The bones beneath the streets: drifting through London’s Quaternary

Abstract

<jats:p> This article reflects on a Situationist dérive in Central London, which mobilised a creative engagement with the city’s Quaternary history (the last 2.6 million years). The aim was to animate paleoecological knowledge in the resistant, opaque and frenetic environment of a dense urban centre. This brief excursion into an alternative London is offered as a model for contemporary drifting that stretches out beyond our immediate situation to connect to successive geological and biological strata, reframing experiences of the urban environment through shifting scales and chronologies. The Situationists had declared ‘sous les pavés, la plage!’ (under the paving stones, there is a beach!), evoking the playful space of possibility behind the veneer of the city’s systems and structures. This drift aimed to search even deeper, encountering spectral inhabitations revealed by the bones beneath the streets. The article argues that uncovering these hidden ecologies has the potential to counter the urban prevalence of spectacular representations of wildlife and develop an eco-politics of co-existence. </jats:p>

Cultural Geography I: Mediums

“…Indeed, such practices can be found within participatory geographies, political, economic and social geographies and even physical geography (principally geomorphology) (see e.g. Brickell et al, 2019; Flintham and Williams, 2015; Hall and Springer, 2017; Overend et al, 2020; Pain et al, 2019; Tooth et al, 2016). Perhaps marking the growing volume and maturity of these relations, cultural geographers have been increasing calling for critical thinking on these creative practice relations.…”

“…For others however, it is the histories and theories of the mediums themselves that offer the purchase point for discussion. A good example here is the account offered of their London-based project Quaternary Drift by collaborators David Overend (performance artist), Jamie Lorimer (cultural geographer) and Danielle Schreve (physical geographer) (2020). Their practice and their account of it repurposes the legacy of the 20th-century avant-garde walking practice, the Situationist Drift.…”

“…Their practice and their account of it repurposes the legacy of the 20th-century avant-garde walking practice, the Situationist Drift. As such, the critical force of this medium is reoriented from its origin as a critique of capitalism, towards being an ‘experimental encounter with deep time and its non-human inhabitants’ (2020: 454). Their performative ‘eco-politics of coexistence’ (2020: 474) is made present on the page in pictures of tiny clay elephants on city streets, laminated woolly mammoths (animal relics and icons) geographers wearing hippo masks and abstract images of river terraces and moss (Deleuzian diagrams and scale-shifting devices).…”

“…As such, the critical force of this medium is reoriented from its origin as a critique of capitalism, towards being an ‘experimental encounter with deep time and its non-human inhabitants’ (2020: 454). Their performative ‘eco-politics of coexistence’ (2020: 474) is made present on the page in pictures of tiny clay elephants on city streets, laminated woolly mammoths (animal relics and icons) geographers wearing hippo masks and abstract images of river terraces and moss (Deleuzian diagrams and scale-shifting devices). The artfulness of this article lies in its meshing of histories and theories of an artistic medium and its critical force with Quaternary Science and cultural geographies of the non-human and urban natures – beneath the cobbles, the bones.…”

Hunting ghosts: on spectacles of spectrality and the trophy animal

“…David Overend, Jamie Lorimer, and Danielle Schreve evoke the writings of Debord to animate the urban wildness of deep-time, noting that 'Debord refuted accusations of "presentism", emphasising the temporal continuity of the situation'. 38 Situations can be seen as the temporally contingent embodied experiences that disassemble the spectacular, cutting against Debord's notion of 'spectacular time' in which 'dead labour continues to dominate living labour' and 'the past dominates the present'. 39 In the sense that they belong neither wholly to the past or present, then, spectacles and spectres are alike.…”