Wake in Guangzhou

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Thereza Alves
Keyword(s):  
City Center ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Landscape Transformation ◽  
Deep Layers ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site

Wake in Guangzhou: The History of the Earth is a site-specific installation exhibited in in the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China, that problematizes issues of migration, trade, and landscape transformation. Wake in Guangzhou investigates the origin of the seeds found on the site of Huagui Lu, in the Liwan district in Guangzhou’s city center, where today a hundred wholesale markets exist. A mound of earth was removed from Huagui lu, a street in the Liwan District, the former merchant quarter’s of Guangdong. The earth sample was put in the courtyard of the Guangzhou Museum so dormant seeds previously buried in deep layers could germinate when exposed. The botanist Heli Jutila writes, “Although seeds seem to be dead, they are in fact alive and can remain vital in soil for decades, and even hundreds of years in a state of dormancy.”

Experimenting with Sociology: A View from the Outlook Tower

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 154-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Bates
Keyword(s):  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
British Sociology

This paper describes a site-specific sociological experiment and looks back at the history of British sociology from the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh. It considers the role of technological innovation in observation, and explores how attention is guided through two exercises in sensory attunement; augmented listening and telescopic looking. Reconfiguring the observer through different technologies and devices, the paper questions what it means to listen and to look, and highlights how our sociological outlook is deeply ethical and historical.

A Work for the Jewish Soul of Warsaw, Old and New

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 57-58
Author(s):  
Lukas Ligeti
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Computer Technology ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Interactive Performance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

In 2015, Lukas Ligeti created a site-specific, audience-interactive performance work while in residence at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Based on interviews with residents of Warsaw, the piece examined aural memories of Jewish life in the city, tracing the extermination and re-emergence of the Jewish community through speech and songs as well as creative musicians’ reimaginings of these memories, with computer technology as a mediator.

scholarly journals Revisiting the Churchyard

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. LW&D.CM60-LW&D.CM69
Author(s):  
James Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Literary Tourism ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
A Site

The churchyard has always been a site of pilgrimage. The remains of the dead, sanctified as holy relics, conferred a hallowed status on their location in the earth; this, in turn, became a destination for travellers. By the eighteenth century, ‘pilgrims’ consciously mapped their interest in literary remains onto these sacred spaces, drawing their pursuit of literary tourism into a long history of travel to the realms of the venerated dead. Using a series of photographs, I retrace my churchyard pilgrimages in London and Thomas Gray’s Stoke Poges, reflecting on the context of thanatourism and thinking about the ways in which the places of the dead—chief among them the churchyard—still mean today.

Inscribing/Inscribed: Bodies and Landscape in the Ritual of Embodied Remembrance at Souvenance Mystique

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 95-101
Author(s):  
Ann E. Mazzocca
Keyword(s):  
The Earth ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
A Site ◽  
Embodied Memory ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
Embodied History

There are many ways in which Haitian Vodou ceremonies defy Western binaries of ritual and performance, sacred and profane, and choreography and improvisation. Vodou, a danced religion, is an embodied practice. Souvenance Mystique refers to a place and an event. Eponymously named, it is a mystical remembrance that occurs annually in a weeklong ritual of Vodou ceremonies in the Artibonite Valley outside of Gonaives, Haiti. At Souvenance, the reference to memory and remembrance is embodied, and therefore Souvenance greatly reflects what Diana Taylor refers to as a repertoire of embodied memory. As a scholar, choreographer, and practitioner of Haitian folkloric dance, I have read this ritual in terms of its significations occurring through various signs such as the practitioners' clothing, their proximity to one another, movement, gesture, and ritual choreography.Souvenance is a site where the multiplicity of histories and bodies signify in relation to one another. While arguably an embodied history in itself, Souvenance also writes. The practitioners enacting the several-days-long ceremonies inscribe upon the surface of the earth. Repetition reinscribes ritual pathways, while a particularly important and meaningful pathway is traversed only twice—at daybreak toward a site and then at sundown returning to the central peristyle. It is the landscape that is inscribed by the practitioners. However, they also become written upon by sweat and sacred blood. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which the rituals at/of Souvenance write history annually and how, simultaneously, the history of Souvenance is being written.

Improvising with Architecture

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-181
Author(s):  
Nicolas Collins
Keyword(s):  
Phase Shift ◽  
Resonant Frequency ◽  
Audio Feedback ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Cold Air ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site

In Pea Soup a self-stabilizing phase shift network nudges the pitch of audio feedback to a different resonant frequency every time the feedback starts to build. The familiar shriek is replaced with unstable patterns of hollow tones, a site-specific raga reflecting the acoustical personality of the room. These architectural melodies can be influenced by movement in the space, other sounds, or even by a draft of cold air. This essay covers the history of the work, from its earliest iteration in hardware when the author was a student in the 1970s through its software reconstruction in the early 2000s, as well as its influence on the author’s subsequent musical projects.

George Hoggart Toulmin: politics and geology

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-481
Author(s):  
ROY PORTER
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Christian View ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document