Cultural geographies in practice

Abstract

T his short essay reflects on the practice of collaboration by a geography lecturer (Hayden Lorimer) and an artist (Kate Foster). During a three-year alliance, our collaborative investigations have taken different forms, led to different kinds of shared output, been enriched by the efforts of others, and resulted in independently produced work. 1 As a cultural-historical geographer and an environmental artist we are keenly aware that the categories of 'geography' and 'art' encompass an extremely broad range of activities, meaning that these reflections are very much of our own making. The ways we have gone about collaborating have suited our circumstances and preferred ways of working, and have emerged out of our personal combinations of skills and experience. But collaboration has also challenged some of our assumptions and habits, and forced us to articulate something of the ongoing process of work, as well as some of our differences. Accordingly, our reflections are illustrative of one kind of dynamic, of how different rhythms and routines for work were set, and of the ways we found our learning shaped by circumstance and context. 2 While these evaluative remarks take the form of a 'self-crit' they are intended to have wider relevance. We hope they may help other geographers and artists currently considering the prospect, practice and politics of joint work, and might assist them in thinking more generally about its possible scope and limitations.

Kites, billboards and bridges: Reading the city’s curfew through the glitch

“…Geographers collaborate with artists all the time, and in the process, they co-create some of the most creative discussions in the discipline (e.g. Foster and Lorimer, 2007; Tolia-Kelly and Raymond, 2020). One element to note here is that while institutional time frames tend to imagine these collaborations as project-based and short term, they often sit within longer-term relationships.…”

“…The vignettes draw on social media sources, as well as news items, which I rewrite as semifictional texts (see Zalewski, 2013 on the use of vignettes as feminist methodology). I build on cultural and creative geographies, which center works with art and artists on one hand (Foster and Lorimer, 2007;Hawkins, 2013Hawkins, , 2015Hawkins, , 2019Tolia-Kelly, 2012;Tolia-Kelly and Raymond, 2020), and experimentation with narrative form as scholarship on the other (McKittrick, 2020), but I draw these interventions more closely to urban geography. My aim is to work with academic language that resists logics of capture and mastery Singh, 2017), and therefore is more attuned to non-disclosure and opacities (Nassar, 2021).…”

Arts–Research Collaboration: Reflections on Collaboration as Creative Method

“…Guided by a mutual starting point of embracing uncertainty to play (or “try things out”), and with a deeply shared interest in conduct, the vignette above also indicates how our collaboration was underpinned by attentiveness to recognizing and harnessing equivalences across our respective skills, expectations, and protocols, or what Foster and Lorimer (2007, p. 427) describe as “finding complimentary aspects of practice in each other’s ordinary activities.” A shared interest in conduct was not about abandoning expertise or our respective skilled practice, nor was it about using entirely new methods or skills. It was about embracing the uncertainty of working together to explore fluidity between our (supposed distinct) roles of “creative practitioner” and “anthropologist” by finding “complementary aspects” in our arts and ethnographic practice.…”

A touching experiment: Tissue culture, tacit knowledge, and the making of bioart

“…A growing number of studies termed creative or experimental geographies have emerged in recent years offering novel approaches to the research process (e.g., Boyd, 2016;Last, 2012a;Straughan, 2015) and styles of dissemination (e.g., Lorimer, 2006;Riding, 2015) in order to draw out and relay the non-representational geographies of sensory, affective and emotive experience. Within this burgeoning area of work, geographers have learned from an 'artistic intersection with "geographical" practices' (Hawkins, 2013, p. 13) to develop practice-led research projects both as artists (Boyd, 2016;Crouch, 2010;Yusoff, 2008) and as geographers in collaboration with artists (for example, Enigbokan & Patchett, 2012;Foster & Lorimer, 2007;Hawkins & Lovejoy, 2009). Meanwhile artists themselves have also taken up a geographic skill set (for example, see Phillips, 2004), while geographers have expanded their technological research apparatus to creatively use visual and audio technologies (Gallagher, 2015;Garrett, 2010;Merchant, 2012) enabling Patchett (2015), for example, to utilise video for documenting taxidermists at work.…”