Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 4, Issue 1-2, 2012

At the heart of this article is a piece of participatory research around art walking practice. Presented as a pair on interleaved trialogues, the aim is to capture the experience of participation and the array of interactions, debates and perspectives uncovered whilst walking the wateryscape and subsequently. Undertaken as a piece of performative and transversal writing, the aim here is to open up, but refuse to resolve, questions of ways of representing the wet, of emotional and communal resilience and of the position of an art walking practice in representing marginalized and watery, human and non-human voices. In resisting closure and in foregrounding the ‘always in the making’ nature of walking practice (growing knowledge by following a path), the article faces the unresolved future of a people yet to come. The assertion is that walking the liminal is both an unsettling and unsettled practice that is only emphasized when the walk is performed in the wateryscape.

This article responds to the following questions: how are homes and a sense of community recreated through Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB) writing for Hurricane Katrina survivors, and perhaps more importantly how does the act of writing demonstrate a facilitated recovery from trauma? Specifically, the article explains the HDMB’s mission and my use of its ‘stories’. This article also conceptualizes writing about home and definitions of place as they relate to home, but focuses most of its theoretical attention on trauma, writing and healing. The article also introduces and explains my theory of relocution and how it bears on the research. Finally, this article shares writings about home posted on the HDMB by Katrina survivors and connects them explicitly with trauma and writing theory concerned with recovery or healing.

This article explores the changing nature of the flood archive, drawing on different disciplinary perspectives, approaches and attitudes. It uses a braiding metaphor to map a journey around shifting islands that contain different primary research on flood archives – in expert hydrology, in lay flood knowledges, in capturing flood narratives and memories, in drawing on folk song as an informal archive and in charting archives for a fluid landscape. The narrative and critical commentary ‘in the flow’ draws out interlinking themes, exploring what forms of archive can capture, and share reflections on, a landscape that is increasingly or episodically wet – a fluid landscape? It explores different facets of the flood archive: in terms of fact versus fiction, the changing nature of material archived, who archives, changing archival practice, changing use of archives and future archives. It concludes that informal archives have the potential to form a key resource in communities learning to live with changing flood risk and uncertainty.

This experimental article seeks to bring new approaches to landscape emerging in cultural geography into conversation with arts and humanities practice and scholarship which are focusing on matters of community, landscape and environment, and particularly vulnerable, watery landscapes. These approaches raise a whole host of questions about how changing and at-risk-landscapes are imagined, studied and lived in. In particular I (Jones) seek to bring the work of cultural geographer John Wylie into conversation with the work of the artist/academic Simon Read, with the purpose of asking; how might landscapes and lives within them be considered as settled, unsettled and/or unsettling? These notions of settling/unsettling offer purchase on various fraught questions about how we (individuals and communities) live with nature in place and landscape. Wylie’s work can be seen as an attempt to develop a practice- and performative-based post-phenomenological account of practiced landscape in which they are woven not only from presences (the dominant view), but also absences and exiles, and tensions between (fragmented) self and landscape, and more besides. Simon Read’s art practice and research seeks to map possible futures of vulnerable coastlines in relation to communities and landscape management plans. Ideas of temporal ecologies of place/landscape are opened up, which show that much of what makes a landscape what it is at any given moment is absent from the present moment and its condition. Landscape is process, and thus it is not, and cannot be seen as just in the here and now. It is a manifestation of on-going processes with the legacies of the past in place and also processes of possible futures, including the uncertainties of climate change.

This article is an invitation to therapeutic deconstruction: a call to reconsider our assumptions about land, water and the relationship between the wet and the dry. It takes the form of a dialogue in which poetry (Gross) and visual art (Price) prompts, probes and challenges reflections offered by a natural resource economist (Staddon), a cultural ecologist (Dillon) and an anthropologist (Irvine). From our multiple perspectives, we explore the wetland as a site of common interest, and through different approaches to the thought experiment of what it might mean to ‘think like a wetland’ we seek to engage with the materiality of these places. We ask what it means to be a part of a wetland, not simply treating these habitats as resources to be managed, but as sites of dwelling that have agency in their own right.

Floods are a threat to livelihoods and landscapes in many places around the world and at many points in history. Yet, they also seem to be an intrinsic component of many landscapes and livelihoods. This article explores the interconnection of multi-directional narratives of flooding through the representation of the memories of inhabitants of wet landscapes in past and present England. The article will illustrate three aspects of the relationship between floods and memory: first, the contextual mediation of flood memories in the contemporary moment. Here audio-visual and textual media (photographs, newspapers articles, television news broadcasts) of present and past flooding compete for our attention; second, the documentation of the early modern English treatment of a changing ‘wateryscape’ and whether we can discern dis/continua with and in contemporary media; and third, the dis/connecting narratives of living with floods in the present day. We emphasize that remembering and forgetting floods is an active and creative process for both flooding communities and those who research them. Stories and experiences of past floods are strategically used within, between and across communities to construct a particular sense of self and a statement on vulnerability and resilience to floods. Thereby the article contributes to developing a creative engagement between past and present, which goes beyond encompassing hegemonic narratives of historical and environmental change by reinforcing the potential of researching everyday, experiential landscapes beyond arbitrary periodization.