What Do Landscapes Say? Telling Details of Cross-Territorial PracticeWhat Do Landscapes Say? Telling Details of Cross-Territorial Practice

How can narratives be a starting point to engage multiple voices in reconstructing the human-landscape relationship? In looking at complex and diverse systems like (inhabited) landscapes, we easily resort to utilitarian approaches and methods of big data. Through the research project What Do Landscapes Say?, Nomaos suggests a methodological innovation in the archiving and narrating of landscapes. Presenting these outcomes in the confined space of the exhibition, the question still remained: how do we transfer the methods of observing and narrating across disciplinary fields and enter the discourse of territorial design and planning?

For this seminar, Nomaos invites eight speakers to join a discussion about the use of narratives as a way to acquire and transmute knowledge about the human-landscape relationship. In three sessions, Human-Landscape Relationship, Landscape-Narratives Relationship and Non-Human Narratives, speakers will introduce their practice and engage in conversation with Nomaos members in exploring this question.

12:30: Introduction by Nomaos
12:50: What Do Landscapes Say? Exhibition trailer
13:00: Introductory talk by DPR-Barcelona
Publisher and architectural research practice DPR-Barcelona will give an introductory talk to the seminar. DPR-Barcelona's work explores how architecture as a discipline operates in the intersection between politics, technology, economy and social issues. It is currently collaborating with Nomaos on the book Landscapes of Care, collating progressive architectural practices supported by the Future Architecture Platform and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

13:30 Break - Soundscape plays with slideshow
14:00: Guest presentations + panel with Nomaos - Block 1

Wapke Feenstra is an artist and founding member of MyVillages (together with Kathrin Böhm and Antje Schiffers), an artist-platform that has worked internationally for almost 20 years with rural communities, collaborating in ways which reflect and engage local cultures, economies and resources to propose a transnational model of self-organisation.

Architect, illustrator and educator Daria Zaytseva is a tutor at MARCH Architecture School and founder of Pro_stranstvye ([Про]Странствие). Her works manifest themselves in installation, performance and lectures introducing questions of architecture within Russian (non)human landscapes.

Panel with Nomaos members:
Ksenia Kopalova
Illustrator and educator with a background in sociology based in Moscow, editor and co-founder of Слон в боа (Slon v Boa): Journal for Illustration (http://slonvboa.ru/)

Rachel Bacon
Visual artists from New York City, based in the Netherlands. Her current work is rooted in a consideration of how to re-imagine landscape in a time of ecological crisis.

Naomi van Dijck
Naomi van Dijck explores ways of producing differently and learning from existing structures to do so. Her practice is committed to creating horizontal structures that facilitate collaborative spheres for cross-disciplinary learning. Naomi worked as a curator for What Do Landscapes Say?

10:30: Guest presentations + Panel with Nomaos - Block 2

Esther Peeren is academic director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at University of Amsterdam and leads the Rural Imaginations project. She examines the media representation of contemporary rural life and its influence on the political mobility of the rural in five national contexts: the UK, the US, the Netherlands, China and South Africa.

masharu is an earth eater and an earth lover. A founder of the Museum of Edible Earth, they combine scientific research and cultural practices with a personal approach. Museum of Edible Earth brings together a collection of edible soils from across the globe and through creative activities invites the audience to review their knowledge about food and cultural traditions.

Panel with Nomaos members:
Radha Smith
Writer Radha Smith is based in London, UK. She is interested in how a sense of place or displacement influences one's perception of oneself and one's culture. Her writing has appeared in Mslexia, Ricepaper Magazine, The Changing Image, and Ampersand. In 2019, her work was longlisted for the International 3-Day Novel Contest.

Vera Mennens
Artist Vera Mennens, co-founder of at7 project space, lives and works in Rotterdam. Throughout her practice Vera Mennens' main research is on the question of how to research history and historiography as an artist. She works in a wide range of media including video, text, photography, audio, installation and textiles.

Polina Veidenbakh
An architect based in Moscow, Veidenbakh's work challenges the idea that urbanism can only be practiced through data analysis and design proposals.

14:00: Guest presentations + Panel with Nomaos - Block 3

Surinamese landscape architect Daphne Bakker is an editor for Failed Architecture and co-curator of the Stories on Earth project, one of the parallel projects of the Venice Biennale for Architecture 2021. Her work explores past, present and future ways of inhabiting the landscape specifically focusing on themes of urban renewal, displacement, traumatic heritages, and (personal) archives.

Working together with Daphne Bakker as co-curator of Stories on Earth,** Chiara Dorbolò **is also an editor for Failed Architecture. A conceptual architect and researcher, she works at the intersection between architecture and social sciences, studying borderlines in multiple forms, including international borders, urban boundaries, perceived social barriers, and physical edges.

Artist, science-fiction writer and fashion designer Anastasya Pandilovska works in the field of environmental communication, focusing on posthumanist and nonhumanist ways of interacting, bringing together theoretical approaches such as ecology with practical methods in the performative creation of an interspecific collective body.

Panel with Nomaos members:
Nataly Lakhtina
An audio-visual artist based in Moscow, Lakhtina's practice plugs into the history and experience of a specific location by developing audio- and visual compositions. By collecting and experimenting with a location's properties in the form of data, algorithms, visual cues, noises and sounds, it then reinterprets the complex multi-sensory experience of a landscape through repositioning these things in a spatial installation.

Yue Mao
Urbanist, researcher, project manager and artist Yue Mao is based in Delft, the Netherlands. She is initiator of Nomaos Collective and the project What Do Landscapes Say?.

Mari Malkova
A graphic designer based in Moscow, Malkova's work focuses on the digitisation and archiving of the research of What Do Landscapes Say?, both for each work individually and the project as a whole.

Research collective Nomaos is a collaboration of Rachel Bacon, Naomi van Dijck, Ksenia Kopalova, Nataly Lakhtina, Maria Malkova, Yue Mao, Vera Mennens, Radha Smith and Polina Veidenbakh.

The project What Do Landscapes Say? is made possible by Creative Industries Fund NL. The seminar is co-hosted by MARCH Institute, Moscow and Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.