“I am drawn to the idea of so many details on surface and living beings that they cannot fit into a categorisation. Not a landscape that can be easily tamed.”
From a discussion with Kate Foster and Alix Villanueva about looking at the surface of the bog closely.
Looking closely at the surface of a bog, practicing the ‘Arts of Noticing’ and trying to watch the bog even when not on field.
On a trip to Flow Country with Lilien Li, I gathered the dead dried bodies of various living creatures, plants, moss and lichens, we listened to the wondrous sound of the wind blowing through the field gate and helped pulled out trees in the name of conservation! It was impressive to learn about the landscape and know not every 'green' is 'natural' and beneficial for the ecosystem.
In my observation in the bog, specifically when we were helping volunteers pull out new regeneration of Scots Pine trees that had been planted 50 years ago, I was struck by new ideas about waste, and how particular viewpoints have changed wetlands by looking at them as wastelands. Picking up what is known as trash I practiced looking at waste as not only objects but processes that occur at different places and times, acting as conceptual, physical, metaphysical and geological structures, forming the ‘planetary’. “Yet planetarity is not to be confounded with generality” (Liboiron et al. 2018).
