03 Mar Can a place learn?

‘The question of whether a place can learn requires keeping the subject who learns, but proposes another realm of capacity, the relational field, which is intangible, but not abstract.

The question draws attention, too, towards site-based performance that is concerned with environmental change, with place, with the chiasmus of the human and the other-than-human. The question’s heuristic value opens up considerations of how the human performs aesthetically in a life world that has processes and desires outwith and affected by those of the human. How would one perform with a valley, a city edge, a stretch of estuary, a sculpted park if one could recognise or enter that meso-zone of learning, however transient or ill-defined it might be?’

key words: Gregory Bateson, Arne Naess, Jakob von Uexküll

in Performance Research (2012) 17:4, pp 120-127.