Nurturing Earthly Intimacies: a fieldwork practice for planetary reparation
Creators: name: Schut, Saskia
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330109
subject: Landscape architecture

description: Nurturing Earthly Intimacies is a creative practice research that values embodied and process-based modalities. Previous training in somatic body-based learning, landscape architecture and etching find traction in the context of an emergent relational fieldwork practice, where care and an ethics of response-ability are nurtured. Material experimentation, walking, drawing and installations become possibilities to sense, monitor, give shape to and care for an Earth in crisis. Fragile domains such as weather, gravity, heat/sun, and tides are brought into close relation through attentiveness to transformations in the materials at hand that help to foster interconnectivities, and recognise an Earth-in-formation. Fostered through embodied and relational methodologies, the research is offered at one scale as a body of work, multiple registers that includes over 21 projects and at another scale, coalesces into four registrations that aim to provide close-up haptic doings developed in the field.
 
The aim is to offer otherwise possibilities that enable planetary reparation in the face of the distancing effect of sustainability practices and dominant climate change narratives. By centering sensory, intimate, material and embodied process-based modes, the emergent fieldwork practice nurtures intimacy, fosters complexities, and provides alternatives to spatial practices and research that prioritise solutionism, overviews and abstractions. Adjusting the position of a mirror through touch in relation to the changing position between the Sun and Earth becomes a possibility to sense and make tangible the fragile and warming habitable zone. Attention to movement, porosity, and acoustic ecology through a walk in the intertidal zone makes palpable rising seas and the movement of materials across bodies and time. 

Nurturing is adopted to evoke care, tenderness and optimism and to summon slower tempos, attentiveness and intensive involvement. The fieldwork practice has been nurtured through careful attention so that it could emerge without being quashed by overarching ideas, production and solutionism. The body of practice research work includes a video that uses the camera’s lens as a sensing device to register the changing light conditions during dusk; a drawing that uses paper as sensitive material that reacts and transforms with fog; a walk that brings attention to the senses of touch, hearing and kinaesthesia to attune to the Ocean’s tides; an exhibition that includes a reconfigurable instrument for sensing and making legible gravity; a material experiment that reveals the instability of soil through making clay from earth dug in my backyard. 
 
This research has revealed that activating response-ability and care for this Earth in crisis starts by attending to how bodies and materials are transformed by, caught up in, and in turn are transformed by phenomena. The process-based, embodied modes developed have nurtured my ability to sense, monitor and give shape to this Earth-in-formation by fostering interdependence between humans and more-than-humans. Nurturing Earthly Intimacies: a fieldwork for planetary reparation provides a differentiated spatial practice that sits alongside traditional spatial disciplines, specifically directed towards the care and repair of the fragile domains of the habitable zone. The research expands the possibilities for care that are urgently needed to support the habitats of human and more-than-human kin. Rather than replicable techniques, this research offers modes that can help spatial practitioners to imagine and sense otherwise to dominant narratives, deliberately left open to allow practitioners to expand on them through their own situated perspectives and ways of knowing. Through making legible, palpable, and tangible emerging conditions, the research provides a reorientation from the idea that climate is out there and happening to us, to a sense that designers are deeply imbricated and involved.