We’re back with a new project and we’re asking people from across the UK to help us capture varied meanings and experiences of ‘landscape’.
The initiative is part of our Unlocking Landscapes Network, a two-year project which aims to explore the many ways in which landscapes become meaningful to diverse individuals and groups; through their senses, personal memories and shared histories.
We’re inviting contributions which could include short stories, poems, sketches, photos, videos or soundscapes, or other creative approaches.
The term ‘landscape’ can be interpreted in any way that’s appropriate to you; it might include the sensations that envelop you as you open a window or step outside the front door, or perhaps a more expansive encounter further afield.
In these times of social distancing, you might like to reflect on how you have been unlocking everyday micro-landscape sensations, or perhaps tapping into past landscape memories.
One or more of the following questions might help when crafting your response:
What is landscape to you?
How do landscapes hold you? How do they speak to you? What stories do your landscapes tell?
What are your hopes for future landscapes? What do these futures mean for human and biodiversity?
For written pieces, we invite contributions of up to 1000 words. Photographs or scanned sketches and artwork should be as high resolution as possible. For audio or video footage, we invite contributions of up to 10 minutes.
If you would like to make a submission or find out more about the process, please email Sarah Bell on Sarah.Bell@exeter.ac.uk.
We hope to use these pieces to inform the efforts of the network to map people’s responses to various landscapes, and understand how these might be shaped by diverse sensory, cultural and historical values.
Subject to author permission, we would also love to share a collection of these pieces online.
