Category: Thinking and concepts

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Archive treasure: Leaky borders in the littoral seascape (new conference paper in progress)

It’s nice to share new work, and today I’m sharing – below – an expanded abstract of a paper I’ve recently submitted in open call to the 2021 RGS-IBG conference, which has the theme Borders and Bordering and which speaks to my ongoing work on Perpetrating Landscapes.

I’m quite excited by this paper… It emerged from a brilliant project I worked on led by the also-brilliant Fiona Fyfe in 2019: our client was the SeaScapes partnership, and the ask was to produce a comprehensive Historical and Archaeological Review of the Durham Heritage Coast. As part of that project I uncovered a small nugget of archival treasure that started the idea – this holding is from Teesside Archives, dated 8th September 1896, and it’s the start of a fascinating story about a performed border at the mouth of the River Tees…

Letter from the Collector of Customs (Middlesbrough) to the Tees Pilotage Commission, 8th September 1896. Teesside Archives U.TPA.2.7

Here’s my abstract – at the moment it’s a conference paper, but in the near future (and hopefully with another trip to Teesside Archives) I’m hoping to submit this as a journal article.

This paper concerns how borders are inscribed as features upon seascapes, or perhaps more accurately, how borders are inscribed as features upon the littoral, those coastal areas where the sea and land are incessantly giving way to one another. One way of making borders in the littoral is “pratique”, which is a collection of bordering intentions and practices used to decide whether a ship requires quarantine because it is suspected of carrying disease, or whether it is safe to enter a port (“free pratique”). Currently used to refer to human health, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pratique was used – slightly incorrectly – as a general term concerned with any potential means of disease coming ashore.

(Aside: for those of you familiar with seascapes and borders, this might raise an eyebrow… as far as I know pratique is only supposed to apply to people – to determine if a ship needs quarantine because the people aboard are carrying communicable diseases. But the holdings I’ve seen at Teesside seem to suggest that both mariners and customs officials used the term “pratique” to cover disease, pests and pathogens that might be found among the crew, passengers, or cargo (the latter we are increasingly familiar with as post-Brexit “phytosanitary checks”). I do not know if this conflation was the norm elsewhere, although I’d be interested to. Anyway – back to my abstract:)

Intentions and practices matter here – the particular border that pratique creates is a coming together and holding together of instructions, understandings, and cultural imperatives: pratique performs a littoral border into existence as a land/seascape feature through key people and institutions delivering their roles (this includes customs officers, pilots, ships’ masters, loadmasters, radio operators, and others). The substance of this paper is that this land/seascape feature, crafted as it was from such performances, could be perpetrated against and upended by the wrong kind of performances.

(Aside: I’ve submitted this abstract now, but if I could go back I think I’d adjust my phrasing in the last sentence… I think “diverging performances” or “alternative performances” or perhaps “creatively wrong” performances, or even simply putting “wrong” in inverted commas would have had more fidelity to the idea I’m trying to express… this is a case of the impact of the phrasing eclipsing what should have been a more critical use of language. One usefully slapped wrist for me.)

Records from Teesside Archives show that in 1896, off the mouth of the River Tees in North-East England, pilots who met and boarded ships bound for port were adjusting their performance of the littoral border, convincing the crews of those ships that pratique was unnecessary (or else simply omitting to mention it). I want to analyse these records as a moment of land/seascape “perpetration” where a land/seascape feature can be seen becoming dysfunctional and leaky. In this analysis I don’t think of this border being any less a feature because it is performed, but I suggest that in being performed there were latent possibilities for perpetration that pilots seized on. Aiming to re-establish this littoral border, other performers in this land/seascape asserted that the border performed care and strength: it was a caring act for the fragile biologies of the land, and it could only be located at the littoral which had the unique strength to apprehend the harm. In short, bringing the notions (and character traits) of care, fragility, and strength into the narrative was a performance tactic to revitalise the perceived need for a border, and to return it as a feature.

This paper is an examination of this border, and how it shifted according to the performances that might make it a feature.

(Final aside: how does this connect to Perpetrating Landscapes as a wider project? Well, first of all, not too neatly – which is fine, even healthy, because Perpetrating Landscapes is a new project and (at the time of writing) a project where the concepts are still brewing. But the bigger story here is that the land/seascape at Teesmouth was formed and pulled between these different and sometimes shifting performances. It’s very easy to assume that a border feature is a kind of perpetration, i.e. a draconian offence to a landscape that seems so flowing (no pun intended) and fluid (slightly intended) in antithesis to bordering. But even though this border was performed with a certain amount of officiousness and (perhaps) squeamishness, it was formed out of care, and worry, and when the Tees pilots made a perpetrating landscape out of it (by performing holes into it), officials counter-performed by invoking care/fragility/strength. Their correspondence began to strongly emphasise that the “pratique border” at Teesmouth kept children from sickening and crops from wilting, and extended a caring hand over the places and peoples inland of Teesmouth and the Durham coast. It is an interesting move that I’m hoping to write more about.)

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The thinking behind Perpetrating Landscapes

At first glance, you might think a perpetration landscape is the site that’s left behind after something unspeakable has happened – a landscape where there have been perpetrations, and which will carry that association for a long time. At second glance, you might think a perpetration landscape is a landscape that can accommodate bad things we’d sooner not think about… vast isolated places, places with caves or dense forests, fortified and unknowable places, or places where abandonment and dereliction allow for secret spots.

In these two examples, association and accommodation, the landscapes contain something that perpetrates against people (or is perceived to have that potential) – these are important places to understand, but I am interested in perpetration against landscapes: what happens when people damage landscapes, leaving them “spoiled”, “scarred”, or “disturbed”? There is a commonly accepted answer in landscape studies about how that happens, and I argue that it’s an answer that needs more critical attention.

It’s possible that if I asked you to do so now, you could recall a landscape which you think is damaged: perhaps you could even tell me about the thing that damaged it. In academic studies of landscape this kind of damage is often referred to as “encroachment” or “disturbance”, the opposite of “coherence” (see Davoudi and Brooks 2019, 9), in everyday English it might be called “spoiled” or “scarred”. But importantly, regardless of the language used to describe it, there is a persistent idea of what causes the damage: it’s caused by features added to landscapes with indifference. Indifference is a gold-plated explanation for landscape damage: it means that a feature is conceived and built with scant (or no) thought to its coherence with the existing qualities of the landscape, so that it is perhaps too large, or not sympathetically aligned, or not the right shape, texture, or colour. For landscapes to fare well, they have to be accorded with, see Davoudi and Brooks 2019, 9).

And so, when we see a landscape that is spoiled/scarred/encroached/disturbed, we see indifference and thoughtlessness as the perpetrations. And it follows that if certain features had been considered and thought through, the landscape would not have been perpetrated against.

So far it sounds like I’ve just thrown the term “perpetration” in as a rebranding of what landscape theorists already know, and which they already have names for. But this is where perpetration is different, because I want to break the link between perpetration and thoughtlessness.

I would like to break that link at Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station: it was completed between 1959 and 1965 in the middle of Snowdonia National Park (roughly!) in Gwynedd, North Wales, and it’s widely perceived as a perpetration by locals and visitors (Jones, 2001). It is, after all, a massive, angular structure in the middle of a national park, and in the middle of some key sightlines. It looks thoughtless… it looks as though it perpetrates through its thoughtlessness… but in truth, genuine love and effort was poured into Trawsfynydd. It was actually founded on lengthy thinking, consideration, and debate about its coherence with the landscape around it.

Rich but rarely-touched archives of commissioning and design documents from that time could support a written history of how those involved in Trawsfynydd’s inception understood the landscape and used that understanding to try and accommodate the huge station structures within it. I’d like this history to be woven into subsequent walk-along interviews with people who currently live and work in that landscape (it will be provided to them in advance).

Capturing the understandings from Trawsfynydd’s inception, of the love, effort and thought poured into it, breaks with the idea of indifference.

Capturing the understandings of those who live and work there today taps into their astute perceptions of how their landscape was perpetrated against.

But importantly, interviewees will also be invited to analyse and critique the “original” understandings and approaches, tracing the misplaced assumptions, wrong turns, and compromises (and successes) that led Trawsfynydd to perpetrate.

And this is the difference this project wants to make. Perpetration isn’t a rebranding but a recognition that simply having “indifference” as the smoking gun behind all scarred/spoiled landscapes is critically untenable. A landscape can perpetrate even when it’s laden with love, effort and thought, and it can do so in a way that isn’t simply linear and unidirectional, from people, to landscapes.

In the coming months, more content will be added to this blog which will continue to discuss some of my earlier work on landscapes and how that work leads into Perpetration Landscapes. So please pop back, and please do say hello and ask me things!