Art Practice and Auto/biography for environmental mobilities research
Jen Southern and Nicola Spurling will be presenting papers at the Space, movement, mobility research group at Université Paris Nanterre, and discussing the broader Cemore agendas of environmental mobilities, just transitions and space, place and movement.
Mobilising Archives, Machines and Plants Jen Southern
Abstract: This paper proposes art practice as a method of doing participatory environmental mobilities research. It uses a series of artworks made using machine learning as a method of entangling archives and environments. It focuses on an art exhibition by the author at a textile industry museum and the movements of water around and through the site to draw together historical and contemporary mobilities and their relationships to climate change and environmental emergency. Water brought the cotton industry to the North West of England, providing the damp atmosphere and water-power needed for spinning, and is integral to the life, death and erosion of meadows, trees, mosses and rocks that are features of that site. The researc takes a posthuman approach to climate and asks: What can humans and machines learn about the impacts of climate change and ecological emergency from the trees, meadows, moss and lichen, rocks and rivers at Quarry Bank Mill?
About: Jen Southern is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and New Media at Lancaster University, and Co-Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research where she advocates for the importance of art practice in Mobilities Research. As an artist-researcher her recent work in more-than-human and environmental mobilities has been commissioned by FutureEverything, Arts & Heritage, and National Trust Quarry Bank (2022), NEoN Digital Arts and Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research (2019), and Mobile Media Studio (Montreal, 2013). She has co-curated exhibitions at conferences Global Mobility Futures (Lancaster 2013), Mobile Utopia: Pasts, Presents, Futures (Lancaster 2018) Im|mobile Lives in Turbulent Times (Newcastle 2021) and Mobilities, Ethics, Aesthetics (Seoul 2023). In 2018 she founded the Art and Mobilities Network with Dr. Kai Syng Tan, and in 2019 she started the Art and Mobilities mailing list with Dr. Kaya Barry. Recent publications include ‘Living with Deadly Mobilities’ (Mobilities 2022) and ‘An agenda for creative practice in the new mobilities paradigm’ (Mobilites 2022).
Im/mobile Autobiography: The mobilisation of life without children auto/biography and its significance Nicola Spurling
Abstract: The paper makes auto/biography the focal point of analysis and theorises its potential to be mobile or immobile. The theoretical developments of the paper are grounded in a mobilisation of life-without-children auto/biographical non-fiction across the last 10–15 years, in which those who do not have children, whatever the reason, have opened-up about their stories and found ways to share them with one another. The paper explicates an original concept immobile autobiography defined as: ‘life narratives that are invisible and side-lined, essentialized or not told in first person, and whose circulation both within (intra) and between (inter) generations is structurally limited’; and its converse mobile autobiography. (Im)mobile auto/biographies include, but cannot be reduced to, digital and physical mobilities. The potential of the concept lies in its ability to consider how lives, and the stories told about them, evolve, circulate and perform transformation, as they intersect with, transgress and re-shape changing (cultural) climates of a mobile world.
About: Nicola Spurling is Associate Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research, and Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. Her interest in social theory and climate change dates back to her co-edited book (Sustainable Practices, 2013). Since then, she has published on the material cultures of past and future mobility (‘Making Space for the Car’, 2018; ‘Parking Futures’, 2019; ‘Lines’, 2022) and co-authored two reports on the future of transport, as consulting sociologist with the National Commission on Travel Demand (2018,2019). Her interest in Auto/biography dates back to her PhD (‘Authors of our Own Lives?’ (2010)) and was carried forwards in subsequent work on oral histories of energy demand (‘Matters of Time’ 2018). She has recently resumed her work on auto/biography through exploring the phenomenon and concept of ‘auto/biographical mobilisations’ with an article published in Mobility Humanities in 2022 (‘Intergenerational (Im)Mobilities’) and in Mobilities in 2024 (Im/mobile Autobiography).