The Amazing Field(s) Summer School: Wayfaring Cartographies

During the Amazing Field Summer School we encourage you to engage in a cartographic exercise through a short period of wayfaring. To ‘wayfare’ is to know one’s-place within a world that opens itself up through particular acts of enquiry. To ‘know’ the world as a wayfarer is to know the patterns of interwoven lives, both human and non-human and use them as frames of reference. These patterns of lives can be usefully described as ‘Meshworks’, “the reticular patterns left by animals, both wild and domestic, and by people (in and around the houses of village or small town, as in the town’s immediate environs)’, whose movements weave an environment that is more ‘archi-textural’ than architectural” (Lefebvre 1991: 117-18). 

We will be undertaking this exercise at Braziers Park, a place that is a difficult entity to describe or to get a handle on. Braziers is a community, experiment, guest house, manor, estate, home, workplace. Our task is to add to the already varied collection of cartographies of the Braziers’ site. These new cartographies can be physical, metaphysical, speculative or material, and will form a collection which will reveal the vastly interconnected patterns which constitute the ‘archi-textural’ nature of the environment.  

[click here for logistical information]

Instructions for Wayfaring: 

Choose your mode of enquiry. What philosophical, theoretical, methodological approaches / perspectives will you use as your frame of reference? 

Explore the site maps and cartographies to inform a direction of travel. Study the maps of the site embedded below, identify points of interest, propose an enquiry of your own to explore over the three days. 

Pick or design an instrument (or instruments) to mediate your enquiry. They can be fleshy and sensory (bodies and bodily-like things, methods of attunement or focusing), mediators or diviners (EMF readers, air quality measures, divining sticks … ), or imaginary and creative visualizers (poetry, drawing, painting, arranging, inventorying). 

Bring materials to create your Cartography. Pens, paint, chalk, camera, film, anything that can capture the enquiry.

Wayfaring, I believe, is the most fundamental mode by which living beings, both human and non-human, inhabit the earth. By habitation I do not mean taking one’s place in a world that has been prepared in advance for the populations that arrive to reside there. The inhabitant is rather one who participates from within in the very process of the world’s continual coming into being and who, in laying a trail of life, contributes to its weave and texture. These lines are typically winding and irregular, yet comprehensively entangled into a close-knit tissue.  (Ingold, 2007, p. 81)