12 Mediated Landscapes I

Chair: Christine Hanke, Henriette Gunkel

Prof. Dr. Henriette Gunkel, RS Knowledges, henriette.gunkel@ruhr-uni-bochum.de 
Prof. Dr. Christine Hanke, RS Knowledges, christine.hanke@uni-bayreuth.de

Cluster Conference “Medialities” (July 7-9, 2022)
 July 8, 2022

Mediated Landscapes

This interdisciplinary panel Mediated Landscapes brings together key thinkers and artists who are working on the question of landscapes as sites of knowledges in which colonial histories register. The term mediated landscapes refers to the different relationships between media and landscapes. The panel is interested in the way landscapes are mediated, i.e. rendered perceivable or knowable through various sensing and imaging technologies. This relates to the ways landscape is located or recorded by technical media, by sensors, satellites, phones, etc. Landscapes are, however, not only mediated but need to be considered themselves as mediating as it is the ecology and the geology and the infrastructures that are already part and parcel of a planetary-scale sensing system. This process can lead us to think about landscape as media, one that can sense, imagine and even sonify its own self (Jussi Parikka; Benjamin Bratton, Sam Nightingale). This two-fold focus on the relationalities of media and landscape opens up new theoretical and methodological insights for the Cluster’s concept of medialities. In this panel we invite participants to reflect on the different aspects in these relations and how this in turn relates to colonial history, knowledges, (post-)colonial modes of seeing and perceiving the world and infrastructures of extraction. We are particular interested in the reflexive ways each scholar/artist takes up the relationship between mediality and landscapes and the question of what remains in the context of colonialism and its afterlives.

 Participants of the workshop will be as follows:

• Dr. Nicole Wolf (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, Berlin/London); her (film) scholarship and permacultural practice focuses on the legacies of extractivist cultivation and racial capitalism and explores experiences with land and soil and how these might affect the possibilities of resistance practices.
• Talya Ruth Lubinsky (artist, South Africa, University of the Western Cape); her work considers the material relationship between permanence and disintegration embodied in memorial sites and the landscapes of cemeteries, particularly in the context of Germany and South Africa.
• Isabel Katjavivi (artist, Windhoek/Stuttgart); her multi-media installations address the history of colonialism and genocide in Namibia and how this violence is registered in bodies and landscapes.
• Prof. Dr. Henriette Gunkel (Bayreuth/Bochum); she will reflect on her fieldwork on the Namib desert where she explores how the sand and the movement of the sand covers but also reveals and preserves traces of the history of German colonialism and the genocide.
• Dr. Aharon de Grassi (Bayreuth/San José), is an interdisciplinary geographer focusing on Angola. He examines political possibilities by (1) tracing how colonial models of African landscapes continue to shape African Studies and policy, and by (2) developing alternate approaches to mediated landscapes by combining long-term archival, ethnographic, and cartographic methods.

 This panel will take place in Bayreuth. In order to make participation available to members of the ACCs, we conceptualize the panel in hybrid form, nevertheless. Since we want to enable that research and artistic materials can be shown and profoundly discussed with respect to multiple relationalities of media, landscape and knowledges, we plan 20 min for presentation and 10 min as Q&A for each panelist (schedule see below). In the end we want to provide space in order to bring the different arguments together and a joint discussion with respect to reconfiguring African studies through these multiple approaches. To initiate this moderated discussion, we will have two responses, one from cultural geography by Prof. Dr. Matthew Hannah, and one from media studies by Prof. Dr. Christine Hanke (both Bayreuth).

 Schedule of Panel “Mediated Landscapes”

 10:30-12:15

Part I
Presentation + Q&A Nicole Wolf (20 presentation + 10 Q&A)
Presentation + Q&A Talya Ruth Lubinsky (20 presentation + 10 Q&A)
Presentation + Q&A Isabel Katjavivi (20 presentation + 10 Q&A)

14:00-15:45

Part II
Presentation + Q&A Henriette Gunkel (20 presentation + 10 Q&A)
Presentation + Q&A Aharon DeGrassi (20 presentation + 10 Q&A)
Response Landscape: Matthew Hannah (10 mins)

Response Media: Christine Hanke (10 mins) Joint Panel Discussion (20 mins)