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.

For more information on Place and Placelessness please visit: http://virtualeh.wordpress.com

Download Episode | right click, ‘save as’ to download

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

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.

Latest posts by Sean Kheraj (see all)

• Nature’s Past Episode 71: Water and Anishinaabe Territory - April 12, 2021
• James Scott: How to Write Like a River - February 28, 2021
• The First Post-War Oil Pipeline Hearings in Canada - February 9, 2021
• 2021 Melville-Nelles-Hoffmann Lecture in Environmental History: Brittany Luby and Chief Lorraine Cobiness - February 8, 2021
• Top 5 Posts of 2020 - January 5, 2021
• Nature’s Past Episode 70: Environmentalism and the Company of Young Canadians - September 2, 2020
• Interview Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times - August 12, 2020
• Nature’s Past Episode 69: Environmental Racism and Canadian History - July 29, 2020
• Whose Nature? Race and Canadian Environmental History - July 7, 2020
• Nature’s Past Episode 68: Home and Environment - May 11, 2020