Conversations Across place

Contributions by Nicola Brandt and Solveig Lønmo offer two different investigations into how memorials and monuments act on space, from the multiple versions of G. F. Watts’ Physical Energy in London and Southern Africa, which underscore the continued legacies of imperial capitalism in the modern world, to Hannah Ryggen and Jonas Dahlberg’s ‘counter-memorials’ to the terrorist attack of July 22, 2011.

Elisa Schaar reads the work of the Swiss artist Miriam Cahn through the lines that colonialism has drawn upon lands and bodies: drawing out the interest in the gender binary and borders to connect the artist’s early and later paintings.

Ama Josephine B. Johnstone also speaks to the entanglements of sexuality, gender and diasporic life, as well as the many violences encountered when doing this research, advancing the new methodology of ‘Pollination as Praxis’ as a caring counterpoint.
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Frances Whorrall-Campbell presents a re-reading of John Ruskin’s ecological criticism, witnessing the liberatory potential of queer and decolonial ecologies that grow through the cracks in his thought. Architect Lorenzo Nassimbeni offers a personal response to the city of Johannesburg, opposing the modernist grid with a sensitive and embodied drawing practice.

Sociologist Denise L. Lim and architect Sumayya Vally speak across their disciplines and subjectivities as women of colour with transnational heritage and intersectional identities. Through dialogue with each other, they consider how their research in African cities informs their understanding and reinvention of social architectural practice—a conversation that builds on Lim’s writing on Ponte Tower in Johannesburg, and Vally’s work on the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park, London.

Lipika Pelham meditates on the versions of Bengal encountered on the partitioned Indian subcontinent and in London’s East End, reflecting on the slippery borders in land and mind that have splintered these communities and forced a process of negotiation that is needed to build new forms of solidarity. Shruti Belliappa proposes a fragmented history of the Indian subcontinent—working through lyrical shards that shimmer on the horizon of memory and narrative, while confronting the harsh reality of contemporary working-class struggle and competition for survival.

Peter Coffin’s Untitled Rivers offer a different way of reading texts: one that is intuitive and imaginative, striking out on unexpected paths that intersect with, but do not follow, the dominant flow – enacting the entanglement that is this book’s project. And activist Hildegard Titus’s photographs of protests in Namibia, and accompanying interview, demonstrate the importance of collective effort, of responsibility for those near and far, in attempting to invoke change.

Conversations Across Place: Reckoning with an Entangled World uses queer and decolonial methods as explicit tools of disorientation, questioning the clarity of time and space that rises from a Western cis-heteronormative and imperial context. Rather than a field guide, this book proposes a constellation of material – a horizontal network which points in new directions.
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Film screening

The book launch will be accompanied with a short ten-minute screening of a film produced by South African and Namibian artists Jannous Aukema, Puleng Stewart and Nicola Brandt. The work translates a section of the book’s introduction written by Frances Whorrall-Campbell into a visual montage of fragments of the past – through recorded film, video and archival footage – to try and illuminate tumultuous and entangled events and spatialities of the present.