Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time: Enchantment
Keynote (25th November)
Cabinets of Curiosity: Objects of Strange Change
Libby Robin
Australian National University and National Museum Australia
In today’s museums and artworks, in digital and other public spaces, there has been a reemergence of the 'cabinets of curiosities' that were once a mark of public culture in the 1500s.
Some, but not all, are presented as formal cabinets, like the Wunderkammer of the preEnlightenment era. What is the significance of curious objects for artists and curators working to
explore the current ecological crises? Cabinets of curiosities celebrate objects, but they are also
display connections, and juxtapositions. They provoke curiosity, and also show how our
perspective can be made ‘curious,’ or strange. Ecological crisis also connects us to distant times in
curious ways—such the deep past that formed fossil fuels, and the consequences of burning these
fuels that will shape the future for generations.
Panel Sessions (26th November)
Session 1: Matters of Deep Time
Deep time materializing
Christina Fredengren
Stockholm University
Deep time materializing deals with how material feminism/posthumanism affects how to
understand the sedimentation of time and may contribute with an alternative view on heritage,
conservation and development. It is argued that constantly altering materialization processes
affects how both a variety of pasts and futures are conditioning the action possibilities in the
present. It makes use of these thoughts to suggest alterations in current practices and care for
nature:culture heritage, but also for placing heritage studies within the environmental humanities
field.
The politics of time in a fire zone
Christine Hansen
University of Gothenburg
Buried in recent discussions around the escalating threat of fire emergencies in Australia is a
hidden and ‘haunted’ historical disjuncture that contains a political echo from the colonial past.
Contemporary communities struggling for a language within which to understand their
experience of devastating bushfires form narratives around the tropes of trauma and recovery. But
little attention is paid to the way in which shallow temporal experience within heavily urbanized
settler cultures continues to sit in stark contrast to the biological reality of a fire dependent ecosystems. Increasingly, as climate change-driven escalation of fire disasters threaten, Aboriginal
Australia is called on to bridge the cognitive distance between the evolutionary scale and practical
human adaptation. This paper will examine how the politics inherent in this strategy willingly
conflate disparate concepts of time in order to jump over the unpalatable role the colonial past is
playing in the contemporary drama of fire in the Australian bush.
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Art – Trees – Walking – Rocks: Deep Time Enchantment in Huntly, Aberdeenshire’
Alan MacPherson
University of Aberdeen
In April 2010 Hamish Fulton undertook a walk: ‘A 21 DAY WALK 20 NIGHTS CAMPING //
FROM HUNTLY SQUARE TO GLENMORE LODGE’ at the behest of Deveron Arts, a socially
engaged arts organisation based in Huntly, Aberdeenshire. The artist book which emerged as a
result of this walk, Fulton titled Mountain Time Human Time. This book contains a long essay by
Fulton which contextualises his project amid other writings, photographed sketchbook entries
and poster images from many walks spanning his career. Among these images are several which
document boulders crowned by trees which have somehow grown around and on top of the rocks.
In March of this year, Caroline Wendling led the planting of a ‘White Wood’ in the Bin Forest on
the edge of Huntly. The planting brought to culmination Wendling’s Oaks and Amity project
with Deveron Arts. Among the many hundred trees planted were forty oak saplings grown from
acorns produced by trees planted in Kassel, Germany as part of Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks project
(begun 1982). Following Beuys’ initiative of erecting a basalt block beside each tree, but
compromised by external restrictions placed upon the planting, Wendling opted to bury a block of
Lutetian limestone at the foot of each oak, hoping that in time, as the roots grow, these stones will
be pushed back out of the earth becoming visible within the tree structure. My paper will explore
the ways in which both Wendling’s and Fulton’s projects hinge on the complex layering of
temporalities; how both, utilising the axes of time and enchantment, employ tactics of disruption
to challenge the way we perceive ‘human time’. Underpinning this exploration will be the
question: what are the implications, in this case, of raising the spectre of deep time to the surface
(or, indeed, of buying it beneath); what does it mean to be enchanted by the deep time of rocks?
Session 2: Everyday Encounters with the Enchantments of Deep Time
A Story of Deep Time in Practice
Osbert Lancaster
osbert.org & School of Geosciences UoE
Several years ago, while training as a facilitator of learning experiences in wild places, I spent a
day alone from dawn until dusk, staying within a couple of square meters. I was present in this
place in the land with few distractions. No watch, no phone, no camera, no notebook. The day and
the place unfolded into an experience of deep time that has stayed with me, powerfully. I tell the
story of this experience and offer some reflections on how it may have helped shape my felt
understanding of my place in the world and notions of ‘sustainability’ and ‘the anthropocene’, and
some implications of this for my practice.
Osbert Lancaster is an independent consultant and facilitator. Using an approach grounded in
values and systems thinking he advises and supports organisations, groups and individuals
seeking insight and skills to embed sustainability into all that they do. His clients include
government, public agencies, education institutions, NGOs, and community groups. He is an
associate facilitator of the Natural Change approach to catalysing and supporting leadership for
sustainability through experience in wild places, and an honorary fellow of the School of
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Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. He has just started to write “Wholehearted: a field guide to
stimulating and supporting change for good”.
Writing about Corncockle
Katy Ewing
University of Glasgow
My own recent experience with deep time was in a return to a place from my past in order to
write a place-based piece of prose. The place was linked to vivid memories from my childhood: a
‘tip’ or dump attached to an amazing old sandstone quarry a few miles from where we lived in
rural South West Scotland, which my parents (poor artists) used to visit specifically to seek out
useful things to salvage in the early 1980s. Three elements were important to my personal
mythology about this place: the frightening tip where the rubbish of others might contain treasure
for us, the amazing spectacle of the quarry itself, out of which sandstone had been obtained to
build important buildings nationally and internationally, and the story my parents had told me
that the footprints of dinosaurs had been uncovered far down below during quarrying. The
juxtaposition of the discarded material goods of the late twentieth century – the smells and the
threat and danger of the tip – with this slice through the earth into the very distant past was both
thrilling and disturbing. As I investigated the story behind the quarry, I discovered that this place
had been tied to the story of a fascinating early 19th century local landowning natural historian
who had reprinted classic natural history texts to make them more accessible to ordinary people
and whose study of the quarry’s fossil footprints had been instrumental in a massive shift in
contemporary scientific understandings. The personal linking of my own past with that of this
important - but unknown to me - historical figure, and of the earth itself began a trajectory in my
own research and writing, exploring new interdisciplinary ways of seeing, experiencing and
representing place, which I continue to explore.
Katy Ewing is a writer and artist living in rural Southwest Scotland. She graduated from the
University of Glasgow in 2013 with an undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts (humanities). Her
dissertation was an exploration of the use of re-told fairy tales by Angela Carter and Sara
Maitland to explore or challenge norms embedded in cultural consciousness. She now studies
Environment, Culture and Communication (MLitt) at the University of Glasgow’s School of
Interdisciplinary Studies, and continues to be interested in the intersection and combination of
multiple perspectives and disciplines, including imaginative frames, as ways of seeing and
knowing the world.
Curling reality: progress on thin ice
Martin Philip
University of Edinburgh and the Open University
Last weekend brought the third indoor Grand Match staged by the Royal Caledonian Curling
Club. The last outdoor version was held on the Lake of Menteith in 1979 but since then a
warming climate has led to insufficient thickness of ice. The modern indoor version of the sport is
played on ice pads which sit upon a solid (disenchanted) base. The outdoor version of the game
involves playing upon a surface which is more malleable and dynamic and indeed one which may
give way if conditions change causing players to slip through into the freezing dark water below as indeed happened to the novelist James Hogg. This paper will argue that Washington Irving’s
‘Rip van Winkle’ uses the sport of curling to represent the enchantment which removed Rip from
the world for twenty years. I will suggest that this American story has its roots in the older
narratives of absence and return from fairyland which are prevalent in the Scottish borders in the
early nineteenth century, including such poems as ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ or ‘Tam Lin’, These
narratives themselves may be a means of exploiting notions of enchantment to both undermine
the Enlightenment fetishisation of human progress and suggest more radical and powerful
processes of evolution (of both species and landscape) which may now be discussed within Deep
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Time. Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft will be used in conjunction with a
few scenes from Hogg’s novel The Three Perils of Man.to discuss ideas of enchantment within the
tensions caused by a Calvinistic predetermined Nature coming into contact with the ideas of
Hutton and other Enlightenment figures. Then I’ll try to figure out how to bring curling back
into the picture…
Martin Philip is a writer, musician and lecturer. He works for the Open University and the
University of Edinburgh where he teaches Scottish and English literature and has taught creative
writing. His publications include ‘Dialectics of Maps and Memory: James Robertson’s
“mythohistoriographical” Art’ and ‘An Interview with Allan Massie’ as well as a number of
reviews. As a singer-songwriter he has toured in Europe and America with the jazz/hip-hop trio
‘Gecko 3’ and with ‘The Sorries’ he performs traditional Scottish songs at the Fringe and around
Scotland. He is currently completing a historical novel set in America in 1770.
Session 3: Forming Deep Time
Landscapes of deep time in poetry from the Cumbrian edgelands
Alan Beattie
University of Lancaster
The poet Norman Nicholson was born and died in the remote south-west edgelands of Cumbria,
having ‘stayed put’ there all his life (1914-1987). Remaining ‘rooted’ in a local world that he felt he
belonged to, he chronicled the rapid de-industrialisation of the settlements along the West
Cumbrian coast, and tried to look far into their future. His poetry excavates the subterranean
terrain of Cumbria – digging back from current times to a pre-industrial ‘agrarian history’ and
into ‘geological history’, preoccupied with intersections of the telluric and the temporal, with what
it means to dwell in both place and time, and with contrasts between geological and
anthropological time. I argue that long before the demise of Cumbrian mines and ironworks he
was already a man haunted by time, by timetables and by timescapes – because having been
confined in a TB sanatorium as a young man he had been socialised into an intense awareness of
the many layers and depths and divergences in the way time passes, which put him on permanent
‘time-watch’. I interpret his work as a series of chronotopes (in Bakhtin’s terms): ways of
imagining a configuration of time and space that defines and constitutes identity and position in a
particular setting; that serves to keep alive particular stories or myths about origins and pathways
and destinations – especially when the continuity of individual and collective life-courses is
threatened with disruption or erasure. Nicholson’s chronotopes are heterogeneous and
interpenetrating. They extend disquietingly from the quotidian, diurnal time of the TB patient
and the industrial worker, to the months, seasons, and wheeling year of rural labourers – and then
on to life-spans (growing up, growing old, contemplating death), family-tree-timescapes,
evolutionary sequences, and deep glacial and cosmological corridors of time. I’d like to read some
of his poems, and maybe some I’ve written ‘after Nicholson’.
Alan Beattie, Cumbrian- born, first trained and worked as a dancer, moving rapidly from Russian
ballet to his own experimental post-modern choreographies; leaving this to go to medical school,
he transitioned (rapidly) from bio-molecular cancer research to eco-social child health and mental
health, and became a Professor of Public Health and Health Education, and a community activist
for health. Nowadays he does critical-creative writing, in particular ‘patchwork poetry’ and other
innovative textual forms that may be useful in addressing social and environmental futures: he is
devising a series of poems under the title ‘movingbeings, dancing to the music of time’
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Mobilitas Loci (Muller Ltd.)
The Confraternity of Neoflagellants
We propose to perform "Mobilitas Loci (Muller Ltd.)" an approx. 8 minute multimedia audiovisual work. As neomedievalist artists living in Scotland and Québec, our collaborative work is
often fabricated mid-Atlantic in a cloud-workshop using freeware. Where much post-net art tends
to rework the forward-thinking modern/postmodern collectives of the 1960s and ‘70s,
neomedieval artistic practice adopts ‘backward-thinking’, to identify and develop possible
‘premodern futures’ through a visceral, indulgent, lavish, liturgical and ludic materialism. Given
its non-modern condition, contemporary artistic practice has as much in common with the guilds
of the middle ages as it does with the avant-garde of the 20th century. Set in a contemporary
passion park, Mobilitas Loci (Muller Ltd.) entangles a number of medieval sources (from the
Bestiary of Philippe de Thaon to Foxe's Book of Martyrs) with the work of living and fictitious
artists, knowledge-architects, Ponzi schemers, and philosophers (e.g. Alexandr Petrovsky,
Amanda Beech, Ray Brassier, Adam Toffler, www.bobsacamano.dr). The A/V work takes the form
of a bestiary entry on the dog-head Muller Ltd., a quasi-human protagonist in our theory-fiction
thN Lng Folk 2 Go: Investigating Future Premoderns™ (Punctum, 2013
punctumbooks.com/titles/thn-lng-folk). It is performed in a mixture of middle and modern Scots
and middle American mall talk and includes cover versions of electronic voice phenomena
recordings of the medieval dead and moving images of Muller Ltd
La Confrérie de Neoflagellants a été fondée en 2009 par le Sergent-At-Bras Hogg (Centre
d'études Interdisciplinaires dans la Société et de la Culture, Université Concordia, Montréal,
Québec) et rejoint par Gardien des Vêtements Mulholland (Directeur des Études Supérieures,
Edimbourg École des Beaux-Arts, Université d'Edimbourg, en Ecosse.) Il s'agit d'une confrérie
laïque et l'égalité des chances lié par chorégraphe.The Confraternity of Neoflagellants are
Sergeant-at-Arms Norman James Hogg (Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society & Culture,
Concordia University, Montreal, QC) and Keeper of the Wardrobe Professor Neil Mulholland
(Director of Graduate Studies, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.) We
are a secular an equal opportunities confraternity bound by chirograph. As a Confraternity, we
tend to develop our work from script-to-flesh. The script for Mobilitas Loci (Muller Ltd.) was
initially commissioned as a text for the artist Amanda Beech’s bookwork FINAL MACHINE
(LCP, England, 2015), which includes drawings by Beech, and a re-print of Reza Negarestani's
First and Final Machines: From Metaphysics to the Forensics of Force and a new text by Ray
Brassier. This would be the first performance of this script.
Enchanté: Singing the other into existence
Christos Galanis
University Of Edinburgh
In coming across waterfall, fire, and rain dances of chimpanzees - ritualized, 'enchanted' modes of
knowing and interacting with the environment among primates - the question arose for me: what
is the sensual-epistemic legacy of hominid species through deep time, and what role did
'enchantment' play in the very oldest modes of knowledge production through the course of our
ancestral emergence? Through simple embodied explorations, workshop participants will use
their own bodies to experience the role that various specialized mechano-receptors in the body
contribute to the perception of the other, the environment, and the experience of self and
consciousness. As an experimental group-exercise, I hope to facilitate a wider discussion on the
nature of knowing, enchanting, and the profound role that *moving with* has contributed to the
experience of what it is to be human.
Christos Galanis is an artist, researcher, and teacher who enjoys migration - facilitated by Greek
and Canadian passports. He is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at the University of
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Edinburgh, where he is pursuing research on dominant and periphery hillwalking practices in
Scotland. He holds an MFA in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque,
USA) and a BFA in music from Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). Christos has taught
workshops and created walking-related performances and works in Mexico, Puerto Rico, France,
Spain, Italy, Portugal, Canada, U.S., and Greece, including long walks over the course of several
hundred kilometers. He enjoys collaborating with both humans and non-humans alike, especially
donkeys.
Session 4: Deep Futures of Enchantment?
Gods of the Anthropocene: human and inhuman agencies in the Earth’s new epoch
Bronislaw Szerszynski
Lancaster University
The term ‘the Anthropocene’ seems to evoke the idea of an ‘Age of Humanity’ in which the planet
– and perhaps eventually the cosmos – becomes a mere echo chamber in which the Anthropos, the
human being, becomes the only source and telos of agency. Yet as a name for the emerging new
stage of the Earth’s evolution it surely exhibits an extraordinary level of irony. I have argued
elsewhere that, if the Anthropocene is the ‘end of nature’, it is also the ‘end of the end of nature’ –
the end, that is, of Homo faber, the human being understood as that being which can carve a stable
setting for human affairs out of non-human nature, and in which the latter finds its purpose and
meaning (Szerszynski 2013). On the contrary, any Anthropocenic ambition to modulate the
dynamics of nature’s becoming on a global scale will see the collective human will progressively
entangled in the self-organising potentialities of non-human becoming on the one hand (Serres
1995) and the demands of an increasingly inhuman technosphere on the other (Haff 2013). The
Anthropocene will surely be an age not dominated by the will of ‘man’ but by a growing
awareness (whether willingly acceded to or forced on human consciousness) that human beings
are part of an Earth which is made up of countless agencies that are constantly concatenating and
ironising each other’s intentions in intrinsically unpredictable ways (Latour 2013). Whatever the
ecomodernists might suggest (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015), in the Anthropocene humans will find
themselves more, not less, conditioned by non-human agency.
Yet in this paper I want to extend this account further, suggesting that the advent of the
Anthropocene is giving rise to what might be called a Great Acceleration of spirit. As seasonal
patterns shift, the old gods known by surviving foraging, agrarian and pastoral societies are
withdrawing from human society. As the high modernism of twentieth-century organised
industrial capitalism is displaced by the delirium of a financialised, postmodern capitalism, the
high god of reason and morality is fading from the public life of the West as harsher, apocalyptic
monotheisms spread in parts of the developing world made turbulent by extractive economies and
climatic change. And as commodified global flows of matter, energy and value accelerate and
undermine local gift economies, reports proliferate in postcolonial contexts of cannibal spirits,
vampiric technicians, demonic mine and factory owners, zombie workers and chthonic demons. I
will interrogate these three interlinked shifts in sacral ordering, and, drawing on the work of
Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Teresa Brennan and others, suggest that we can use them to
better understand the hidden material and cultural logics of the Anthropocene.
The Ethical Implications of Different Deep Time Eschatologies among Scottish Christian
Environmental Activists
Michael Northcott
University of Edinburgh
Interviewees in the Ancestral Time project reveal a range of beliefs about the enchantment of life
on earth and the deep future of life. Some believe that all life forms are enchanted because they are
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part of a divine eschatology in which 'all things' are brought together into an ultimate redemptive
future. This redemptive future has elements of immortality in it since it refers in the minds of
some to post-mortal human and other than human life. But it also has elements associated with
mortality such as diversity of life forms, habitats analogous to presently existing ecosystems,
temporal experience, and multi-sensory perception. Others believe the enchantment that matters
and motivates the quest for sustainable solutions to things like humanly caused climate change are
presently existing human souls who experience or will experience extreme weather, or are or will
be environmental refugees. This paper will consider the ethical purchase of different enchantment
scenarios.
Michael Northcott is Professor of Ethics in the School of Divinity in the University of
Edinburgh. He has published 12 books and over 70 academic papers. He has been visiting
professor at the Claremont School of Theology, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Flinders
University, and the University of Malaya. Before moving to Edinburgh he was a lecturer in an
ecumenical seminary in Kuala Lumpur and assistant priest at St Mary's Cathedral, Kuala Lumpur.
He is also a Trustee of Traidcraft, and a keen vegetable gardener, jogger, cyclist, swimmer and
kayaker. His most recent books include: Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of
Sustainable Comunities (Bloomsbury 2015). Systematic Theology and Climate Change:
Ecumenical Perspectives (Routledge 2014) edited with Peter Scott and A Political Theology of
Climate Change (SPCK 2014)
Futures of Safety and Adventure, (Re)Enchanting the Future
Sarah May
University College London
What do we mean when we say forever? Natural and cultural heritage management policies
concern themselves with conserving and preserving things ‘for future generations’. But the future
as a great unknown sits uneasily with the management practices that underpin those policies. The
futures that are created are primarily concerned with security. In this way they are analogous with
the futures created through nuclear waste management. But are these futures worth caring about?
Futures that 'our children and grandchildren' will flourish in? If intergenerational justice is to be
meaningful then the futures it works for need to be more than a risk assessment. If we consider
the futures created by creating and transmitting messages to deep space, messages that may not
be received during the lifetime of humanity, a more adventurous future concept emerges. This
paper will consider this triangulation and whether it can re-enchant the deep future with equal
wonder to the deep past
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