Conversations Across Place
Conversations Across Place (CAP) provides a publishing platform for international artists and writers engaging with landscape in the broader sense of geography, ecology, space, place, built and ‘natural’ environments. Contemporary discourse focused on decolonial, feminist and queer methodologies is underscored through a variety of subjects and themes in order to reveal historical and present-day entanglements. The format of ‘conversation’ – of translation and dialogue – frames this project, which originated in a process-based workshop. Artists, writers and architects gathered to converse across the borders that divide places and disciplines, enacting the tangling that already exists in our plural ecosystems.
Volume I: The first volume of Conversations Across Place grapples with the reflexive relationships of extraction, ruination and reverberation, working towards solidarity across places and perspectives. Within and between the essays, texts, interviews/conversations and artwork that make up the book, landscapes both metaphorical and material are mapped onto each other producing new images of liminal times and spaces that provide a critical opportunity to reassess diverse relationships to the world. The book uses queer and decolonial methods as explicit tools of disorientation, questioning the clarity of time and space that rises from a Western cis-heteronormative and imperial context. Rather than a field guide, this book proposes a constellation of material – a horizontal network made of various perspectives which together may point in new directions.
List of contributors:
Shruti Belliappa (writer) / Nicola Brandt: Artist (Founder and series editor of Conversations Across Place) / Ama Josephine B. Johnstone: Speculative writer, artist, curator and pleasure activist / Peter Coffin: Conceptual artist / Denise Lim: Decolonial sociologist and Fellow at Yale University / Solveig Lønmo: Art historian and curator / Lorenzo Nassimbeni: Architect and conceptual artist / Lipika Pelham: Writer, broadcaster and filmmaker / Elisa Schaar: Curator and art historian / Hildegard Titus: photographer and activist / Sumayya Vally: Architect and founder of collaborative architecture studio Counterspace / Frances Whorrall-Campbell: Artist and writer (Guest editor and curator of Conversations Across Place)
Book recommendations
‘If there was ever a time when we needed new intellectual maps and new cultural thinking, it is now, if ever there was a time for inspiration and beauty, it is now, if there was a time for us to share the message that this volume has to offer, it is today. This is a timely and astutely considered book that offers affecting and important reflections on this complex moment of cultural adaptation.’
- Augustus Casely-Hayford, OBE, Director, V&A East
‘Conversations Across Place: Reckoning with an Entangled World, Vol. 1 is a compelling collation of novel and enlightening perspectives organised around the idea of landscape/place. This collection of essays, interviews and images is provocative; creatively and imaginatively engaging with a host of critical contemporary paradigms through a wide and venturous lens.’
- Mark Raymond, Director, Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg
Conversations Across Place begins with the notion of radical empathy and the interconnectedness of human experience. Released in 2021, the timing of this book could not be more relevant. The one thing that seems clear is that it will take all of us to stem the tide of an errant virus, to stall or reverse catastrophic climate change, to fight for justice on behalf of the oppressed. This tome comes at solutions from all angles – engaging at the intersections of photography, biology, ecology, textiles, mapping, painting, literature, human rights, and more. There is something here for everyone with a curious mind and a desire to seek solutions. Solutions lie not in singular places, but in many places and times all at once. Conversations Across Place serves as a field guide in the search for hope, a portal to a healthier, connected, and just world. One we can create if we can all find the places of connection. Start here. The roadmap is waiting.
- Ruth Stanford. Associate Professor of Sculpture at Georgia State University
However, heterogenous its subjects, Conversations Across Place goes far beyond gathering in its execution, gladly living up to a transformative proposition of interdependency. The collection is restorative in its approach, and urgently needed in its examinations.
- Lili Zarzycki, Writer, and assistant editor at The Architectural Review
