The first events in the Critical Kent series, exploring and building the ‘Topographies Project’ and involving academic staff from Kent Law School and Kent Law Clinic take place in Whitstable next week.
The Topographies Project launches on Monday 21 September with a daytime seminar and an evening of readings themed around the topic of ‘beaches’. A field trip will follow on Tuesday 22 September.
Anne Bottomley, Reader in Law at Property at Kent Law School, co-organiser of the two-day project launching the series said: ‘The seminar will include presentations which range from the contested space of beaches, including issues of access, through to the pleasures and dangers associated with ‘the beach,’ and the significance/s of this symbolic and actual threshold between land and sea.
‘In the evening there will be readings, performances and projections associated with beaches and the Kent coast line. On Tuesday there will be a field trip along the north Kent coast visiting sites through which the fragile history and contested future of the Thanet coast can be traced and explored. ‘
The Topographies Project brings together academics from a range of disciplines with artists (working within a broad range of media), and activists (involved across a range of key current issues) to explore and develop collaborative potential through site specific engagements.
Anne said: ‘Topographical exploration investigates symbolically charged landscapes, tracing, following and activating pathways between the ‘actual’ materiality of physical attributes, and the ‘virtual’ of the imaginary, those constructions in narrative and image which invest feature and place with significance. This is vibrant spatiality, a fleshy diagramming, in which we seek and build potential for productive beginnings in a new landscaping of emergent architectures found in and crafted from the once familiar now rendered strange.’
More details can be found on the Critical Kent blog with a limited number of spaces available for both the 21 and 22 September, please contact Anne Bottomley or Ben Hickman if you wish to attend either or both.
Further events themed around marshes, cliffs, estuaries and commons will take place in Kent on an annual basis.
Image credit: Nick Piska