Tara Page's Placemaking: A New Materialist Theory of Pedagogy: A Becoming Book-Review

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Notes

1 As an aesthetic practice (or set of practices), deep mapping is a “method of creating a record of space, place or time that commits to an investment in enacting multi-vocal understandings: a ‘deep’ (as opposed to shallow, one sided or perfunctory) investigation of place” (Springett, 2015, p. 624). As a “record,” chapter 1 contains five series of photographs “made” by children and Page whilst engaging in practices of place-making with the place-world Thirton (Page draws a distinction between “taking” and “making” photographs: taking suggests the capturing of a pre-existing world by a self-contained subject, whereas making emphasises materiality and agentic co-becoming or intra-action). The counter-representational, counter-significant photographs of “tracks” (left on the ground by a ram, a kangaroo [with joey?] and the photographer’s father on a motorbike) made by Jenny partly comprise the first series (but I am also fond of the word “impressions” as it emphasises their fleeting, more-than-human quality: anything could leave an impression, including the sun, a non-human agent involved in photography [Zylinska, 2018]). The images are sepia-like in the book, black and white in the PDF (text-image) version emailed to me, and in colour on Page’s website (www.tarapage.org). I find myself moving back and forth between these versions, finding something different each time.

2 Thirton is a town in the south-west of Queensland, about 700 kilometres west of Brisbane (the name of the actual town was changed to anonymise participants).

3 Other research-participants included older children from Thirton State School.

4 “Imbrication” refers to an overlapping of edges, especially roof tiles – perhaps not an entirely appropriate materiality to register a new materialist ontology. However, the word seems to work in the built environment context of this quote, which itself doesn’t quite get to the essence of method-world co-becoming. See Deleuze and Guattari on “mimicry” in footnote 7.

5 Zylinska (2018), for example, says that “photography [today] records our lives non-stop” (p. 67). Perhaps this is not so much for “individual” lives, but rather the effect of the ubiquity of such technology is that it creates a collective archive of life. Consider, too, the ubiquity of surveillance cameras in urban spaces and the fact that the “data” they yield is so voluminous that it must be “written over” at certain intervals.

6 Though definitions for “bulldust” do not emphasise its motility (the Australian National University [ANU] give it a less powdery, more grounded feel, saying that it is probably named such “because it resembles the soil trampled by cattle in stockyards” [2017]), bulldust is the fine red dust stirred up in the Australian outback by the movements of “livestock” (or the massive vehicles that stack them, layer upon layer, to take them where?). The word, a colloquialism for “bullshit,” was first recorded as being used in the 1920s (ANU, 2017), and seems to fuse land and animal slaughter together. I have only experienced bulldust in images and now texts (specifically, Page, 2020), but in its settled form, I imagine it resembling an installation by Anish Kapoor involving pigment (https://anishkapoor.com), and in its “stirred up” form, a performance/installation by Cai Guo Qiang involving daytime fireworks (https://caiguoqiang.com). Contributing something sometimes camp to otherwise masculinised representations of the outback, but nonetheless still romanticised, and capturing bulldust’s more hazy visual qualities are the photographs of Håkan Ludwigson that were shot in the 1980s but only made public in 2015. (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/04/balls-and-bulldust-the-raw-1980s-photos-of-cattle-stations-that-time-almost-forgot). Note that Page explores representations of the outback (including those that are romanticised and/or masculinised) in the second chapter of Placemaking.

7 This quote appears just after Deleuze and Guattari have argued that “the book is not an image of the world [rather] it forms a rhizome with the world” and that “mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature” (p. 11). It follows that a book-review ought also do more than just “reflect” the book it is responding to.

8 But, in fact, the movements of the different impression-yielding-agencies (ram/kangaroo(withJoey?)/John/motorbike) also mark heterogeneity of time past as presumably they did not move through the place together.

9 See Jagodinski (2013) for a discussion on the time of Chronos and Aion that is very relevant to this discussion.