A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships
that underwrite a physical location with layers of sedimented
names. In Place Matters scholars and artists conduct varied forms
of place-based inquiry to demonstrate why place matters. Lavishly
illustrated, the volume brings into conversation photographic
projects and essays that revitalize the study of landscape.
Contributors engage the study of place through an approach that
Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick call critical topography: the
way that we understand critical thought to range over a place, or
how thought and symbolic forms invent place through text and image
as if initiated by an X marking the spot. Critical topography's
tasks are to mediate and to diminish the gap between representation
and referent, to be both in the world and about the world; to ask
what place is this, what are its names, where am I, how and with
what responsibilities may I be here? Chapters map the deep
cultural, environmental, and political histories of singular
places, interrogating the charged relation between history, place,
and power and identifying the territorial imperatives of place
making in such sites as Colonus, Mont Sainte-Victoire,
Chomolungma/Everest, Hiroshima, Fort Qu'Appelle, Donetsk airport,
and the island of Lesbos. With contributions from the renowned
artists Hamish Fulton and Edward Burtynsky, the Swedish poet Jesper
Svenbro, and others, the collection examines profound shifts in
place-based thinking as it relates to the history of art, the
anthropocene and nuclear ruin, borders and global migration,
residential schools, the pandemic, and sites of refuge. In his
prologue W.J.T. Mitchell writes: "Places, like feasts, are
moveable. They can be erased and forgotten, lost in space, or
maintained and rebuilt. Both their appearance and disappearance,
their making and unmaking, are the work of critical topography."
Global in scope, Canadian in spirit, and grounded in singular
sites, Place Matters presents critical topography as an approach to
analyze, interpret, and reflect on place.
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