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Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts
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Bringing It All Back Home: Towards an ecology of place
Carl Lavery & Simon Whitehead
Published online: 16 Aug 2012.
To cite this article: Carl Lavery & Simon Whitehead (2012) Bringing It All Back Home: Towards an ecology of place, Performance
Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17:4, 111-119, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2012.712337
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2012.712337
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Bringing It All Back Home
Towards an ecology of place
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Carl Lavery & Simon Whitehead
The search for an existential Territory
or homeland doesn’t necessarily involve
searching for one’s country of birth or
a distant county of origin…. All sorts of
deterritorialized ‘nationalities’ are conceivable.
Félix Guattari (2000: 41–2)
First steps
For the past three years, theatre scholar Carl
Lavery and dancer Simon Whitehead have been
meeting regularly in their ‘home patch’ of West
Wales to discuss and share their related
interests in location, ecology and embodiment.
This article is the first public articulation of
these conversations and deals with their shared
interest in exploring the interface between
ecosophy and performance practice.1 The text
unfolds in a double movement. The opening
section concentrates on Lavery’s critique of the
political and ecological shortfalls in Martin
Heidegger’s notions of homecoming and
dwelling; in the second section, and prompted
by that critique, Whitehead provides his own
practice-based insights into how one might
perform an ‘ecology of place’ – an expanded
ecology founded on a logic of implication and
interdependence between ‘social, animal,
vegetable or Cosmic [worlds]’ (Guattari
2000:19). Our understanding of what a ‘located
ecology’ might be resonates with some of the
ideas expressed by the cultural geographer
Nigel Thrift in ‘Steps to an ecology of place’. In
Thrift’s essay, place is defined as ‘a rich and
varied spectral gathering’ (1999: 316, original
emphasis), conjured via ‘an embodiment which
is folded into the world by virtue of the passions
of the five senses, and constant, concrete
attunements to particular practices, which
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 17·4 : pp.111-119
http: //dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2012.712337
always involved highly attuned bodily stances’
(315). While we do not pay so much attention to
what Thrift terms ‘spectrality’ in this text, we
are nevertheless interested, like him, in how
bodies practise places. For us, this turn to
somatic experience affords a useful antidote to
the logocentric and essentialist dangers
inherent in Heideggerian thought.
Heidegger
The etymology of the word ‘ecology’ fuses the
meanings of two Greek words: oikos (house) and
logos (science, law). Ecology can be regarded
as a type of domestic science, a way of being
at home. This intimate unity of ecology and
place (in this instance the house or home) helps
explain why many eco-critics, especially deep
ecologists and eco-phenomenologists, have
been concerned to make use of the ideas of the
German philosopher Martin Heidegger for their
own ecosophic projects. Developing the theme
of homecoming that played such a prominent
role in his thinking after the famous
‘turning’ (Kehre) which occurred in his thought
circa 1935, Heidegger argues in essays such as
‘Poetically Man Dwells’ and ‘Building Dwelling
Thinking’ that to be in a place forms the basis of
an authentic ontology, which he associates with
dwelling and building:
1
Ecosophy is a way of
doing environmental
philosophy that has clear
ethical and political
objectives.
The way in which you are and I am, the manner
in which we humans are on the earth is Buan,
dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the
earth as a mortal. It means to dwell.… Building
in the sense of preserving and nurturing is not
making anything … genuine building, that is,
dwelling. (1997: 101)
ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online
© 2012 TAYLOR & FRANCIS
111
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For Heidegger, ‘genuine building’ is ethical in
the extent to which it is caused by and sustains
an ethos, which might be defined in this context
as a way of doing justice to one’s relationship
with the earth. In Heidegger’s ontology – and
this is what has made him such a crucial figure
for certain types of ecosophical thinking and
practice – homecoming can only be undertaken
in the light of a fundamental interrogation of the
causes of our current homelessness (unheimlich)
– in other words, in our inability to dwell. For
Heidegger, such homelessness is caused by
our desire to master the world technologically,
which, he argues, leads us to forget what
authentic human dwelling consists of:
The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals
ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that
they must ever learn to dwell. What if man’s
homelessness consisted in this, that man still does
not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the
plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his
homelessness, it is a misery no longer. (1997: 109)
Heidegger’s rejection of industrialized
technology as well as his deconstruction
of the metaphysics involved in traditional
humanist thought explains his attraction for
deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, Bill Devall
and George Sessions. For them, his focus on
dwelling and on letting things be offers an
ecologically valid form of caring for the earth –
one in which mortals learn to attune themselves
to the play of the Fourfold (earth, sky, mortals
and gods) and so become ‘shepherds’ rather
than ‘lords of Being’ (Heidegger 1993: 245).
D i l e m m a s While Heidegger’s ideas on dwelling and
place have had a profound effect on many
ecological thinkers and architects, it would be
disingenuous to claim that his thought has
been adopted by all ecosophists. In a thoughtful
reflection on this question, the deep ecologist
philosopher Michael E. Zimmerman (1993)
distances himself from his earlier, wholly
positive appropriation of Heideggerian
ontology, claiming that Heidegger’s close
affiliation with Nazism and silence regarding
112
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 17·4 : ON ECOLOGY
the Shoah are inherently problematic for
anyone wishing to posit him as a precursor
to progressive ecological thought (a mode of
ecology that attempts to effect a radical shift
in economic and social perception as a way of
creating a more caring and creative relationship
between humans, the earth and cosmos). For
Zimmerman, Heidegger’s turning away from
technological modernity and sympathies
with Nazi ideas of ‘blood and soil’ results in
a destinal and destructive vision of history that
is too often willing to sacrifice others in the
name of propriety and authenticity. Zimmerman
claims, with some justification, that such
a narrowly conservative and authoritarian
interpretation of modern homelessness is
dangerous for deep ecology in that it could lead
to a ‘Nazification’ of nature. In simple terms,
this could justify the murder of humans for the
sake of a higher idea: in this instance, saving the
planet or biosphere.
Although Zimmerman does not explore
this issue (at least not in any depth), a major
problem with Heidegger’s philosophy in terms
of its ecological applicability is found in his
thinking about what home, the oikos, consists
of. Despite the fact that this article is hardly the
place to conduct a rigorous exploration of the
complexity involved in the dense conceptual
cluster of Heim, heimlich and Heimat, it is
important to point out, albeit too crudely and
quickly, that the exclusionary logic connected
with Heidegger’s notion of home is inherent in
his philosophy itself and not simply due to his
political orientations. As post-Heideggerian
thinkers in France such as Emmanuel Levinas
have argued, there is a deep-rooted ambivalence
in Heidegger’s thought with respect to dwelling.
On the one hand, Heidegger posits homecoming
as a never-ending ontological quest that
transcends any attempt to substantialize it in an
ontic site or place; however, on the other hand,
he also tends to contradict this more open and
perpetual process by equating home with an
actual country, Germany. By doing so, Heidegger
assumes that Germany – its landscape, language
and people – has, in some metaphysical sense,
a privileged and authentic relationship with
dwelling. The return, then, is not consonant
with a type of transcendent experience that
always remains unfinished; rather, it is a return
with a very real telos or destination. To put this
differently, we might say that the progressive
aspects of Heidegger’s profound meditation on
homecoming are negated when he transforms
an ontological allegory about homecoming into
a literalist and essentialist practice.
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Questions
The question that emerges for performancemakers interested in ecology today is
the following: how might we appropriate
Heidegger’s ontological insights about
homecoming and yet avoid the pitfalls of his
disastrous politics? One way of doing this
might be to interrogate the stakes involved in
Heidegger’s own methodological shift in the
1930s and move from philosophy to art. In his
writings on the German Romantic poet Friedrich
Hölderlin, Heidegger suggested that poetry, and
in particular the expressive powers of poetic
language, is the place where our homelessness
can be overcome through a type of speaking and
listening that returns us to the source of Being
itself. Poets are important for Heidegger in that
they are able to harness uncanniness and to
abide in a processual form of homecoming that
is ‘continously being re-enacted’ (Mugerauer
2008: 132). For Heidegger, the poet shows that
homecoming is not simply about dwelling
in a definite territory; rather it concerns an
interminable dialectic between homelessness
and homecoming: the heimlich and unheimlich
are imbricated and resist disaggregation. In his
exhaustive study of Heideggerian homecoming,
Robert Mugerauer argues that:
This homecoming is not just an initial coming
or arriving at the place which may be home: it is
a continous becoming at home…. This becoming
at home would be the persisting learning to
become at home. (2008: 124)
Irrespective of Mugerauer’s useful
rehabilitation of Heidggerian homecoming,
Heidegger’s poetics of dwelling, as the
phenomenologist Edward Casey points out
(1998: 284–96), tell us little about ontic
specifics, about how, that is, artists and
spectators engage in this eternal (re)turning
that appears to be so fundamental to ecological
being. Moreover, the focus on language,
highlighted in the primacy that Heidegger
grants to poetry, undervalues the materiality
of the body, and, as a consequence, finishes by
elevating the human being, who is now posited
in theological terms as a type of steward, as
the species who has the closest relationship to
Being. There is little in Heidegger that troubles
the boundaries of the human, nothing that
intimates a porous space for ‘animal becomings’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 233). In Heidegger’s
thought – and this is, essentially, a theological
thought – oikos is logos. As such, it is difficult to
understand how humans might overcome the
disembodied and transcendent lures of language
and start to perceive themselves as belonging
more fully to earth and cosmos as material
substance, an entity among others. In order to
negotiate these systemic problems inherent
in Heidegger’s thinking on what it means to
‘become’ at home, it seems important to look
to other art forms, practices and, ultimately,
ontologies that, while being just as concerned
with the ecological affordances of ‘homecoming’,
place more emphasis on the materiality of the
‘molecular’ body, the body that we share with
other animals and elements on earth.
As a way of addressing, with a degree of
ontic specificity, what these alternative
ontologies and practices might consist of, the
remainder of this essay will explore the ethic
of location in the practice of of the Walesbased movement artist and choreographer
Simon Whitehead. To speak, perhaps too
schematically, Whitehead’s work in Wales can
be divided into three separate periods, each
of which expresses a different attitude to the
practice of home-making. In the first period
(1995–8), Whitehead installed himself in the
village of Clynnog Fawr on the Llŷn Peninsula
and created a series of solo and collaborative
dance pieces with the sound artist Barnaby
Oliver. In the second (2000–9), Whitehead’s
move from the Llŷn to the village of Abercych
L AV E RY & W H I T E H E A D : B R I N G I N G I T A L L B AC K H O M E
113
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on the North Pembrokeshire–Ceredigion border
resulted in an important shift in emphasis.
Thereafter, Whitehead’s corporeal exploration
of the landscape – his environment – was
complemented with an increasing interest in
social ecology, in examining how people make
sense of and relate to their environments.
According to Heike Roms, the historian of Welsh
theatre and performance:
More and more it is ‘ordinary people’ who are
invited to take a walk in Whitehead’s work…. The
work has shifted from a discrete performance
practice to a daily practice to the labour of the
audience itself, whose task is to visualize the cycle
of energy and movement around which so much of
Whitehead’s work revolves. (Roms 2006: 5)
The third period of Whitehead’s work is the
most recent and exemplifies a concrete desire
to ‘bring it all back home’. Rejecting the heroic
role that has been historically associated with
the male avant-garde artist, Whitehead and
his partner, the dancer Stirling Steward, have
since 2009 curated and hosted a series of artist
residencies in 2 Penrhiw Cottage in Abercych
(Whitehead lives with his family next door).
■■locator 22. group
drawing (detail), 10 people.
pencil in non dominant
hand, follow the pencil. 1
hour.
114
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 17·4 : ON ECOLOGY
The remit is for the resident artist to reflect
on Abercych and the surrounding area and to
show his or her work to the people who live in
the village.
In the writing below, Whitehead seeks to
establish a space where his own thoughts on
the oikos enter into dialogue with my critique of
Heideggerian homecoming.
Body
As I see it, home doesn’t start with language,
as it does in your explanation of Heidegger, it
starts with the body. The body is an amazing
ecological resource, and I don’t think we have
fully grasped it or even understood what it can
do. I’ve been strongly influenced by the artists
of Judson Dance Theatre, a group of New York
experimentalists who invented the precepts
of postmodern dance in the 1960s. Steve
Paxton, for example, spent years developing
‘material for the spine’, a study evolved from
his observation of the spine in the practice of
Contact Improvisation. For Paxton, the body
is always in the environment. It can’t really
be separated from it. If we are to understand,
fully, how the body can allow us to ‘become’ at
home, then we have to find ways of preparing
it, working with it so that we can be receptive
to our surroundings. In a sense, then, the body
is the ‘first home’, and the place or the territory
where we live is a ‘second home’, or perhaps
something that is made through our heightened
sense of awareness to where we are. The ‘third’
home is the home you discover when you start
interacting with the assemblage of body and
environment to produce something new. For
me, that’s the creation of a dance piece.
I think that one usually moves from a state
of displacement in order to find home. It is
this relative process of lostness that can be
a hugely evocative and productive process,
particularly if this is a shared one. That’s been
the logic behind the Locator series of workshops
I’ve been running in Tŷ Canol, a woodland
reserve in North Pembrokeshire since the mid1990s. Although Locator takes different forms,
depending on who is there, I have always been
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interested in finding ways of making the body
more attuned and keyed in to where it is. The
point was always for the participants to take this
heightened, and hopefully more receptive, body
back with them to their everyday environments.
I agree with Heidegger when he says
that home is always something in flux; it is
constantly being re-experienced and reformed.
Unlike him, though, I find it useful to think of
home in terms of improvisation. When I am
working I feel I am getting somewhere if I can
sidestep the intellect and simply play with the
materiality around me. This is where something
breaks through and creates chaos; there’s
often a sensitivity to the conditions, a realm of
contingency in the face of the unpredictable …
for me this is improvisation….
L l ŷ n
The early work that I made on the Llŷn
Peninusla – Shed (1995), Salt/Halen (1996),
Folcland (1997), Skyclad (1998) – was an attempt
to internalize aspects of this place that I had
chosen to live in, in order to form an intimate
relationship to it. Hence the walks and the
seasonal nature of the processes that went into
making these pieces. Salt was made during my
first winter on the Llŷn and involved a daily walk
along the littoral tide line. A consequence of this
was that I began to experience this particular
habitat through my body in all aspects of winter
weather, so much so that it entered my dream
world and informed the images I worked with.
In the piece I worked with materials that I found
on the walks, including sound recordings taken
on site, which were assembled and mixed live by
Barnaby Oliver, as well as part of a caravan that
was washed up on the tideline. In performance,
I used the wreckage as an unstable surface to
move on and to reflect light. The movement
material was developed from the instability of
the found objects, the ‘affective life’ of the body
in winter, and a series of vertical and horizontal
studies of place. I also read out texts that were
generated during the process composed from
my perceptions of the landscape and interwoven
with fragments from the recurring dream
I mentioned above. I spoke these while jumping
up and down in the space, towards and away
from the microphone and in and out of the
light source. The piece was an assemblage of
materials and experiences represented through
the body, sound and light.
Folcland was made in a similar way, during
the following summer on the uplands above my
home. I gathered materials from the site (the
sound of wind through an open gate, the trunk
of a dead oak tree) and brought large rolls of
newspaper into the space. The movement was
a kind of obsessive tracing in and on the body
and in space. I unrolled the paper and wrote and
spoke an account of climbing a hill (I had a mic
taped to my hand) from memory.… [T]he paper
was subsequently formed into an impression of
the uplands at sunset, and I carried a hand-held
lamp to illuminate them in the ‘West’. Barnaby
used an array of guitar foot pedals to mix
the sound.
Table(land) (1998) was my first public act
of performance on the Llŷn and came later. It
revealed my desire at the time to make my work
visible there and create dialogues both with the
landscape and with people who encountered
me. In it, I took a table from my kitchen and
walked with it on my back through the lanes
and paths criss-crossing the Llanaelhaearn
uplands. This piece informed much of my
subsequent site work, because I consciously
took my process into the public realm and my
encounters with others became an implicit part
of the work itself.
If I think about this in relation to your ideas
on home, I would say that the work on the
Llŷn used rhythm to create an embodied and
musicalized sense of place. Through walking the
landscape, I allowed it to express itself through
me, in a way. The repetition of walking creates
a rhythmic force-field or energy that produces
a sense of immersion through the beat of the
body. Everytime you go for a walk, you allow the
place to enter you differently. Home is layers of
sedimentation in the body. Touching and being
touched by the landscape, and what’s in it. This
is very different from Heideggerian philosophy,
where all the energy seems to lie in language.
L AV E RY & W H I T E H E A D : B R I N G I N G I T A L L B AC K H O M E
115
companions in Las Ramblas. In all of these
works, the body is both home and place of
symbiosis – a reaching beyond, a becoming
porous, a crossing over into the animal world.
As far as I know, Heidegger doesn’t pay much
attention to animals in themselves, and that’s
a problem, I think.
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Elements
■■Vulpine. 2007. Holland
Park. London, following
scent with Ben Stammers.
Photo: David Davies.
116
A n i m a l s
For me, humans are just part of the oikos, and
I have always been interested in work, like
Marcus Coates’s piece Dawn Chorus (2007), for
instance, that troubles the boundaries between
species. The word ‘companion’ comes to mind
when I think of my own work with animals
and habitats. In pieces such as Homings (2002),
Cysgod (2002), Stalks (2001–3), Vulpine (foxlike) (2007) and Louphole (2010), the animals
and other life-forms become totems, symbols
of kinship, and reveal my desire to learn
something about my own animal-self.
In Louphole, I spent a wintertime learning to
howl each day and then took this into the public
realm. The research was also about finding
redemption through resonance. The wolf
narrative is a hugely distressing one culturally,
and recent scientific research undoes most of
our cultural stereotypes around this animal.
In the public ‘howls’ I was wondering about
how we might find some memory of the wolf
in a collective voice and body, a memory that
might allow us to physicalize and emotionalize
a relationship to an animal long absent from
our ecosystem.
In Stalks I followed feral and domestic
animals across Barcelona day and night, with
the intention to be led into often secret and
physical relationships with a city unknown
to me. I recorded these encounters through
drawings and video. On the final day I walked
barefoot and delivered copies of the videos
I shot to the animals and their human
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 17·4 : ON ECOLOGY
Dulais (2006) and Lake Guitar (2005) are both
pieces in which I tried to listen to and record
the play of the elements through an electric
guitar – the rhythm of the river Dulais near my
home in the Teifi Valley, Wales, the resonances
and reverberations of wind and ice on a frozen
lake in Quebec. I simply turned the guitar on
and after tuning the feedback made no attempt
to interfere with the sounds. I moved out of the
picture, so to speak.
Both these pieces employ an electric guitar,
something I perceive as a body. The electric
guitar is hugely sensitive to and resonant with
its surroundings, it often surprises me with
the complexity and wildness of its responses
– a dance that expresses the ecosystems in the
landscape through a machine.
M e n t a l a n d S o c i a l Ec o l o g i e s
Reflecting on Guattari’s ideas in The Three
Ecologies, I think that the current environmental
crises are crises of mind more than anything
else. Given that, it seems important that we
start to reflect about how people interact with
their environments and how they interact
together. This is to do with the social, ultimately
– something again that Heidegger glosses over.
Guattari puts this well when he says: ‘Ecology
must stop being associated with the image of
a small nature-loving minority or with qualified
specialists. Ecology in my sense questions the
whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power
formation’ (2000: 35).
In relation to the above, I have worked with
people in cities and towns in order to open
a space where they can start to reengage
with the idea of home. In Lost in Ladywood
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(2008), a relational piece that was was sited in
a housing estate in Birmingham, I spent time
walking with and talking to people from the
neighbourhood, a neighbourhood that was
going to dramatically change in the light of new
urban planning functions. I simply lent an ear
and found ways of representing these voices in
the public realm. The means of representation
and performance involved someone agreeing
to take a walk, with the possibility that they
might get lost, or become involved in a search
for places, narratives and people’s voices hidden
away in liminal spaces.
In Louphole, which took place in Newtown
Powys, the collective activity was that of
listening, walking and howling … all of which
invited the individual to be part of something,
say a voice, that was bigger than their individual
being.… [A]gain I think we created a transient
fold – a fold that enveloped and amplified
the participants.
In our discussions about politics and ecology,
I have always been reluctant to take up the
position of eco-artist. In fact I have always
resisted it. It just sounds like sloganeering,
and in a certain sense it might actually
harm the more complex, covert and subtle
ecologies that the works have hopefully set
in motion. I’m more interested in trying to
shift perceptions a little. I couldn’t say if my
large-scale participatory pieces in towns and
housing estates, such as Louphole or Lost in
Ladywood, were examples of eco-art. That’s
the job for other people to do. However, I think
they work from the desire to mobilize and
listen to different narratives of a place and to
bring people together to explore and share
different modes of experience. These pieces
were also invitations. Invitations to make
something together, to realize a physical idea
through participation or to explore a series
of suppositions.
here – Stirling and I have two young daughters
– but there’s something else that’s equally
important. I’ve grown a little tired of the
paradox that I’m a site-specific artist who works
everywhere in the world but at home! That
doesn’t mean that my idea of homecoming ends
up by fetishing Wales. I see place as relational,
part of a network, something connected. My
collaborator Barnaby Oliver lives in Australia,
for instance, and I’ve always been concerned
to show how Aberych is part of a globalized
world, a planet. In my piece Rupture and Residue
(2004), I took six sticks from the beaches of
Pembrokeshire and used them to make six
drawings in Queensland. Ecology teaches
us, doesn’t it, that everything is connected,
a matter of systems.
But saying that, and departing a little
from Miwon Kwon’s writings on site-specific
performance that you’ve talked about,
I wonder if working at home might actually
highlight the full complexity of what an
■■Dulais.2006. Wade
through the river, binaural
field recording with electric
guitar.
Ab e r c y ch
■■2mph. 2002. (Abercych
to London Smithfield)
approaching Uxbridge,
west London.
Photo: Pete Bodenham
I’m finding it more and more difficult to work
away from Abercych, the village where I live.
There are, of course, famial pressures at stake
L AV E RY & W H I T E H E A D : B R I N G I N G I T A L L B AC K H O M E
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■■(above) Lost in Ladywood.
2007. 23 Towers. a walk
between the towers of
Ladywood, photographs
were taken from the top
floor of each tower by Phil
Martin, laid out in a pocket
guide, these photos were
used to map the route. A
walking figure in a tall hat
is visible, the public were
invited to follow him and at
intervals could call a phone
number to listen to the
voice of a resident
describing the view. Each
tower is named after a
cathedral, this photo is
taken from Brecon tower.
ecological consciousness might be and
also better reveal how different ecosystems
interconnect. In Abercych, there’s a domestic
ecology (the gender politics involved in who
does the housework, looks after the children,
buys the shopping etc), a social ecology (the
social sphere in the village is something that
I encounter each day) and a ‘natural’ ecology, if
you will (the plants, birds and waterways who
also occupy the Teifi Valley). To a certain extent,
I have tried to bring these together through
residencies that we offer in the village for
emerging artists. The artists stay in the cottage
next to ours, make work from the surrounding
environment, and then show their work to
the people in the village. We usually end the
residency with a twmpath, where everybody
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PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 17·4 : ON ECOLOGY
comes together through social dancing, and all
boundaries between artists and other residents
are dissolved. The fact of dancing together –
and here we return to the pivotal role played
by the body in my notion of ecology – creates
a different kind of openness and receptivity
between people. A different type of social and
artistic ecology emerges.
I think the work that Stirling and I do in
Abercych is about bringing other experiences
of this place to light, through performance,
dance, presenting the work of other artists
and encouraging dialogue. Importantly, we
don’t see this dialogue as taking a single or
restricted form. We see it rather as dialogue that
exists through social dance, through dragging
my guitar across the frozen river, or through
conversations that arise out of inviting artists
who may use their outsider status as a means to
inculcate new ideas. Art is form of conversation;
something that everybody can participate in.
It is not some mysterious, esoteric activity
reserved for a special élite, which Heidegger
seems to imply with his notion of the poetguide. This relates to what you define as
a ‘progressive social ecology’, and which I see as
a way of creating alternative, less harmful ways
of being together. Returning to the epigraph
at the start of this essay, I wonder if dance,
the body moving with its environment, might
then be one of the ‘existential territories or
homelands’ that Guattari mentions. To borrow
the name from a walking/installation piece
I made in Gallery 39 in Cardiff with the artists
Barnaby Oliver and Stefhan Caddick in 2002, we
could see this as a type of ‘homing’.
Downloaded by [University of Glasgow] at 04:17 21 September 2014
■■Louphole. 2010.
Dawn Howl, Newtown.
Final Steps
For us, ‘homing’ seems like a good word to
bring our dialogue to a tentative conclusion: it
conveys a sense of process and openess; implies
a type of ethics (we orient ourselves to, or
‘home in’ on, a desired object); and uncouples
the dangerous binary that Heidegger erects
between human and non-human worlds. It also
suggests that there is more than one home.
Homing affirms one’s territory as relational,
a play between house, region, country, world
and cosmos. No matter what its primary focus
– for us, in this article, this has been on the
relationship between body and environment –
a located ecology ought to be able to address all
of these issues. We don’t think that Heidegger’s
jealously bounded and hierarchical notion of
place is necessarily able to do that. Likewise, we
would suggest that his obsession with language
means, paradoxically, that he tends to live
more as ‘an assassin than a poet’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 345). For us, poetry needs to be
expanded to take the body and its movements
into account; in that way, we might discover
a space where performance and ecosophy
can ‘think’ location in terms of what Manuel
DeLanda terms a realist ontology – ‘an ontology
that does not depend upon essences’ (2009: 24).
References
Casey, Edward (1998) The Fate of Place: A philosophical
enquiry, Berkeley: University of California Press.
DeLanda, Manuel (2009) ‘Ecology and realist ontology’,
in Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.) Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 23–41.
Deleuze Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Guattari, Félix (2000) The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar
and Paul Sutton, London: Continuum.
Heidegger, Martin (1993) Basic Writings, trans. David F.
Krell, London and New York: Routledge.
Heidegger, Martin (1997) ‘Dwelling Building Thinking’,
in Neal Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A reader
in cultural theory, London and New York: Routledge,
pp. 94–119.
Mugerauer, Robert (2008) Heidegger and Homecoming:
The leitmotif in the later writings, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Roms, Heike (2006) ‘Remembering walking’, in Simon
Whitehead, Walking to Work, Abercych: Shoeless, pp. 6–7.
Thrift, Nigel (1999) ‘Steps to an ecology of place’, in
Doreen Massey, John Allen and Philip Sarre (eds), Human
Geography Today, Oxford: Polity, pp. 295–328.
Zimmerman, Michael E. (1993) ‘Rethinking the Heidegger–
Deep-ecology relationship’, Environmental Ethics 15(3):
195–224.
L AV E RY & W H I T E H E A D : B R I N G I N G I T A L L B AC K H O M E
■■(opposite page, right)
Pings. 2008/2009 remote
collaboration with Barnaby
Oliver over one year.
Performance, sound,
drawing in response to our
local rivers, the Cych west
wales and the Maribyrnong,
Melbourne. (A painting in
response to a field
recording by Barnaby)
119