AXIOMS FOR READING A LANDSCAPE

For the past year and a half, I've been working on a durational installation-based poetry project, called Interview with a river.

it draws on my experience with installation-based practices, is influenced by my training in critical geography, and engages with field-based practices.

for this particular installation, i tied three geography texts to a cedar tree facing the river, and am tracking how the river ecosystem interprets (changes, influences, adapts) the writing of these texts.

The texts include:
Lewis, Peirce. "Axioms for reading the landscape." The interpretation of ordinary landscapes 23 (1979): 167-187, a classic and influential (and also problematic) geography text.

Mitchell, Don. "New axioms for reading the landscape: paying attention to political economy and social justice." In Political economies of landscape change, pp. 29-50. Springer, Dordrecht, 2008, an important response to Pierce’s earlier Axioms.

Phillips, Jonathan D. "Place formation and axioms for reading the natural landscape." Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment 42, no. 6 (2018): 697-720. I have no context to gauge its influence. We read landscape through our own disciplinary, social contexts.

I am also writing my own 'axioms', number three of which is:

map lines, traces, patterns. note the limitations of the visual.
avoid settler stories and the stasis of archives.
(maps are power.)


My thanks to the Canada Council of the Arts for funding to support this project.