Introduction

GeoHumanities is an umbrella term that has emerged internationally over the last 2-3 years to signal the growing interdisciplinary engagement between Geography and arts and humanities disciplines and practices. It incorporates other designated developments such as the ‘environmental humanities’, the ‘spatial humanities’ and the ‘urban humanities’. In essence, the term indicates how scholarship on key geographical concerns such as space, place, landscape and environment is advanced across arts and humanities disciplines.

The recognition of the GeoHumanities has been driven by recent developments in theory (e.g. the ‘spatial’ and ‘mobilities’ turns; the idea of the Anthropocene), politics (e.g. the increasing urgency of environmental issues, or questions of territory, borders and displacement), data (e.g. the embrace of geo-coded data and Geographic Information Systems [GIS]) and practice (e.g. in site specific performance art or the creative use of locative media). However, the GeoHumanities also stem from dmn a much longer intellectual history, being rooted in the pre-disciplinary origins of Geography and its ‘earth writing’. Geography has never been the exclusive preserve ge of Geographers and has always sat uneasily across modern disciplinary divisions. It is therefore unsurprising that the GeoHumanities has emerged as a key field in our mb current interdisciplinary intellectual culture. fp | hh

This Foldedsheet mappazine has been produced to showcase a selection of the work done by members of the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities. Launched pa in June 2016, the Centre for the GeoHumanities is a major interdisciplinary initiative cultivating links between arts and humanities scholars and practitioners, geographers and the creative, cultural and heritage sectors. The Centre builds on a long legacy of relations between arts and humanities scholars and practitioners and geographers at RHUL. This includes the MA Cultural Geography (Research) that celebrates its 20th birthday in 2016. Founded by Professor Denis Cosgrove the MA continues to bring together geographers, writers, artists, architects and a range of other creative practitioners to think about the intersections of geography and arts and humanities scholars and practitioners. fd | lj bm jd dg | cd | nh | hs

The Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities will focus in particular on five tek ba cross-cutting interdisciplinary themes: cb • The Environmental GeoHumanities, encompassing arts and humanities scholarship on environment, nature and environmental change; • The Creative GeoHumanities, encompassing practice-based arts research lm engaging themes of place, space, landscape and environment; • The Spatial GeoHumanities, encompassing arts and humanities research on imaginative geographies and the production of space, past and present; • The Digital GeoHumanities, including the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), geo-coded data and digital mapping within arts and humanities scholarship; • The Public GeoHumanities, encompassing the place-based and spatial understandings of the cultural, creative and heritage sectors as well as community and participatory work.

web royalholloway.ac.uk/geohumanities and geohumanitiesforum.org twitter @RHGeoHumanities email [email protected] ac vdd hh jo hs imk | cwjw | bb om bb vdd nbh

Knowing the Underground Flora Parrott and Harriet Hawkins Ecological Poetics in a Time of Crisis Lucy Mercer ahrc Creativity and Climate Change: Creating Collective Responses Miriam Burke esrc Hidden Histories of Exploration: A Research Exhibition Maps and Memes Gwilym Eades sshrc Methodologies of Socially Engaged Art Danny McNally with Peckham Platform Air Peter Adey the leverhulme trust the leverhulme trust artist in residence Felix Driver and Lowri Jones with the Royal Geographical Society ahrc ahrc cultural engagement fellow environmental | creative | spatial | digital | public This project takes Andrea Alciato’s book of emblems the Emblematum Liber (1531) Exploring how humans know and understand their place within the environment is Maps and cartography have long been used in the lands and resources offices of Combining cultural and scientific history with a philosophical account, this volume Subterranean spaces conjure up powerful geographical imaginaries; the unknown as a starting point for documenting changing ecological interactions as manifested crucial if we are to engage communities with issues of climate change. Influenced The history of exploration is often imagined as the work of exceptional individuals Canada’s indigenous communities in support of land claims and traditional-use As a ‘Researcher in Residence’ at Peckham Platform, Danny is exploring how explores our attempts to understand, engineer, make sense of, and find meaning in lurks in their dark unfathomable depths; their damp volumes unsettle, disarming in emblems, symbols and allegories in poetry from the Middle Ages to the present. by the growth of citizen science and competency groups as well as socially engaged in extraordinary circumstances. The Hidden Histories exhibition at the Royal studies. Exploring alternative conceptualizations of maps and mapmaking, Maps and geographical perspectives enable understandings of the impact and value of socially air. Long an essential element to life on earth—from the atmospheric composition with their challenge to visually dominated sensory regimes and discomforting The project contends that the once popular poetic format of the emblem works arts practices, the creativity and climate change project studies and develops a Geographical Society presented another view, highlighting the role of indigenous Memes theorizes the potentially creative and therapeutic uses of maps for indigenous engaged art practice. Combining interview and archival work on two prominent that gave life to the coal-forming forests some three hundred million years ago with experiences of confinement and containment. They are spaces of capitalist in the multifocal mode required by observers of contemporary ecological crisis. series of experiments that use creative practices to cultivate community engagement peoples in expeditions around the world, as revealed by research in the historical healing from the legacies of residential schools and colonial dispossession. socially engaged artists, Barby Asante and Sarah Cole, Danny is examining the to the air that fuels our most important technologies today—we think little of its exploitation and scientific fascination and significance, where bones and material Fusing poetry with climate science, natural history, contemporary speculative with climate change. Working for example with the “Knit ‘n’ Natter” group in North collections of the Society. By making visible the diverse roles of local people and working methods, philosophies and deeper understandings of socially engaged incredible properties. Air examines how humans have managed and manipulated culture are dug up and dated, where sediments enable the recreation of past realist philosophy and visual art the project produces a new timeline for ecocritical East London, a project explored the knitting of climate change, investigating the intermediaries—as guides, porters, pilots, cooks, carriers, interpreters, informants artistic practices. The project organised a public event Methodologies of Socially air as a natural resource and, in doing so, have been taken to the limits of survival, environments and the prediction of future ones, and where nature and technology studies by charting a changing pan-European ‘ecological thought’ that can be social relations of humans and non-humans composed by these collective knitting and go-betweens—the exhibition presented exploration as a fundamentally Living Outside Society, Migrant Counter Cultural Identity Ben Murphy Engaged Art at Tate Modern on 21 April 2016. brought to high-altitude mountain peaks, subterranean worlds, and the troughs of come together to exploit resource rich environments and to create powerful found in the emblems and symbols of selected texts. Accompanying this research practices. Ideas of vitalism, materialism, charisma and cosmopolitics are woven collective though uneven experience. Rethinking the history of exploration in this new moral depths. As well as central to philosophical, scientific, and technological environmental imaginaries. Taking up these themes, this residency creates a unique is a creative writing project in which new poems are written for the original images together with art theory to untangle and scrutinise the many complex relationships way means working against the grain of received wisdom. It involves creative as This practice-based research uses photography to explore the dwelling places and pursuits, Air also reveals the way that the artistic and literary imagination has been collaboration between artist Flora Parrott and physical and human geographers of the Emblematum Liber. Lucy’s intention is to reinvigorate these emblems with between nonhumans, people, and place. well as scholarly work with maps, manuscripts, artefacts, photographs, drawings, counter-cultural identities of a group living in a remote mountainous region of south- Making Suburban Faith: Design, Material Culture and Popular Creativity lifted through air and how, in air, cultures have learned to express and inspire each exploring embodied engagements with the underground both in historical records of developments in environmental and philosophical knowledge, as well as the new paintings, books and film. In the context of a research exhibition it also requires east Spain. Identities are reinforced through coexistence in loosely structured, David Gilbert, Claire Dwyer (UCL), Natalie Hyacinth and Henry Stobart ahrc other. Combining established figures such as Joseph Priestley, John Scott Haldane, the scientific exploration of underground spaces but also in contemporary scientific material uncovered by her research. sustained collaboration between researchers, curators, designers and educators. transient, self-regulating, intentional communities. Their makeshift dwellings and and Marie Curie with unlikely individuals from painting, literature, and poetry, this practice conducted in underground spaces. Contemporary Art, Curating, and Environmental Change in the Age of the Anthropocene Yet in the process of co-creation something new may emerge: less familiar and in surroundings act as deliberate architectural symbols of rejectionist ideologies. Making Suburban Faith examines the creative practices and identities of suburban richly illustrated book unlocks new perspectives into the science and culture of this Bergit Arends rhul some ways more hopeful stories of exploration, encounter and exchange. This research aims to demonstrate that dwelling and habitat are implicitly linked religious communities. Working with a range of different faith communities in pervasive but unnoticed substance. Landscape, Nature and the Sacred in Byzantium Veronica della Dora to the expression of identity. Using large format analogue photography and its West London, the project explores their creative practices (architectures, material Gardens Speak Tania El Khoury ahrc The age of the Anthropocene and its associated imaginaries of nature-culture ability to draw out detail and particular modes of observation the work explores cultures, rituals, music and performance). The project, based at Royal Holloway and Nature is as much an idea as a physical reality. By placing nature within Byzantine relations poses challenges not only for artists, but also for those who commission Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 the complexities of rejectionist identities and offers new understandings about the UCL, is engaged in historical and ethnographic work, such as Natalie Hyacinth’s Art and the Airport Clare Booker Across Syria, many gardens conceal the dead bodies of activists and protestors who culture and within the discourse of Orthodox Christian thought and practice, and curate their work. Bergit’s project draws on her experience as a curator, creating Innes M. Keighren with Charles W. J. Withers and Bill Bell ahrc formation and evolution of migrant counter cultures. study of religious music and performance. It also involves three major artistic adorned the streets during the early periods of the uprising. Gardens Speak is an Landscape, Nature and the Sacred in Byzantium explores attitudes towards creation environments within and beyond institutions in which sciences and the arts can projects that include participatory work with faith communities and local school The airport is a site of rich imaginaries and a locus of many contemporary debates interactive sound installation that contains the oral histories of ten ordinary people that are utterly and fascinatingly different from the modern. Drawing on Patristic interact to build cultural knowledge. Curator of Contemporary Art at the Natural In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, books of travel and exploration were students, working with leading creative practitioners in architecture (Mangera around surveillance, security, mobility, simultaneity and globalization. As a cultural, who were buried in Syrian gardens. Each of the ten narratives has been carefully writing and on Byzantine literature and art, the book develops a fresh conceptual History Museum in London from 2005 to 2013 Bergit curated a series of major much more than simply the printed experiences of intrepid authors. They were Curating Pain: The Sick Body in Martin O’Brien’s Taste of Flesh/Bite Me I’m Yours Yvars), photography and material culture. social, philosophical and psychological space, it has been the subject of a range constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their framework for approaching Byzantine perceptions of space and the environment. exhibitions and created an international artists-in-residence programme. Highlights works of both artistry and industry—products of the complex, and often contested, Jareh Das with The Arts Catalyst ahrc of different interpretations. This project investigates these interpretations through stories as they themselves would have recounted them. The audience is invited to It takes readers on an imaginary flight over the Earth and its varied topographies of include the exhibition Lucy + Jorge Orta: Amazonia, shown as part of International relationships between authors and editors, publishers and printers. These books the creation of a series of visualisations of the airport based in material developed enter a garden space in which ten tombstones are planted. Under each tombstone gardens and wilderness, mountains and caves, rivers and seas, and invites them to Year of Biodiversity in 2010. Other exhibitions as part of the programme include captivated the reading public and played a vital role in creating new geographical Taste of Flesh/Bite Me I’m Yours (2015) by London based performance artist Martin Austerity Fashion in Post-War London: 1945-1951 from a range of contemporary technologies; Google Street View; Google Earth and a speaker is buried. Each speaker tells the story of one of the ten individuals killed. shift from the linear time of history to the cyclical time and spaces of the sacred—the Mark Dion: Systema Metropolis (2007) and, in 2006, The Ship: The Art of Climate truths. In an age of global wonder and of expanding empires, there was no publisher O’Brien was part of an experimental curatorial project carried out by Jareh Das in Bethan Bide with the Museum of London ahrc webcams. Through multi-media practices that draw together modelling, mapping, To be able to hear the stories, audience members are invited to dig with their hands time and spaces of eternal returns and revelations. Change in partnership with Cape Farewell. In 2009 to mark the 150th anniversary of more renowned for its travel books than the House of John Murray. Drawing on collaboration with The Arts Catalyst. Taking place in a space fashioned in the style painting and experimental writing the project investigates experiences of the multi- to get to the sound source. They lie on the soil, under a tombstone, and listen to the publication of On the Origin of Species she curated After Darwin: Contemporary detailed examination of the John Murray Archive of manuscripts, images, and the of a quarantine room the performance began with O’Brien chained to a central pole Working with the Museum of London’s fashion collection, this project uses the layered landscape of the airport. the stories whispered into their ears. Gardens Speak is a performance that functions Expressions and in 2012, Galápagos a touring group show of 13 artists’ work based on firm’s correspondence with its many authors—a list that included such illustrious with his arms secured in a strait jacket, and his breathing restricted with a mask that material culture of fashion to uncover a more colourful, unseen side to the post-war without a performer. It is the audience members themselves who activate the Creating Earth Futures: Exploring GeoHumanities Approaches to Global Environmental research they undertook on the Ecuadorian archipelago. explorers and scientists as Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, and literary giants doubled as a hood covering his entire head. He began a gruelling action that saw city. It draws on the variety and vibrancy of the museum’s collection to break down

piece while engaging in a (collective) ritual of mourning. Throughout the piece, the Change Harriet Hawkins ahrc image: Mark Dion, On Tropical Nature, Orinoco River Basin, Venezuela, 1991. Installation detail, Marta Herford, like Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott—Travels into Print considers him crawl on his knees in slow circular movements, from the centre of the space to existing orthodoxies and redraw the map of London fashion. Through this, it explores Disaster Playground Nelly Ben Hayoun arts council england audience bares witness to the stories they hear and embody the lives and deaths of Germany. Image credit: Bergit Arends how journeys of exploration became published accounts and how travellers sought its outer edges, whilst dipping his head repeatedly in a bowl of green nontoxic paint. how fashion was used to negotiate, subvert and resist cultures of austerity during the ten martyrs. They end by placing themselves inside the stories of the deceased A recent article in Nature: Climate Change asked what kinds of global environmental to demonstrate the faithfulness of their written testimony and to secure their His breathing difficulties became apparent very early in the performance, further this period. At the heart of this project lies the materiality of extant fashion objects. We are used to a particular version of disaster, one curated by Hollywood where through addressing their surviving families and friends. They contribute to the change research for what sorts of earth futures? The science community often personal credibility. restricted by the fact that he crawled on all fours throughout this action. O’Brien It proposes a methodology for studying museum collections that places the messy despite the terrible news someone somewhere usually knows what to do. Nelly’s GeoHumanities collective mourning and remembering of activists and ordinary Syrians who revolted finds answers in interdisciplinarity, but a form of interdisciplinarity that tends to Collecting Natural Selection Janet Owen the british academy used his head as a paintbrush to create a circular spiral on the linen lined floor as if details of individual histories centre stage, using the rips, mends and sweat stains feature film Disaster Playground offers us a rather different account. The film follows Royal Holloway, University of London and, as a result, were killed by the regime. overlook arts and humanities research and practice. This AHRC funded Leadership it was his canvas. Exploring the spaces and practices of the performance and the left behind to further our understanding of the city by invoking its past inhabitants. the scientists who lead in the monitoring and deflection of hazardous Near Earth Fellowship aims to correct this overlooking through a focus on GeoHumanities Acts of collecting in extreme environments are intense physical and mental Drawing Out Space Helen Scalway ahrc experiences of the audience, artist and curator the project asked what it means to Objects and the real-life procedures in place in the event of an asteroid collision with royalholloway.ac.uk/geohumanities approaches to global environmental change. Working with a range of project experiences that engage all the senses. This project explores the collecting practices bear witness to pain in performance art. the earth. Nelly follows these procedures from NASA and the SETI Institute to the Forests, Lexicons and Literary Geography Amy Cutler the leverhulme trust partners including Tipping Point and The Cultural Capital Exchange, the fellowship of Alfred Russel Wallace in northern New Guinea (1858) and Charles Darwin in Working with an expanded drawing practice Helen is interested in finding innovative image: Martin O’Brien, Taste of Flesh/Bite Me I’m Yours, 2015 commissioned by The Arts Catalyst, London Mountain Veronica della Dora White House and the United Nations exploring the people and processes responsible involves research on existing projects based in the global north and the global Tierra del Fuego (1833-4). Both men were great observers and systematic collectors ways of understanding relationships through the visualisation of spatialities, for protecting humanity from a potentially devastating asteroid impact. The original isBn 978-0-9568607-7-4 | © rhul 2016 Timed to coincide with the 800th anniversary of the Charter of the Forest (1217AD), the south, an artist residency, new artistic commissions bringing together early career of specimens and data, which they drew upon to develop their ideas about natural particularly in contested situations such as urban diaspora spaces or the locations Majestic and awe-inspiring, there is nothing like the sight of a mountain on the soundtrack features music by The Prodigy and the film has been screened around mappazine produced in collaboration with foldedsheet.com first British legal text defining the rights and resources of the forest, this research global environmental change scientists and a series of networking events that bring selection. They were also adventurers who took significant personal risk to embark of stressed ecologies. The Fashioning Diaspora Space project investigated the Urban Subversions and the Creative City Oli Mould horizon. Throughout all of human history mountains have been linked to the eternal, the world, including at the V&A, the BFI and SXSW film festival.

proposes an innovative new history of the cultures and practices associated with together artists and sciences. As well as advancing and assessing GeoHumanities on major global expeditions of scientific and personal discovery. Janet is interested presence of South Asian clothing textiles in British culture in both colonial (1850s attracting us to their dizzying heights, stunning us with their natural beauty, and image: Disaster Playground poster, screen graphics by The Machine, © Nelly Ben Hayoun Studio defining the forest. The research will explore the history of words and idioms which research, the project will also respond to Arts Council England’s calls for evidence of in how these two collecting journeys beat to a rhythm in the field. Challenging to 1880s) and post-colonial (1980s to 2000s) times. Through this dual focus it Continuing his on-going critique of the Creative City, Oli’s book Urban Subversions often threatening us with their dangers. Through a compelling journey to both real define the British forest; investigate key institutional efforts to standardise forest how creative practices engage audiences with global environmental change. periods of active collecting that sometimes wrought havoc with physical and provided historical depth to contemporary debates over British Asian fashion and and the Creative City explores the city as a space of creative possibility. Arguing and imaginary peaks, Mountain: Nature and Culture explores how the mountain has definitions and consider literary representations of the forest as a space of power mental wellbeing, were interspersed with periods of travel, preparation, processing, multiculturalism, whilst simultaneously relating the V&A’s historical collections and against the forms of creativity promoted by the neoliberal capitalist frameworks figured in our history, culture, and imaginations. The book shows how mountains struggles over definition. The project also includes a programme of high profile stillness, reflection and recuperation. Through exploring the rhythms and the nature knowledge of South Asian textiles to their contemporary contexts of reception. Helen of the Creative City and the Creative Class, the book builds a case for the critical have functioned spiritually as a boundary between life and death, as a bridge between symposia and an exhibition bringing together artists, geographers, philosophers, of sensory encounter involved in these collection journeys we can understand more used visual investigations to explore the cross-cultural exchanges through clothing and political value of the subversive creativities of the city. Exploring parkour, urban the earth and the heavens. Interlacing science, culture, and religion, it sketches the scientists and lexicographers to consider the importance of lexicon to human- about both men as collectors and scientists. textiles in two sites, Green Street, Newham, London and the V&A. The work was exploration, yarn bombing and graffiti as well as a broad range of tactical urbanisms, mountain as a geological phenomenon that has profoundly influenced and been environment relations. shown in an exhibition, Moving Patterns, at The Royal Geographical Society in 2009. the volume argues for a realisation of another form of creative city, one that can influenced by the human imagination, shaping our environmental consciousness Helen is currently an AHRC artist in residence on the Creating Earth Futures project. challenge the inequalities and injustices of neoliberal creativities and open up the and helping us understand our—quite small indeed—place in the world. city as a space of possibilities for living and practicing differently.