Views of (distant) bridges. Displacement and the presences of absences in practices of everyday landscape: An autotopographical account

Jones, Owain

Abstract

I seek to contribute to recent discussions of absence, landscape, and memory within cultural geography and beyond, adding differing inflections about the ways in which absences can operate. A series of attachments, tensions and disjunctions relating to the presence of absence and the absence of presence are explored, scrambling any simple dualism between the two. That scrambling is within/between time past and present and space here and there, memory, vistas, texts, photos, objects, infrastructure (bridges), people, dreams, alcohol, weathers and tides. Absences can be looming presences in everyday life and can be generated by a number of means, including displacement from home(land). They can suffuse through, and cleave to materiality, and materiality patterned into landscape, in contingent, unexpected and unaccountable ways, which, as articulated through affective life, are hard to represent in (academic) language. Thus a generally non-representational account is offered which forms a (deep) autotopological account of displacement from home/family/childhood landscape, the absence that brings, and the resulting grief and confusion.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Deposit Date: Oct 26, 2011
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: absence, displacement, landscape, memory, autotopography
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/960446
• Contract Date: Dec 2, 2016