Spatial Ecologies - Counter Bodies
The focus of this one-week short course hosted by Norwich University of the Arts, was to formulate new creative approaches adequate for communicating and addressing the urgent problems related to a deepening climate catastrophe.
Retiring to our studios, we iterated and prototyped sustainable solutions. However, design anthropologists have begun to ask: what if there is a problem is how and where we practice? They urge creative practitioners to get “out of the studio”, exchanging the practices it affords for a more direct engagement with the ecologies that we are part of.
It is this question, and those that follow from it, that the Spatial Ecologies course invited the participants to consider: 1) how to escape the physical and allegorical enclosure of the studio. 2) how designs embed into the environments where they exist. 3) how learning from them can inform our creative processes.
We chose Seahenge as the starting point for your work with spatial ecologies. Seahenge is one of two henges discovered in the 1990s in Holme-next-the-Sea near King’s Lynn (where it is now on display at the local museum). The henges are a man-made, wooden structures that had cosmological and spiritual uses for Bronze-age East Anglians. According to archaeologist David A. Nance the Holme henges, including Seahenge, are:
“Best explained as independent ritual responses to reverse a period of severe climate deterioration recorded before 2049 BC” (2024, p.88)
In its original location Seahenge was uniquely embedded in Norfolk’s landscape. The henge afforded communion with – and was a measure of its environment. These qualities, so absent in contemporary design, means Seahenge is an exemplar for how we today may design to reconnect with our environment.
As part of the short course, the participants were asked to produce a device that they brought to Holme-next-the-Sea. These devices made a speculative surveying of the original Seahenge site possible. Their survey would then inform the collaborative creation of a panorama of that landscape, documenting their creative intervention there.
The Counterbody performance sprung out the investigations. The project was conceived as relay performances where the participants, in formations reminiscent of forensic work or beachcombing, engage with the environment through systematic movement and with a focus on macro and micro scales at which the coast and the sea affect each other. The project is planned to continue along the Norfolk and Suffolk coastline, involving a collaborative, ritualised reenactments of geological processes.
Elin Eyborg Lund and Christian Petersen are summer school directors, while Kirsty Badenoch, Sarah de Villiers and Gustavo Balbela de Azambuja are tutors, Ben McDonnell and Teresa Stoppani are guest critics of the project.
