EHTV Episode 12 – Southern Quartet

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The 2011 Place and Placelessness Virtual Graduate Conference featured a short film competition. EHTV is proud to present the three films submitted to the contest as a special series. The second film in this series is by Cristina Silaghi, a Ph.D. candidate in art history and theory at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Silaghi describes her film as follows:

“In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), Yi-Fu Tuan connects seasonal variations to a cyclic sense of time; he writes about ‘… the pendulum-like swing of the seasons’.[1] Tuan regards seasons as natural rhythms reflective of astronomic time and its repetitions. Since my arrival in Wellington, New Zealand, I have become attentive to daily weather changes more than to changes of season. I have found aspects of every season surfacing within the span of hours or weeks. Rapid variations in temperature and humidity shape the colours, textures and rhythms of the city, pointing to a characteristically dynamic relationship between weather and place.

My short film inquires into patterns of time as made visible by place. The traces of spring, summer, autumn and winter are highlighted as revealed in found objects, enduring structures, rehearsed activities, or accidental micro-events. A subjective, place-related, materially manifested map of the seasons thus takes shape. Bearing in mind Charles Baudelaire’s Correspondences (1857) and Claude Monet’s depictions of London sites (1899-1901), I reflect on various facets of the four seasons at work in my daily experience and environment.”

[1] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Edward Arnold, 2001 [1977]), 90, 99, 120, 131, 135.

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Sean Kheraj

Associate Professor at York University, Department of History
Sean Kheraj is the director of the Network in Canadian History and Environment. He's an associate professor in the Department of History and associate dean of programs in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University. His research and teaching focuses on environmental and Canadian history. He is also the host and producer of Nature's Past, NiCHE's audio podcast series and he blogs at http://seankheraj.com.

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