Landscape As Meaning

In Athens last week i managed to fit in a few hours of exploring at the end of the event, making it over to the Agora, the ancient marketplace and civic centre, noted as the birthplace of democracy. I did not specifically need to go: i’ve learnt about it in many different contexts, from studying classics to my first degree in archaeology. But to be in the space is, of course, different. Because the space itself gives context.

Context is something archaeologists like to talk about: as the artefacts we dig out of the ground cannot vocalise their own provenance, we tend to identify them by inference or proximity, where they sit within the strata, or what lies next to them. Scanning, testing, using lenses, these things can also give us a story. But some things are best understood within the landscape in which they were created or conceived: to stand in the Agora, to see the Acropolis and the relationships of shape, space, size and height, to move yourself to change perspective, these are parts of immersing ourselves within the meaning.

Of course this does not just relate to the ancient and ruined: to move ourselves between people, within different communities, different relationships, to carry ourselves down unknown corridors, into strange rooms, and to will ourselves lost, these things can help us to challenge our own knowledge and certainty, in part by seeing the horizon anew, from gaining a new perspective and vista.

Last week i wrote about trans-disciplinarity, but perhaps we can be trans-spatial. Transported. To traverse. To walk trails. This reminds me of how writing is part of thinking: spotting patterns by moving through a vocabulary.

The landscape near my home is a Neolithic one, and these landscapes, whilst filled with the traces of habitation and belief – the tumuli, hill forts and field structures – were intended to be conceived spatially. They are designed as interrelated, as connected. Not abstract deposits on a blank canvas, but perhaps almost as a new phrase in a continuing story.