Casting and Straying: hybrid approaches to understanding the dissolution of the body into landscape and landscape into body

This research project interrogates our understanding of the relationship between body and landscape through audiovisual art practice. It takes displacement as the framework for this exploration, while specifically drawing on audiovisual field research undertaken in Europe in 2011. Deploying practice-led research and its attendant approaches and methodologies, it culminates in Straying, an audiovisual installation that creates a space of expression that is beyond the seeable and sayable. The poetic and documentary impulse that drive the creation of the installation also help move beyond the representational, beyond each form, and towards a hybrid, ‘haptic’ space of experience.

Casting, the exegetical component of the research, offers up various prisms through which to engage with the installation work. The work’s nomadic theoretical terrain looks to the practice of poetry, documentary, the essay, translation, philosophy, intercultural film practice, and the phenomenology of the moving image as a means to frame and illuminate the project. This transdisciplinary, practice-based research examines unique ways of knowing and knowledge production that transcend habitual ontological and epistemological frameworks.