Jonathan Montgomery Lettmann

"Out of Place, in Place"

Section MS12, Riccardo Badano

Keywords: borders, book, indigenous, environment

Out of Place, In Place provides an understanding of “landscape” as a medium of interaction between humans and the environment, the inhabitation of a territory subsequently as a process of identity formation and knowledge formulation. The notion of displacement in place refers to communities stranded within landscapes, dispossessed from their environmental and cultural textures, unable to access their knowledge. Contextualised within the ongoing crude oil exploitation of the territory of the indigenous Huaorani population in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the project engages with printing and scanning techniques to explore the effects of oil extraction on the landscape and to juxtapose indigenous hunting methods as regenerative ways of interacting with the environment. Thus, the sedimentation of the printing process becomes a translation of the continuing effects of oil extraction. At the same time, the accompanying text provides a verbal cartography similar to indigenous storytelling, challenging the reader's perception and visualisation of the landscape.