Perhaps there is an opportunity here. Perhaps we could think of this strip of land which exists outside of market interests and state funding not as insignificant but rather as vital for unfolding a new language of value. In The Human Shore , John R. Gillis writes about the urgent need to collectively (re)learn how to live with our coasts, and not only on them. To begin to learn how to value, and feel at home on, land that is destined to vanish will require nothing short of a kind of temporal sorcery, of finding stability in a field of chaos. Ecologies and landscapes of the abandoned edge can be instructive in this regard - they endure in
time not through stasis but through the ebb and flow of coastal transformation. Perhaps we could engage with them as rhythmic spacetimes, provisional orderings, environments that in their transformations anchor us to changing land. Here I am reminded of Tim Robinson, artist, writer and cartographer, who spent decades mapping and walking the coastlines of Aran, and who aptly identified the task at hand as finding the ‘good step’, both grounded and in movement, ‘as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin’s arc to the wave.’ 2 *
2 Robinson, Tim. Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage . London, Penguin Books, 1986 [1990], p 12
all images and drawings Barbara Prezelj
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on site review 49 :: shorelines
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