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
Sean Kheraj
Latest posts by Sean Kheraj (see all)
- Nature’s Past Episode 64: Environment and Alibi - May 22, 2019
- From Field Trip to Walking Tour: Animals in the City - April 30, 2019
- What Role Should History Play in Canadian Oil Pipeline Politics? - April 16, 2019
- Building Environmental History Networks Around the World - April 12, 2019
- I’m Not Going to Ohio: How I Will Participate in ASEH 2019 - April 11, 2019
- More: Energy History and Energy Futures - April 10, 2019
- Nature’s Past Episode 63: Unbuilt Environments - March 25, 2019
- Nature’s Past Episode 62: Carbon Democracy and Canadian History - September 27, 2018
- Autumn Renewal - September 26, 2018
- The Complicated History of Building Pipelines in Canada - June 1, 2018