2025-05-12 12:20:14
Sasha Engelmann
Between Queens and Schilling Buildings, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
Another year, another Cosgrove Lecture at the Centre for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway. Our speaker this year is Siobhan Angus who has written Camera Geologica, a book tracing the interrelations of geological materiality, social-environmental history and photographic image-making. I learn that in the 19th century, 20% of global silver went into photographic production processes. Gelatin, derived from animal bones, was so important for photographic practices that slaughterhouses were kept near Kodak and other major photo studios and facilities. Platinum printing processes were used to print and archive photographs of indigenous and global south communities, and the softer, ethereal aesthetics of platinum is therefore irrevocably linked to archives of communities at the threshold of ‘disappearance’. These are the traces of what Kathryn Yusoff calls ‘geological ghosts’ in historical visual cultures. Siobhan follows the work of Azoulay in stating that photography was not born in the 19th century, it was born in 1492 upon the threshold of the colonisation (and extraction from) the Americas.
2024-12-06 11:18:06
Sasha Engelmann
Hackney Downs, London, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
NOAA-18
As I look ahead to the final sprint of a writing project, for which I will be submerged in books and my laptop the whole weekend, I am inspired by the collections of geographical thinking and arts practice that I pull out of the towering pile of books on my desk's side-table. I read of 'volcanic polyphonies', 'magmatic languages', 'fluvial hydropoetics', 'sand saltations', 'geo-mimicry' and 'reclaiming energy flows'. I think about the ways in which, across scholarship and creative practice, artists and writers are amplifying the animacies and memories of the elements, from Sotaventine rivers in Mexico, to tidal islands in Scotland, to the humid 'warm fronts' of Southeast Asia. In the satellite image that I capture today from Hackney Downs, I wonder about the repeated patterns and rehearsals of clouds in the North Atlantic, and consider these patterns as another form of air's 'working memory... a memory of energy' (Szerszynski, 2019).