Supported by The Nottingham Trent University Cultural Heritage Research Peak (CHeRP) & the PGR Candidate Research Fund.

Transcript:

The study of landscape is about the complexity of people’s lives—how people being in the world is spatially and historically contingent. It becomes clear that landscapes are always in process: potentially conflicted, untidy, and uneasy.
(Bender, 2002)

To acknowledge and be responsive to the noncontemporaneity of the present, to put oneself at risk, to risk oneself (which is never one or self), to open oneself up to indeterminacy in moving towards what is to come.
(Barad, 2014)

Meaning is not an identity; meaning is material. And matter isn't what exists separately from meaning. To stop mattering is a matter of what comes to matter and what doesn't.
(Barad, 2014)

The Pythia occupied a liminal space in antiquity—not fully belonging to this world, not fully to the beyond—yet bridging both.
(Biro, 2022)

The liminal figure of the Pythia is archetypal, and surviving accounts shed light on her function in the cultural imaginary of antiquity.
(Biro, 2022)

Entanglements are not unities. They do not erase differences. On the contrary, entanglements entail differentiating, and differentiating entails entanglement.
(Barad, 2014)

The woman arriving open over and over again does not stand still; she is everywhere, she exchanges, she is the desire that gives... she comes in between herself, me and you, between the other me—where one is always infinitely more than one and more than me—without the fear of ever reaching a limit.
(Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976)

The new woman will be, as an arrow quits the bow with a movement that gathers and separates the vibrations musically, in order to be more than herself.
(Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976)

They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the producer and the abyss. That would be enough to set half the world laughing, except that it's still going on…
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.
(Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976)

Her prophetic utterances are ambiguous: fragmentary, metaphorical, suggestive in that they delineate an unknown. Her language, though linguistically indeterminate, is not nonsensical.
(Biro, 2022)

Poetry doesn't lend itself to bearing on this quarrel, setting itself in opposition to reason: the quarrel belongs to reason alone, even as it defines what philosophy and poetry are.
The ambiguous speech of the Oracle offers an illustration of such excess, as her replies express a multiplicity of meanings, where truth is multivalent rather than direct and unequivocal.
(Biro, 2022)

Her oracles were words sent from the god; she held right of access to a knowledge that was divine, engaging in a production of meaning that was nonlinear and undetermined.
(Biro, 2022)

A woman at the centre of the world is a producer of ambiguous knowledge, and that ambiguity was respected in the ancient world.
(Biro, 2022)

“All phenomena are interrelated and imbued with spirit... Enacted, it is both a physical thing and the power that infuses it.”
(Anzaldúa, as cited in Barad, 2014)

Boundaries don't hold; times, places, beings bleed through one another. The past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold. The past and the future are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of space-time-mattering.
(Barad, 2014)

Difference is not some universal concept for all places and times but is itself a multiplicity within/of itself. Difference itself is diffracted.
(Barad, 2014)

Myth remembers a history that has been forgotten and erased.
(Anzaldúa, as cited in Barad, 2014)

What I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project.
(Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976)

Time can't be fixed. The past is never closed, never finished once and for all, but there is no taking it back, setting time aright, putting the world back on its axis. There is no erasure finally. The trace of all reconfigurings is written into the enfolded materializations of what was/is/to-come.
(Barad, 2014)

Her speech, even when theoretical or political, is never simple or linear or objectified, generalized; she draws her story into history.
(Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976)

Poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious because the unconscious—that other limitless country—is the place where the repressed managed to survive.
(Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976)

The language of myth contains imaginative elements; it is magical, suggestible, ambiguous, capable of contradiction, lending itself to excess and transformation.
(Biro, 2022)

To choose philosophy over poetry, reason over myth, truth over fiction, is to think within a binary opposition, whereby identity and difference divide each other endlessly. One is asked to choose, to weigh in on the opposition: either I choose philosophy or myth, reason or madness, the sacred or the mundane. The choice is indicative of the ancient quarrel that demands we choose where we cannot, must not, choose.
(Ross as cited in Biro, 2022)

Diffraction owes as much to a thick legacy of feminist theorizing about difference as it does to physics. Re-turning—as in turning it over and over again—iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting and you, in the making of new temporalities, new diffraction patterns.
(Barad, 2014)

But the work of poetry and myth, of poiesis, interrupts and disturbs every technical reduction, “circulating against the authority of any categorical opposition.”
(Ross, as cited in Biro, 2022)

Whereas technē introduces categories and distinctions, the matter of poetry and myth suggests something otherwise than a binary opposition.
(Biro, 2022)

Poiesis, poetry, the domain of myth and its mimetic function, speaks of what must remain unknown to technē, because technē rules through division, conflict, opposition. Poiesis interrupts, displaces technē and its oppositional structures, instead bringing “the good unknown to technē, a relation to the good, the beautiful, to madness, sensuality and the sacred.”
(Ross, as cited in Biro, 2022)

To address the past (and future), to speak with ghosts, is not to entertain or reconstruct some narrative of the way it was, but to respond, to be responsible, to take responsibility for that which we inherit (from the past and the future), for the entangled relationalities of inheritance that 'we' are.
(Barad, 2014)

Because she arrives, vibrant, over and again, we are at the beginning of a new history.
(Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976)

This video essay explores the sacred landscapes of Delphi and Delos, studying their historical significance as a centres of female knowledge, through embodied, intuitive, and affective engagement. Thinking about Ada Lovelace’s notion of poetical science, the site visits seek to trace the contextual and geographical roots of this concept. The film approaches knowledge as a sensuous, relational and embodied process, one that resists dominant rationalist and technocentric paradigms.

The voiceover, recorded in Greece, threads reflections from Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), Karen Barad’s Diffracting Diffraction (2014), and Sasha Biro’s The Oracle as Intermediary (2022) from Otherwise Than Binary, New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture Decker, J.E., Layne, D.A. and Vilhauer, M. (2022). Through these situated readings, the film proposes curating research and thinking through place as not merely interpretive but performative: an intra-active practice between self, site, and matter. 

The work explores myth and reverie, positioning the body in context as instrument. It proposes an expanded curatorial methodology rooted in presence, sensual attention, and poetic science - where intuition is included, and the landscape is approached as co-creator in the production of insight.