Critical Correspondence

Correspondence from Wanda Gala at the University of Limerick #2

Terrain and Territory

The generation of land-based plastic and performance art is a concentrated effort in communicating relation. This association of body and terrain is a subjective process of linking cultural identity to our built environments 1: a symbiont discourse regarding the construction of place. Bourdieu, in his notion of habitus, refers to this idiomatic relationship between the body and space as a kind of ”…’structural apprenticeship’ through which we at once appropriate the world and are appropriated by it.2 One’s habitus,as defined by Bourdieu, is informed by one’s social practices.

“A set of acquired characteristics…(which) may be totally or partially common to people who have been the product of similar social conditions…(but) may be changed by historical action oriented by intention and consciousness and using pedagogic devices.”3

Hence, one’s disposition is not fixed, no matter how deep the embodiment of the social facts determining ones nature. Culture does not equate nature, and it is around this thought that I organize a structure with which to sustain query .

The topic: movement research within a specified terrain.

I have approached my engagement with this study at the University of Limerick with the intention to discover a theoretical framework for this direction of movement research. A practical perspective inclusive of the culture of terrain itself as reflective of that of its inhabitants: the value systems it communicates, the stories inscribed in its topography. My initial approach to this task was to include an ethnographic element to the study of site; an addition to what would normally be a self-reflective bodily based discourse. Through the inclusion of these modalities of fieldwork: formal and informal interviewing, researching archives, participant observation, and video recording: terrain became territory and its attributes, social signifiers. Somewhere in this mode of empirical (experiential, sensual, social, and historical) data collection, culture has been communicated, and with it, a base from which to develop performative action.4

Notes

1 See, Dovey p.283

2 See, Leach p.297

3 See, Borurdieu p.45

4 While I work to find a conclusion, what are your thoughts concerning this topic, or on such an approach?

References

Dovey, K. ‘The Silent Complicity of Architecture’ from Habitus : A Sense of Place. Ed. Jean Hiller and Emma Rooksby. Ashgate Publishing, 2005.

Leach,N. ‘Belonging, Towards a Theory of Identification with Space’ from Habitus : A Sense of Place. Ed. Jean Hiller and Emma Rooksby. Ashgate Publishing, 2005.

Bourdieu, P. ‘Habitus’ from Habitus : A Sense of Place. Ed. Jean Hiller and Emma Rooksby. Ashgate Publishing, 2005.