Visions of Place

Panelists

Anna Selby (chair)

Anna Selby is a poet and naturalist. Her poetry often explores our connection with water and the natural world. She  works collaboratively with dancers, choreographers and conservationists, writes poetic-studies of different species in the field, directly from life, often underwater, and aims for these poems to share a sense of compassion and attentiveness to the environment. She is currently doing a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University on Empathy and Plein Air Poetry, and is inspired by Deep Ecology, Animism and Gaia Theory; Rachel Carson; the Transcendentalists, and painters such as Emily Carr and Casper David Friedrich. Field Notes, her new collection, is published by Hazel Press.

Tommaso Gorla and Filippo Vogliazzo

Tommaso Gorla is an Italian artist and researcher with an interdisciplinary approach to the Visual Arts. He is the founder and chief editor of the visual culture journal Anima Loci, an editor for the online contemporary drawing magazine Drawing Tube, and has been founder and curator for the sound art research collective El Cocuy (2011-2016). Tommaso holds a PhD in Visual Anthropology from the EHESS, Paris, and has taught at the Verona Academy of Fine Arts, the SantaGiulia Academy of Brescia, and at the London Metropolitan University. He has exhibited his work and projects in various galleries and foundations around Europe, including Galleria Patricia Armocida (Milan), Errant Bodies Project Space (Berlin), Centre For Recent Drawing (London), Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation (Venice), the Milan Triennale (Milan).

Filippo Vogliazzo is an artist from Milan currently based in Berlin. He studied Visual Arts at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. His research focuses on the role of objects as parts of our surroundings, and what perception of ourselves they might indicate within a context. He thinks that as products of contemporary technological evolutions, objects around us are hyper-objects, applications of traditional functionality, addressed by social conventions and employed by power structures that impact our daily lives. With an interdisciplinary practice that spans from investigations into materials, symbols and architectural forms to questions of poetic nature, with a discreet sensibility he attempts to explore how we act according to the space we move in.

Emma Jones 

Emma Jones is a non-fiction writer and Curatorial Assistant (Photography) at Tate Modern. She holds an MA in Writing from Royal Holloway. Emma was a contributor to the recent publication Photography: A Feminist History (Octopus Publishing). Her non-fiction writing mainly focuses on travel and place-writing, most recently with a piece about cycling through Uist, which can be found on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place.

Elizabeth Ransom

Elizabeth Ransom is a visual artist and researcher working between the UK and the US. Ransom uses alternative photographic processes, particularly film soup, soil chromatography, and cyanotypes to translate the experience of transnationality. She is currently enrolled on the PhD research degree programme at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. As an artist Ransom takes from her own lived experiences of migration to explore homesickness and autobiographical memory. Ransom’s research builds on theories of migration and place attachment particularly from the perspective of the migrant woman. Her work has been exhibited internationally in the UK, India, Mexico, China and the US.

Abstracts

Anima Loci

Anima Loci is a visual culture journal that proposes explorations of place by looking at its iconic aspects. Convinced that processes of ‘place-making’ can be often mediated by images, the journal hosts interdisciplinary contributions where images act as elicitors for perception and memory, orienting the way in which space is experienced. In this talk, we will dig further into “Concrete Shores”, a research project that explores the physical and emotional geography of postwar Venice.

Photographing an Imagined Place: Lieko Shiga’s ‘Spiral Shore’

This paper forms part of Jones’ ongoing work and research into the theme of place by female and non-binary photography practitioners. It will explore the work of Lieko Shiga (born 1980, Okazaki, Japan) to raise questions about what photographing ‘place’ could mean, beyond traditional documentary practice.

Migration, Place Attachment and Gender

This presentation explores how alternative photographic processes, specifically soil chromatography, can be used to unpick the complexities of place attachment and its relation to gender and the migrant experience. Taking an autobiographical approach, Ransom will draw from her creative practice to visualise her own experience of place attachment.