Publisher's Synopsis
'Earthly Surfacing' focuses on questions of epistemology and representation of the land. Seen by who? Seen how-through which institutional or other lenses? Represented with what materials? Rejecting or embracing the aesthetics of whose ideological traditions and cultures? In this context, the term surfacing reflects the notion of representing or teasing out externality; the act of surfacing as a process of giving an outward finish to something as well as the idea of emergence, in this case of ideas and ideologies that the act of surfacing always entails. Surfacing thus works as an umbrella term for a range of practices and approaches to the representation of the land as conceived from multiple cultural standpoints. To emerge, to bring to the surface, to make something previously hidden appear in plain sight. The earth's surfaces are essentially interfaces, and negotiating our engagement with them might at times entail a level of implied and inescapable superficiality and fictitiousness. At others, reaching deeper into these surfacing processes might reveal entanglements and ecologies that have often been side-lined and overlooked by the institutional gaze.
