Creative Geographies: experiential affinities in art-geography relations

Abstract

Characterized by reciprocal influences with artistic practices, creative geographies intend to explore innovative methodologies in Cultural Geography’s field. The essay has the objective of unraveling the ways by which the creative (re)turn in Geography can potentialize research practices for the contemporary geographer. To do so, bibliographical research and revision were employed alongside an approach with Merleau-Ponty’s existentialist phenomenology philosophical provocations. It has comprehended that the different ways of making and writing Geography in the context of its creative turn can bring new reaches to its study field. Innovations on research divulgation and ways of approaching subjects/objects are an important motivation for possibilities in the development of geographical science. Creative geographies are more than a passing tendency and can be a foundational route for contemporary Cultural Geography innovations.

Keywords:
Geography and art; Perception; Geopoetics; Innovative practices

Resumo

Caracterizadas por influências reciprocas com práticas artísticas, geografias criativas visam explorar metodologias inovativas no campo da Geografia Cultural. O ensaio objetiva desvelar de que maneiras o (re)torno criativo em Geografia pode potencializar as práticas de pesquisa do geógrafo contemporâneo. Para tanto, foi efetivada pesquisa e revisão bibliográfica, assim como uma aproximação com as provocações filosóficas da fenomenologia existencialista de Merleau-Ponty. Foi compreendido que os diferentes modos de fazer e escrever Geografia no contexto da virada criativa pode trazer novos alcances para o campo de estudos. Inovações na divulgação dos resultados e no modo de abordar sujeitos/objetos de pesquisa são uma motivação importante para possibilitar o desenvolvimento da ciência geográfica. Conclui-se que as geografias criativas são mais que uma tendência passageira e podem ser uma trilha fundante para inovações na Geografia Cultural contemporânea.

Palavras-chave:
Geografia e arte; Percepção; Geopoética; Praticas Inovadoras

INTRODUCTION

Recent developments in Cultural Geography, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, have pointed towards a relevant focus on the employment of creative and experimental research practices (WYLIE, 2010). This reverberates in how they explore questions concerning diverse themes, such as spatial perception, corporeality, gender and traditional communities (HAWKINS; STRAUGHAN, 2015).

To approach those questions, they pursue a geographical reconnection with artistic practices. Following on the steps of geographers like La Blache and Humboldt, who had interfaces with romanticism, current geographers make connections with contemporary art (HAWKINS, 2014). They seek to innovate or renovate when correlating research methodologies with performative, geopoetic or interventive/installation approaches (MAGRANE, 2015).

An approximation of artistic practice to geography’s disciplinary field also favors this recent convergence (VOLVEY, 2007). Artists in Land Art or Environmental Art movements, for instance, are concerned with ecological, cartographical or spatial issues (CASEY, 2005). Such mutual affinity encompasses intriguing possibilities for both areas.

The creative return in geography is tied to this active reciprocity. Theorized and idealized mainly by Hawkins (2011; 2012; 2014; 2015), this turn can be characterized by its focus on the intertwining at which artistic practice emerges as a research object or methodology (ESCHUN; MADGE, 2016). Geographers have been profoundly influenced by the arts when researching geographical realities concerned with emotive, experiential and corporeal issues (ROSE, 2016).

Creative geographies, as popularized by Hawkins (2014), intend to rethink how geographers tackle determined research problems. This perspective comprises both a creative form of comprehending geographical space and a creative manner of divulging research results.

As such, this essay aimed to unravel the creative (re)turn in geography and decipher how this movement can potentialize contemporary research practices. To do so, we conducted an extensive bibliographical revision concerning this field, with a focus on the origins and definitions of the creative turn in geography. We also explored how these practices can methodologically contribute to cultural geography. The bibliography was correspondingly interrelated to Merleau-Ponty’s (1960; 2011; 2012; 2013) existentialist phenomenology philosophical provocations to promote a discussion on art-geography relations.

CREATIVE (RE)TURN IN GEOGRAPHY

Methodologies that intend to connect active practices, such as action research or geo-ethnography, have been recurrent in cultural geography since the late 20^th century (ALMEIDA, 2013). However, in the first decade of the 2000’s, issues concerning sexuality, gender, performance, installation and other artistic expressions were gradually included as relevant research topics for this science (MAGRANE, 2015).

Especially in Anglo-Saxon countries (WYLIE, 2010), these research problems generated concerns that resulted in the necessity of new methodological practices. Methodologies developed in this field intend to respond to specificities inherent to contemporary themes of interest to those researchers.

According to Hawkins (2014, p.1) “the idea of creative geographies more broadly encompasses a range of different approaches and forms of creativity”. Its purpose is to explore multi and transdisciplinary possibilities of geographical studies. As the author contemplates, different forms of creativity are used as inspirations for wide-ranging approaches of research objects.

Hawkins (2015, p.248) highlights that “primary among the justifications for geography’s creative (re)turn is the potential of creative practices as a response to the discipline’s ongoing orientation towards embodied and practice-based doings”. That is to say that this turn is a gradual development that reacts to research tendencies that have been recently carried out by cultural geographers (ALMEIDA, 2013; HAWKINS, 2014; 2015; CRESSWELL, 2012; ROSE, 2016).

Those approximations with creative fields are situated in the sense of an inspiration for methodological constructions and art-geography studies. As the geographer explains:

Geography’s recent creative (re)turn has seen scholars across the discipline coming to embrace creative geographical methods - including visual art, image-making, creative writing, performance techniques - both as the means through which research can proceed and by which it can be communicated and presented (HAWKINS, 2015, p.248).

Synthetically, she indicates an ample possibility of experimental practices centered upon creative modes of thinking and doing geography. Eshun and Madge (2016, p.6) emphasize that “the creative (re)turn in geography has the potential to animate cultural geography, prising it open to a pluriversal perspective in which many worlds belong”. By expanding cultural geography’s practices, the creative turn can potentialize a multifaceted vision on diverse themes of interest in this research field.

Furthermore, as Wylie (2010, p.212) establishes, it intends to bring “cultural geography more clearly within the arts and humanities disciplines. I do believe that there are many possibilities for inter- and multi-disciplinary work and collaboration in these areas”. Partnerships with other disciplines that have similar study objects foster approaches that can potentialize methods centered on (inter)subjective and emotional perspectives.

In this respect, approximations with contemporary artistic practice open up the possibility of deciphering sensible spatialities of daily life. Tuan (1995, p.221) reinforces that “Art persuades us to attend to the ephemeral and the insignificant - to events, things, and people that pass us by as we pursue goals that seem to have permanence and that loom large in our perceptual fields”. The arts, as pointed out by the author, evoke social and spatial relations that are subjacent to their embodiment.

According to Marandola Jr. (2010, p.22, our translation) “geographies are inscribed in artistic manifestations in the same way as geographies were necessary to conceive them”. Implicit in the manner by which it manifests itself in the world, art’s geographicality accentuates sensible perspectives on human spatiality. Therefore, the creative (re)turn in geography can potentialize comprehensions of geographical experience and its microcosms.

Hawkins and Straughan (2015, p.213) point out that “exploration of arts practices have become a means to draw out considerations of surface textures as they are felt, as well as a site to think through environmental change at a micro-scale”. Geographers can identify environmental relations and perceptions when immerging in artworks. Environmental Art or Land Art movements, in particular, have installations that are fully integrated in determined landscapes and are latent in geographies to be studied (CASEY, 2005).

More than the place where a determined artwork is located, there are geographical intersections in its production and resignification. Volvey (2007, p.10, our translation) problematizes that “an art object is not only located in a place (or a locality), it is a place and, particularly when articulated with place, is an object-place”. This implies that the artwork itself creates a reflexive place by its contact with interacting subjects.

In the sense that an “artistic product that articulates some aspect of human spatiality is bound to articulate not just one feature having to do with space or place but, typically, several such dimensions” (RICHARDSON, 2015b, p.232), there is a fecund field to be explored by artistic-geographical studies. In creative geography’s proposal, the multiple spatial characteristics inherent to artworks have the potential to unravel geographical realities expressed by the artist’s gaze.

Installations such as Narcisus Garden, by Yaoi Kusama, and Folly (2005-2009), by Waleska Soares, present spatial questions that only make sense when immersed by a spectator. A walk inside the artwork changes one’s perspectives and compels hisperception to reflect upon the body-spatial relation at which it is engaged.

As Merleau-Ponty points out, what is unique in art “is that it contains, more than ideas, matrices of ideas” (MERLEAU-PONTY, 2012, p.157, our translation). The philosopher explains that artwork offers an active presence towards a perception that forms a sublimated existence (MERLEAU-PONTY, 2012). This characteristic indicates that it is a composition to be comprehended in its becoming.

Recognising this relational sense of art’s being is fundamental towards expanding the possibilities of understandings that can transcend positivistic or linear spatial comprehensions. Volvey contributes to this discussion when she emphasizes that “art must be recognized not only as a scientific methodology, but also as a horizon of spatial knowledge” (VOLVEY, 2014, p.3, our translation).

In creative geographies, one has to acknowledge that “artworks can offer us a rich means to destabilize Cartesian subjectivity, with its separable subjects and objects, in favour of a more intersubjective, relational way of understanding artwork and the world” (HAWKINS, 2011, p.473). Different worlds can be evocated by the relational potential inherent to this perspective.

Beyond objective perception, some geographies permeate atmospheric, circumstantial or affective experiences of difficult elucidation by traditional formal methodologies (MCCORMACK, 2015). According to Lorimer (2006, p.516) “cultural geographers have been urged to escape the perspectivist vision that locks their work into a formal and limiting representational logic, and to summon up more plentiful forms of life”. As the author proposes, recent attention to spatial phenomena concerning more-than-human entities compels a distinctive regard by cultural geography (LORIMER, 2014).

These themes seek to observe different intertwinements in human beings’ experiences with their environments. It aims to decipher body-spatial issues that are connected to intangibilities. They intend to create ways of deciphering the complexity of those spatial relations their diversity of scales, which also reflects the tenuity of “built” and “natural” distinctions.

Bauch’s (2015) Scapelore manifesto contains an innovative methodology that proposes to agglutinate landscape with folklore. Associated with creative practice, the methodology unravels convergences between landscape perceptions and their lived worlds. As the author points out: “geographers and other scholars need to adopt practices of artistic production-of fabrication-to further their own agenda of describing landscapes” (BAUCH, 2015, p.2).

Practices towards this emerging field strengthen the construction of specific modes of conducting multidisciplinary researches allied with artistic-scientific doing. As Hawkins summarizes:

The result has been the development of a threefold analytic framework for creative geographies, an analytic framework that suggests we should ask the following interrelated questions: What ‘work’ does art do in the world? What are the geographies of the artwork’s production and consumption? And, thirdly, how is it that we encounter artworks? (HAWKINS, 2014, p.237).

The first question posed by the author’s tripartite proposal aims to identify the manners by which artworks act in the world. This means striving to unravel how a determined artistic production materializes its spatialities. Be it through the creation of a place, as disserted in Volvey’s (2007) and Brady’s (2015) Land Art studies, or by conducting a biostratigraphy of artistic practice regarding disability, as in Macpherson (2015).

Understanding geographies of art consumption and production, i.e. its reception and elaboration, is deeply connected with the spatial-perceptive sense of the subject-artwork relation. This implies questioning: How are artworks experienced? How does the artist project a meaning that specializes itself in the world? To decipher these conditions, studies such as Biemann’s (2011) on video art production as a means towards a counter-geography of Sahara’s Desert and its peoples, or Modlin’s et al. (2018) on the absence-presence of slave memory at Plantations place-museums in the southern United States of America, recur to different approaches to situate spatial nexuses.

Hawkins (2014) last question concerns the different ways geographers encounter artworks. How do those interpenetrate the geographical gaze? In art-geography reciprocity, this means an effort into the exploration of tenue disciplinary limits and comprehending the forms by which artistic practice and geography can contribute with each other.

If artistic experience affects the corporeality of those that interact with it through research, it also provokes them towards how to describe and write about it. As Hawkins (2012, p.63) explains, there have been recurrent “expanded registers of geographical writing that deploy ‘creative-critical’ or ‘geopoetic’ modes to better respond to the experience and the theoretical fields under study”. Beyond only studying these subjects, they should also transform the geographical descriptions of those spaces.

Lévy pointed out this tendency in the late 20^th century when he suggested that: “it is comprehended that geopoetics do not speak of something other than of rocks, sand and flowers, of ice, sun and ruins, it speaks, thus, about the re-encounters of man with himself” (LÉVY, 1992, p.34, our translation). The concern about how to encounter art implicates in formulating geographical and poetic modes of approaching existential aspects of space.

Inherent to this process is the development of an adaptative capacity towards unravelling spatialities of the invisible and intangible. According to Bauch (2015, p.3), “artistic practice must meet cultural geography if relational ontology is to survive in its spatial manifestations”. Geopoetic writing or practice is one pathway towards this encounter.

The relational convergence about which the author disserts (BAUCH, 2015) express a necessity of making intersubjective elements emerge into research results. Magrane (2015) expresses that geopoetics are invitations to aesthetic experimentations that convey new meanings to geographical work. He summarizes that “geographers who employ creative geographies-and in this case, the use of poetry-should push each other to undertake and aspire to produce work that expands the boundaries of both geography and poetry” (MAGRANE, 2015, p.92).

More than a call to action for cultural geography, the creative return aims to maximize textual possibilities latent in this field. Rose (2016) situates that multiple narratives can be joined to collaborate in a writing that can evoke the different cosmos of each place. Geographers must also be part of the voices of interpreted spatialities.

To study a more-than-human, animal sense of place of reindeers and their relationship with herding, Lorimer (2006) employed metaphors and poetics in an essay between frontiers of traditional academic writing. In Homeland (Lorimer, 2014), geographies of a family home and its different memorial perspectives are revealed through a narrative that is close to that of a tale.

Couper (2017) framed the spatialities of subject-nature encounters following her own experience of travelling in a boat. By the corporeality of the contact, the authors’ geopoetic writing composes an account that puts scientific notions of geography in contact with aesthetic sensibilities. The immersive processes in her essay challenge binary notions of separation between humans and their environment.

Cresswell (2017) argues that places are inherently associated with elements that can hardly be reduced to an objective scale. Objects, meanings and practices are intertwined in ways that evoke another form of writing. In assuming a creative posture, the geographer (CRESSWELL, 2014) experiments with poetry to explain place dynamics.

It is also important to highlight the You are Here journal, annually published since 1998 by the School of Geography and Development at University of Arizona (YOU ARE HERE, 2018). It aims to explore the concept of place through experimental practices in geography, such as photography, poetry, imaginative cartography, essays and other creative expressions.

It is noticeable that there is a multiplicity of finished and ongoing studies that intend to collaborate toward a more creative form of doing geography. By employing active methodologies and approaches, it is possible to develop researches that follow through corporal and poetical experimentation on the dynamics of geographical reality.

Creative geographies understand that studies must be procedurally conducted in such a way that they can be open to the dense cosmos of experience. As Hawkins (2012, p.66) emphasizes, “creative geographies are often celebrated for challenging the spaces, strictures and structures of geographical knowledge-making”.

The researcher's engagement in identifying possibilities is the course through which creativity directs active practice. Artistic-scientific modes of research can respond to contemporary investigative problems. They are, thus, a provocation to extend the geographical gaze beyond disciplinary limits.

According to Wylie (2010, p.213) “creative cultural geographies might result in an enhanced ability to access and address wider reading, watching and listening publics”. Therefore, the creative (re)turn can be a fertile ground to collaborate with scientific communication and divulgation in this academic field. By entering spaces traditionally associated with artistic practices, geography can dialogue with other and new interested publics.

AFFECTIVE WEAVING - EXPERIENTIAL AFFINITIES

Art is a constant invitation to reflection. It has an expressive capacity that can connect different matrices of ideas. Artistic creation is an active possibility that is crystallized in the world through the emerging will by which a body-subject manifests a determined sensorial field (DUFOURCQ, 2012). Simultaneously, an artwork is a perpetual unfinished object fulfilled in the contact with a perceiving subject-spectator.

Richardson (2005a, p.11) expresses that “we appreciate both the plastic qualities of the imagined world and the plastic qualities of the work itself, and, at least in those cases where the work succeeds in its aims, we are moved by what we experience”. The contact with an artwork is a moving force that mobilizes the active center of a perceiver. As the author situates, subject-art relations emerge as a connection that generates another world (RICHARDSON, 2005b).

In this relationally created world, both entities reciprocally interpenetrate each other, artwork and person are indistinguishable in that specific instant. If, as proposes Merleau-Monty (2011, p.105, our translation), “looking an object is coming to inhabit it and from there learn all things according to the face they turn towards it”, it incurs that cohabiting between subject and art is a point of contact.

The sensible subject completes an artwork when he or she is touched by it. By his or her perception and imagination, it gains a new meaning and a place. It is spatialized by the active consciousness that attributes it to a crystallization in that specific moment. According to Merleau-Ponty (1960, p.83, our translation):

The finalized artwork is, thus, not that which exists in itself as a thing, but that which is encountered by its spectator, that invites him to return its creative gesture and, beyond its intermediaries, without another guide other than a movement of an invented line, an almost incorporeal trace, makes it join this silent world, now professed and accessible.

Be it a painting, installation or performance, artworks are a persistent creative becoming. Every artwork has its life before a spectator that transcends the original intentionality of the artist that conceived it. As discussed by the philosopher (MERLEAU-PONTY, 1960), artworks are permeated with gaps that gain meaning through the active circuit of perception.

In a geographical perspective, this reverberates in Hawkins (2011, p.472) statement that “what becomes clear is the need, as geographers, to explore not only art as a ‘finished’ object, but also to think about artworks as ensembles of practices, artefacts, performances and experiences”. To creative geographies, thinking artistically means comprehending art as a process. The methodological plasticity of this turn is tied to how embodied experience acts in the world.

Dufourcq, based on Merleau-Ponty’s writings, argues that “the poetic profundity is engaged in an unending play on the diversity of viewpoints” (DUFOURCQ, 2012, p.331, our translation). It is this plastic capacity of multiple superposing meanings that holds a latent potential in poetics towards engaging with art’s microcosms of signification.

The poetic-creative expressions produce tensions in conceived reality and show fissures on the linear ways of comprehending a given thing. Merleau-Ponty (2013, p.45, our translation) ponders that “art is not a construction, artifice, industrious relation to an outside world or space. It is really the ‘unarticulated cry’.”. Each perceptive contact creates a world that is possible through a procedurally articulated expressive activity.

As an experiential nucleus, the artwork puts forward multiple potentialities for each immersed subject. Each time a person interacts with the artwork, there is something new or different to be explored. According to the philosopher,

A romance, poem, painting, musical piece are individuals, that is to say, beings at which one cannot distinguish expression from expressed, from which meaning is only accessible through a direct contact, and that irradiate its signification without abandoning their temporal and spatial place. (MERLEAU-PONTY, 2011, p.201, our translation).

In this perspective, each sensibility inherent to a determined artistic creation exists as a permanent transcendence of its own expressive phenomenon. Each artwork consubstantiates a world to be inhabited and deciphered. There is no finished perception of an artwork, but a perpetual relational potential (MERLEAU-PONTY, 2012).

Kaushik (2011, p.9) explains that “there is a sense for Merleau-Ponty in which the art object itself bears a meaning-giving expressivity such that it has its own temporal and spatial aspects composing its own world”. In creative geographies, art-geography research must have the capacity of unveiling artworks’ worlds and of generating worlds through artistic practices.

This contact is only possible due to artworks being more than an intangible in-itself, but a complex coordination of materialized intangible phenomena. As Ramírez (2010, p.57) situates “art is a creation of reality, what art does is create, and what it creates is something real”. Dynamizing a geographical poiésis implies in potentializing the act of researching as something that creates an effect in the world.

For the creative (re)turn in geography, points out Hawkins (2014, p.11), “art does not, or does not only, mean or represent; it produces, it circulates the world, independent of its makers, with singular powers and properties”. Similar to what Merleau-Ponty (2011), Ramírez (2010) and Dufourcq (2012) propose, the artistic attention towards poiésis, that which is created by art’s active force, is the crux of the matter.

More than something to be contemplated “art is not imitation, nor is it something manufactured according to desires of instinct or good taste. It is a process of expression” (MERLEAU-PONTY, 2013, p.137, our translation). Through the creative externalization crystalized in the world, art composes a particular and multifaceted way of exposing intersubjective spatial experience. Different forms by which subjects encounter and make their places can be engaged with artistic-geographic modes of thinking.

Hawkins (2011, p.473) states that “thinking and writing about art, and making art, can offer an interesting way to approach the study of our embodied experiences of the world”. Thinking, writing and doing geography artistically is an opportunity to decipher affective weavings subjacent to human spatiality. In the case of her performative research on a community alongside an artist, the previously cited geographer (2015) accomplished a mean of conducting research that coincided with inhabitant place-making for those that lived there.

Proposals such as this can have an effective impact on geographical realities of social subjects and groups. According to Wylie (2010, p.213), this approach facilitates “conceptualizing and practicing cultural geography as performance; as creative writing, as photography and video, as site-specific art, as different forms of mapping and diagramming”. Towards this effort, it is necessary to be open to draw, illustrate, sketch, make croquis and poetize. In creative fieldwork, the experience must guide the gaze through the affective weavings that catch the researcher’s sensibility.

Hawkins (2014, p.188) proposes that “if ‘experiencing’ art enables us to attend to ideas of space and the body’s empowerment and entrainment within space, we can also consider how the act of ‘making’ art can accomplish similar conceptual work”. Art can, more than expand, create other spatialities that have potential towards creative encounters with sensible and affective aspects of geographical reality.

Situating artistic doings as a methodological possibility in cultural geography opens possibilities to include geographical-artistic works to be included in geographer’s practice. These creations might favor texts that use concrete poetry or imaginative maps to explain determined spatial phenomena. Artistic abilities have much to contribute with research conduction in this discipline.

Body-subject centered narratives and practices have to take into consideration an active-affective contact with the world. In Marandola Jr.’s (2016, p.145, our translation) perspective, this means that “the path I envision in the pursuit of a phenomenological writing, especially in geography’s context, is of a text that is close to mundanity, that is, with geographicality itself”. To seek the ordinary, which is implicit at intangibilities of life’s geography, it is necessary to employ forms of writing that can encompass this dimension.

It is essential to bring narratives situated in poetic-literary fields to the center to encompass spaces of everyday life. It is fundamental to build connections between metaphors and concepts to describe and analyze these places. Through poetic images, one can envision spatial situations that deal with affective, perceptive and embodied bonds present in studied realities.

Gratão provokes the geographer when alerting that it is necessary “to have an experiential and lively (un)veiling that (de)ciphers ‘things in themselves’ in existential spaces. An act of geographical (ad)venture that challenges traces of geography’s formal pathways” (GRATÃO, 2010, p.313, our translation). Making this journey through existence’s non-formal geographies by creative means demands building new modes of gazing keen to experience other worlds.

More-than-human places, as those that Lorimer (2006) studied, can only be experienced by immersion into another way of being-in-the-world. Hawkins and Straughan (2015, p.23) state that:

art thus has come to be appreciated its capacity to engage us with things and experiences beyond the human body’s ability to actually sense or experience them, in short, opening us up to the nonhuman and other human worlds beyond ourselves.

The opening proposed by the authors (LORIMER, 2014; HAWKINS; STRAUGHAN, 2015) demands a corporeal contact that engages environmental phenomena with their geographical meaning.

Artworks concerned with this problematic are recurring since the late 20^th century (CASEY, 2005) and can collaborate with geographers’ reflection. According to Casey (2005), amongst artists that take primary inspiration in their earthly engagement “their task is to move with(in) matter itself-to move in its terms, to follow its terrain” (CASEY, 2005, p.98). Dealing with the diverse intertwining of human and natural cosmos, they display paths through which geography can also tread.

Artworks such as Ilha Brasílis, by Denise Milan, or Raios da Manhã (com leito de rio) para São Paulo, by Yoko Ono, reinforce telluric-environmental conditions of dwelling. Both installations made with mineral materials and natural analogies show evidence of implicit geographies wove through their synergic subject-environment unicity.

Addressing topics like climate change or anthropic impacts in natural cycles, artists have been creating rich connections to geographical discussion. Approaching artworks that concern those themes can collaborate towards creating other means for geographers to achieve public sensibilization on critical spatial reflection.

Those artworks invite the geographer’s gaze to be renovated in their investigation of affect and geographical reality. Research practice must let itself be inhabited by the creative impulse. When touched by a perceptive relation with an artwork, the geographer-researcher can pursue more than a representational-intentional meaning. Through the experience of this contact, the perceiving subject identifies other subjacent significations.

If, as Merleau-Ponty (2011, p.66) disserts, “perception is exactly this act that creates with just one stroke, with a data constellation, their unifying meaning - which not only discovers their sense, but also creates their signification”, it is the body-consciousness active capacity that is united with the place in the artwork’s heart. Thresholds between observer and art-spaces become tenue frontiers.

Based on Merleau-Ponty, Kaushik (2011, p.62) argues that “the work of art, in other words, brings into existence the hitherto unexpressed unthematic and implicit meaning of things”. In expressing what looks inexpressible, art can compose affective weavings that are built while in contact with a given subject. The geographer, as a being with a sensible body, can immerge into these artworks to comprehend existential spaces. Simultaneously, he can also make other works of art emerge as a form of describing, writing or discovering geographical realities of invisibility and intangibility.

Almeida (2013, p.49, our translation) states that “to penetrate the invisible, making visible the invisible, looked like an ability reserved to poetry, painting, sculpture, etc. Geography, however, has also demonstrated possessing this gift”. Experiential affinities with art are a fundament that can transform the geographer’s work into creative practice. To unveil the intangible, one must find ways of doing and creating that can touch those involved in the research process as much as those that seek its results.

According to Hawkins (2014, p.12), “art has the potential to transform the field on which it is working, creating the possibilities for different kinds of subjects, knowledge, and worlds”. Seeking other geographical voices is fundamental to the conception of a geography that can undertake studies on the more-than-human and existential conditions of earthly being-in-the-world.

It is important to achieve modes of expressing the affective and experiential weavings. A language closer to existential narratives that flow through conditions of life and geographical reality might expose the entrails of beings and places. Art is one pathway towards a dynamic geography that is open to being intertwined and inhabited by Earth’s becoming.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The creative (re)turn in geography presents a fertile possibility for this discipline’s renovation in the early 21^st century. Its approaches indicate paths to be followed through a gaze that seeks to capture affective weavings that permeate lived worlds. It incites cultural geographers to reposition their conceptions of doing science.

Contemporary artworks, especially in Land Art and Environmental Art movements, concern themes convergent to geographical interests. Approximations in both fields indicate that there is common interest that can be explored by geographers and artists seeking to promote reflections on environmental situations, place and spatial perception.

Art-geography encounters have important areas of reciprocity that can result in inter-influences and mutual collaboration. Active methodologies centered on experiences of artistic making or immersion contribute to creative ways of conducting research. Geopoetic writing, illustration or performance make possible to find other narratives that contribute towards the decipherment of multiple geographical realities.

There is still the challenge of finding a geopoetic writing that has the evocative capacity to express the subject’s spatial experiences. Being-in-the-world and earth-dwelling conditions might be deciphered and described as to transcend art and science frontiers. Thus, geographers occupy an immersive center of innovative and dynamic practices.

To become more than just a popular tendency that fades in the next years, it is necessary to conduct a permanent reflection on creative geographies. Its practices, even if expansive by their own nature, must align to theoretical studies in order to give substance to its investigations.

Cultural geographies of the 21^st century have much to learn by multifaceted and creative approaches. As research themes progressively challenge the geographical gaze towards new practices, it is necessary to provoke its doings and writings seeking answers to the contemporary world.

REFERENCES

• ALMEIDA, M. G. A propósito do Trato do Invisível, do Intangível e do discurso na Geografia Cultural. Revista da ANPEGE, v. 9, n. 11, p. 41-50, 2013. https://doi.org/10.5418/RA2013.0911.0004
  » https://doi.org/10.5418/RA2013.0911.0004
• BAUCH, N. A Scapelore manifesto: Creative geographical practice in a Mythless Age. GeoHumanities, v.1, n.1, 2015, p.1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1069716
  » https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1069716
• BIEMANN, U. Counter-geographies in the Sahara. In: DEAR, M.; Et. Al. (Orgs.) Geohumanities: Art, history, text at the edge of place. London: Routledge, 2011, p.162-172.
• BRADY, E. Aesthetic regard for nature in Environmental and Land Art. In: HAWKINS, H.; STRAUGHAN, E. (Orgs) Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining space, staging encounters. Ashgate: Surrey, 2015, p.197-210.
• CASEY, E. Earth-Mapping: artists reshaping landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
• COUPER, P. R. The embodied spatialities of being in nature: encountering the nature/culture binary in green/blue space. Cultural Geographies, v.25, n.2, p.285-299, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474017732978
  » https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474017732978
• CRESSWELL, T. Geographies of poetry/poetries of geography. Cultural Geographies, v.21, n.1, p.141-146, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474012466117
  » https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474012466117
• CRESSWELL, T. Towards Topopoetics: Space, place and the poem. In: JANZ, B. B. (Org.) Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham: Springer, 2017, p.319-332. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_23
  » https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_23
• DUFOURCQ, A. Merleau-Ponty : Une ontologie de l’imaginaire. New York: Springer, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1975-0
  » https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1975-0
• ESHUN, G.; MADGE, C. Poetic world-writing in a pluriversal world: a provocation to the creative (re)turn in geography. Social & Cultural Geography. V.7, n. 3, p.1-9, 2016.
• GRATÃO, L. H. B. Por entre becos & versos - a poética da cidade vi(vi)da de Cora Coralina. IN: MARANDOLA JR, E.; GRATÃO, L. H. B. (Orgs.) Geografia e Literatura: ensaios sobre geograficidade, poética e imaginação. Londrina: EDUEL, 2010, pp.297-328.
• HAWKINS, H. Dialogues and Doings: Sketching the Relationships between Geography and Art. Geography compass. V. 5, n.7, p.464-478, 2011.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17498198.2011.00429.x
  » https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17498198.2011.00429.x
• HAWKINS, H. Geography and art. An Expanding field: Site, the body and practice. Progress in human geography. V.37, n. 1, p.52-71, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132512442865
  » https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132512442865
• HAWKINS, H. For creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. Routledge: London, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014530961
  » https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014530961
• HAWKINS, H. Creative geographic methods: knowing, representing, intervening: on composing place and page. Cultural Geographies, v.22, n.2, p.247-268, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015569995
  » https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015569995
• HAWKINS, H.; STRAUGHAN, E. Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining space, staging encounters. Ashgate: Surrey, 2015. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315584355
  » https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315584355
• KAUSHIK, R. Art and Institution: Aesthetics in the Late Works of Merleau-Ponty. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011.
• LÉVY, B. L’empreinte et le déchiffrement : géopoétique et géographie humaniste. Cahiers de géopoétique, v.1, p.27-35, 1992.
• LORIMER, H. Herding memories of humans and animals. Environment and Planning D: Society and space. v. 24, n.1, p.497-518, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1068/d381t
  » https://doi.org/10.1068/d381t
• LORIMER, H. Homeland. Cultural Geographies, v.21, n.4, p.583-604, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014547335
  » https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014547335
• MAGRANE, E. Situating Geopoetics. GeoHumanities, v.1, n.1, p.86-102, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1071674
  » https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1071674
• MARANDOLA JR, E. J. Humanismo e arte para uma geografia do conhecimento. Geosul, v. 25, n.49, p.7-26, 2010. https://doi.org/10.5007/21775230.2010v25n49p7
  » https://doi.org/10.5007/21775230.2010v25n49p7
• MARANDOLA JR, E. J. O imperativo estético vocativo na escrita fenomenológica. Revista da Abordagem Gestáltica. v. 22, n.2, p.140-147, 2016. https://doi.org/10.18065/RAG.2016v22n2.4
  » https://doi.org/10.18065/RAG.2016v22n2.4
• MCCORMACK, D. Devices for doing atmospheric things. In: VANINI, P. (org.) Non-representational methodologies. London: Routledge, 2015, p.89-111.
• MCPHERSON, H. Biostratigraphy and Disability Art: An introduction to the Work of Jon Adams. In: HAWKINS, H.; STRAUGHAN, E. (Orgs.) Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining space, staging encounters. Ashgate: Surrey, 2015, p.165-180.
• MERLEAU-PONTY, M. Signes. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.
• MERLEAU-PONTY, M. Fenomenologia da percepção. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2011.
• MERLEAU-PONTY, M. A prosa do mundo. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2012.
• MERLEAU-PONTY, M. O olho e o espírito. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2013.
• MODLIN, E. A., Et. Al. Can plantation museums do full justice to the story of the enslaved? A discussion of problems, possibilities, and the place of memory. GeoHumanities, v.4, n.2, p.335-359, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2018.1486723
  » https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2018.1486723
• RAMÍREZ, M. T. Creativity. In: SEPP, H. R.; EMBREE, L. (Orgs.) Handbook of phenomenological aesthetics. London: Springer Science+Bussiness Media, 2010, pp.57-61.
• RICHARDSON, B. The “spatio-cultural dimension”: overview and a proposed framework. In: RICHARDSON, B. (Org.) Spatiality and symbolic expression: on the links between Place and Culture. New York: Paulgrave macmillian, 2015a, p.1-20. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488510_1
  » https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488510_1
• RICHARDSON, B. Symbol, situatedness, and the individuality of literary space. In: RICHARDSON, B. (Org.) Spatiality and symbolic expression: on the links between Place and Culture. New York: Paulgrave macmillian, 2015b, p.21-40. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488510_3
  » https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488510_3
• ROSE, M. A place for other stories: Authorship and evidence in Experimental Times. GeoHumanities, v. 2, n.1, p.132-148, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2016.1157031
  » https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2016.1157031
• TUAN, Y. Passing strange and wonderful: aesthetics, nature and culture. New York: Island Press, 1995. https://doi.org/10.2307/432053
  » https://doi.org/10.2307/432053
• VOLVEY, A. Land Arts : Les fabriques spatiales de l’art contemporain. Travaux de l’Institut de Géographie de Reims, v.129, n.1, p.3-25, 2007. https://doi.org/10.3406/tigr.2007.1527
  » https://doi.org/10.3406/tigr.2007.1527
• VOLVEY, A. Entre l’art et la géographie, une question (d’)esthétique. Belgeo, v.3, p.1-25, 2014. https://doi.org/10.4000/belgeo.13258
  » https://doi.org/10.4000/belgeo.13258
• YOU ARE HERE. Tucson: University of Arizona. 1998-Anual. Eletrônica, disponível em <http://www.youareheregeography.com/>; acesso em 10 de janeiro de 2018.
  » http://www.youareheregeography.com
• WYLIE, J. Cultural geographies of the future, or looking rosy and feeling blue. Cultural Geographies. v.17, n.2, p.211-217, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474010363852
  » https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474010363852

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 Jan 2022
• Date of issue
  2020

History

• Received
  07 Mar 2019
• Accepted
  17 June 2020