Landscape and Memory

During the Anthropocene, natural landscapes and the environment have been treated harmfully by humans insomuch as nature has been exploited and its landscapes altered by human action. As a result, the relationship between humankind and nature has progressively changed. It is interesting to analyse how Kazuo Ishiguro tackles the issue in his contemporary novel Klara and the Sun, which subtly and effectively explores the theme by presenting various sides of nature and the ways characters interact with it. Although the narration is centred on androids and their cutting-edge technology, nature plays an important role, and the Sun (capitalised as if it were a character) is a key element. Natural landscapes are highly symbolic and deeply entwined with society and memory. In addition, the relationship between a non-human-namely the android Klara-and the Sun is characterised by ritual hues. Such characterisation is of extreme value for the development of the plot. By exploring the connection between nature and characters as portrayed in some scenes, I will show how nature retains unexpected meanings, which enrich the novel's message and strengthen its themes.

This paper considers the role and persistence of long term memory in communities in the south west peninsula and the way that it affected their disposition and practices as they occupied and engaged with places from the earliest Neolithic period c 4000 cal BC down to the centuries of first millennium cal BC. Case studies from recent archaeological excavations and new analyses of older excavations are drawn upon to give examples of how communities used and at perhaps at times manipulated long held traditions as means of engaging with particular places or for establishing new types of sites in the landscape. Examples include the digging of pits, the continuing engagement with ‘natural’ features and ‘ancient’ monuments and the reuse of roundhouses.

В книге в словарной форме описана семейная и календарная обрядность, различные типы несказочной прозы (предания, легенды, былички и анекдоты) и детского фольклора, народные заговоры и молитвы, молодежные и детские развлечения и игры, записанные в Шацком районе Рязанской области. Издание предваряется аналитическими очерками традиционной материальной и духовной культуры, а также краткой историей заселения этого региона.
Издание рассчитано на этнографов, фольклористов, диалектологов, историков и широкий круг читателей, интересующихся традиционной народной культурой.

In the Shatsky Ethnodialect Dictionary the traditional Forms of  Culture of the Ryazan Region in the First Half of the XX Century in their interrelation with economic and socio-cultural Processes of the XX — beginning of the XXI Century are presented. The Description of the calendar and family Holidays and Rites, the everyday and festive forms of Behavior, the most important Persons and Characters of the local Folklore, and also the commonly used Types of folklore Texts is made in the Form of a Dictionary and is based on the Materials of field Research of the Authors. The Main Body of articles of the Dictionary is preceded by the Introductory Essays, devoted to the Analysis of the Genesis of cultural Forms, presented in the Body of the Dictionary, for which comparative Materials from other Regions of the Central Russia, Russian North and the Volga Region, and also the archival Sources of the XIX Century are used. The Conclusions of the Authors of the Introductory Essays are supported with the Analysis of the local Features of Culture in their Interrelation with the history of populating this Territory, as well as with the Study of the ethnocultural and language Features.

The landscapes and the memory of the landscapes are evolving with natural and humancentered activities. In some places, landscapes continue to reveal their memory ecologically, socially, and culturally. On the other hand, in some places, landscapes lose their ecologic and socio-cultural archive as a result of globalization. This issue causes to emerge fragile landscapes according to lack of water resources, global warming, a decrease in biodiversity. Preserving the memory of landscapes and using it in the practice of landscape is a deeply crucial issue. The paper tries to answer two questions: How can landscape memory be used in design education? How can a research-based design studio pedagogy be conducted on this approach? This paper focuses on the research-based design approach in landscape architecture education to decode and recode the memory of the landscapes in the design process. ITU Landscape Architecture Department 2019-2020 Fall Semester Landscape Design Studio I-II, which is the case study of the research, worked in Savur, Mardin. The study area provides unexpected landscape carpet including browns and greens together in the valleys of the region that have a rich social and ecological structure. The methodological process of the studio was based on the three approaches which are integrated into each other: The Landscape Memory Model, Action-based Design Studio, and Research-based Design Studio. The model provides a guide for reading the memory of the landscape with various memory codes hidden under the visible and invisible values of it. This core process is used by the students for understanding the cultural and ecological values of the study area and implementing them into the design process. The action-based studio approach allows the tutors to find the problematic points in the design process of each student and resolve them in a positive way. Covering these two approaches, the research-based design studio expresses the discovery of the knowledge through a strong research process. The results are as followed: Implementing a research-based process ensured a place-based and innovative perspective to shape a design concept. Using the pre-specified landscape memory model empowered the research phase and helped students to analyze and discern the place with their own perceptions. Action-based flow allowed the instructors to leave the conventional studio performing and helped to use in-situ (special to the studio) instructing techniques within the semester. This paper may be influential for especially landscape design studios and relocate conventional studio approaches with more flexible and progressive techniques to understand the place and beyond.

Shaw, J. 2018.  'A ”reflexive” multi-stage survey methodology for historical landscape research in Central India: fieldwalking, local knowledge, and satellite imagery as archaeological site prospection and mapping tools in the Sanchi Survey Project', Current Science 113(10), 1918-1933 (Special Section on Geospatial Techniques in Archaeology, edited by R. Korisettar and R.R. Navalgund).

http://www.currentscience.ac.in/php/show_article.php?volume=113&issue=10&titleid=id_113_10_1918_1933_0&page=1918

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Abstract:
The present article evaluates the relative usefulness of systematic versus unsystematic field-walking, local knowledge frameworks and satellite imagery as archaeological prospection and mapping tools for the Sanchi Survey Project (SSP) in central India. While
the satellite imagery proved helpful as a supplementary site prospection and mapping tool during later phases of the project, initial site identification was more effectively facilitated through ground-based explorations, and a ‘reflexive’ approach that included a sensitivity to local memory and the continued currency of archaeological sites in today’s socio-ritual landscape. Set within discussions of the role of local traditions in ‘reflexive’ field methodologies, as well as broader public archaeology discourse, the article stresses the importance of local perceptions of place and history in the development of a regionally specific research design.

Landscapes rebuild themselves repeatedly because they are living systems. The changes in the landscape leave traces over time. These traces are a vital record of our comprehensive history; nonetheless, these records are not written documents (Hoskins, 1955). The landscape contains lots of tangible and intangible data concerning natural and anthropogenic activities. These activities create a medium in which landscapes evolve based on the interrelated effects. Thus, it is essential to understand the changes within a landscape to ensure the continuity of landscapes processes and develop resilient landscapes. Each landscape is unique with its memory (Brierley, 2010); each memory layer in landscape must be read from a holistic perspective. The holistic evaluation of landscape memory shapes the natural and cultural context of contemporary landscape designs. Designing landscapes separate from its embedded memory codes makes designed landscapes irrelevant and vulnerable. Designing landscapes detached from anthropogenic memory codes generate places without identity and a sense of belonging. When the landscape designs disregard memory layers, landscape practice will overlook the site’s heritage, hence misinterpretations of its unique character. The present essay aims to present a holistic model for the systematic reading of landscape memory. It asks whether the landscape can remind and remember natural and anthropogenic processes and how these memory layers can be read systematically.

Представленные в статье данные вопреки стереотипному мнению свидетельствуют о значительной роли земледелия у прибалтийско-финского населения Обонежья. Субстратные топонимы прибалтийско-финского происхождения указывают на существование в крае укрепленных поселений (городищ) и сельских населенных пунктов, о наличии земледелия и животноводства, добычи полезных ископаемых, кузнечного ремесла, смолокурения, неоднородности этнического (языкового) состава населения, использовании волоковых путей и определенных, совпадающих с природными, границ. Наличие топонимических калек указывает на былое прибалтийско-финско-славянское двуязычие, а адаптация топонимов в форме полукалек и хорошая сохранность микротопонимии – о постепенном обрусении местного прибалтийско-финского населения, произошедшем в довольно позднее время.

This paper deals with the main events and
processes that contributed to the emptying of
rural settlements in former eastern territories
of Prussia from the modern period to 1939. General
conditions supporting the interruption of
settlement continuity are described with particular
attention paid to the processes occurring
on the territory of Pisz poviat. Features of the
natural environment that characterise this
area, including a large share of forests, lakes
and infertile soils, influenced the formation of
specific types of settlements. The functioning of
numerous small forest settlements was closely
related to manufacturing and production based
on local natural resources. The depopulation
and disappearance of these settlements was
therefore primarily related to the depletion of
these resources and the disappearance of the
outlets. An example illustrating these processes
is the Wielki Las settlement translocated in
the 19th century. As part of the case study, the
landscape relics of its former functioning in its
original location were subjected to preliminary
analysis.

W artykule przedstawiono wybrane zagadnienia dotyczące cmentarzy jako istotnych składowych niezamieszkanych współcześnie wiejskich jednostek osadniczych położonych w części byłych Prus Wschodnich włączonej do Polski w 1945 r. Podjęta została problematyka identyfikacji i rozmieszczenia miejsc pochówku na obszarze badań oraz ich położenia w środowisku geograficznym. Zagadnienia zrealizowano poprzez wykonanie komparatystycznej analizy archiwalnych i aktualnych materiałów kartograficznych oraz analiz przestrzennych z wykorzystaniem technik hGIS. Rezultaty przedstawione w opracowaniu stanowią część wyników badań nt. krajobrazowych skutków przerwania ciągłości osadnictwa, do którego doszło w miejscowościach Warmii, Mazur i Powiśla w końcowym etapie drugiej wojny światowej i po jej zakończeniu.

The article discusses selected issues surrounding cemeteries as important elements of presently abandoned rural settlements located in the part of former East Prussia incorporated into Poland after 1945. It tackles the issue of identification and distribution of burial sites on the researched area and their location in the geographical environment. The discussion is based on a comparative analysis of archival and contemporary cartographic materials and spatial analyses making use of hGIS technology. The results presented in the paper constitute of a part of a study of the impact of the interruption in settlement continuity on landscape in selected localities of the regions of Warmia, Masuria, and Powiśle in the final months of World War II and after the end of the military conflict.

This article studies the transformation of commemoration and memorialization and the effects of this transformation on memory(scape) making in Turkey. The article focuses on the case study of the Gallipoli Peninsula where the most concentrated examples and intensive instances of commemoration and memorialization practices are represented. The article exposes contemporary political and social change in terms of landscape architecture and sociology by analyzing the transformation process in memory and memory(scape) making in Turkey. The article is based on ethnographic research patterns and concludes that the centralized secular memorialization practices in Gallipoli starting from the early 2000s until today were transformed into distributed narrative-based memorialization through religious and traditional values by using landscape as a fundamental element of memory(scape) making.

Μια συναρπαστική όσο και γοητευτική ιστορία, είναι η μεταμόρφωση της περιοχής και της λίμνης Auensee, στη Λειψία από τόπο, σε κοινωνικά κατασκευασμένο χώρο.Πώς το φυσικό τοπίο και η αδιαμεσολάβητη μας σχέση - εμπειρία με τη φύση μετατρέπεται σε πολιτιστικό τοπίο στο οποίο εμείς, οι άνθρωποι, αποδίδουμε συγκεκριμένες έννοιες και αξίες! Είναι δυνατόν μέσω μιας τοπικής ιστορίας και του πολιτισμού να τοποθετηθούν τοπικά ζητήματα σε ένα εθνικό ή παγκόσμιο πλαίσιο;

Over the last thirty years, Berlin’s landscape has undergone major changes, which transform the unique relation of the German capital with its collective memory. Despite the official monuments or memorials, most traces of the past are disappearing. The Tempelhofer Feld, a former inner-city airport made famous by the 1948 airlift, opened as a park in 2010. It is now the largest public space of the city, as well as its biggest historical monument. This article attempts a description of its qualities as a landscape.

« Berlin sous le ciel. Paysage urbain, mémoire et politique », revue Mémoires en jeu, n° 7, dossier “La mémoire se fond-elle dans le paysage ?”, dirigé par Luba Jurgenson, éd. Kimé, 2018, p. 101-105.

The landscape is a medium that contains tangible and intangible values inside. They provide a habitat for plants, animals, and other livelihoods on earth. They shape the surface with morphology, water, vegetation, soil and change with time. Rural landscapes are basically a production space whether it is natural or designed, while its basic idea is based on ecosystem services. Urban landscapes are designed to provide more natural images in built areas, help to urban ecosystem, keep biodiversity, and create recreational spaces for humans. The enthusiasm for urban landscapes comes from the naturalness of the rural or pastoral images of the landscapes. Landscapes are also a threshold not only in the meaning of concrete borders but also unseen worlds, senses, dreams, or memories. The landscape defines the place which is a socially constructed space. It is created by personal and collective memories besides the natural phenomenon of the landscape itself. The memories in a place collect over and over as a palimpsest and become the layers of place memory. Mnemonic devices in landscapes are the reminder elements of place memory. They can be used to remembering the past, an event, a person, or more deep inside our subconscious. The main object of the research is understanding how contemporary urban landscapes can evoke the rural memories of visitors. The research is conducted on a closed and open questionnaire. The general images of urban landscapes and rural landscapes, landscape design materials, and design approaches are used to understand the power of evoking rural landscape memories. The outcomes of the survey show that there is a strong connection between the main design elements used in urban and rural landscape designs. On the other hand, the use of design materials strongly affects the power of reminding the rural landscapes. Despite the fact that naturalness becomes a strong keyword for the rural landscape memories, every urban landscape does not perceive as a pastoral image even if the natural materials inside. The participants emphasize that the places in urban landscapes give positive feelings when they have more rural landscape images.

This paper contributes to discussions about landscape and place and how they are practised in relation to time, displacement, memory and loss. I develop a multi-dimensional account of how landscape is generated in the moment by spatio-temporal topologies and topographies in which memory, movement and materiality play full parts. I consider absence, loss and displacement and how they operate within self-landscape practice, and how particular forms of materiality (in this case, large bridges) become charged with all sorts of emotions relating to personal history (how bridges can be psychogeographical “hotspots”). Displacement from, or loss of, home/land/place/nature—driven by one means or another (economic, conflict, environmental degradations)—can be a looming presence in everyday life. Resulting emotions and affective traces can suffuse through and cleave to materiality, and materiality patterned into landscape, in contingent, unexpected and unaccountable ways, which, as articulated through everyday affective life, are hard to represent in (academic) language. Questions are raised about the relationships between self, time, memory, materiality and place, using a non-representational, creative approach, based on image and textual collage.

This paper is in the open access Jounral Environmental Humanties  - copy this link to browser http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.1.pdf

Wśród rozległych pustkowi Aragonii leży niezwykłe, zrujnowane miasto, będące wstrząsającym świadectwem okrucieństw wojny domowej w Hiszpanii. Osiemdziesiąta rocznica zakończenia walk o Belchite jest okazją do przypomnienia jego tragicznych dziejów – tym bardziej że wplecione są w nie również polskie wątki.

Depuis l’ouverture des frontières en Europe dans les années 1990, l’horizon du paysage est mis à l’épreuve dans la culture visuelle (photographie, cinéma, installation). Trois micro-histoires permettent d’interroger les limites de leur horizon (les Pays-Bas, l’Espagne, l’ex-Yougoslavie). Le paysage devient un écran-mémoire, témoignant du bouleversement des visions européennes et de leurs horizons multiples.



The Photographic Memory of Landscapes testify to European issues (the Netherlands, Spain, former-Yugoslavia)
Since the opening of European borders in the 1990s, horizon landscapes have been challenged. Three European countries allow us to examine the limits of their horizons : landscapes in film become a memory-screen testifying to important European changes and numerous interpretations of their national horizons

"Crush Me", Exhibition catalog essay for Entang Wiharso's solo exhibition, Crush Me,  Pearl Lam Fine Art, Shanghai, 20 May-28 June 2013. Pages 6-13. Please properly cite.
CRUSH ME –  In the English-language, the word ‘crush’ is both noun and verb, and carries different yet equally intense meanings. A crush is a powerful, short-lived passion -- a deep infatuation. To crush also means to suppress, to psychologically, socially and emotionally destroy someone, to physically annihilate something. Crush implies relations of power and scale.  Entang Wiharso maintains the dual meaning of ‘a crush’ and ‘to crush’ throughout the works in this exhibition.
The series of works in Crush Me also contend with issues of memory and geography, and the intertwined pathways of identity, place, becoming and belonging. How memory and geography are performed involves the ways in which we construct and inhabit our lived environs.
This includes the constructs of barriers (psychological, historical, ideological, social, political, physical, etc.) as simultaneously a means of protection and conflict, sovereignty, conviviality and exclusion, recognition and misrepresentation. In this regard, the works are a critical reading and query into the burden of history and its geo-political sediments (AKR)

Almost immediately after the hostilities ceased on the old Western Front, tours were being taken to visit the so-called ‘devastated regions’.  To accompany these tours a spate of literature emerged to support the would-be visitor. As time elapsed from the end of the war and the combination of nature and reconstruction began to hide the scars of war, a second wave of illustrated collections emerged that depicted a comparison of sites during the war and how they appeared some years later. The combination of these two sets of publications provides a contemporary viewpoint as to how visitors engaged with the former battlefields. This paper draws on the two sets of literature to explore how distinct audiences of the former battlefields emerged and their differing engagement with sites of memory.

In a village community in the highlands of Cambodia’s Southwest, people struggle to rebuild their lives after nearly thirty years of war and genocide. Recovery is a tenuous process as villagers attempt to shape a future while contending with the terrible rupture of the Pol Pot era. Forest of Struggle tracks the fragile progress of restoring the bonds of community in O’Thmaa and its environs, the site of a Khmer Rouge base and battlefield for nearly three decades between 1970 and 1998.

Anthropologist Eve Zucker’s ethnographic fieldwork (2001–2003, 2010) uncovers the experiences of the people of O’Thmaa in the early days of the revolution, when some villagers turned on each other with lethal results. She examines memories of violence and considers the means by which relatedness and moral order are re-established, comparing O’Thmaa with villages in a neighboring commune that suffered similar but not identical trauma. Zucker argues that those differing experiences shape present ways of healing and making the future. Events had a devastating effect on the social and moral order at the time and continue to impair the remaking of sociality and civil society today, impacting villagers’ responses to changes in recent years.

More positively, Zucker persuasively illustrates how Cambodians employ indigenous means to reconcile their painful memories of loss and devastation. This point is noteworthy given current debates on recovery surrounding the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Forest of Struggle offers a compelling case study that is relevant to anyone interested in post-conflict recovery, social memory, the anthropology of morality and violence, and Cambodia studies.

Artykuł prezentuje analizę związków między krajobrazem a pamięcią, ukazanych w poezji polskiego pisarza, Henryka Grynberga, dla której głównym punktem odniesienia jest doświadczenie Zagłady. Proponowana analiza stanowi zarówno próbę dopełnienia dotychczasowej recepcji twórczości autora, która skupia się przede wszystkim na utworach prozatorskich, jak i wskazania konkretnych rozpoznań w obrębie teorii krajobrazu kulturowego. W oparciu o interpretację wybranych wierszy autorka opisuje poszczególne aspekty pojęcia „krajobrazu pamięci”, kształtującego się w wyniku interaktywnej relacji krajobrazu, podmiotu i pamięci naznaczonej traumatycznym doświadczeniem.

The elegist Sextus Propertius used a fantastical mode of representing landscape to draw attention to losses suffered in the Perusine War, the battle of Actium, and the conquest of Veii. In each of these conflicts, the dominant narrative established by the victors attempted to downplay or elide the sufferings of the defeated. Propertius challenges this elision in the way he depicts the battle sites. Though none would likely have borne physical traces of the fighting that took place there, he re-inscribes them as landscapes of defeat, marked out by the bones of soldiers denied proper burial. He also imparts to them a kind of subjectivity. Together, these depictions create an ironic linkage between attempts to (figuratively) 'bury' military losses and battle sites that defy the natural processes by which physical traces of armed conflict are normally concealed or neutralized. Propertius may not be anti-imperialist or even anti-Augustan, but neither will he agree to forget that Rome grows, as it were, from the blood and bones of those killed at places like Veii, Actium, and Perusia.