There is plenty of Art and Geography activity coming up at the next Conference of Irish Geographers, held at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin – Details here.
Dr Karen Till has organised three sessions of papers from artists and academics
I am convening an Author Meets Critics session with Jason Moore to discuss his book, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015)
Dr Karen Till is curating an exhibition of work from some of the artists involved in the Art and Geography sessions. The exhibition is at the Cregan Library, Ground Floor, DCU St. Patrick’s College, 5-7 May 2016. I will give further details of the artists in the exhibition in a later email.
The keynote lecture in Human Geography is by Dr Harriet Hawkins, a leading scholar of Art and Geography and author of For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2013).
On the Saturday there is a fieldwalk with Professor Luke Gibbons covering themes of memory, identity and landscape in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and based on his book Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism and Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Here the details of these Art and Geography activities.
CIG 2016: Art and Geography Sessions
Organisers: Dr. Karen Till MU Geography, Dr. Nessa Cronin, NUI Galway Centre for Irish Studies; Dr. Tim Collins, NUI Galway Centre for Landscape Studies
Thursday 5 May 2016. 9:30-11am: Art and Geography 1: Irish Memorial Cartographies
Session 1B: Room E201
Chair: Mark McCarthy
EL Putnam, independent multi-media artist (Ireland): ‘Silenced Echoes: Multisensory Tracings of Grangegorman’s Institutional Spectres’
Karen E. Till, Maynooth University Geography: ‘ANU’s 1916-2016 Triptych: Emplacing Ireland through the Female Body’
Gerry Kearns, Maynooth University Geography: ‘Postcolonial Memory: Commodities and Institutions’
Clodagh O’Malley Gannon, Maynooth University Sociology: ‘Local Place-name Maps and Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK): Supporting Local Agricultural Sustainability Through Folklore and Material Insight’
Discussant: Lorraine Dowler, Department of Geography, Penn State University
Coffee break: 11-11:30am
11:30am-1pm: Plenary Session: GEOGRAPHIES OF 1916, Heaney Lecture Theatre,
G114, Cregan Library
Lunch break: 1-2pm
Thursday 2-3:30pm: Art and Geography 2: (Re)Mapping Public Space through the Body
Session 3B, Room E201
Chair: Nessa Cronin, NUI Galway, Centre for Irish Studies
Lorna O’Hara, Maynooth University Geography: ‘Street Harassment: Creative-placed based interventions’
Kellie Ann Payne, Maynooth University Geography: ‘Avant-garde Geopolitics’
Beatrice Jarvis, independent movement artist (UK/Germany): ‘Dancing with Shadows: Choreo-cartography, memory production and the embodied spatial archive in Berlin’
Dorothy Smith and Kathy Herbert, independent community-based artists (Ireland): ‘Walking/Drawing’
Discussant: Gerry Kearns, Maynooth University Geography
Coffee break, 3:30-4pm
Thursday, 4-5.30pm, Capitalism in the Web of Life
Session 4c, Room E406
Chair: Gerry Kearns, Maynooth University
Jason Moore’s “Capitalism in the Web of Life” (Verso 2015) is an important intervention in debates about the Anthropocene. Moore incorporates environmental change within a broader narrative about the evolution of capitalism. This is an audacious materialist reading of the politics of climate change and challenges the naturalizing of structural violence, class conflict, and colonialism that is so often produced under the sign of the Anthropocene. Jason Moore (Binghampton University) will attend the session and will engage with the responses to his book from Anna Davies (Trinity College Dublin), Gerry Kearns, John Morrissey (NUI Galway), and Conor Murphy (Maynooth University).
5:30-7pm: KEYNOTE LECTURE
Dr Harriet Hawkins, author of Creative Geographies, Heaney Lecture Theatre (G114) Cregan Library
Friday 6 May 2016, 11.30 am – 1 pm. Art and Geography 3: Deep Mapping
Session 6A, Room E201
Chair: Karen E. Till, Maynooth University Geography
Aoife Kavanagh, Maynooth University Geography and musical artist: ‘Making Music and Making Place: Insights from Musical Practice in Carlow’
Silvia Loeffler, Maynooth University Geography IRC Postdoc and visual artist: ‘Utopia and Weltfremdheit: Deep Mappings of Rootedness in Dún Laoghaire Harbour through the Lens of Migrant Border Existence’
Laura Donkers, University of Dundee, School of Art and Design, and community-based artist: ‘The Monument Game’
Nessa Cronin, Centre for Irish Studies, National University of Ireland Galway: ‘“You’re all the time adding”: Deep Mapping, Community Practice and the ‘Invention’ of Place’
Discussant: Harriet Hawkins, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London
1-2pm: Lunch
2-3:30: Concurrent Sessions
3:30-4pm: Coffee Break
4-5:30pm: Keynote Lecture, Professor Nigel Routlet, Peatlands, Carbon and Climate Change, Heaney Lecture Theatre (G114) Cregan Library
6:30pm: Conference Dinner: All Hallows College
Saturday 7 May 2016
9:30-1pm: Conference sessions and tea breaks
1-2pm: Lunch and GSI AGM Meeting
Saturday 7 May 2016, 2.30 pm at Glasnevin Cemetery. Field trip: Joyce’s Ghosts in Dublin with Professor Luke Gibbons.
2:10pm: Leave SPD Cregan Library OR meet at 2:30pm at Glasnevin Cemetery entrance.
Ending point: Gravedigger’s pub at Glasnevin Cemetery.
Luke Gibbons will introduce us to the relations between landscape and memory in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Luke Gibbons’ marvelous Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism and Memory (Chicago University Press, 2016) identifies many spectres in Ulysses. Some of these feature as the kind of uncanny traces that disturbed Joyce himself. There is a sort of unfinished business that allows conversational scraps, unbidden memory, and the names secreted or suggested by elements of the landscape, to trouble us with a reflection at which we shudder but can not quite master. Of course, we do not share all the contextual knowledge that Joyce imagined his Dubliners carried around as sly half-knowns, and for this reason Ulysses is incomplete for us in quite a different way than it was for his first, and ideal, readers. Luke Gibbons’ forensic research conjures some more of these ghosts for us. We will walk through part of Glasnevin Cemetery and review the issues of memory, landscape, and identity in Joyce’s writings. This place was particularly dense with history and memory for Joyce, most dramatically, but not only, in the ‘Hades’ chapter of Ulysses. We will end at the Gravediggers pub for some final reflections on memory, conviviality and the ghosted stories in Joyce.
The Geographical Turn 