an interdisciplinary series on the ground’s many manifestations and meanings
While a primary medium for landscape architects’ physical intervention, the ground has remained muted in discourse and action despite its many manifestations and capacities – to stir, to connect, to remember, as well as to expose and destabilize. This multifaceted explorative series aims to excavate the ground for these manifestations and meanings to better understand how we (humans) situate ourselves in the world and in relation to each other, to our pasts, and to the more-than-human – materials, systems, species. We explore its significance as a noun (the ground; a material), a verb (to ground; its agency), and an adjective (to be grounded; situated). In particular, the series will consider the ground as both a site of exploitation and extraction, as well as resistance and creation. The series of conversations, exhibition and field happenings focused on questions of landscape and its varied grounds, integrates activists, designers, artists, scholars, scientists, environmentalists with diverse and intersectional identities.
Part 5 – Shaky grounds
Contested ground claims, occupancies and appropriations are often played out over the most unstable of grounds – sites of flood, flow, subsidence, slide, as well as ground rendered fugitive through increasing aridity and/or misuse. This conversation is intended to consider the intersection of geo-/spatio- political forces and geophysical instability, including what it means to occupy or be forced to occupy (or flee) risky ground. It additionally aims to imagine how grounds deemed instable have the potential to be sites of possibility, for alternate modes and models of existence.
MODERATOR: Davi Schoen, USC Faculty, Landscape Designer, STOSS
Invitees practicing across media studies, anthropology, art, climate science, geography, landscape architecture
