16th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research – Resonance

I’m really looking forward to presenting my research on ‘creative field work in forest plantations’ at SAR 2025 in Porto. The full programme for the conference is available here and the abstract for the performance lecture I will be giving on Thursday 8th May is pasted below:

Creative field work in forest plantations: seeking resonance in anthropogenic landscapes

This performance-lecture arises from artistic research, using sited creative practices – including field recordings, sound-making, movement and song – to explore Portuguese forest plantations in fire season. This creative field work responds to pressing global issues, including the effects of a warming climate, which reverberate through anthropogenic, or human-made, natural landscapes such as the pine and eucalyptus plantations of central Portugal. These are deeply ambivalent, contested places, made by humans, but primarily occupied by more-than-humans. Around the planted and industrially extracted trees hangs a legacy of state afforestation and rural depopulation, as well as present fire risks. In an era of climate crisis, they are both a counter to human-made carbon emissions and an example of ‘cheap nature’ (Moore and Patel 2018), where trees are treated as a resource to be extracted as efficiently as possible. The plantations are also full of surprising beauty, feral happenings and ‘unruly edges’ (Tsing 2015) that soften and counteract the straight lines of industrial extraction. The research is currently exploring affective and resonant materialities – how it feels to be in these spaces. Such feelings arise from the trees labouring for humans and being life-limited because of this, from their characterisation as flammable ‘fuel load’ and risky materialities, and from their presence as living beings, communities, and homes for multiple species. The creative field work reaches into these contradictory feelings to foster a deeper, more nuanced understanding of anthropogenic landscapes. It seeks new ways of expressing our relationships with the more-than-human in such places, alongside creative ways of being, which might transform perspectives of what they are and what they are for. The project also aims to explore the controlled extraction of nature, alongside how it feels to live in landscapes that are seen as increasingly risky and outside the control of humans.