“…An Alchemist as once profoundly wondrous and entirely banal, water guides our bodies from young to old, from here to there, from potentiality to actuality. Translation, transformation. Plurality proliferates.”
Astrida Niemanis (2012) ‘Hydrofeminism, or on becoming a body of water’ in Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck (eds) Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke: 85-100.
Bodies of water can easily feel just ‘part of the scenery’ – but in times of flood (or drought) they show their power, and pecularity. But we are also bodies of water, our lives are intertwined with the life-giving and deadly potency of water.
This session in the SHU Space & Place Group’s series of online talks around ‘Perceiving Climate Change’ brought together four presentations that each invited us to pay more attention to water, its agency and its changing behaviour in an era of accelerating climate change.
The SHU SPG’s sessions are always informal and playful, but the 70 plus attendees at this event experienced some wonderfully off-beat moments, even by the SPG’s proudly undisciplined terms. The recording captures this (and a couple of compering errors by me – sorry) and its best that I don’t spoil things by trying to explain.
So, here’s the event recording, with the speakers’ abstracts set out below:
Mel Lacey (Associate Professor, Department of Biosciences & Chemistry, SHU)
Nature’s witness: Using citizen science to monitor flood management in the era of climate change.
The South Yorkshire Source to Sea Nature-Based Solutions Partnership advocates a catchment-wide approach to natural flood management. Within Sheffield, a pilot project has been undertaken within the Limb Brook which included members of the public taking photographs at fixed positions over the course and after the project to observe subtle, incremental change to the waterscape over many months. What data does this library of community-generated images hold? What can we learn about impact of the natural flood management intervention on flooding, biodiversity and citizen science from the Limb Valley? And to what extent can the images reveal signs of climate change, and human adaptation to it?
Alban Krashi – Rights of Nature Advocate, Opus Independents
The River Dôn Project: Critical commons as agent and infrastructure
The River Dôn Project brings together a unique collaboration of organisations and citizens both internationally and locally to the region: https://www.theriverdon.org/. Including Dark Matter Labs, Don River Catchment Trust, WeAreOpus, Urban Flows Observatory, Sheffield Hallam University, South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre, Sheffield Data for Good and Lawyers for Nature. Applying a multi-disciplinary approach The River Dôn Project aims to model and demonstrate the future rights of nature, both as an agent and as critical civic infrastructure. It aims to show that a repositioning of critical commons like waterways in our governance, sensemaking and choice-making infrastructures would enhance our collective capabilities to address intersectional crises such as climate breakdown and biodiversity loss in the region. This talk will explore the ontological, complex and compounding nature of the social, economic and ecological crisis we currently face and the implications inherent in how we construct and deploy proofs of possibility or demonstrations of systemic transformation in response.
Jon Bridge & Julia Udall (Department of the Natural & Built Environment, SHU)
The Landscape Lab: interdisciplinary engagements with changing upland catchments
The landscape of the Upper Don catchment in South Yorkshire is also known as the ‘Sheffield Lakelands’, a moniker given in the 1950s by an enterprising local tour bus company. The ‘lakes’ in question are artificial – more than a dozen reservoirs built between 1830 and 1930 to supply the rapidly-growing industrial populations downstream. Now a central component of Sheffield’s modern identity as ‘The Outdoor City’, these reservoirs and their hinterlands on the eastern fringe of the Peak District National Park form a complex natureculture in which human and more-than-human interactions are mediated by a hybridised and deeply modified waterscape. The fluctuating reservoir levels provide a graphic barometer in times of drought and floods, but the future of this landscape and its resilience and flourishing in the face of climate change depend on a deeper and richer understanding of the landscape system: its biodiversity and ecological functioning; human perceptions and understanding of the landscape as a basis for relationships of care and conservation; and a new more circular political economy in which value generated within the landscape system is returned to it. Here, we outline an interdisciplinary applied research agenda, the Landscape Laboratory, which seeks to address these critical issues in catchment management.
Andre Kong (Architect, Andre Kong Studio)www.andrekong.com IG: @andrekongstudio
Stories in Space: Inhabiting the Data of Uninhabitable Futures
This presentation examines three recent projects by Andre Kong Studio, arguing that spatial design and architectural installations can enhance awareness of current and future challenges posed by climate change and related environmental damage. How can we make data more tangible? How can we inhabit data and tell its story? How can we engage communities for meaningful change? Our approach is playful, informative, and accessible. ‘Whale in the Room’ is an installation at the Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange in Penzance, exploring the effects of pollution on coastal communities. Community discussions took place under the looming burden of 380kgs of plastic waste collected from the sea near Penzance. Meanwhile, ‘seeAsaw,’ is an interactive hammock structure made from rescued fishing nets, is part of an educational project for young people on Governors Island, New York City. It aims to raise awareness of ghost nets and their impact on delicate marine environments, orchestrating a collective balancing act. And, ‘A Cautionary Benchmark’ presents inhabitable data in the form of a bench set on two levels, anticipating the storm flood level change predicted by 2030 in the River Thames in London.
Our next online event in this series will be themed around ‘Heat’ and will take place 7.00-9.30pm on Thursday, 13 June 2024. Details of the four presentations for that event, and registration for it, is here: https://shu-spg.eventcube.io/
Image source: Luke Bennett (Otter Valley, East Devon, 2023).
“As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”
Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont), (1869) Les Chants de Maldoror
Sewing machines, umbrellas and operating tables have no obvious connection – and that’s why the Surrealists took inspiration from the Comte de Lautréamont: the juxtaposition of these items was unfathomable and unsettling (uncanny). But if those three items were to become co-located, they would reach their own accommodation. They would find a way of co-existing, but that search for a ‘spatial justice’ would not readily (except via Surrealist tickstery logics) mean much to us humans.
These were the kind of thoughts swirling around my mind 10 years ago whilst I struggled to write-up a book chapter which I’d been invited to contribute to a book entitled ‘Post-Human Research Practices in Education’(2016, eds Taylor & Hughes).
Here are my abstract and biog, as presented on that registration site, and the event recording has also now been added below, courtesy of the AARE:
Reflections on ‘Thinking like a brick: Posthumanism and building materials’
Abstract
In my essay contribution to Carol A. Taylor & Christina Hughes’ 2016 edited collection Posthuman Research Practices in Education (Palgrave) I set out to answer the question “How can we know of bricks, blocks and slabs in a posthuman way?” But the process of writing, and responding to that question, led me increasing to an ambivalent position, at least as regards the limits of posthumanism within education. Ultimately, I ended up having to distinguish between a ‘weak’ and a ‘strong’ posthumanism and concluded that only a ‘weak’ (and ‘thing-for-us’ rather than ‘thing-in-itself’) position was possible. My essay ended up a playful (but sincere) foray: drawing together the theoretical abstractions of transhumanism, object oriented ontology and material culture studies and setting them to work alongside prosaic encounters with building materials (to see what would happen in that encounter). In this session I will share my candid insights into that authorial journey, in doing so disassembling the integrity of my presented text and highlighting some of the ‘paths not taken’, and some of the roadblocks that I stumbled upon along the way, and how I struggled to deal with them. This deconstruction will ultimately deliver upon a positive motive: it will point to pragmatic ways in which a greater attentiveness to our relationships with things is needed and is – through a more openminded (and playful) pedagogy – possible. In doing so it will achieve my essay’s additional aim to “examine how we learn about, and pass on, the materiality of the world around us” – and why that “matters” (in the dual sense attributed to that word by Karen Barad in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007, Duke University Press).
Brief Biography
Luke Bennett is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of the Natural & Built Environment at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. After a 17 year career as an environmental lawyer, Luke stepped into academia in 2007 to teach law to built environment students. Along the way he gained a PhD by publication (his published outputs being summated under the title ‘Interpretive Communities at work and play in the built environment’). Treating the materiality of the built environment as a negotiated text, across various field studies Luke looked at how – collectively – groups of professionals and lay-actors frame their relationships with places and the matter which composed them (variously urban trees, gravestones, ruined buildings, copper cables) using acquired cultural codings, like liability for accidents and hobby practices. Luke has continued to examine these themes through, academic publications (details here), his leadership of Sheffield Hallam University’s interdisciplinary ‘Space & Place Group’ (whose session recordings are here) and his bloggings about his investigations and ruminations here.
Image Source: Salvador Dalí, Sewing machine with umbrellas, scene shoot for a film project involving a writer and model, New York and Madrid (1951), gouache on cardboard, 25 x 32 cm via https://www.huffpost.com/entry/miami-spice_b_6229802
“Between 1992 and 2020, Earth’s polar ice sheets lost 7,560 billion tonnes of ice – equivalent to an ice cube that would be 20 kilometres in height. The polar ice sheets have together lost ice in every year of the satellite record, and the seven highest melting years have occurred in the past decade”.
This ‘ice’-themed event was the first in Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s series of online events considering how scientists, artists and the wider public ‘notice’ climate change. Further details of our 2024 series are here: https://shu-spg.eventcube.io/
Our presenters for this event were:
Rob Storrar (SHU, DNBE – glaciologist)
Measuring how water affects glacier changes from space and with drones
We are all familiar with images of retreating glaciers, and of icebergs calving dramatically into the ocean. But there is more to glaciology than simply noticing that glaciers are melting. As the climate warms, glaciers and ice sheets experience more and more melting, and this produces huge volumes of water that drain across, within and beneath ice. The addition of liquid water can cause glaciers to accelerate (potentially speeding up ice loss and sea level rise), but it can also cause them to slow down. Being able to predict which of these will predominate is clearly important for understanding future sea level rise. However, understanding how water moves through glaciers is a complex business, since it involves studying processes that occur beneath 100s or even 1000s of metres of solid ice. It has impacts that are felt at a huge range of scales: from centimetres to thousands of kilometres, and from hours to thousands of years. This talk will explore how we can use 3D models created from satellite imagery and drone surveys to advance our understanding about how water behaves underneath ice, based on ongoing projects in Iceland and Greenland.
Niall Gandy (SHU, DNBE – Palaeo-glaciologist)
Ancient to Modern, Digital to Physical: Connecting the Dots of Ice Sheet Science
Greenland and Antarctica are facing gargantuan change over the next century as we warm our climate. We are pushing these ice sheets away from many millennia of remarkable stability, towards collapse at an uncertain rate. It is obviously important to understand the magnitude and pace of this change. One way to reduce our uncertainty is to study ancient ice sheets of the last ice age, examining periods of rapid change help us better predict future behaviour. At Sheffield Hallam University we have been running computer simulations of these ancient ice sheets, and have reproduced ancient “instabilities” – collapse events which could cause rapid sea level rise over the course of just a few decades. This work can help us improve the accuracy of simulations predicting future change, but actually joining together the perspectives (from ancient ice sheet to future change, and from digital simulations to real physical change) is an outstanding challenge. This talk will examine which barriers still exist, how they can be removed, and the potential benefits of doing so.
How can an Icelandic glacier guide’s perspective on glacier change, climate and sustainability make a difference?
Visiting a glacier is a unique and special experience, and one that thousands of tourists are able to do each year in locations around the world. However, a single visit to a glacier can make it hard to understand how they are changing. This talk provides the perspective of the owner of a glacier guide business (Glacier Adventure) in SE Iceland. The talk will explore the daily-seasonal-annual changes that can be observed when visiting glaciers regularly, and the longer timescales and experiences of living with glaciers. It will also explore how glacier tourism can be used as a powerful educational tool, and stimulus to help people to think more about climate change, and why they might want to try to live more sustainably.
Lise Autogena (SHU, Professor of Cross-disciplinary Art / Director of Narsaq International Research Station (NIRS), Greenland)
Greenland – what next? Local Perceptions of the retreating ice.
In Greenland, the melting glaciers is already impacting on traditional ways of life and Greenlanders are experiencing a huge influx of climate researchers from around the world who come here to understand the wider impacts of the changes to the arctic climate. The melting ice also drives a growing international interest in Greenland as a site for exploitation of natural resources, in particular the mining of minerals critical to the global energy transition away from fossil fuels. This growing geo-political importance is perceived by many Greenlanders as an opportunity for diversifying local income sources to build financial independence for a new decolonised Greenland. However, many in Greenland are also concerned with the potential impact of international mining activities on the fragile arctic ecology, which could have long-term consequences for the Inuit way of life. This talk will focus on local perceptions in South Greenland, where a legal dispute with an international mining company is currently threatening to destabilise the entire Greenlandic economy, raising concerns about the country’s vulnerability in dealing with geo-political interests.
“Consider raindrops: you can feel them on your head – but you can’t perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You only ever perceive your particular, anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn’t this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head, and global climate, not the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system? I can think and compute climate in this sense, but I can’t directly see or touch it. The gap between phenomenon and thing yawns open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world.”
Timothy Morton (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 11
For 2024 the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group has selected ‘Perceiving Climate Change’ as our year-long theme.
The subtle, but inexorable, changes brought by climate change are hard to sense. Has it really got colder, wetter, windier this year? Empirical data can give some pointers, but data sits at a distance from bodily sensation and the rhythms of living. Perhaps what we notice most deeply is that which we carry in our bodies, rituals and the stories that we share and circulate. But what if the phenomenon sits outside human timescales, sensory ranges or language?
Across our 2024 series of events we will ask, “how can humans notice the subtle but fundamental processes of climate change?”, and we will examine from a range of perspectives how people are striving to make climate change intelligible to human senses and cognitive processes. Starting with an examination of how scientists, artists and others find ways to detect and narrate changes in the cryosphere, subsequent sessions will explore the challenges and creativity of noticing climate change in the realms of ‘heat’, ‘water’, and will then turn to considering the resulting (or absent) sense of a ‘climate emergency’. Hosted in conjunction with the Royal Geographical Society (Yorkshire & North East Regional Committee), this series of events will foster an exploratory, interdisciplinary conversation and we very much welcome participation from all disciplines.
Here are the presentation details for our first event:
Rob Storrar (SHU, DNBE – glaciologist)
Measuring how water affects glacier changes from space and with drones
We are all familiar with images of retreating glaciers, and of icebergs calving dramatically into the ocean. But there is more to glaciology than simply noticing that glaciers are melting. As the climate warms, glaciers and ice sheets experience more and more melting, and this produces huge volumes of water that drain across, within and beneath ice. The addition of liquid water can cause glaciers to accelerate (potentially speeding up ice loss and sea level rise), but it can also cause them to slow down. Being able to predict which of these will predominate is clearly important for understanding future sea level rise. However, understanding how water moves through glaciers is a complex business, since it involves studying processes that occur beneath 100s or even 1000s of metres of solid ice. It has impacts that are felt at a huge range of scales: from centimetres to thousands of kilometres, and from hours to thousands of years. This talk will explore how we can use 3D models created from satellite imagery and drone surveys to advance our understanding about how water behaves underneath ice, based on ongoing projects in Iceland and Greenland.
Niall Gandy (SHU, DNBE – Palaeo-glaciologist)
Ancient to Modern, Digital to Physical: Connecting the Dots of Ice Sheet Science
Greenland and Antarctica are facing gargantuan change over the next century as we warm our climate. We are pushing these ice sheets away from many millennia of remarkable stability, towards collapse at an uncertain rate. It is obviously important to understand the magnitude and pace of this change. One way to reduce our uncertainty is to study ancient ice sheets of the last ice age, examining periods of rapid change help us better predict future behaviour. At Sheffield Hallam University we have been running computer simulations of these ancient ice sheets, and have reproduced ancient “instabilities” – collapse events which could cause rapid sea level rise over the course of just a few decades. This work can help us improve the accuracy of simulations predicting future change, but actually joining together the perspectives (from ancient ice sheet to future change, and from digital simulations to real physical change) is an outstanding challenge. This talk will examine which barriers still exist, how they can be removed, and the potential benefits of doing so.
How can an Icelandic glacier guide’s perspective on glacier change, climate and sustainability make a difference?
Visiting a glacier is a unique and special experience, and one that thousands of tourists are able to do each year in locations around the world. However, a single visit to a glacier can make it hard to understand how they are changing. This talk provides the perspective of the owner of a glacier guide business (Glacier Adventure) in SE Iceland. The talk will explore the daily-seasonal-annual changes that can be observed when visiting glaciers regularly, and the longer timescales and experiences of living with glaciers. It will also explore how glacier tourism can be used as a powerful educational tool, and stimulus to help people to think more about climate change, and why they might want to try to live more sustainably. https://glacieradventure.is/team/haukur-ingi-einarsson/
Lise Autogena (SHU, Professor of Cross-disciplinary Art / Director of Narsaq International Research Station (NIRS), Greenland)
Greenland – what next? Local Perceptions of the retreating ice.
In Greenland, the melting glaciers is already impacting on traditional ways of life and Greenlanders are experiencing a huge influx of climate researchers from around the world who come here to understand the wider impacts of the changes to the arctic climate. The melting ice also drives a growing international interest in Greenland as a site for exploitation of natural resources, in particular the mining of minerals critical to the global energy transition away from fossil fuels. This growing geo-political importance is perceived by many Greenlanders as an opportunity for diversifying local income sources to build financial independence for a new decolonised Greenland. However, many in Greenland are also concerned with the potential impact of international mining activities on the fragile arctic ecology, which could have long-term consequences for the Inuit way of life. This talk will focus on local perceptions in South Greenland, where a legal dispute with an international mining company is currently threatening to destabilise the entire Greenlandic economy, raising concerns about the country’s vulnerability in dealing with geo-political interests.
Registration is via our Eventcube site: https://shu-spg.eventcube.io/, and our second free online event in this series, Perceiving Climate Change #2: Water (25 April 2024, 7-9.30pm) is also now bookable there (with presenter details for that to follow).
“Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring.”
Last week Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place Group held the fourth, and final, session in our 2024 series exploring contemporary exploration. Having previously mulled over urban exploration, spelunking and climbing our attention turned to mountain biking.
This session was themed around the pre-launch of ‘Mountain Biking, Culture and Society’ (Routledge, 2024), an edited collection of essays edited by Jim Cherrington to be published on 15 February 2024, details here.
In each of our sessions an interdisciplinary selection of presenters have dissected the motives, methods and means of recreational exploration. The recording for this session is embedded below, and the previous sessions are available here.
When considering how to write-up this final session, I was first thinking of how mountain biking involves an interface – the bike – through which the exploring is experienced. At first glance this seemed like an important distinction, when compared to caving, climbing and urbex. But the distinction doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny – there is plenty of ‘gear’ desired and/or involved in any of these pursuits. The climber’s life depends upon an intimate, and essential, relationship with his climbing apparatus. Likewise the caver needs the very-best torch (ideally more than one). Meanwhile, few urban explorers would feel complete without a high-spec camera with which to capture (and thus express) their adventures. Therefore each exploration practice has its own vital interface through which the exploration becomes possible, and there are studies done (or to be done) on the person-equipment meld that is the contemporary explorer.
But it was in the mountain biking session that gear was (to me) most noticeable. In his introductory talk Jim Cherrington (Sheffield Hallam University) showed us how mountain biking enables people to be, by detailing the variety of identities and mobilities which can be constructed around a diverse set of levels and types of mountain biking engagement. In doing so he pointed intriguingly to the ambivalence of the ‘mountain’ within mountain biking. Thus for some mountain biking is an opportunity to commune with wilderness (i.e. to be experiencing the mountain as ‘wild nature’) whilst for others the mountain is appropriated as a gradient, enabling rapid downhill runs, in which the bike-body meld is tested to the edge of their unity. Meanwhile others bring tools with which to make new (mini) mountains, crafting and tending their humps with care and a sense of community. In short, Jim made a persuasive case for appreciating the multiplicity of practices and meaning-making that exists within any notion of mountain biking as a sub-culture. Jim also pointed to creaturely entwinements, to add alongside the machine-body meld of bike riding. Here, mountain bikers perceive climate change in the form of the increasingly likely presence of ticks clinging to their legs by the end of rides, due to global warming. So, there are often multiple bodies riding with a lone mountain biker!
This environmental sensibility was depended by Claire Nattrass (Leeds Beckett University / York St John University) who introduced us to her performative art methodology for studying the constant ‘bleed’ between riders bodies and the surrounding atmosphere. Centring upon air pollution as a form of ‘slow violence’ to riders (by enlisting laboratory analysis to detail the pollution assailing riders), Claire also showed how – incidentally – those chemical analyses also reveal contaminates emitting from the rider’s body itself, via perspiration and other means. The act of riding then becomes a constant exchange of trace matter within the rider/environment meld, and as the rider and the bike move through the environment they are enmeshed within it.
Jeff Warren (Quest University, Canada), drawing upon his work with colleague John Reid-Hresko, explored the role of ‘authenticity’ as a desired ethos within mountain biking, pointing out how a notion of ‘escaping to find yourself’ permeates mountain biking culture. That quest for authenticity is (in part) expressed through gear: either in having all that is needed to claim an authentic performative identity as a mountain biker, or via an ascetic renunciation of gear, striping things back to some form of purity (the analogy here being with ‘free climbing’) – but of course, to be a mountain biker you can’t renounce the bike itself (although during the event Jim mentione mountain bike unicycles which amount to a partial renunciation of the bike – in rejection of one of the bike’s wheels and the replacement of that with the authenticity of the greater balancing skill required to carry this off). I’m extending Jeff and John’s discussion here, in order to follow my rumination on the gearfulness of exploration.
Jacob Bustad (Towson University, USA) and Oliver Rick (Regis College, USA) presented their cultural analysis of urban mountain biking contests staged by Red Bull in the steep and winding urban passageways of Valparaiso in Chile. We watched GoPro footage of frantic downhill descents by expert riders, seeing how you don’t need a mountain in order to mountain bike, but you need plenty of gear to pull off such feats as these. That gear keeps these riders safe (to some degree) and enables the mediation of their individual experiences into a seemingly shared-experience in which we (the viewer) safe in the comfort of our armchairs (or other viewing positions). Here we can vicariously descend perilous routes at great speed, imbibing the ‘GoPro gaze’ afforded to us, courtesy of the event-sponsorship of an international energy drink manufacturer, co-opting a seemingly ‘DIY urbanism’ into global networks of consumption. Thus, here mountain biking’s gear is connecting us to the whole world.
“We can never expect to encounter culture ‘on the ground’, instead what we find are people whose lives take them on a journey through space and time in environments which seem to them to be full of significance, who use both words and material artefacts to get things done and to communicate with others, and who in their talk, endlessly spin metaphors so as to weave labyrinthine and ever-expanding networks of symbolic equivalence.”
Tim Ingold (1994) ‘Introduction to culture’ in Companion Encyclopaedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life (Routledge, London 329–49): 330.
The above quote says it all really: the aim of the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s 2023 series, and its theme of ‘Exploring’, has been to show how enthusiastic explorers of seemingly ‘blank’ spaces choose to enchant those places by co-opting them into their meaning-making practices.
We started our journey through this theme back in July with In Ruins. Here our presenters introduced us to the lure (to them) of ruins, and how they seek to activate those broken places, and why. That session has been written up here. And the session recording is available here.
Our second session Going Underground, in October 2023, presented four speakers giving insight into the siren’s call that summons them into the dank dark depths of caves, sewers, catacombs and abandoned mines. Along the way we heard the infectious enthusiasm of mine explorer (and photographer) Denzil Watson, learned from Kevin Bingham about his new book Exploring the Natural Underground: A New Sociology of Caving (Routledge, 2023), followed anthropologist and cultural geographer Maria Perez on her journeys to study the cultures of caving practices across the karst landscapes of Venezuela, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and lastly we got an enticing glimpse of the motivations and frictions around the origins of sewer exploration in St Pauls / Minneapolis from Greg Brick. You can watch the session here:
Our third session, On the Rocks (November 2023) saw us hanging out online with rock climbers and quarry lurkers, examining their chosen relationships with the stone, mud and lichen to be found (and embraced) within natural and human-formed rockscapes. This session featured Victoria Lucas outlining her intimate lone engagement with an abandoned hard rock quarry, poet, climber and sound artist Mark Goodwin presented an enigmatic audio-visual performance engaging with the Dinorwig Quarries in North Wales, and Canadian Sociologist Jennifer Wigglesworth examined the rising critique of misogynist (and other exclusionary) route namings by first ascenders, drawing the link to colonialism. Finally, artists Sarah Bowden and Jean Boyd pressed into focus the glutinous mud of an operational blue lias clay extraction site in Gloucestershire, drawing out from the prosaic (and aesthetically null) vista relations working across vast spans of time and space. You can watch the session here:
We have our final session in the ‘Exploring’ theme on 7 December (7-9.30PM online). This time we will follow mountain bikers as they hurtle down mountain tracks. Once again we will seek to understand – by giving these enthusiasts time to speak – Why would anyone want to do that? How do they do it? And what are the implications of them doing it?’. You can find further details for that event here and register for places there.
“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”
Ernest Hemingway (2014 [1944]). “By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades”, Simon and Schuster, p.343
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 SHU SPG’s first session in its 2023 series of online talks themed around contemporary ‘exploration’, investigated the motives, means and modes of exploration of modern ruins, as recorded and digested here. For our fourth event we will be continuing our exploration of exploration by hanging out with mountain bikers.
For ‘Exploring #4: On Your Bike’ our presenters will be:
Introduction: Mountain Biking, Culture and Society
Jim Cherrington (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
Via an innovative reading of mountain biking, this introductory presentation will outline the importance of the collection. Following some important definitions, the chapter introduces the reader to the notions of dominant, residual, and emergent structures of feeling, suggesting that these three modalities allow scholars and practitioners to move beyond static and essentialist readings of subculture. Subsequently, it suggests that the tensions and conflicts relating to mountain bike culture serve to highlight some of the most important issues of our catastrophic times, and that important lessons can be learned from studying these disagreements. Finally, the presentation briefly sketch the book’s themes, with new insights offered on the significance of mountain bike culture in relation to identity, bodies, ecology and the cultural politics of lifestyle sports.
Riding with Red Bull: Downhill MTB, digital Media, and DIY urbanism
Jacob Bustad and Oliver Rick (Towson University, USA)
This presentation examines the intersection of digital media and urban sport and leisure practices through a focus on point-of-view (POV) videos of downhill MTB racing, specifically the Cerro Abajo races in Valparaiso, Chile. In our analysis, we discuss how these videos function as part of the wider marketing and advertising efforts of GoPro and Red Bull (Kunz et al., 2016) and reflect transformations within the relationships between corporations, athletes, and fans in the contemporary sport industry, especially in regard to ‘niche’ sport cultures such as downhill MTB. We argue that these videos demonstrate a particular type of ‘GoPro gaze’ (Vannini & Stewart, 2017) that incorporates not only the representations of active bodies and the sights and sounds of branded global sport competitions, but also depends on the unique urban environments of the race route and emphasises the ways in which this form of branded content includes representations of do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism (Finn, 2014).Air pollution as ‘slow violence’ during multi-day mountain bike trips
Clare Nattress (Leeds Beckett University/York St John University, UK)
Bikepacking consists of multi-day, self-sufficient, journeys by bike, that usually take place off-road, and is a phenomenon which has increased in popularity in the last 10 years. This presentation represents one of the first attempts to unpack contemporary multi-day mountain bike experiences, whilst identifying key themes in past and present scholarship. The presentation uncovers how mountain biking can be a performative art methodology to investigate, reveal, and disseminate the problem of air pollution. Multi-day mountain bike trips are cycled to collect data using a technological sensor, as well as employing artistic and embodied methods such as the concept of attunement. In doing so, the artist elucidates the ability to convey embodied experiences of dirty air through sensorial, affective, and more-than-cognitive registers. This research therefore calls attention to human and non-human bodies not only as victims of slow violence but also, conversely, as crucial sites of knowledge production
Escaping to Find Yourself: Portrayals of Authenticity in Mountain Biking Multimedia
Jeff Warren and John Reid-Hresko (Quest University, CAN)
How do the historical trajectories of ideas of authenticity, and the sociopolitical conditions that frame them, inform contemporary mountain biking multimedia, and what can this media tell us about mountain bikers and the broader contemporary mountain biking sportscape? In this presentation, we investigate these questions by examining two exemplars of mountain biking multimedia. We argue that these films do not simply reflect mountain biking experiences but are co-constitutive of experiences in ways that both solidify and perpetuate particular constellations of authenticity and also reproduce socioculturally-situated forms of inequality. In other words, mountain biking films do not just give us something to watch but give us ways to experience mountain biking. Throughout our analysis, we call for mountain bikers to critically rethink problematic ideals of authenticity and strive to understand one’s place within political and societal constructs and consider the ethical implications of our actions.
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.
“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.
“I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (2021) The Ministry for the Future. Orbit: London. p. 14
“Ah, yes – I remember – you wanted it cut shorter last time because you were going on holiday, to somewhere hot.” So recalls my barber as a I sit, at the end of the summer in his chair, and in his hands. He’s right. My last visit was in June. When for what seemed like an eternity the days and nights had been hot that month in my home city and the prospect of a trip to somewhere likely hotter was causing me some anxiety. For many days sleeping had been fitful, like ascending each evening into an attic-sauna.
You know it’s hot when you need to keep the windows shut in the daytime, lest the intrusive breeze otherwise stoke the inferno.
I don’t do ‘hot’ well, and as I’ve grown older I find it ever more oppressive. But it was the record-breaking day in July 2022 that seemed to deepen my heat-anxiety. Admittedly, there was a novelty to that day. The predicted record heat spike rather came out of the blue, and was short lived. That day we did all we could to turn our home into a cool-shelter, gazing out with bemusement at the empty street at mid-day, and dashing out into the garden in the middle of the day to check on a thermometer – would we go above 40oC? (no – as it turned out – but we hit a still astonishing 39 degrees).
But a year later, stuck in an unchanging high temperature zone for weeks and with a sweltering UK summer then being predicted I was feeling anxiety rather than entertained by record-breaking novelty. Would this be the new normal? It felt like it.
So, travelling to traditionally hotter climes felt crazy. But we were paid-up and committed.
As it turned out our Spanish resort was only a fraction hotter than home climes, and a sea breeze took the edge off things. And yet, I recall a couple of occasions where the sun’s rays seems to suddenly intensify – inducing a different sensation on my exposed skin. And for a brief moment it felt like the heat was a focussed beam, burning into an exposed portion of my body. Later that day that brief assault had left its mark (despite sunscreen) and days-after of nagging discomfort. We felt humble, punished by the sun.
This summer – of course – others have been punished much more severely by the sun. On our return to the UK we found the heat wave over, and thereafter 40 days of wet, cool and calm to confound the predictions. But it was not that a heatwave had not come – it was simply that it had become stuck across mainland Europe. Viewed from the vantage of a soggy Britain the parade of heatwave and wildfire stories across continental Europe, and thereafter in North America.
Against this backdrop, my summer reading took a deep dive into climate change literature – with Jeff Goodell’s (2023) The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planetregaling me with myriad insights into the limits of human bodily and social adaptation to rising global temperatures. Meanwhile Gaia Vince’s (2023) Nomad Century charted the existential implications of rising temperature in truly global terms – outlining the likely shifting of the Earth’s habitable zones to the extremities of the Northern and Southern hemispheres, with all in between laid waste to uninhabitable hotness (and consequent mass-migrations).
My reading journey started with the most disturbing heat-related examination of all. The first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, depicts in jaw-dropping detail the impact of a near-future heatwave in Uttar Pradesh, India. As the day dawns, the heat continues to rise and we follow the protagonist’s increasingly frantic efforts to escape the heat bubble that has descended upon his town: first seeking breeze on the rooftop, then sheltering shuttered inside his home, the evacuating to an air conditioned clinic, then finally seeking survival in a local lake. Each place becomes defeated as respite as its temperature rises to match the surrounding air temperature, and it can no longer cool core body temperature.
As the opening epigraph powerfully suggests – we ignore the power of the sun at our peril, and shorter haircuts are not going to be the solution.
References
Goodell, J. (2023) The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Little Brown: New York
Vince, G. (2022) Nomad Century: How to Survive Climate Upheaval. Penguin: London
“I am interested in what library scientists call the “information-seeking behaviours” of artists—how and why arts practitioners pursue research, often in the form of primary source archives, objects, and interviews, but also from sources as diverse as statistical records, song lyrics, scientific data, archaeological reports, amateur film, architectural plans, found documents, unpublished recordings, and so on. While not necessarily new, this desire to examine, extract, and enfold “real world” information into artistic practice is a phenomenon that, in my twenty years as an artist, curator, art historian, and now MFA director, I have seen intensify significantly in recent years.”
We were introduced to Rebecca Duclos’ notion of ‘compulsive browsing’ by Jane Wildgoose during her joint presentation with Harry Willis Fleming at Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place Group’s recent ‘In Ruins’ event, the first in our ‘Exploring’ season.
Our season of four events seeks to investigate the motivations and methods of a range of enthusiastic explorers of otherwise mute portions of the environment: broken buildings, underground spaces, rock faces and bumpy trails. The connecting thread is that in each place something is being sought there by the explorer – a desired mix of visceral experience, a curation of an event and some sense of attaining a truthful and/or creative discovery through material engagement with a place and its fragments. In short, a pursuit of a harvest of something needed from the chosen place, via a ‘compulsive browsing’.
The ‘Exploring’ series sessions will enquire into that meaning making – that animation (or re-animation) of the mundane.
For our first session we focussed on engagements with ruins. Enthusiastic photographer and urban explorer Denzil Watson guided us through the rooftops, culverts, passages and broken shells of Sheffield’s abandoned places. Denzil’s rich and engrossing account showed his sustained engagement with the city’s ruins over the past four decades. In his images the recent, the eternal-seeming and the now-gone all intermingled, summoning both a local-ness (for those in the audience familiar with this city) and a universal-ness, for those who were not.
Next, Portuguese architect, academic and curator Ines Moreira chronicled her encounters with modern ruins in both her home country and in Eastern Europe. In doing so the tone of the event started to change. Ines questioned the desirability of the relics of war, totalitarianism and calamity that her projects had foregrounded. Variously she showed her ruin-sites to be implicated in networks of dark purpose, to be semantically unstable and/or to be on-the-brink-of-forgetting-and-erasure. A sense of ruins’ fractured sense of loss, meaning and futurity was brought into the arena. Ines confessed to having come to feel exhausted through her ruin gazing.
These revelation of the emotional labour entwined in the prolonged act of gazing upon others’ (and/or common-heritage) ruins set the stage nicely for Harry Willis Fleming and Jane Wildgoose’s joint presentation on the entropic interaction of their two arts practices, and of the emotional labour of more personalised ruin gazing. Harry articulated a recovery-drive of sorts, related to his attempts to restore (virtually) his ancestral home, North Stoneham House. Jane introduced her attempt to recreate a Cabinet of Curiosities. Each them problematised the compulsive browsing sitting at the heart of their each working with ruined remainder. Harry moved on the explain his Bervie Brow Research Station – created in the abandoned ruins of an Aberdeenshire nuclear bunker. Meanwhile Jane chronicled how she had increasingly come to question the ethical acceptability of the fragments assembled in her ‘Wildgoose Memorial Library’, leading to the decision taken to inter her artefacts in the bunker’s subterranean strongroom. In effect to sequester them; to sever them from the accessible world of now, to further restrict their meaning and integrity. In short to ruin them, but at the same time to stall their entropy.
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