Haunted landscapes
🥀Landscape carries a relational hybridity, always already natural and cultural, deep and superficial, it is inherently 'deconstructive'...it deconstructs itself. Boundaries, borders and spaces themselves dissolve in fluid reconfigurations as that which haunts, moves in and out, here and there, in-between and nowhere. The boundaries between ghost, place and those who witness or experience the haunting are deconstructed, only to be reconstructed anew by affect. 🥀Repressive and abusive political regimes ‘Haunt’. Their influence and impact are felt even after they have been dismantled, as is the case within the human psyche: when trauma is repressed it doesn’t simply disappear, it lays dormant. The present is revealed as unstable, and the spectre’s deconstructive nature reminds us to challenge basic binaries such as past, present, alive and dead. ‘Spectrality is what makes the present waver’ (Jameson). Via abstraction, the presence of the ghost reminds us that atrocities and injustices make up parts of our social fabric, not forgotten, but repressed and returning - as we are seeing at this present time in the ethnic cleansing taking place in Palestine. 🥀A call to centre subjectivity, and to, ‘pay attention to that which is not said overtly’ (Good et al) offers a strategy in which interrogating the duplicitous nature of these ghosts, how they ‘hide’ as well as ‘reveal’ on a personal and political level, may elucidate how they physically manifest in space, bodies and the social landscape. The material effect of the ghost may be expressed through uprisings and riots, for example, and as Sara Salem explains, ‘Haunting is frightening, in that it registers and brings to the surface the harm inflicted or loss sustained by social violence that happened in the past or present’. (Part excerpt from essay by Sarah) 🥀By engaging with these ghosts of our colonial past on the Maryleyline pilgrimage we are taking seriously histories forgotten and repressed.
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