OF SPACES IN-BETWEEN

The edited volume Marxism and Urban Culture has now been published by Rowman & Littlefield. The book is edited by Benjamin Fraser [executive editor of Journal of Urban Cultural Studies], and includes a forward by Andy Merrifield.

Further details of the book here

My chapter in the volume is ‘The Archive City: Film as Critical Spatial Practice’.

Chapter abstract: In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre describes film as an ‘incriminated medium’ (Lefebvre 1991; Roberts 2012a) that allows for, at best, only partial understandings of and engagements with the dialectics of urban space. If anything, for Lefebvre, film, like other visual media, distorts and fragments space as it is otherwise lived in the everyday. Insofar as the moving image, in all its phantasmagoric forms, is complicit in the reduction of cities to spectacular and virtual spaces of representation – a process described as the ‘cinematization’ of urban space (Abbas 2003; Roberts 2012a) – Lefebvre’s contention can be clearly evinced. However, at the same time it represents something of a broad-brush and un-nuanced dismissal of the role of film in terms of its capacity to mobilise more critical understandings of the dynamic and multi-layered spatialities of ‘the material and symbolic city’ (Highmore 2005). In this chapter I explore the scope for archive film imagery to prompt re-evaluation and re-imaginings of urban landscapes as spaces of ‘radical nostalgia’ (Bonnett 2009) where past and present are brought into dialogue and tension. As well as demonstrating the ways that archive film can function as a form of spatial critique (Keiller 2005), the chapter also sketches the outlines of ‘cinematic cartography’ (Roberts 2012b) as a hitherto under-developed mode of critical urban practice. Drawing on four years of research conducted in the UK city of Liverpool (Roberts 2012a), and considering archival film practices recently developed by film archivists in Bologna, I argue that by mapping and engaging with the ‘archive city’, film can offer a means by which the representational spaces of the past can be harnessed and mobilised as part of a wider Marxian politics of urban spatial practice.

Useful article in The Guardian on the history and politics of map projections in relation to the African continent (article originally published in Think Africa Press):

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/02/google-maps-gets-africa-wrong

On Thursday 3 April I presented the paper ‘The Bulger Case: a Spatial Story’ as part of the Media and Politics seminar series at the University of Liverpool.

The paper will be published in May in The Cartographic Journal – Les Roberts, ‘The Bulger Case: A Spatial Story’, in Special Issue on ‘Cartography and Narratives’, S. Caquard and W. Cartwright (eds.), The Cartographic Journal, 51 (2).

The paper is pre-published online:

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1743277413Y.0000000075)

‘Big Ruins: The Aesthetics and Politics of
Supersized Decay’

14 May, 2014. Limited places remaining (for
attendees only)

Attendees are invited to book a place on the
following event. Tickets are limited, and available via Eventbrite: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/big-ruins-the-aesthetics-and-politics-of-supersized-decay-tickets-10733583437?aff=eorg

As global capitalism intensifies its hold on the
planet, so its ruins are scaling up in size: from vast junkyards of jumbo-jets
in Nevada to entire empty cities in China waiting to be inhabited. Meanwhile
the urban ruins of the Cold War era continue to resist appropriation, whether
because of their toxicity, ideological misplacedness, or as a consequence of
intractable ethnic conflicts. Coupled with a recent plethora of
(post)apocalyptic visions of ruined cities in cinema and computer games, the
links between real and imagined ruination are becoming increasingly blurred. If
we are to imagine large-scales sites of decay, how might their possible ruin be
represented in a way that helps us adequately respond to that very possibility?

This event will address that question by focusing
on the wider significance of big ruins in an age of global capitalism. Drawing
from a wide range of sites – both real and imagined – this conference aims to
create a dialogue between big ruins and the culturally-prescient theme of the
imagination of disaster and to open up an emancipatory space that, following
Slavoj Žižek, accepts the universal inevitability of ruin in order to break its
ideological grasp and thus to suggest liberating alternatives.

Confirmed speakers include:

Keynote – Tim Edensor: ‘Ruins are everywhere’

Luke Bennett: ‘The ruins of ruins’

Michael Crang: ‘Mired but alive’: the aesthetic
taming of toxicity

Anca Pusca: ‘Postcommunist ruins: the fine line
between decay vs. rebuilding’

Mark Sanderson: ‘Derelict utopias’

Matthew Philpotts: ‘Rocket-fuelled ruin:
Re-territorialising the traces of German dictatorship’

Emma Fraser: ‘Reading the ruins of Detroit: poetic,
dialectical and phenomenological approaches’

Clare O’Dowd: ‘Gregor Schneider and the ghost
towns’

Paul Dobraszczyk: ‘40 years later: ruin gazing in
Varosha’

Camilla Røstvik: ‘Like sleeping dragons: an
exploration of the ruins of CERN’

Carl Lavery & Lee Hassall: ‘Return to
Battleship Island: Future of Ruins’

William Viney: ‘Futures in ruin’

Andrew Hardman: ‘Where is my apocalypse? Living in
a ruined future’

All welcome. Tickets for the conference can be
booked via Eventbrite: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/big-ruins-the-aesthetics-and-politics-of-supersized-decay-tickets-10733583437?aff=eorg

Other upcoming ruin-related events from CIDRAL are
listed on the 2014 programme: http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/cidral/events/

Re-blogged from Progressive Geographies

Henri Lefebvre recordings – three audio; one video

Three audio recordings of Lefebvre. The first from 1975 is
the most wide-ranging; the second is a brief discussion from 1970 that
discusses La fin de l’histoire; and the third is on space. There is also this video interview.

//www.youtube.com/embed/0kyLooKv6mU

Re-blogged from Progressive Geographies

The People, Place, and Space Reader – open access material

The People, Place, and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack
Gieseking & William Mangold, with Cindi Katz, Setha Low, & Susan
Saegert

The editors of The People, Place, and Space Reader believe
that knowledge should be open to the public and have therefore decided to
publicly share their writing in the form of the book introduction and twelve
section introductions. If open access (OA) selections from the reader are
available, they are hyperlinked on the pages.

On Friday 14th March 2014 I took part in a panel discussion at the Atlantic Sounds: Ships and Sailortowns conference co-organised by Graeme Milne from the Dept of History at University of Liverpool. The panel, which included the Liverpool filmmaker Dave Cotterill, discussed filmmaking as a key means of recording and analysing popular music and its history
in the second half of the twentieth century.

This Liqufruta bottle is a found object which was my contribution to a workshop organised by Hazel Andrews and held at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London on Thursday 13th March 2014.

Participants each brought an object of their choice which formed the basis of a short talk explaining the reasons for their choice, what significance it has and any stories related to or prompted by the object. Each talk was followed by a group discussion.

An edited collection based on the contributions and discussions is currently being planned.

A transcript of my talk can be accessed here.

[Below is the publicity blurb for an event I took part in at UCLAN this week…]

Liminal Landscapes: assembly, enclosure & the West Lancs coast

Tuesday 11th March, 2014
6pm – 8pm
Lecture Room 3, Foster Building,
University of Central Lancashire,
Preston, PR1 2HE

The event, which is the second in the Practising Place programme, will also premiere Jacques’ new film, The Dionysians of West Lancs. Described by the artist as ‘a phantom ride’ along the West Lancashire coast, the film weaves together historical topography, rave culture and Greek mythology to examine the age-old tension between enclosure and freedom of assembly which continues to shape this landscape.

These themes will be further explored by Les Roberts, who will present his research into sites of liminality, including the treacherous terrains of the Dee Estuary and Morecambe Bay. Through conversation, Jacques and Roberts will discuss the power struggles, both past and present – such as the current controversy surrounding ‘fracking’ – which define such places, and outline a political reading of liminal landscapes.

About the speakers:

David Jacques is a multi-media artist primarily involved with film. His practice engages with the subject of History, its narrative interpretations and the interplay between factual and fictional strategies of representation. His interest in deconstructing and re-apportioning the subject often results in the exploration of forgotten, marginalised and socially / politically disruptive sources. In 2010 he won the Liverpool Art Prize and was shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize. Recent screenings of his work include; Tate Liverpool ‘Art turning Left’, 17th International Video Festival VIDEOMEDEJA, Novi Sad Serbia, WNDX Film Festival, Winnipeg Canada 
and Sheffield Fringe at BLOC Projects Sheffield. He lives and works in Liverpool.

David Jacques on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user5423212

Les Roberts’ research interests and practice fall within the areas of urban cultural studies, cultural memory, and digital spatial humanities. His work explores the intersection between space, place, mobility, and memory with a particular focus on film and popular music cultures. He is author of Film, Mobility and Urban Space: a Cinematic Geography of Liverpool (2012), editor of Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice and Performance (2012) and co-editor of Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place (2013), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between (2012), and The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections (2010).

For information on research activities and publications see www.liminoids.com

On 7 & 8 March I attended the Location London conference held at UCL and University of London Senate House. Organised by Roland-Francois Lack and Ian Christie, the conference programme featured some excellent papers and a preview screening of Another London, a film written and presented by architectural historian Robert Harbison, and introduced by the director Hector Arkomanis.

My paper was titled ‘Locating the City in Film | Navigating the Archive City’.

Slides of the presentation can be downloaded here

http://www.locationlondon.net/

North! Mapping Cinematic Norths

Friday May 2nd 10-6, Showroom Cinema Sheffield

This event, hosted by the Sheffield Centre for Research in Film, invites exploration of the representation, construction and function of North in film.

The North retains a singularity and certitude in its magnetic signaling of trajectory, route, and direction (home) yet, as Peter Davidson’ reminds us in The Idea of North (2005), ‘Everyone has a different north, their own private map of the emotional – indeed the moral – geography of north and south.’

North
remains an important relational positioning, a loaded projection, an
emphatic somewhere and a powerful elsewhere. Such relational sites are
imbued with cultural, economic and political geographies, epitomized by the defiant signage of Sheffield’s Designers Republic which proclaims their place as ‘North of Nowhere’ TM.

Norths
evoke topographical and meteorological challenge, landscapes of harsh
remoteness, austere beauty and meditative emptiness. Constructions of
space and place characterized by both passionate solidarities and
haunting solitudes, sparkling utopias and dark nostalgias, industrial
heartland, badland, borderland, no man’s land.

The
plotting of these myriad Norths, which bewitch compasses and confound
maps in their elusive, shifting and relational natures can be explored
and traced in moving images.

Suggested areas for discussion include:

– the construction of different relational Norths
– the role of north-ness in constructions of star identity (auteurs and actors)
– Romantic ethnographies and Northern-ness
– landscapes and soundscapes of the North
– national and transnational constructions of Norths
– genre and North
– the role of national / regional policies for funding film production

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers. Please send proposals (200 words) to – researchinfilm@sheffield.ac.uk. Deadline: Friday 21st March

http://researchinfilm.group.shef.ac.uk/

Video of lecture by Marc Auge ‘Architecture and Non Places’ at the Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University, 12–13 October 2012. Access here.

Interesting Guardian article from Alexandra Harris in response to recent floods and extreme weather:

Drip, drip, drip, by day and night
From the April showers that begin The Canterbury Tales to Shakespearean storms to sodden Victorian classics, English literature is full of rain and flooding. Alexandra Harris on how every era creates its own kind of downpour…


http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/14/english-literature-rain-flooding

International Colloquium

Spaces of Memory &
Performance: Trauma, Affect, Displacement

University of East London, Centre
of Performing Arts Development (CPAD)

Date: 20-21 June 2014

Venue: University of East
London, University Square.

Confirmed
speakers: Claudia Fontes (visual artist), Lola Arias (theatre
director), Vikki Bell (Goldsmiths), Anne Huffschmidt (Freie Universitat
Berlin), Ananda Breed (UEL), Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow), Valentina
Salvi (UNTREF), Patricia Violi (University of Bologna), Eve Katsouraki (UEL).

‘Places
are lost – destroyed, vacated, barred – but then there is some new place, and
it is not the first, never can be the first.’ – Judith Butler

The aftermath of episodes of
trauma and loss have traditionally given way to urban rituals and encounters
with sites of public grieving. Even so, the emergence of disparate sites of
trauma has not been enough addressed from a performative perspective. The very
existence of the so-called ‘spaces of memory’ requests the reconfiguration of
modes of engagement with the public space in the face of trauma and its
performance. With this in mind, this two-day symposiumwill explore
unconventional forms of intervention in performance and visual arts in a wide
spectrum of geographical scenarios. The question that underlines the event is
how to propitiate public pathways to engage with loss and trauma among expanded
publics. While contesting processes of normalization of memory, the
symposium seeks to discover embodied, ephemeral and unmarked spaces as sites of
enchantment and public gathering. It also explores transitional and diasporic
interventions that might envisage news forms of being together. The
symposium is also an invitation to imagine the futurity of sites of memory and
explore fictions that may transform the politics of spectatorship in the
present.

Some of the key themes to be
explored include:

– What is a ‘space of memory’?

– How innovative practices of intervention may awake a shared sense
of ownership towards disparate traumatic pasts?

– How to investigate the affectivity of space in
relation to memory and spectatorship?

– How sites of trauma become marked, unmarked, and
displaced?

– Is it possible to encourage ways of ‘performing
life’ within landscapes marked by loss?

– How disparate forms of theatre, performance and
visual arts may contribute to ‘work through’ collective processes of suffering?

– Might bodies emerge as sites of public grieving?

– Might different forms of fiction help us to
re-inhabit trauma in the present?

By rethinking the
performativity of space and trauma, the symposium aims to generate a new and
interdisciplinary dialogue among social sciences, visual arts, literature,
theatre and performance.

We
invite proposals (300 words) for 20 minutes papers & practical
presentations, showings or shorter 10minprovocations/interventions from artists
and curators, practitioners and scholars working at the crossroads of memory
studies, performance, cultural studies, affect and trauma theory. Some
thematic explorations may include:

– Urban space, memorialisation and landscapes

– The affectivity of the space and unconventional
ways of relating to trauma

– Topographies and architectures of affect

– Post-traumatic spaces & performatives

– Sounds of trauma & haunted spaces

– Monuments, living memorials & bones

– Curation, empathy & care

– Ruins, future & potentiality

– Practises of reoccupation and ‘rehabilitation’ of
space

– Abject spaces & body as site of trauma

– New museums, dark tourism

– The place of the perpetrators

– Transmission of trauma, vicarious and prosthetic
memories

– Politics of reparation & spectatorship

Please send
proposals to Cecilia Sosa c.sosa@uel.ac.uk and
Eve Katsouraki e.katsouraki@uel.ac.uk by
March 31st2014.

This research event has the support of the British Academy International Partnership and
Mobility (IPM) SchemeProgramme ‘Commemoration,
New Audiences and Spaces of Memory in Latin America’s Southern Cone:
Trans-cultural Dialogues in the Wake of Loss’. (PI: Dr. Cecilia Sosa,
Postdoctoral researcher, School of Arts and Digital Industries, University of
East London).

A podcast of Will Self in discussion with Patrick Keiller and Matthew Beaumont at the LRB bookshop can be accessed on the writer’s website: here

CALL FOR PAPERS: MOVING MOUNTAINS – STUDIES IN PLACE,
SOCIETY AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATION

February 5, 2014

University of Edinburgh

History of Art and ESALA

18-20 June 2014

Visit the Moving Mountains website here

Mountains have been considered embodiments of higher
spiritual goals and peak experiences since ancient times. By viewing mountains,
climbing and experiencing changing atmospheres, people have undergone physical
and spiritual quests, the character of which varies depending on the motivation
and identity of the participant(s). The consistent presence of mountains in
legends, myths, literature, artistic and architectural creations suggests their
cultural, religious and social significance. Additionally, mountains and their
surrounding landscape have been the focus of cartographic and scientific work,
mountaineering expeditions and other kinds of explorations.

In order to more fully understand the role of mountains in culture
and society, the History of Art Department at the University of Edinburgh and
the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture are hosting an
inter-disciplinary conference and an exhibition of practice-based material. We
invite abstracts of no more than 300 words addressing questions and proposing
works relevant to the role of mountains in the humanities, arts and design. As
this is intended to be a highly interdisciplinary conference, we welcome
submissions from a wide range of subject areas, which include art history,
architecture, anthropology, cultural studies, film studies geography,
literature, theology and philosophy, among others.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

– The integration of mountains into architectural design and
artistic creations

– City and mountains

– Mountain landscapes, caves and paths

– The impact of mountains on religious practices

– Memory and mountains

– Studies of Mountain communities

– Cultural representations of mountains (cartography, iconography,
photography)

– ‘Peak’ Experiences and Mountain Views

– Atmosphere and the aura of mountains

– Religious experiences and mountains

Confirmed keynote speakers include: Professor Veronica della
Dora of the University of London, Professor Tim Ingold of the University of
Aberdeen and Eamonn O’Carragain of the University College Cork.

Please email abstracts to movingmountainsconference@gmail.com
by 28 February 2014. Abstracts will be reviewed by an academic committee and we
hope to publish selected papers from this conference.

Please email any further inquiries to
movingmountainsconference@gmail.com, or you can contact the conference organisers,
Emily Goetsch and Christos Kakalis directly at ebgoetsch@gmail.com and
xpkakalis@hotmail.com.

A review of Patrick Keiller’s ‘The View from the Train’ by Will Self has been published in the London Review of Books – access here

Guardian article (29/01/13) on anxieties surrounding Google Maps and state & corporate data tracking/surveillance.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/29/google-maps-gchq-a-to-z

Reblogged from Progressive Geographies

An auditory tribute to Harry Beck’s Underground map, the
skeleton which has long lent shape to the city in the minds of Londoners. Here
sounds were collected from along London’s canals and lesser rivers. Completed
in March 2012.

– See more at: http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/survey/waterways

Reblogged from Progressive Geographies


I’m not entirely sure what motivated someone to map places mentioned in Tom Waits’s songs, but as a long time Waits fan I felt duty bound to share.

http://tomwaitsmap.com/