Third Text

13 September 2023

Matt Barlow

Growing up, we were caught between the ground and the air, always looking up
Shona Illingworth   ^[1]

Between 1747–1755, immediately after the Jacobite rebellion had been suppressed by British forces, King George II commissioned the first Military Survey of Scotland. What ensued was an immensely detailed map, generated from the ground, that would accurately depict the Scottish Highlands from above in a two-dimensional, birds-eye-view fashion. This map, and the techniques and practices that generated it, advanced a colonial cartographic method that complemented ‘growing Enlightenment aspirations for greater geometrical accuracy and standardisation, as well as a desire to discover empirical truth, and to control and order geographical space through reconnaissance and survey’ (National Library of Scotland). It was the beginning of a new relationship between land and sky, one that would support the ongoing militarisation of northern Scotland for the centuries that followed. Caren Kaplan suggests that this ‘belief in the truth value of a map comes to constitute one of modernity’s most powerful ideologies: the material ground of a singular, knowable world’. ^[2]  Shona Illingworth’s work, and the critical engagement with it that is compiled in this edited volume, highlights the need to continue to interrogate these cartographic histories and imaginaries, and how they inform and relate to the increasing use of satellite data, which uses access to the world from above to implement an optical regime of asymmetrical power relations. She joins a suite of researchers and artists who have recently begun to grapple with the advent of colonial and capitalist practices that have moved beyond the Earth’s surface and into Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. ^[3]

Shona Illingworth is an artist and researcher who grew up in an abandoned Cold War early-warning station in Balnakeil, on the edge of the Cape Wrath Firing Station in the remote northwest Highlands of Scotland. Her family was part of a small community of craft workers who moved into the semi-derelict military buildings in the late 1960s, creating the Balnakeil Craft Village. As such, from a very early age Illingworth was surrounded by art, the glacial and elemental landscape of northern Scotland, and the past, present and future of British militarisation. Her immersive visual and sound works are in many ways influenced by this upbringing amongst, and with her memories of, the ongoing militarisation of northern Scotland and its effect on the land, sea and sky, and the people who call the Highlands home.

The book is a collection of essays and conversations reflecting on two of Illingworth’s video works: Lesions in the Landscape (2015) and Topologies of Air (2022). The essays and conversations are interspersed with still images and narrative passages from the videos. The first half of the book is dedicated to Lesions in the Landscape, the second to Topologies of Air. The two works are similar in that they are both three channel video installations and share a political sensibility that demonstrates how ‘we need to radically rethink and reorient the trajectory of technological development, who has access to it, and its relationship to knowledge production, life, and environment’. ^[4]  They are also both rooted in Illingworth’s deep connection to northern Scotland, and in the ways they speak to how ‘we cannot think about the military and commercial exploitation of airspace, and increasingly outer space, as unrelated to land rights struggles, cultural erasure and the existential threat of climate change’. ^[5]  The book then aims to tease out some of the threads and openings within Illingworth’s work, of which there are many, and I highlight here some of those threads and suggest even more. I also reflect on the value of these kinds of collections and this book as an artefact itself.

Lesions in the Landscape brings together the history of displacement and militarisation on the remote island of St Kilda, off the northwest coast of Scotland in the Outer Hebrides, and the experience of amnesia of a woman named Claire. St Kilda was inhabited for thousands of years, until it was evacuated on 29 August 1930. The popular history of the story goes that the island was evacuated due to a combination of worsening weather and a decline in the male population, leading to increasingly difficult harvests for those living on the island. The more obscured history of the evacuation is that the island was, and continues to be, a strategic location in the increasing militarisation of the Outer Hebrides. In this version of history, the evacuation of St Kilda was just one moment in the ongoing militarisation of northern Scotland. In this three-channel video and sound work, Illingworth situates this history in collaboration and conversation with the neuropsychologists Martin A Conway and Catherine Loveday through narrative techniques. In doing so, Illingworth demonstrates how our ability to imagine is rooted in our ability to form memories. As she states in a conversation with Gaëtane Verna: ‘Without memory, you cannot imagine the future, you become trapped in the present moment’ (p 81). The result is a haunting account of cultural erasure, the experience of loss – both of place and memory – and the residual atmosphere of militarisation.

Shona Illingworth, Lesions in the Landscape, 2015, digital video stills, three screen video and multi-channel sound installation, 35 mins, courtesy of the artist and NLS Scottish Screen Archives

By traversing this history of colonial violence and militarisation, the experience of memory loss and intimate connections to place, Lesions in the Landscape draws out complex and contested cultural resonances across time and space. It is also where Illingworth developed her ‘approach to thinking about the sky from multiple perspectives and also multiple scales’. ^[6]  The essays reflecting on Lesions in the Landscape orbit around Illingworth’s process and practice, and how it intersects with memory, self and consciousness. As Jill Bennett summarises in her contribution, ‘the landscape positioned in Lesions of the Landscape does not presuppose an accessible past but an experientially dislocated space’ (p 47). How does a place evacuated nearly one hundred years ago come into relation to the ongoing military presence in the area, and come to be represented by, and in concert with, the experience of amnesia? I agree with Gabrielle Schwab when she suggests that Illingworth uses these techniques of contrast in scale to ‘increase emotional intensity’ (p 73). The contrast between scale and between individual experience and a more collective sense of loss promotes reflection on the untethered nature of atmospheric relations. Issie MacPhail recognises this in a field note from her time working on the Lesions in the Landscape project by referring to ‘the birling of the Earth’ that shapes sensory corridors in the landscape (p 58). ^[7]  This phrase reminds me of an essay by Elizabeth Povinelli, in which she states ‘as the world overheats, the accelerant will be the winds’. ^[8]  But if birling draws our attention to wind and sound, Illingworth’s work, and many of the essays in this collection, are firmly concerned with the question ‘how might one create a different eye?’ (p 65). MacPhail’s essay reflects on the primacy of the visual, both metaphorically and literally, in militarisation practices, artistic works and in social theory. Lesions in the Landscape reminds us that, as James C Scott has said in his book Seeing Like A State, ‘certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision’. ^[9]  In this way, Illingworth’s work produces an uncanny sense of both zooming in and zooming out, a simultaneous narrowing and expanding, a softening through crystallisation.


Shona Illingworth, Lesions in the Landscape, 2015, installation view at FACT, Liverpool, three screen video and multi-channel sound installation, 35 mins, courtesy of the artist, photo by Jon Barraclough

Building out of her work on Lesions in the Landscape, Illingworth moves deeper into the composition, nature and exploitation of airspace and outer space in Topologies of Air. While Lesions in the Landscape was about the displacement of time, space and memory in and from a particular place, and through one person’s experience of amnesia, Topologies of Air engages with a much more general, yet no less terrifying prospect: the attempt to conquer Earth from above. In fact, Topologies of Air seems to suggest that the advent of the Anthropocene is best grasped through this relationship with Earth’s atmosphere, rather than through geological strata. ^[10]  The film is also situated in conversation and collaboration with Illingworth’s involvement in the Airspace Tribunal, an international public forum that brings together diverse expertise and experience to consider the case for and against a proposed new human right: to protect the freedom to live without physical or psychological threat from above. ^[11]  Topologies of Air demonstrates, through narration by numerous voices and carefully curated and composed footage that is not from any particular place, how war around the world is being made increasingly inaccessible to human perception and intelligibility. This ontological threat from above is orchestrated while humans paradoxically rely ever more heavily on data generated in and about the atmosphere and outer space. These entangled processes of knowing and unknowing, visibility and obscurity, lie at the heart of Topologies of Air, and push Illingworth’s work to the edges of metaphysical thought.

Shona Illingworth, Topologies of Air, 2021, digital video stills, three-channel digital video and multichannel sound installation, 45 mins, courtesy of the artist and IWM, commissioned by The Wapping Project

Perhaps due to the slightly different nature of the film they engage with, the essays that reflect on Topologies of Air are much more conceptually driven, looking out from Shona’s work toward more expansive and geographically dispersed set relations and concerns. It is here that, drawing on the work of Steven Conor, Caterina Albano gives us a useful definition of topology as ‘geometry plus time, geometry given body in motion’, prompting reflections on the changing nature of human relationships to the sky, atmosphere, and airspace through time (p 209). Giuliana Bruno reflects on how thinking atmospherically – as an experiential experience of envelopment ^[12] – changes not only the ways we conceive of colonial violence and aerial warfare, but how we might think about Illingworth’s work itself as generating certain kinds of atmospheres. The legal aspect of Illingworth’s work is highlighted by the co-founder of the Airspace Tribunal, Nick Grief, when he states that ‘the human rights dimension of airspace and outer space is still relatively unexplored, despite the fact that individuals are increasingly vulnerable to threats such as surveillance, location tracking, and predictive targeting’ (p 235). Catherine Loveday then reflects on the traumatic experience of those living with the threat from above, stating how ‘living in constant fear… has very real, long-term consequences for the body and for the mind, but this is potentially even worse when the threat is uncertain or unseen’ (p 256). These essays emphasise the existential and ontological insecurity of modern life that Topologies of Air represents so well.

Shona Illingworth, Topologies of Air, 2021, installation view at The Power Plant, Toronto, 2022, three-channel digital video and multichannel sound installation, 45 mins, courtesy of the artist, commissioned by The Wapping Project, photo by Toni Hafkenscheid

Together, these essays demonstrate the immensity of Illingworth’s work, an immensity that ultimately ‘is in ourselves’, as Gaston Bachelard wrote in 1969. ^[13]  As Bachelard goes on to stipulate, it is ‘this inner immensity that gives their real meaning to certain expressions concerning the visible world’. ^[14]

It is in this way that I am curious about the relative absence of, and the potential for, the concept of psychogeography within the reflections in this collection. Psychogeography refers to the inner, almost spiritual, connection with a surrounding environment. It was developed alongside methods of walking through cities as ways of exploring their meaning through a kind of creative and critical practice of what Tim Ingold has called ‘ambulatory knowing’. ^[15]  Psychogeography has been relatively under-theorised in anglophone geographical research until quite recently, although, as James Sidaway has highlighted, some researchers have begun to move it beyond its origins in urban contemplation as a way of deepening what would otherwise be thought of as nature writing to extend a psychological analysis to experience of rural life. ^[16]  I am curious about what a psychogeography of air might entail that is far from the sidewalks of London and much more than nature writing. Might it offer new insights and approaches to these kinds of transcendent forms of research and art, where psychology (in this case, memory, amnesia and existential threat from above) and geography become co-constitutive?

Another avenue for further thought about Illingworth’s work that only garners a brief mention in these essays is the relationship between visualisations and the politics of other sensory experiences and processes. Here I am referring to Illingworth’s use of sound in Lesions in the Landscape to represent neurological activity in Claire’s mind when she looks at photos that were taken with a sensory-operated camera worn on the body to aid her in documenting her life. Jill Bennett reflects on this process in her essay ‘Landscape Without Memory’, but she does so without critical attention to what Catherine Loveday later reminds us – that ‘sound is one of the earliest and most fundamental ways that we communicate emotions’ (p 255). I am curious here about Claire’s use of images rather than sound to trigger memory, and then Illingworth’s decision to represent Claire’s brain activity through sound for the experience of the viewer. There is more to tease out here in relation to the primacy of visual methods in geography, creative practice and social theory, and a recent turn in the social sciences toward sound and sounding. ^[17]

Ultimately, this is a wonderfully collated and thought-provoking series of essays and conversations that demonstrate the intensity and breadth of Illingworth’s artistic and research practice. It is a beautifully put together artefact that features a range of textures, voices and images that are a joy to move through. While there is some unavoidable repetition in the essays, those who have not experienced Illingworth’s installations will find this to be a great introduction, and for those who have it will deepen their appreciation of the immersive experiences Illingworth so compellingly creates. As the contestations over the deep sea and outer space only intensify over the coming years, it is precisely these kinds of ‘interscalar’ approaches to research and critical creative practice that will be best able to grapple with the complexities and asymmetries of life beyond Earth. ^[18]

Shona Illingworth: Topologies of Air, edited by Anthony Downey, with contributions by Caterina Albano, Amin Alsaden, Jill Bennett, Giuliana Bruno, Martin A Conway, Anthony Downey, Conor Gearty, Derek Gregory, Nick Grief, Andrew Hoskins, Catherine Loveday, Issie MacPhail, William Merrin, Renata Salecl, Gabriele Schwab and Gaëtane Verna, is published by Sternberg Press, London, and The Power Plant, Toronto, 2022, 288 pp, 164 colour and 47 b/w illustrations, ISBN 978-3-95679-553-4

^[1]     Shona Illingworth: Topologies of Air, Anthony Downey, ed, Sternberg Press, London, and The Power Plant, Toronto, 2022, p 80

^[2]     Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2018, p 34

^[3]     See, for example, David Valentine, ‘Atmosphere: Context, Detachment, and the View from above Earth’, American Ethnologist, vol 43, no 3, August 2016, pp 511–524; and Katherine G Sammler and Casey R Lynch, ‘Apparatuses of Observation and Occupation: Settler Colonialism and Space Science in Hawai’i’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol 39, no 5, October 2021, pp 945–965

^[4]     Shona Illingworth: Topologies of Air, op cit, p 86

^[5]     Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey, ‘Topologies of Air and the Airspace Tribunal: Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey’, Philosophy of Photography, vol 12, nos 1–2, October 2021, pp 7–25, p 10

^[6]     Ibid, p 11

^[7]    ‘To birl’ is to revolve with a whirring sound

^[8]    Elizabeth A Povinelli, ‘Fires, Fogs, Winds’, Cultural Anthropology, vol 32, no 4, 2017, pp 504–513, p 511

^[9]    James C Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1998, p 10

^[10]   See Kathryn Yusoff, ‘Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol 33, no 2, March 2016, pp 3–28

^[11]   The Airspace Tribunal was established in 2018 by Illingworth and human rights lawyer Nick Grief

^[12]   See Dereck McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2018

^[13]   See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1969, p 197

^[14]   Ibid

^[15]   See Tim Ingold, ‘Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol 16, no 1, 2010, p 122

^[16]   See James D Sidaway, ‘Psychogeography: Walking through strategy, nature and narrative’, Progress in Human Geography, vol 46, no 2, April 2022, pp 549–574

^[17]   See Michael Gallagher, Anja Kanngieser and Jonathan Prior, ‘Listening geographies: Landscape, affect and geotechnologies’, Progress in Human Geography, vol 41, no 5, October 2017, pp 618–637

^[18]   See Gabrielle Hecht, ‘Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence’, Cultural Anthropology, vol 33, no 1, 22, February 2018, pp 109–141

Matt Barlow is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of International Relations at University of St Andrews. His ethnographic research investigates how colonial environmental imaginaries influence efforts to address environmental crises. His PhD explored colonial infrastructures and contestations over a waste crisis in Kochi, India.