The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image

This project aims to identify and understand aspects of the current global predicament in the UK's landscape, exploring its histories and possible futures, through creating images and texts that critique and document a point in history characterised by conflict and anxiety. A central theme is the relationship between belonging/dwelling on the one hand and mobility on the other.

With funding support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this collaborative project has produced different contributions from each of the researchers influenced by conversations within the group: Patrick Keiller, a film; Patrick Wright a monograph; and Doreen Massey an extended essay to be read alongside the film.

The film, Robinson in Ruins, has been screened around the country and at international film festivals. It is a meditation upon and excavation of landscape, with a view to rethinking it, disturbing it, and opening up the possibility of alternative futures. The actual process of the film's making was central to the project's mode of investigation of its themes, and the construction of its political argument.

The forthcoming monograph by Patrick Wright, England's Itch, will investigate how modern ideas of history and nationality, settlement and movement, have come to be expressed so much in terms of landscape, often accompanied by a mode of thought in which mobility is seen as a threat to organic settlement.

Doreen Massey has contributed an extended essay to be read with the film. Landscape/Space/Politics explores and brings out the radical politics of the film in relation to the current conjuncture. It interweaves the film's challenge to many conventional notions of 'landscape' with her own arguments about the need for the reconceptualisation of space and place. It also explores how this politics of the reconceptualisation of landscape is pursued by the very form of the film. The essay will also be distributed with the film in DVD format, scheduled for release in June 2011.

The project has been presented to a number of audiences, both collectively and individually, including the Art and Environment conference, hosted by the AHRC at Tate Britain in June 2010.

For more information please visit the project website.

Principal researcher

Patrick Keiller, Royal College of Art

Co-researchers

Prof Patrick Wright, Nottingham Trent University
Prof Doreen Massey, The Open University