SYMPOSIUM: MILITARY LANDSCAPES
The symposium MILITARY LANDSCAPES takes place during the opening weekend of the Bergen International Festival Exhibition 2008. For this exhibition Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén take as their starting point a project they began to develop in 2005 in conjunction with a commision for a public art work for the military facility at Rena in eastern Norway. The exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall shows both a continuation of this work and newly produced material relating to the the of land used for military purposes.
The photographs address the development of a new military landscape while at the same time illuminating the laborious process of returning other areas to civil uses and to nature. These military landscapes suggest reminiscence of place and open up a space for more general questions about the relationship between military and civil uses of land areas. In a time when warfare is often discussed in relation to intagible phenomena, such as the struggle for opinion, media strategies, satallite imagery, etc, the physical impact on nature reminds us of the presence and local realities of war.
For this symposium, as well as for the accompanying exhibition catalogue, several leading scholars take part in broader discussions on the work of Book & Hedén, as well as presenting different approachesto the topic of military landscapes.
These are:
Rachel Woodward b. 1965, is currently a Reader in Geography at Newcastle University, based in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology. She is a geographer and a social scientist by training and by inclination. Her academic work is based on two main areas. The first of these is the study og military geographies, a short-hand term for the studies of the ways in which militarism and military activities are geographically constituted and geographically expressed. Her work in this field includes studies of the politics of military land-use, of the ways in which environmental politics and environmentalist argumentsare used by military institutions, and of the ways in which military landscapes are represented, both by armed forces and civilian observers. The second area of work is the study of the culture and sociology of the military. She has researched and written about the politics of gender in the contemporary British Army, about the ways in which the identities of soldiers are formed and expressed by soldiers themselves in photographs and in military memoirs, as well as about the ways in which news media represents military personnel.
Ekaterina Degot, Ph.D, b. 1958, is an independent curator and writer. Formerly a curator at the State Treyakov Gallery and a cultural columnist at Kommersant Daily, Moscow, she now concentrates in curating exhibitions that often juxtapose historical and contemporary pieces, and on writing about art, cultural politics and everyday culture. She has colums in the newspapes Moscow Vedomosti and in Big City magazine. Curator and co-curator of shows including “Body Memory: Underwear of the Soviet Era”(2000-2002), “Moscow-Berlin 1950-2000” (2001-2002), “Soviet Idealism” (2005), “The Comedy: the Funny Side of the Moving Image” (2005), “Struggling for the Banner: Soviet Art Between Trotsky and Stalin” (planned for 2008). Her books include Terroristic Naturalism (1998), Russian 20th century Art (2000), and Moscow Conceptualism (with Vadim Zakharov, 2005). She teaches at the Moscow Rodchenko New Media and Photography School.
Sverker Sörlin, b. 1956, is proffesor of Environmental History in the Division of History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He has held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley (1993), University of Cambridge (2004-2005), and the University of Oslo (2006). Sörlihas published widely on art, film, architecture, and landscape history in journals such as Environmental History, Worldviews, Kursbuch, and in exhibitions catalogues of museums and galleries, including the essay “Can Places Travel?” in the Documenta 11 (2002). He wrote the article on “Nature” for Dictionary of History of Sciences (London, 2000), and his book on nature in history of ideas, The Nature Contract (Naturkontakten, 1991, in Swedish), was shortlisted for the August Prize (for Strindberg) and has remained in print. He later won the 2004 August Prize for his History of European Ideas in two volumes.
Halvor Haugen, b.1972, lives and works in Oslo. He has his formal education from The National College of Art and Design (NCAD/SHKS), Oslo. Haugen currently works as a writer and translator. He is editor of the contemporary art journal UKS -Forum for Samtidskunst. He has written texts on art magazines such as Billedkunst, the webjournal Kunstkritikk.no and for Umelec International, the magazine for contemporary art and culture.
PROGRAM
16.00
Introduction
16.15
Rachel Woodward: How military landscapes work
17.00
Halvor Haugen: reply to Rachel Woodward, open for questions.
17.15
Break
17.30
Ekaterina Degot
18.15
Halvor Haugen: reply to Ekaterina Degot, open for questions
18.30
Break
18.45
Sverker Sörli: Iconographies of Nowhere: Aspects on 21th Century Political Photogeography
19.30
Halvor Haugen: reply to Sverker Sörlin, open for questions