference draws attention to the paradoxes and complexities in people’s experiences of places in the present. For example, as new forms of securitization and surveillance track our movements, we also become newly reflexive about our place in the world by virtue of the distancing effects of travel and mediation. What prospects for the creative revitalization of place emerge from such reflexivity? Against the annihilation of places by environmental destruction and/or colonial feat, how are places being re-imagined as sources of ontological security, sustenance, or inspiration?  

This two-day colloquium is sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre as part of the 2014 annual theme, ‘Now Showing: Cultures, Judgments and Research on the Digital Screen’.

Convened by Melinda Hinkson, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, ANU, melinda.hinkson@anu.edu.au