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 III – Ancestral grounds
This conversation will focus on the ground as material medium through which to connect with ancestors, as a manifestation of ancestral presence and care, as a homeplace. It will consider dislocated grounds as a medium through which to explore, shape and express diasporic identities and connections to homeland. It will additionally investigate ancestral grounds as sites of dispossession, expulsion and displacement, and as a political terrain to which claims to rights and access are played out; where communities indigenous to a particular ground can claim the right to self-determination.
MODERATOR: Thaisa Way, PhD, Director of Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks
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