Reading Landscape
The second season of Armchair Walks continues from 2020’s programme to consider practical methods and processes of working in and with landscape, to read and re-read our environments.
As part of Art Gene’s Extreme Views residency programme Owen developed Armchair Walks, a series of online and in-person events around civic green spaces in Barrow-in-Furness. Season 2 further explores landscapes in flux, from the civic to the post-industrial, and explores how together we can better understand our green spaces. In these series, speakers from the fields of architecture, activism and art are invited to share their practices, and expand our understanding of what it means to work in and with landscape. The first two sessions take place online, with the third taking place at the polytunnel at Art Gene’s Allotment Soup site in Barrow-in-Furness. This aims to build a working group for the area, which can imagine how we can move forward with care, paying attention to and protecting local habitats, knowledge and resources.
Chapter 1
Landscape Healing
In this first event, architect Haakon Rasmus Rasmussen and councillor and campaigner Sakina Sheikh discuss the after effects of industry and capitalism on landscape, what healing and recovery can look like and the role imagination plays in rebuilding a place and responding to multiple crises.
Still from ‘Landscape Healing’, a film by Richard John Seymour in collaboration with 3rw Architects. Image courtesy of Haakon Rasmus Rassmussen.
Chapter 2
Shared Ecologies
With artist Rachel Pimm, this event explores what it means to consider landscape from the perspectives of the non-human.Together we will begin to listen in to the animal, vegetal and mineral processes that continually shape and reshape the shared environments and ecologies that we are always a part of.
Volcanic Rocks, Rachel Pimm. Image courtesy of the artist.
(The Great Exhibition of) The Work of Cash Crops by Rachel Pimm, courtesy of the artist
Chapter 3
Mapping Methodologies
The series culminates in an in-person event at Art Gene’s polytunnel at Allotment Soup, where we begin to collectively map the lost, unseen, abandoned and undervalued landscapes of Barrow-in-Furness. This will bring together research from previous events to form a working group who can move forward with this long term work.