Reconfiguring the Mountain: A Topographical Approach to Aesthetics in an Age of Time- and Place-Illiteracy
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Where does knowledge begin?Let's take the example of a mountain.For a subarctic Norwegian, what could be a more mundane view than that of a mountain that you see every day.Still, steady, seemingly unmoving.Can a local, not famous, mountain top, not very tall, hold the key to a major ecological insight in an "age of unreason"?Can it hold the key to an understanding of the embodied situatedness and technological formation of knowledge, and how these factors are co-constitutive?In our time, as fictions are built upon fictions.theory upon theory, there is a need to touch ground again.As the editors state in this issue's questionnaire, there is a need to re-address "the fundamental question of access to knowledge and our ability to know."As an artist researcher who uses the camera as means to think, a mountain is the perfect object.It is an object of stillness and motion, of different time scales, an entanglement of materials and meaning. 1 A mountain may have significant meaning for those who live in the area-emotional, symbolic-yet it has a materiality that stretches back millions of years in time.It is a popular motif for amateur photographers, and thoroughly mapped by cartography, satellites, and the like.Mountains are technologically mediated at the same time as having persisted throughout all human history as familiar features.A mountain is an excellent example of Karen Barad's point that matter and meaning "are inextricably fused together," and that "no event can tear them apart." 2 This is the case with Klotinden, The Claw Peak, an old, ragged mountain peak in the north of Norway, a local landmark, 671 m tall, which resembles an animal claw, a point of orientation for nearby villages, which has persisted though time, at least seemingly so for generations of humans residing at its foot.
Source: The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics
Author: Elisabeth Brun
Institution: Museum Nord
Language: English
Topic: Photographic and Visual Arts
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4401855888