Cultural Geography I: Mediums

I Introduction

Creative geographies, experimental geographies, creative collaborative interdisciplinary research, art-full geographies, the geoartist, creative geographical research methods, research creation, artistic research, practice-led or practice-based research

A growing number of monikers and neologisms have emerged to capture and sort the rich relations between creative practices and geographical research within and beyond cultural geography. Some of these express allegiances to philosophical and theoretical inheritances (e.g. research creation, Manning and Massumi, 2014; Williams et al., 2019), others are shaped by arts and humanities disciplines (practice-based or practice-led PhDs, Elkins, 2009). A third group relate to geographical discussions around ideas of creativity, experiment and artistry within geography (Boyd and Barry, 2020; Jellis, 2015; Last, 2014; Madge, 2014). In this, the first of three progress reports on cultural geographies, I want to do what is perhaps a very cultural geographical thing. Specifically, I use a critical concept drawn from the arts and humanities – the idea of the medium (e.g. sculpture, dance, painting, drawing) – as a lens onto this intensification of relations between creative practice and cultural geographies. I am interested in those relations in which creative practices are enrolled as geographical research methods, as creative practice led research, or within the production of creative research outputs. In the first section, I explore the alignment of cultural geographies with the so-called ‘post-medium condition’ with its vibrant field of transdisciplinary arts. Despite, however, the energy of such movements beyond medium, in the second and third sections I turn to the persistence of medium within geographers’ work with creative practices. I frame these discussions through classic cultural geographical analytics – the geographies of creative production and those of consumption.

II Thinking with Medium?

The entanglement of geographical knowledge and creative practice is centuries, if not millennia, long (for diffuse histories, see Barnes, 2018; Dixon et al., 2013; Driver and Martins, 2002, 2005; Smith, 1988; Stafford, 1984). Yet, the past decade has confirmed Divya Tolia-Kelly’s observation in her 2012 Progress report of collaborations between geography, art and visual culture as ‘almost a new orthodoxy’ of research (2012: 135, see also Crang, 2010). Indeed, alongside long-practiced visual methods including photography, drawing, video-making, we find cultural geographers turning to a diverse range of practices (alone and in collaboration) including dancing, poetry, theatre-making, taxidermy, singing, music-making and diverse sound practices, neon-lighting and, geo-graphics (Arnold, 2019; Delyser and Greenstein, 2021; De Leeuw, 2015; Dwyer et al., 2019; Engelmann, 2020; Gibbs et al., 2020; Magrane and Cokinos, 2016; McLean, 2017; Nordström, 2016; Noxolo, 2018; ó conchúir, n.d; Okoye, 2017; Peterle, 2019; Raynor, 2017; Sachs-Olsen 2019; Rosa, n.d; Straughan, 2019; Veal, 2016). Indeed, such is the expansive diversity that it is far beyond the capacity of a progress report to survey this field. This is further compounded by the interest in creative practices beyond cultural geography’s always blurry subdisciplinary boundaries. Indeed, such practices can be found within participatory geographies, political, economic and social geographies and even physical geography (principally geomorphology) (see e.g. Brickell et al., 2019; Flintham and Williams, 2015; Hall and Springer, 2017; Overend et al., 2020; Pain et al., 2019; Tooth et al., 2016). Perhaps marking the growing volume and maturity of these relations, cultural geographers have been increasing calling for critical thinking on these creative practice relations. Such probings align with wider critiques of creativity, alerting us to the politics, histories, ethics, impact and public agendas of these forms (De Leeuw et al., 2017; McLean, 2017, Mould, 2018, Wylie and Webster, 2019).

Here I want to mobilise the question of ‘medium’ as a means to explore creative practice and cultural geography relations. For some, medium is an outdated and conservative category of thought (Krauss, 2000). Yet for others, to query medium is to open up what has been called the ‘post-medium condition’. Peter Osborne (2013: 3) writing of contemporary art observed the dissolution of medium specificity (e.g. dance, sculpture) into ‘a complex and fluid field of generically artistic practices’. This in turn has driven the wider recognition of an open energising field of transdisciplinary arts practice. This open field, and its associated dynamics of practice, funding and its infrastructures, has been an important force shaping recent creative practice and cultural geography relations. One common feature of this transdisciplinary field is the growth of research consortia driven by creative practices and large, multi-disciplinary creative teams. We might think, for example, of geographer Sasha Engelmann (2020) and her work within the group of artists that constitute Studio Saraceno, or Thomas Jellis’s (2013, 2015) ethnographies of ‘experimental’ spaces. Jellis’s work takes in both another large multidisciplinary artistic studio, Studio Olafur Eliasson, but also the Montreal University-based Sense Lab and its diffuse and theoretically informed practices of ‘research creation’ (see also Manning and Massumi, 2014). Artistic embrace of a transdisciplinary field (and emerging funding forms) has also enabled many practitioners to evolve new ways of working, including participatory and community-based practices. This intersects with participatory geography’s ongoing interest in creative practices (Mestizo Arts and Activism Collective, ¹ Pain et al., 2019). Further, we see a rise in geographers self-identifying under the general term ‘artist’ (vs. medium-specific descriptors of musician, sculptor etc.). Some have adopted compound neologisms such as geoartist to describe their mobilisation of a range of creative practices as suited to their research questions (e.g. Banfield, 2016; Boyd and Barry, 2020).

Attending to the post-medium transdisciplinary field of the arts also directs attention to the political economies of the global academy. The rise in practice-based PhDs within cultural geography, for example, should be seen within the context of shifts felt around the world in the relationship between arts education and the academy (Butt, 2019). ² Funding calls too have played a role in shaping cultural geographical and creative practice relations. For example, the rise of research creation was a response to the terms of a Canadian funding call (Manning and Massumi, 2014). The form has become prominent in French Geography. This includes projects such as the antiAtlas Journal (Szary et al., 2016) ArtiCités (led by Pauline Guinard) and the Structure fédérative de Recherche-Création coordinated by Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary at University Grenoble sur les Alpes. ³ In the UK context, the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ‘Landscape and Environment’ Programme (2006–2012), led by Stephen Daniels, has significantly shaped the landscape of geography and creative practice collaborations. These were documented in special issues of the journals Cultural Geographies, Tate Papers and Performance Research. ⁴ An important recent example would be the UK-based Global Research Challenges Fund. ⁵ This fund seeks interdisciplinary responses to pressing issues in the Global South through in-country collaboration with researchers and stakeholders, which can include creative practitioners. ⁶ More broadly, the currency of innovative beyond-disciplinary working for addressing complex, wicked problems has seen creative practices situated within major new research centres and networks. These include the Space&Place Reseach Collaborative (Ireland) at Maynooth University partnered with Ómós Áite: Space/Place Research Group at the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland Galway; the Mobility and Humanities Centre at the University of Padua (Italy) and the Academy for Mobility Humanities, University of Konkuk (Seoul), as well as the Global Futures programme at University of Taipei. ⁷ While in Chile, interest in transdisciplinary research approaches finds artistic practices integral to major research programmes such as the GeoHumanities and Creative (Bio)Geographies project led by Andres Moreira-Munoz. ⁸ It seems then, that cultural geography’s relations with creative practice have thrived in the context of arts’ transdisciplinary post-medium condition. Yet, as the following two sections will explore, a persistent set of questions about medium continue to shape cultural geographical thinking and practice.

III Persistence of Mediums 1: Geographies of Production

Cultural geographers writing of their own creative practices often pose some version of the question ‘what do mediums do?’ This emerges through often lively and well-illustrated autoethnographic or collaboratively produced accounts of creative doings, of learning to do, or of the dynamics of collaboration (e.g. Clark et al., 2020). Interestingly, as within the arts, an attention to medium in these accounts foregrounds materiality and practice (Krauss, 2006). For cultural geographers, the material-embodied practices of specific practices of making and creating offer diverse openings onto research concerns. Experiments with sound, for example, reflect on how vibrating bodily territories connect humans, non-humans and environments (Gallagher, 2015; Gallagher et al., 2018; Kanngieser, 2015; Paiva et al., 2018; Scriven and Langon, 2020). While practices such as the thready geographies of weaving, knitting and embroidery (Burke, 2018; Dwyer et al., 2019), or the messy-fleshy practices of taxidermy (Patchett, 2016; Straughan, 2019) offer means to explore connections with human and non-human others.

As geographers concentrate around specific mediums increasingly sophisticated vocabularies develop. We might think for example of storytelling, creative writing, or, as I want to develop here drawing. Drawing, a creative practice entwined with geography’s disciplinary history in sometimes troubling ways, has offered geography many forms (e.g. Driver and Martins, 2002). These include, the histories of the field sketch, drawing as thinking-practice, sketching en plein air (Wylie and Webster, 2019), collaborative scribing (Bertoncin et al., 2020), and architectural drawing (Gilbert et al. Making Suburban Faith). ⁹ Uniting these forms is an account of drawing as an embodied engagement with the world in its material making that has its own geographies of proximity and distance. Sage Brice (2017: 158), for example, writes of her time spent drawing cranes on wetlands in the Jordan Rift Valley as a practice of ‘becoming open (corporeally, social and politically) to the cranes and the complex histories of the nature reserve’. While John Wylie and Catrina Webster (2019) observe of their drawing and painting in the landscape ‘looking at the canvas, and looking out; looking between them: these were exercises in closer attention, immersion and absorption…drawing is understood in terms of intimacy, beckoning and revelation, such that when you draw, so you are drawn into the world’ (2019: 38). Other geographies of drawing are foregrounded in Aparna Parikh’s (2020) account of her sketching-stitching field practices in her research into everyday working life in Mumbai. For Parikh, these practices, informed by her architectural training, bring into view critical feminist questions of positionality. Parikh describes her expanding drawing practices (using pencil, pen and thread) as entangling depth of field explorations with points of view, as her status as a researcher and insider–outsider shifted. Drawing, she suggests, enabled her to challenge sometimes ‘taken-for-granted assumptions about what constitutes “indigenous” knowledge, and how we use both our commonalities and differences to heighten sensitivity to others’ complex and shifting world views’ (2020: 5).

Such a focus on medium has enabled cultural geographers to assemble increasingly sophisticated vocabularies for talking about their creative doings. In some cases, these foreground the specificities of material and embodied practices, variously skilled bodies, social and political contexts, geographical thinking and histories of practice (Patchett and Mann, 2018). In other cases, these draw on theoretical languages to understand the material specificities of practice, including post-phenomenologies, feminist new materialisms and neo-vitalisms. Brigstocke and Noorani’s (2016) special issue of the journal GeoHumanities on attunement and the ‘arts of listening’, for example, deploys creative practice and other means to explore diverse a currents of thinking on attunement. While, Latham and Wagner (2020) are inspired by the photography projects of Korean artist Nicki Lee to reflect on and evolve their own experimental practices of bodily becoming. For others however, it is the histories and theories of the mediums themselves that offer the purchase point for discussion. A good example here is the account offered of their London-based project Quaternary Drift by collaborators David Overend (performance artist), Jamie Lorimer (cultural geographer) and Danielle Schreve (physical geographer) (2020). Their practice and their account of it repurposes the legacy of the 20th-century avant-garde walking practice, the Situationist Drift. As such, the critical force of this medium is reoriented from its origin as a critique of capitalism, towards being an ‘experimental encounter with deep time and its non-human inhabitants’ (2020: 454). Their performative ‘eco-politics of coexistence’ (2020: 474) is made present on the page in pictures of tiny clay elephants on city streets, laminated woolly mammoths (animal relics and icons) geographers wearing hippo masks and abstract images of river terraces and moss (Deleuzian diagrams and scale-shifting devices). The artfulness of this article lies in its meshing of histories and theories of an artistic medium and its critical force with Quaternary Science and cultural geographies of the non-human and urban natures – beneath the cobbles, the bones.

The careful intersection of creative project, critical accounts of mediums and geographical thinking is increasingly found within cultural geographers’ discussions of creative practice. There are two clear benefits of this. Firstly, there is a notable move beyond any simplistic linguistic and material-affective alignment – sound works ‘attune’, weaving ‘entangles’– to detail the complexities of such encounters, entanglements and attunements. Secondly, just as Overand et al. (2020) describe the defamiliarisation of their drifts, there is an acknowledgement of the tensions and challenges in these intersections of knowledge and practice. The account of the collaborative project Globe offered by Olivia Sheringham (2020) and her collaborators, including the artist Janetka Platun, is a wonderful example of how varied vocabularies, concepts and practices can come together without collapsing into one another. Their discussion of this film, sculpture and participatory project draws on Sara Ahmed’s understanding of encounters together with discussions from within participatory and relational art. In doing so, they explore how rolling the 1-m diameter copper sphere with four cameras enabled an exploration of ‘questions of home and belonging in the context of an increasingly “hostile migration milieu”’ (2020: 178). Rolling Globe through the streets of London and Delhi, its degraded form comes to trace migration journeys of the artist and participants, as well as, importantly, the relations of the collaborators. Tracking Globe through streets, galleries and videos, they use Ahmed’s sense of encounters as ‘a meeting, but a meeting which involves surprise and conflict’ to draw out the force of Globe for both thinking through migration and collaboration.

A more sophisticated sense of mediums seems to bring cultural geographers a greater facility with their deployment. Vickie Zhang (2020), for example, makes careful use of the photo-essay form to entwine corporeal and photographic exposures to explore ‘misattunements’ in her fieldwork in regional Australia. Combinations of image and text enable a dwelling on an ‘indeterminacy of meaning’ and the ‘unwanted static’ of multiple information sources that don’t add up (see also Zhang et al., 2019). Other geographers too are finding critical value in creative methods for addressing challenges of disconnection. Asil Duru (2019) writes of using video editing practices during the making of the videographic work A Walk Down the Shore on violence and well-being in Istanbul. In the place of simply rendering visible, these practices enabled an embrace of ‘moments of disruption, physical obstruction, indecision and confusion without reducing these to questions of legibility’ (see also Costas Constantinou’s, 2020, discussion of his film ‘Lines, 2019’ on the ‘microgeographies’ of life around Cyprus’s Green Line). It seems then that a focus on medium, whether done consciously or not, is enabling cultural geographers to build more sophisticated ways of thinking and writing about and with creative practices, as well as more conceptually informed ways of evolving their practices. What though of occasions where rather than only write about their creative practices, these practices result in creative ‘outputs’?

IV Persistence of Mediums 2: Geographies of Consumption

Cultural geography’s engagements with creative practices, while often written about, continue to overspill the pages of its journals, edited collections and monographs. There has been, for example, a rise in geographers working as curators (Driver, 2013). This includes those based in galleries such as Divya Tolia-Kelly’s and Rosanna Raymond’s An Archaeology of ‘Race’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2012, 2020, 2021) and those based in geography departments, such as Eden Kinkaid’s (2019) Critical Futures Visual Archive. Cecilie Sachs Olsen’s recent curation of the Degrowth themed Oslo Architecture Triennial (2019–2020) sees the geographer emerge as curator of a major city-wide festival. ¹⁰ Geographers also seem increasingly drawn to live arts practices, such as Garden’s Speak by Tania El Khoury, or Open Weather’s radio-performance art created by Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer and Am Kanngieser’s Climates of Listening’s collection of sound and performance works. ¹¹ Yet objects and artefacts are also still important, ranging from the experimental provocations of Anna Secor’s psychoanalytic ChaosmosDichotomizers, to the media experiments of James Riding’s and Jack Wake-Walker’s (2017) documentary-poetry-film Bridges <Bosnia 20>. ¹² Importantly, with these diverse mediums finding form in cultural geographical outputs, we need to reflect on cultural geography’s changing geographies of consumption.

Indeed, like the wider world of creative practices, cultural geographies are regularly consumed within the spaces of internationally renowned museums, galleries, theatres or the cyclical spaces of the arts festival. Elsewhere, cultural geographies are encountered in small, specialist arts venues, university galleries or in community-run spaces. ¹³ Indeed, one of the enduring frameworks for cultural geography’s engagements with creative practices (and likely one reason for their popularity) concern their potential to engage ‘publics’, including through participatory working (Bagelman and Bagelman, 2016; Camps to Cities ¹⁴ ; Crang, 2010; Johnston and Pratt, 2019; Pain et al., 2019). It is, of course, not only in formal ‘spaces of display’ that we can consume these cultural geographies beyond the page but also in a whole host of locations, streets, fields, mountains and moors, abandoned buildings, the list could go on (Dekeyser and Garratt, 2015; Gallagher, 2015; Pyyry, 2019; Ramsden, 2017). Many of course, circulate digitally, and in the context of Covid-19 some claim this has been accelerated. Some works are ‘born-digital’ (e.g. Boyd Current, 2020 ¹⁵ ; Harris, 2016), others take advantage of the potential for mass distribution of online forms such as exhibition websites or digital creative archives (e.g. https://Diffusion.org.uk).

Yet interestingly, while questions of the whos, hows and wheres of consumption are crucial, they tend to attract far less geographical attention than questions of production. A notable example is Johnston and Pratt’s (2019) testimonial play Nanay. Across a suite of papers and most recently a book they reflect on the play’s assembly of audiences and its reception as it is staged in multiple locations around the world. Concerns with consumption are also common at the intersection of participatory geographies and creative practices, as participant’s experiences are integral to the work (e.g. Askins and Pain, 2011; Gorman-Murray and Brickell, 2017). As yet, however, questions of mediums and the geographies of their consumption lack wider traction, despite being crucial to the prospects of cultural geography’s engagements with diverse creative mediums.

If asked where I consume most of my cultural geographical work engaging with creative practices, I would still (like many I would hazard) count the pages of journals and monographs at the top of my list. While there have been a growing number of monographs and edited collections focused explicitly on accounts of creative practices within geography of late (Banfield, 2016; Boyd, 2017; Boyd and Edwardes, 2019; Johnston and Pratt, 2019; Magrane et al., 2019), the journal article is a hugely popular outlet. Not least given the possibilities enabled by the special sections of journals that have evolved to support geography’s creative practices. This includes cultural geographies’ ‘cultural geographies in practice’ (launched 2000), but also GeoHumanities’ ‘practices and curations’ (launched 2016) and Emotion Space and Society’s ‘Creative/Interventions’ section (launched 2019). ¹⁶ Other journals such as History Workshop Journal, Antipode and ACME have long welcomed so-called ‘alternative formats’. These sympathetic venues have offered a home to many autoethnographic and collaborative accounts of geographers’ creative productions. For others however, these are experimental spaces, enabling exploration of the poetic forms on the page or the possibilities of the visual essay (Lantto, 2019; Palmgren, 2017; Sachs-Olsen and Hawkins, 2016). Oftentimes the goal of these pieces is to do more than merely to account for practice or to document live events. Instead these essays are conceived of as an aesthetic form in their own right (Hawkins, 2020). These experiments have perhaps been inspired by those geographers for whom text is their creative medium of choice. Alongside the emerging field of geopoetics (Last, 2017; Magrane, 2015; Magrane et al., 2019), we find diverse experiments with the geographical work and potential of words and the spaces of the page. Whether this be in poetry collections – books, pamphlets or chap books (Cresswell, 2013; Cutler, 2013; De Leeuw, 2015; Eshun and Madge, 2016; Mercer, 2017); field guides (Magrane and Cokinos, 2016); experimental monographs (Cresswell, 2019) or play scripts (Richardson, 2015), comics (Petrele, 2019) or zines (Bagelman and Bagelman, 2016) – the list could go on. We also find exciting collaborations between geographers and small press publishers (DeLyser and Greensetein, 2021; Desilvey et al., 2011; Keighren and Norcup, 2020; Neate and Craggs, 2016).

Thinking through this report reinforced my sense that huge amounts of interesting cultural geographical work finds its primary expression in other than the written form. In focusing on what happens in the doing, or on the production of often non-text-based creative outputs, these cultural geographies often exceed the spaces of the page. This is of course not restricted to cultural geography, but across geography, where field encounters are vital sites of knowledge production and consumption. It is perhaps marked in participatory geographies, where the importance of solely disciplinary spaces of knowledge production and consumption is challenged. A resistance to the written form poses a challenge to the presence of these creative forms of cultural geography within academic worlds where journal articles, monographs and edited collections are the dominant forms. This has impacts not only for the circulation of our work but also in how we structure disciplinary reward and recognition systems. Arts and humanities journals, including those of historical geography, more often embrace footnote and endnote use. These systems are far better for acknowledging the role of outputs beyond the journal article or monograph. Yet citation conventions and the increasing presence of metrics of ‘influence’ such as the ‘H-index’ can reinforce the value of certain forms of texts. If citation practices are important ways in which we choose to reproduce our discipline, then we need to develop the ability to account for forms of our discipline – like these creative outputs – which don’t easily align with citation practices. Following Carrie Mott and Dan Cockayne’s (2017) calls for citation to be deployed as a ‘progressive technology’, we might reflect both on how to mobilise citation practices to make visible certain bodies and voices, but also to make visible geography’s multiple mediums.

V Looking Forward

In the context of the exciting growth of relations between cultural geography and creative practices, and the call for critical perspectives on these relations, the idea of medium has multiple critical valences. If on the one hand, it enables us to explore the influence of the transdisciplinary post-medium condition. On the other, it enables us to address questions of the production and consumption of creative practices enrolled within cultural geography. Indeed, to query medium has raised some of the seemingly enduring questions of the cultural geography progress report. Namely, how does cultural geography relate to other geographical subdisciplines, to other disciplines, to the world beyond academia, but also what, in these contexts, emerges as culture?

Cultural geography’s embrace of different mediums of knowledge making, specifically as evolved here, creative mediums, might signal another example of the subdiscipline’s productive methodological influence over the wider field of geography. The gathering pace of interest across the discipline in what creative practices might do, and the deepening of the critical discussions and debates about these approaches, their use and value is exciting to see. Cultural geography’s distinctive contribution to this wider geographical interest in creative practices is perhaps through its evolving critical vocabularies. For these vocabularies, direct attention to the richness, potential and challenges of a transdisciplinary field. They also point to the potential of medium specific answers to questions around what creative practices do. What these practices might do concerns both answering geographical research questions but also engaging those beyond academia within geographical knowledge making practices. The two reports which follow situate creative practices alongside written forms of cultural geographical work, but also take forward from this report the need to think further about cultural geography’s disciplinary and more than disciplinary relations.