Lost and Found

Exploring the capacity for the transformative resilience of everyday ritualised performances and co-joined connectivity to place and identity in the context of future climate change
Tamar Valley
 
Climate change will significantly impact our place(s) of life, work, and play and how we connect to place(s) emotionally, mentally, physically, and/or spiritually. These impacts will reverberate beyond physical place(s), affecting our every day yet meaningful actions of life, work, and play. Because these actions are meaningful, we value, remember, and repeat them – thus becoming ritual(s) we enact in everyday life. Over time, we associate these rituals with the place(s) we enact them and with our identity. Through being enacted, valued, remembered, and repeated, rituals assume power to guide us, give structure to our lives, connect us to place(s), and reaffirm our identity.
This project explores ritual’s potential (and ourselves) to be more resilient in the face of climate change. Can ritual reveal ways to meet the challenges climate change will pose for the place(s) we live, work, and/or play, and how we live, work, and/or play? Can these rituals transform what we do and/or where we do them? Will such transformation change the ritual, place(s), our connection to place(s), and/or our identity?

This project explores the interrelation of ritual, place, and identity, and their capacity to transform in the face of change. It uses digital-based tools to help participants and researchers (working 1:1) co-author images and stories intertwining ritual, place, and identity. Working along the River Tamar in Plymouth and the Tamar Valley National Landscape, we will explore sea-level rises’ impact on participants’ placed-based rituals and how their rituals might transform to address change in a future impacted by climate change. Our project engages with Plymouth Octopus and the Tamar Valley National Landscape stakeholders across different generations. This project will enhance understanding of rituals’ resilient capacity to meet the challenges of future climate change and will support the development of civic policy that will enable such resilience.

Land/Water and the Visual Arts

Land/Water and the Visual Arts is an international network of artists, filmmakers, writers, curators, scholars and researchers who embrace a diversity of creative and critical practices.
Operating as a forum for the interrogation of nature, culture, aesthetics, and representation relating to land, landscape and place, we generate work that addresses a range of issues, including environmental change, sustainability, journey, site and regional specificity. In addition, a forum for theoretical and methodological debate is constructed through research events, exchange exhibitions with other higher education institutions, conferences, symposia and publications.
Jem Southam: 'Birds, Rocks, River and Islands', The Levinsky Gallery, University of Plymouth, Jan–Mar 2019