‘Going Underground’ and ‘On the Rocks’: Announcing Exploring #2 and #3‘, our forthcoming Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group online sessions, on 26 October & 16 November 2023

“Because it’s there”

George Leigh Mallory, on why he wanted to climb Everest (New York Times, 18 March 1923)

Since 2012 the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group has been convening interdisciplinary conversations about the study, experience, management and use of a diverse range of places. Our contributors include artists, architects, geographers, creative writers, managers and engineers. Since 2020 our playful and informal sessions have run online, and have been recorded for posterity here, ranging across topics such as haunting, covid, place making and homeliness.

In July, the first session in the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s 2023 series of online talks themed around contemporary ‘exploration’, focussed on the motives, means and modes of exploration of modern ruins, with a resulting write-up here.  This Autumn we will be continuing our exploration of exploration with sessions on subterranean delving in caves, abandoned mines, and sewers; and on engagements with rock by climbers and quarry lurkers.

The events are free to attend, and open to all. Details of each event is set out below. To register for a place at either or both events please signup via our Eventcube store: SHU-SPG (eventcube.io).

Exploring #2: Going Underground (7-9.30PM, Thursday 26 October 2023)

Exploring the forgotten mines of England and Wales.

Denzil Watson (Accountancy & Finance, Sheffield Hallam University)

“Why do you explore those mines you go down? You must be mad!” one for my explorer friends asked me a few months ago. For once, I didn’t have an immediate answer, so I mulled it over. It started a few years ago after my friend showed me pictures of a small ganister mine he’d found in Wharncliffe Woods. It was fascinating. Another world. A lost world I had no awareness or knowledge of. So fascinated by it, I went out and explored it myself and immediately got the bug. Since then, I have explored the vast and cavernous slate mines of North Wales and the spatially-challenged lead mines of Derbyshire, amongst others. So returning to my friend’s question. When you are underground it is a place of absolute solitude and peace. I guess it’s a form of escapism. Then there’s the geology. And the social history. These mines were peoples’ livelihoods and sustained local communities over decades. And while all traces may have disappeared above ground, underground it’s a different story. In the mine it’s like a private museum. Then, as a photographer, there’s the not inconsiderable challenge of capturing the mines on camera. On next seeing my friend and offering these reasons, he fell silent for a moment. After a brief pause, he then replied: “OK, I’d not thought of it like that”.

Exploring the Natural Underground: A New Sociology of Caving

Kevin Bingham (Sociology & Leisure Studies, Barnsley College) 

Challenging the old language of caving and the control and authority of ‘legislators’ over what it means to be an ‘authentic’ caver, Kevin Bingham’s new book views the natural underground as a site of leisure and anthropotechnics. What the book sets out to do from a sociological perspective is reveal the heterogeneity of the natural underground by unpacking some of the ways it can stimulate imaginations, senses and emotions. Viewing the act of caving as something special because it occurs between the rhythms and routines of the surface world and the obscurities of darkness, it is argued that a world can be found that offers richer experiences of living. The experiences are richer because the natural underground can become a place of ontological dislocation. To view caves in such a way is to realise that they lead into the naked convulsions of differends and the magical wonders of the sublime. The book concludes with the suggestion that caving, from a leisure perspective, is in the end all about the art of sublimation. That is to say, the natural underground is for some people about finding pleasure, pain and trauma simultaneously since it grants temporary liberation from the normal temporal, spatial and existential orders found in present modernity. Challenging the old language of caving and the control and authority of ‘legislators’ over what it means to be an ‘authentic’ caver, Kevin Bingham’s new book views the natural underground as a site of leisure and anthropotechnics. What the book sets out to do from a sociological perspective is reveal the heterogeneity of the natural underground by unpacking some of the ways it can stimulate imaginations, senses and emotions. Viewing the act of caving as something special because it occurs between the rhythms and routines of the surface world and the obscurities of darkness, it is argued that a world can be found that offers richer experiences of living. The experiences are richer because the natural underground can become a place of ontological dislocation. To view caves in such a way is to realise that they lead into the naked convulsions of differends and the magical wonders of the sublime. The book concludes with the suggestion that caving, from a leisure perspective, is in the end all about the art of sublimation. That is to say, the natural underground is for some people about finding pleasure, pain and trauma simultaneously since it grants temporary liberation from the normal temporal, spatial and existential orders found in present modernity. 

From Caves to Karst and Back: Reassessing What It Means to Study the “Underground” in Venezuela, Cuba, and Puerto Rico

Maria Perez (Geography & Anthropology, West Virginia University)

This talk revisits two decades of experience accompanying, assisting, and learning from cave explorers both during expeditions to caves large and small and in other spaces where they gather, plan, process, and share what they learn in the field. The caves I have visited with cavers are located in the diverse karsts of Venezuela, Cuba, and, most recently, Puerto Rico. Karst refers to an environment formed by the dissolution of soluble carbonate rock (typically limestone). This process of dissolution forms not only caves, but also sinkholes, towers, and other geomorphological features typical of such processes. During these two decades I have closely followed a particular shift in emphasis from caves to caves-as-part-of-karst-systems. This shift has had major implications in terms not only of cave and karst science and exploration, but also conservation. In this talk, I offer examples of this shift from my research and I reflect on how it invites a reassessment of what we mean when we think of the “underground.” The first point is easy and far from novel, and that is that the term is too simplistic and often unhelpful to understand what’s actually going on (in our experiences) in the world. How easy we forget that the modern default thinking on the “underground” is extremely recent (in the context of human history), and in large part the result of engineering projects that have hardened and flattened the ground in ways inconceivable for most humans only a few centuries ago. My second and more ambitious point is to convince you of the power, purchase, and fruitful applications of a karst sensibility in our investigations. This sensibility, I argue, is most useful not only when challenging a whole slew of dichotomies (i.e., under vs over ground, land vs sea, soil vs water, past vs present, living vs dying, nature vs culture, etc.), but also for inspiring more accurate frameworks to make sense of what makes the appeal of the “underground” so powerful in the first place. 

Situationism in the Sewers? Urban Caving versus Urban Exploration

Greg Brick, (Geology, University of Minnesota)

I began exploring natural and artificial caves in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area of the state of Minnesota, USA, in 1988, culminating in my 2009 book, SUBTERRANEAN TWIN CITIES. I made early use of the phrase “urban caving” to describe this activity, in a 1992 article in the NSS NEWS. I took it as a point of pride never to go underground without investigating some geological or hydrological enigma. With the advent of urbex (urban exploration) websites in the late 1990s, however, the local caves and tunnels were suddenly flooded with a new generation of urban explorers. Because of ample subterranean resources in these cities, much local urbex focused on infrastructural exploration, rather than the usual aboveground industrial “ruins.” Latter-day urbex has been explained by some researchers using postmodernist theory. The very term “exploration,” however, is fraught with colonial baggage. It’s even questionable whether urbex fits the trendy “transgressive” label. Urbex is a highly gendered practice, most participants being young white males, whose online self-promotion and pursuit of “spectacle” (now with YouTube monetization!) were readily assimilated by consumer capitalism. Situationism, on the other hand, a French movement often cited as a forerunner of urbex, could prove fatal to someone underground. Guy Debord himself would soon be lost in the Paris catacombs or sewers if he had “drifted” randomly through the confusing labyrinths. I argue that much scholarship on urbex by cultural geographers applies more readily to aboveground urbex. We should make this distinction when assessing the academic literature.

Exploring #3: On the Rocks (7-9.30PM, Thursday 16 November 2023)

Quarry Woman: Pixelated Extraction as Material Reckoning 

Victoria Lucas (artist)

Victoria Lucas is an artist based in Sheffield, UK. She is one third of the art collective Heavy Water, 0.5 Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire and part-time PhD Candidate in the Art, Design and Media Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. Recent exhibitions include PostNatures, Graves Gallery, Sheffield (2023); Aggregate, Freelands Foundation, London (2022) and Heavy Water at Site Gallery, Sheffield (2021). Her artistic research lingers at the edges of materiality and culture, as an interrogation of how the technological dissolution of boundaries might reorientate female subjectivity in the context of an ecological crisis. Lucas uses technology specifically to deconstruct and reconstitute post-industrial sites as artworks, as a method of exploring the web of interrelations between the material, biological, cultural and historical subjects encountered. This research is realised through the production and distribution of artworks incorporating video, photography, storytelling, performance and sculpture. This ecological approach to artistic practice is contextualised by the post-industrial landscapes of Northern England. In the craggy rock of post industry and at the conceptual edges of human-centred culture, the skins of ontological categorisation are permeated through a collaborative, subversive process of material reckoning. Technology becomes a co-conspirator; nature a mentor. Through lingering with nature in the aftermath of material extraction, Lucas visualises new aggregates that de-centre the human subject as part of a post-humanist entanglement of matter. 

The Tale of The Journey to The Dead Engine in The Shed at The Bottom of Heaven’s Walls: being a poetic voyage into the depths of Dinorwig Quarries

Mark Goodwin (poet and climber)

The Tale of The Journey is a sound-enhanced version of a long poem that remembers a collaborative exploration made by a poet, photographer and climber. The original text version of the poem is published in Mark Goodwin’s Rock as Gloss (Longbarrow Press, 2019). This sound-enhanced version is a mix of on location field-recordings, including  Mark performing the poem amongst the slate slabs & rubble of Dinorwig Quarries in North Wales, in January 2018. In January 2009 poet Mark Goodwin, photographer Nikki Clayton and internationally renowned rock-climber Johnny Dawes shared a trip down into Dinorwig Quarries. These vast holes of haunting slate consist of forty galleries, hundreds of feet deep, extending over an area of seven hundred acres. They are a climbers’ playground … and the many tunnels, inclines, winding-houses and vertiginous rusting ladders offer exhilarating and bewitching opportunity for exploration. However, the slate-ancient sadness and pain this place contains is sharp ¬– for these mountainside holes were where many Welsh people struggled and suffered to extract slate … this place killed people. Since his teens (in the 1980s) Mark has had a go at making poems from this ruptured ground … and has also given time to audio-recording its rich sound-sculptural atmosphere … dripping water, cronking ravens, and sliding slate-scree. The Tale of The Journey is one of his more successful struggles with this intricately layered place of deep rift and play.

“Whose consent do you have to name this in this way?”: Gender and the politics of land in outdoor rock climbing route names.

Jennifer Wigglesworth (Outdoor Recreation & Tourism Management, University of Northern British Columbia)

In outdoor rock climbing, the ‘first’ person who successfully ascends and sets up a route – the first ascensionist – gets to choose a name for it. Some first ascensionists use misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist names for routes, and these naming practices extend across North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom (Climb the Gap, 2022). This issue is a complex one – the first ascent (FA) tradition is made possible by settler colonialism – with a long history (Loeffler, 1996). Discriminatory route names were rarely challenged because of the widely accepted tradition of FA naming rights; however, in the summer of 2020, the advocacy around renaming routes gained momentum alongside transnational calls for racial justice. In this presentation, I use an analysis informed by feminism, anti-racism, and settler colonialism to discuss the implications of naming practices within a shifting cultural terrain. I revisit data I collected in 2018 that examined climbers’ reactions to misogynistic route names, and I document significant route name changes that took place in Canada and the United States since the summer of 2020. I argue that the politics of naming routes cannot be divorced from a settler-colonial logic that has long used (re)naming land as a strategy for nation-building. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the successful renaming of discriminatory routes is one way to support different ways of exploring rock faces. It is my hope that this talk contributes to a larger discussion about the intersection of gendered and colonial power and how they shape landscapes and recreation practices.

The Quarry: conversations on mobile geologies

Sarah Bowden and Jean Boyd (Art & Design, University of Gloucestershire)

A local quarry here in Gloucestershire has been of interest to us, as a site for investigative field trips and the ongoing critical reflections these provoke. The quarry is both an extraction site for blue lias clay and gravel, sedimented over immense periods of geologic time, and a landfill site, sedimenting new forms of material strata. Through conversation and images we will offer a call-and-response dialogue with the quarry and each other, to consider the contrasts that the site encompasses: of geologic and human histories and their timescales. We will move between perspectives; analytic, interpretive and speculative. Our points of focus are the following: Sarah questions extraction and circulation as economic dynamics maintaining flows of matter, capital and fossil debt between past and future. She will consider how mapping, surveying and image-making enable extractive apprehensions of landscape. Jean will discuss the site as an intercalation of storied matter; a mobile geology of deposition and distribution, construction and ruin. The quarry is lively and has stories to tell.

Image credit: Nikki Clayton