Přednáška a seminář skotské umělkyně a výzkumnice Kat Hill se bude zabývat praxíl zaměřené na malé prostory a specifické lokality jako způsobu zkoumání propletených lidských a nelidských vztahů v daném místě a podněcování rozhovorů o péči a odpovědnosti vůči ostatním a živým světům.
Přednáška je součástí pásma pozorování možných aktivizačních metod a možností spojení mezidruhového a akademického života na dvoře TCM organizovaného v rámci předmětu Výstavnictví na KVU.
On solitude and encounter: observing places with curiosity and care
This talk and seminar will explore my creative practice focused on small spaces and specific localities as a way of examining the entangled human and non-human relationships in a place, and stimulating conversations around care and responsibility, to others and to living worlds. At a time of environmental and climate crisis, I am interested in how the acts of curiosity and creativity can offer a way of understanding and reframing our relationships to places.
From mountain huts to repeated walks along particular paths, I will examine these as places where we may often be alone, consumed by our own thoughts or retreating from modernity, if just for a moment. But also, as places where we encounter beyond-human worlds and other people on our journeys, if only for fleeting moments. Drawing on my residency at the Woods and my wider creative non-fiction work, my talk will explore how we as practitioners might read landscapes and localities through experience, research and observation; how we record and respond to the shifting temporalities of a place, its rhythms of dwelling, sensory worlds and its many actors; and how that conversation about curiosity and observation may make us sensitive to the entangled practices of care and damage that are threaded through our relationship with landscapes in the current climate.
Kat Hill is an author & researcher based in the Highlands of Scotland. Her work focuses on questions of landscape, people, and heritage in various contexts from the bothies of the Scottish Highlands to non-conformist religious communities such as Mennonites in Europe, America and the Global South. She is the author of books Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585 (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter(William Collins, 2024). She currently works as a freelance writer and is a fellow at the IAS in Princeton. She is a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt and a European champion.
Kat Hill’s research and creative work will focus on the interrelated stories of human and non-human actors in the landscape and on more-than-human kinships. Rooted in her work on communities, landscapes, environmental futures and local histories, she will be working on a series of creative outputs which explore the temporalities, lives and entanglements of specific beings in this place, from the mountains to the flowers, the birds to the stars. She asks what it matters to engage in ways of living that are attuned to the rhythms of seasons, of day and night. She is also interested in exploring the question of futures and sustainability, including threats to pastoral traditions and rural landscapes. Drawing on research resources such as archives, almanacs and maps, as well as her own practical experience in the landscape, she will ask what may be lost if landscapes and ways of knowing the world disappear. Kat’s interest in communities will include outreach to local residents and heritage institutions in surrounding rural areas.