# data[].attributes.body
https://bahrainpavilion.bh/exhibition/reclaim

# data[].attributes.headline
bahrain wins golden lion for best national pavilion at venice biennale

# data[].attributes.subject
bahrain wins golden lion for best national pavilion at venice biennale

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.designboom.com/architecture/bahrain-wins-golden-lion-for-best-national-pavilion-at-venice-biennale/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Reclaiming Artistic Research - Expanded Second Edition (2024) explores artistic research in dialogue with 24 artists worldwide and embraces artists' dynamic engagement with other fields. Reclaiming the term "artistic research" from its academic associations, the book foregrounds the material, spatial, embodied, organizational, choreographic, and technological ways of knowing and unknowing specific to contemporary artistic inquiry. Through in-depth dialogues, the book seeks to articulate the dynamic nature of artistic thinking in practice, tracing how ideas and forms co-emerge through material, conceptual and embodied ways of working.

The second expanded edition of this acclaimed book features four new artist dialogues and a new essay by Lucy Cotter entitled "Artistic Research in a World on Fire" that reflects on the changing stakes of artistic research in the wake of the global pandemic, a widespread reckoning with social justice and equity, the growing role of artificial intelligence, and the urgent reality of climate change. Foregrounding art's engagement with multiple fields, Reclaiming Artistic Research manifests how artists produce new paradigms and questions, rather than supplementing existing (academic) knowledge.

The book embraces contemporary art's multisensory modes of witnessing and highlights how artists' gathering and creation of material, textual, and embodied sources of knowledge can support the decolonization of knowledge, the centering of Indigenous ways of knowing, and the creation of greater accessibility to knowledge. Through radical archival interventions and oral-material creations, many featured artists find ways to manifest and engage with the fragmentation and dispersal of human histories in ways that the discipline of history struggles (and often fails) to do. This matters in a world in which marginalized peoples, enslaved and disappeared peoples, and those who have faced forced migrations, genocide, and extinction seek to claim their own histories and trajectories.

Several artists in Reclaiming Artistic Research engage the ethical and social repercussions of emerging technologies in provocative and publicly accessible ways. The dialogues offer insight into artists' intimate relationship with media, which encompasses the ability to repurpose existing technologies for critical and unforeseen possibilities. Building on the book's original twenty dialogues with artists worldwide, the new dialogues engage with US-based artists Stephanie Dinkins, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Yo-Yo Lin, and Richard Mosse, whose practices attend to questions of human and nonhuman survival, self-care, and collective care, new technologies, and the unlearning of ableist, gendered, sexist, and racist paradigms.

Cannupa Hanska Luger's ongoing Future Ancestral Technologies project imagines past the exodus of the wealthy to other planets to consider adaptations necessary for the future survival of Earth. Stephanie Dinkins's interactive and immersive works create models for reorienting AI and emerging technologies toward social benefit, equity, and collective care. Richard Mosse's recent film Broken Spectre repurposes multispectral technologies and UV microscopy photography to create one of the most extensive documents of the Amazon rainforest destruction in existence. Yo-Yo Lin leans into transcultural and queer imaginaries around the body, incorporating chronic pain, illness, and disability to co-shape expanded forms of collective knowledge.

Dialogues with:

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Katayoun Arian

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Stephanie Dinkins

Sher Doruff

Em'kal Eyongakpa

Ryan Gander

Mario García Torres

Liam Gillick

Natasha Ginwala

Cannupa Hanska Luger

Sky Hopinka

Manuela Infante

Euridice Zaituna Kala

Grada Kilomba

Yo-Yo Lin

Sarat Maharaj

Emma Moore

Richard Mosse

Rabih Mroué

Christian Nyampeta

Yuri Pattison

Falke Pisano

Sarah Rifky

Samson Young

Katarina Zdjelar

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Reclaiming Artistic Research – Expanded Second Edition (2024) explores artistic research in dialogue with 24 artists worldwide and embraces artists’ dynamic engagement with other fields. Reclaiming the term “artistic research” from its academic associations, the book foregrounds the material, spatial, embodied, organizational, choreographic, and technological ways of knowing and unknowing specific to contemporary artistic inquiry. Through in-depth dialogues, the book seeks to articulate the dynamic nature of artistic thinking in practice, tracing how ideas and forms co-emerge through material, conceptual and embodied ways of working.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
https://www.hatjecantz.de/reclaiming-artistic-research-7621-1.html>

Contributors: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Katayon Arian, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Sher Doruff, Em'kal Eyongakpa, Ryan Gander, Liam Gillick, Natasha Ginwala, Sky Hopinka, Manuela Infante, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Grada Kilomba, Sarat Maharaj, Emma Moore, Rabih Mroué, Christian Nyampeta, Yuri Pattison, Falke Pisano, Sarah Rifky, Samson Young, Katarina Zdjelar

identifies as a Native from the Ho Chunk Nation, uses moving image, sound, performance, spoken and written language to explore notions of native identity and a sense of "neomythology". His practice examines the transversal movement between ritual, contemporary poetry performance and film towards spaces of abstraction. He uses tools such as the International Phonetic Alphabet to transliterate and thereby other the Hocąk language to, not only open up new spaces for poetry, but also examine myth and mythmaking and their utility in the formation of the contemporary tribe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Review of Lucy Cotter (ed.) "Reclaiming Artistic Research"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
https://www.hatjecantz.de/reclaiming-artistic-research-7621-1.html> Contributors: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Katayon Arian, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Sher Doruff, Em'kal Eyongakpa, Ryan Gander, Liam Gillick, Natasha Ginwala, Sky Hopinka, Manuela Infante, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Grada Kilomba, Sarat Maharaj, Emma Moore, Rabih Mroué, Christian Nyampeta, Yuri Pattison, Falke Pisano, Sarah Rifky, Samson Young, Katarina Zdjelar identifies as a Native from the Ho Chunk Nation, uses moving image, sound, performance, spoken and written language to explore notions of native identity and a sense of "neomythology".

# data[].attributes.headline
Mock Funeral for Venice Dramatizes Flight of Residents From City’s Heart

# data[].attributes.subject
Mock Funeral for Venice Dramatizes Flight of Residents From City’s Heart

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mock Funeral for Venice Dramatizes Flight of Residents From City’s Heart (Published 2009)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Part photo opportunity, part political theater, the spectacle was meant to protest the fact that thousands of residents are being pushed to the mainland.

# data[].attributes.headline
OSPEDALE AL MARE: AN ABANDONED HOSPITAL IN VENICE

# data[].attributes.subject
OSPEDALE AL MARE: AN ABANDONED HOSPITAL IN VENICE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Ospedale al Mare (" Hospital of the Sea") is located on the island of Lido in Venice, Italy. It opened in 1868 and was once used mainly as a tuberculosis treatment center, offering alternative treatments such as heliotherapy and hydrotherapy, which went along perfectly with its beach-side location. In 2003 the hospital was closed down, and over a decade later, the site still remains (source: something-interesting.com).

During the summer of 2016, a fellow traveler I met told me about this place. He had actually been living there for months, as the buildings are now used as squatter housing. It was an absolute pleasure to meander through the halls. There is still some medical equipment left, which gives the site an eerie feel. Artists have claimed entire rooms as their canvas. Some have created sculptures with the remaining materials, others have added murals and graffiti.

If you happen to visit, make sure to allow an entire day to explore! I arrived a bit too late in the afternoon and so what you see here is just a glimpse of the many buildings. There is apparently a concert hall and a chapel which are difficult to enter, but quite the visual feat for those who figure it out!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ospedale al Mare: An Abandoned Hospital in Venice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Ospedale al Mare ("Hospital of the Sea") is located on the island of Lido in Venice, Italy. It opened in 1868 and was once used mainly as a tuberculosis treatment center, offering alternative treatments such as heliotherapy and hydrotherapy, which went along perfectly with its beach-side location.

# data[].attributes.body
Debris of history matters of memory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The 2023 edition of the International Exhibition of Architecture at the Venice Biennale welcomed an arcane spectrum of practices to stretch the definitions of architecture and architectural practice. In this interview, Sammy Baloji, Gloria Cabral and Cécile Fromont discuss the reframing of detritus and the arguments for retaining a 'presence of the past' in contemporary construction.

This interview is part of KoozArch's focus dedicated to Biennale Architettura 2023 - 18th International Architecture Exhibition The Laboratory of the Future, curated by Lesley Lokko and organised by La Biennale di Venezia. The International Exhibition is open in Venice from May 20 to November 26.
KOOZ In her statement for this year's Biennale, Lesley Lokko states how she sees the exhibition as "a laboratory where architects and practitioners across an expanded field of creative disciplines [...] imagining for themselves what the future can hold". Your participation in theexhibition - Debris of History, Matters of Memory -focuses on the catastrophe of the deadly and destructive collapse of a dam in Bramudinho,a South American mining town. What prompted the project as a response to Lokko's invite? How does it weave together the geographies of Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo, both poles to which your project is tied?
SAMMY BALOJI | GLORIA CABRAL | CÉCILE FROMONT The project began with an encounter between the three of us: Gloria, Cécile, and Sammy. Gloria had an ongoing research project about bricks made from industrial waste in Brazil, conceiving a closed-cycle production mode that uses industrial and agricultural waste as primary material. For example, it is possible to produce bricks that are up to 20% rice husk. This manner of considering material that harnesses the possibility of debris as a resource resonated with Sammy's and Cécile's work, about the role of history in shaping the present and future of contemporary societies.

In his artistic practice, Sammy has unfolded a reflection on the historical and social resonance of materials from the colonial era. His public art installation in Antwerp, The Long Hand, used bricks made from Belgian mining residue, marking the maritime gateway through which commodities and people traveled between Belgium and its colony of Congo in the 19th and 20th century. Here, waste is historical in nature, coming directly and indirectly from the colonial exploitation of Congo that allowed for the industrial development of Belgium.

That Brazil, Congo, and Europe have been intimately connected for centuries through the slave trade and colonialism and continue to be entangled today has been a core thread in Cécile's scholarship as an art historian. The catastrophic events of Brumadinho were a recent and striking example of the critical and contemporary stakes of this common reflection. We thus became interested in thinking further and together about the colonial and post-colonial transatlantic exploitation that have linked these geographies historically and materially. We set off to imagine a visual and architectural form that could transform material and historical debris into a structure that looks from the present into the future. A key dimension of the work is the way in which the transformation of debris into structure can mobilise Indigenous Brazilian and central African motifs and their underlying systems of knowledge.

Image: Gloria Cabral.
KOOZ The installation consists of a multimedia installation, constructed out of debris and bricks made of mining waste from Congo's former metropolis. Has anything changed since the catastrophic events of 2019? How does the intervention seek to renew international attention towards the dangers and toll of mining and rare mineral extraction - on both the environment and in terms of human labour?
SB| GC | CF Gloria's practice has demonstrated that it is critical to think about how to build today and in the future without creating more waste, but instead that one may reinvent extant structures and remobilise materials that are already in use. Transformation, rather than production, is key here. In our conversations, the idea of alchemy came to the fore. Historically, alchemy has meant turning disparate elements into gold. Here, it served as an inspiration for our structure, in which foraged bricks and glass - material fragments which often hold a violent or sinister past - become a strong, free-standing, brilliant, jewel-like structure.

There are trends in architecture, such as eco-certification, that effectively make few demands on builders and which ultimately have little impact on the natural or social environment. Instead, Gloria's architectural practice is about a radical reconceptualisation of architecture's approach to material and construction; one that mobilises what is already built and gives new form to debris, instead of relying on new material. It's not about substitutions of specific material, but rather about rethinking ways of building altogether: to rehabilitate what is already built, giving new form to debris of past buildings.

This process is an experimental response to the systems of extraction, which have relied on the exploitation of nature and people in the past and today: from the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery to the abhorrent human and ecological devastation of contemporary mining in Brazil, Congo, and elsewhere in the Global South.

KOOZ What is the value of exhibiting this project within the context of the 18th Biennale of Architecture in Venice - considering that the practice of architecture is itself one of the most extractive processes? Meanwhile glass, one of the major artistic and industrial tradition local to the city of Venice, has acted as means of exchange, adornment and medium of cross-cultural design experimentation since the era of the slave trade.

SB| GC | CF In Venice, we used mainly materials that already existed on site, foraging bricks and glass lumps from waste dumps made by the industries in the lagoon. The installation was the opportunity to demonstrate a concept. It built a structure from demolition material and industrial refuse collected, foraged from Venice itself: a city which wealth and beauty derive in significant part from its implication in the slave trade and colonialism. It was a way to literally turn material and historical debris, rescued from sites where they are discarded as useless or undesirable, into a structure whose new form mobilises subaltern knowledge and form: one that is poised to stand from the present into the future.

This recuperation of debris thus helps to make history visible, acknowledging that both matter and memory are important to build the future in both a social and an architectural sense. This, perhaps, is the particular alchemy that comes from a collaboration between artist, architect, and historian, in which form, structure, and history mix and merge into a precious, non-finite resource.
KOOZ The project is conceived as a highly collaborative endeavour which brings together the practices of architecture and the arts. Lokko herself suggests that "the rich, complex conditions of both Africa and a rapidly hybridising world call for a different and broader understanding of the term 'architect'." How defined is the role and mission of the architect in your eyes? In what ways and to what extent should this be framed beyond the act of building buildings?
GC I never tire of saying that I cannot think as an architect but only as a person. Architecture is just a tool - a beautiful tool - depending on the use you make of it; one that allows you to interact with others, who will come with their own tools of transformation. We will come together when we have similar purposes and beliefs about a better society.
KOOZ The project highlights the value and potential of past debris and ornament as architectural, but also an historical and social structure with which to chart a reimagined future. How does this reimagined future look like from your participation in this edition of the Biennale?
SB| GC | CF In many regards, we continue to live in a patriarchal, hierarchical system, in which many projects have a (male) leader giving directions to a team of subalterns. However this project began as a tripartite conversation, drawing together three people from completely different backgrounds and perspectives. This continued with a building process that involved the whole team of Mutaforma, the Venice-based laboratory and design studio who collected the material and hand-built the structure. The entire process was collaborative. Collaboration is the only thing that can make a difference in the way we build: constructing not in a hierarchical manner but with a sense of common purpose. The collaborative and experimental process is part of the work, both in its structure and its form.

Our contribution was born from a truly experimental process, the results of which are on display in the Biennale. The rhythm of the glass inclusions and the seams of the rhomboid modules are aesthetic features that emerged from the alchemy of the studio. Experimentation is also why the structure, though freestanding, is presented with scaffolding - it was not tested before being built but rather invented and made for the first time, then and there.

Gloria Cabral and Sammy Baloji with Cécile Fromont, "Debris of History, Matters of Memory", 18th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, The Laboratory of the Future. Photo: Sammy Baloji.
Bio
Sammy Baloji is an artist based in Brussels. He is currently researching the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the Katanga region. He is examining the impact of Belgian colonisation of the Congo, by using archives that enable him to manipulate time and space, and to make parallel between colonial narratives and contemporary economic imperialism. He is Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and laureate of the Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. In 2008, Sammy Baloji co-founded the Rencontres Picha/Biennale de Lubumbashi.

Gloria Cabral is an architect and has been titular partner of the firm Gabinete Arquitectura in Paraguay from 2004 to 2020. In 2016, together with her partners, she won the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, for Best Participation in the International Exhibition. In 2021 she won the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture. She studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Asunción.

Cécile Fromont is Professor in the history of art department at Yale University investigating the visual, material, and religious culture of Africa and Latin America with a special emphasis on the early modern period (ca 1500-1800), on the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic World, and on the slave trade. Her latest book is Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (Penn State UP, 2022).

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Collaboration in Construction: Debris as Resource in The Laboratory of the Future - KoozArch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A conversation with Sammy Baloji, Gloria Cabral and Cécile Fromont on their project exhibited within this year's Biennale Architettura 2023.

# data[].attributes.body
app with information about the different islands

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Once, the islands in the Lagoon were densely inhabited, each occupied by a town or at least a monastery. Whenever the city became claustrophobic and sad, all a Venetian had to do was get in a boat:

Coi pensieri malinconici
Non te star a tormentar.
Vien co me, montemo in gondola, Andaremo fora in mar.

(Don't remain tormenting yourself with melancholy thoughts/Come with me, let's get in the gondola/ go off to sea)

By the 1990s, all but a few of the islands were abandoned; many a tiny one, with its forlorn, vandalized shell of a building, has been abandoned to weeds.

Recently, however, the boom in property prices around Venice has seen new interest in re-investing and restoring them by business interests either as luxury hotels ( San Clemente), residential housing ( Santo Spirito), sport centres (La Certosa), archaeological sites ( Lazzaretto Novo) and even as, just what Venice really needs, a theme park ( Sacca San Biagio).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Once, the islands in the Lagoon were densely inhabited, each occupied by a town or at least a monastery.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Film About Feedback
Documentary / 2013 / 55 min / 16:9 / English

A documentary featuring the innovating Feedback Method developed by DasArts in collaboration with the philosopher Karim Benammar.
This unique method allows a whole new attitude toward professional group working through giving and receiving feedback on each other works in process, while expanding the edge boundaries of the process of learning.

Commissioned by DasArts, Master of theatre, this film is a collaboration with the Master of Film program in the Netherlands Film Academy (NFA) and Sub-Pacific Films.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What is Creative Places West Cork Islands?

Creative Places West Cork Islands is an ambitious three-year (2023 - 2025) culture-based community development programme for and about the West Cork islands. Creative Places aims to connect with people, artists and places, to allow ideas to develop into creative actions that are inspired by and enrich our island communities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
creative places west cork islands - oileán chléire / cape clear island

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Creative Places West Cork Islands - Oileán Chléire / Cape Clear Island, Sherkin Island, Heir Island, Long Island, Whiddy Island, Bere Island, Dursey island.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Oileán Chléire / Cape Clear Island, Sherkin Island, Heir Island, Long Island, Whiddy Island, Bere Island, Dursey island.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The DOC Fellowship Programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences offers funding for highly qualified doctoral candidates in all areas of research. The fellowships allow young researchers to dedicate themselves to working in focused fashion to complete their doctoral thesis within a clear timeframe.

Applications for a DOC Fellowship are open to highly qualified doctoral candidates of all ages who

completed their Diplom or Master's degree no more than two years prior to applying (dated from 1 January of the year of submission),

are writing their doctoral or PhD thesis at an Austrian university,

can prove that they fulfil the admission requirements for doctoral/PhD studies at their respective university, and

submit a project exposé and a reference from their doctoral supervisor.

The basis of assessment of the applicant's academic qualifications are the course of studies (including length and marks), stays abroad already completed and the list of publications. Some international experts also require the applicant's diploma or master's thesis.
NEW 2023 Fellowships from FZÖ funds
The Fonds Zukunft Österreich (FZÖ) provides funding for dissertation projects dealing with issues related to the EU Missions within the framework of Horizon Europe (Cancer, Climate, Ocean, Cities, Soil) or the priority topics in the ÖAW's development plan (Empires and World Orders, Energy Systems, Aging, Artificial Intelligence).

Applications for funding under this framework are automatically included in the DOC selection process. Application requirements, selection criteria as well as amount and duration of funding correspond to the specifications for the DOC program.

In the case of an application for funding under this framework, the reference to one of the named subject areas must be clearly presented in the project description.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mit dem Stipendienprogramm DOC fördert die Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Dissertanten und Dissertanten mit EUR 38.000 pro Jahr für 24 bis 36 Monate für ein Doktoratssstudium in Österreich. Bewerbungsunterlagen u.a. Proposal der geplanten Dissertation und Empfehlungsschreiben des/der Dissertationsbetreuers /-betreuerin

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kunstpreis der Arbeiterkammer OÖ (wird 2023 ausgesetzt)
Die Arbeiterkammer fördert die künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit Aspekten der gegenwärtigen und zukünftigen Arbeitswelt.

Preis des Diözesankunstvereins
für Werke besonderer künstlerischer Qualität mit religiöser, ethischer oder sozialer Relevanz bzw. für eine besonders herausragende Arbeit der Studienrichtung Architektur.

forum Stipendium
Seit 2003 vergibt das forum - Kunstuniversität Linz einmal jährlich ein Stipendium in der Höhe
von € 10.000 an eine/n AbsolventIn der Kunstuniversität Linz, der/die auch Mitglied des forum ist.
↪︎ Zur aktuellen Ausschreibung

Arbeitsstipendium
für ein mit Auszeichnung an der Kunstuniversität Linz abgeschlossenes Studium.
Antragstellung: Dienstag 13. Juni 2023, 00.00 Uhr bis Montag 10. Juli 2023, 12.00 Uhr (nach 12.00 Uhr ist kein Upload auf den Server mehr möglich).
↪︎ zum Antrag

Würdigungspreis
Der Würdigungspreisals Auszeichnung für hervorragende Studienleistungen.
Antragstellung: Dienstag 13. Juni 2023, 00.00 Uhr bis Dienstag 11. Juli 2023, 12.00 Uhr (nach 12.00 Uhr ist kein Upload auf den Server mehr möglich).
↪︎ zum Antrag

Förderungsstipendium
Das Förderungsstipendium zur Anfertigung wissenschaftlicher oder künstlerischer Arbeiten von Studierenden ordentlicher Studien.
Antragstellung im Wintersemester 2023/24 ist von Dienstag, 03. Oktober 2023, 00:00 Uhr bis Montag, 06. November 2023, 23:59 Uhr (nach 23:59 Uhr ist kein Upload auf den Server mehr möglich).
↪︎ zum Antrag
↪︎ Anleitung - Registrierung - Ausschreibung zum Antrag

Leistungsstipendium
Das Leistungsstipendium zur Anerkennung hervorragender Studienleistungen.
Antragstellung im Wintersemester 2023/24 ist von Dienstag, 03. Oktober 2023, 00:00 Uhr bis Montag, 06. November 2023, 23:59 Uhr (nach 23:59 Uhr ist kein Upload auf den Server mehr möglich).
↪︎ Zum Antrag
↪︎ Anleitung - Registrierung - Ausschreibung

Förderungsverein der Kunstuniversität Linz
↪︎ InfoMehr Informationen zu Förderungen für PhD-Studierende und wissenschaftlich-künstlerische MitarbeiterInnen finden Sie auf folgender Seite der Abteilung Kunst.Forschung.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kunstuniversität Linz: Stipendien & Preise

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kunstpreis der Arbeiterkammer OÖ (wird 2023 ausgesetzt) Die Arbeiterkammer fördert die künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit Aspekten der gegenwärtigen und zukünftigen Arbeitswelt. Preis des Diözesankunstvereins für Werke besonderer künstlerischer Qualität mit religiöser, ethischer oder sozialer Relevanz bzw. für eine besonders herausragende Arbeit der Studienrichtung Architektur.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Research and Innovation Week (R&I Week) is the 2024 European Commission's flagship event on research and innovation which will take place between 18 and 21 March 2024 in Tour & Taxis (Brussels, Belgium).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The EU's research and innovation funding programme 2021-2027

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Funding and Tenders Portal is the single entry point (the Single Electronic Data Interchange Area) for applicants, contractors and experts in funding programmes and procurements managed by the European Commission.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Funding and Tenders Portal is the single entry point (the Single Electronic Data Interchange Area) for applicants, contractors and experts in funding programmes and procurements managed by the European Commission.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Funding and Tenders Portal is the single entry point (the Single Electronic Data Interchange Area) for applicants, contractors and experts in funding programmes and procurements managed by the European Commission.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ICST Residencies 2024

The residency program of the ICST - Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology offers artists the opportunity to realize their own project and to benefit from scientific and artistic research at the ICST during a stay at the Zurich University of the Arts.

For 2024, the ICST offers an artistic residency in each of these research areas: spatial sound synthesis, tempo polyphony, moving loudspeakers, immersive arts, and acoustic ecology. Lasting from one to three weeks, residencies include the use of the ICST facilities, professional support from ICST researchers as well as meals and lodging for the duration of the stay in Zurich. Welcome to apply are musicians and artists working with sound and sound media whose work reflects an in-depth interest in one of the mentioned research areas.
The application deadline for the residencies 2024 is 17 September 2023. Candidates will be informed about the results in the second half of October 2023.

Find detailed descriptions of each residency as well as informations regarding conditions for application and the selection process here:

Residency A: Spatial Sound Synthesis
Residency B: Tempo Polyphony
Residency C: Moving Loudspeakers
Residency D: Immersive Arts
Residency E: Acoustic Ecology
Conditions / Selection process

As the Zurich University of the Arts is committed to equity, inclusion and cultural diversity, we particularly welcome proposals from women, candidates from diverse cultural backgrounds as well as underrepresented groups.

ICST - Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology

The Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) was founded in 2005 and is active in research, education and musical creation. Besides the long-standing focus on three-dimensional sound projection, current research fields include Interfaces & Augmented Instruments, Audio Haptic, Auditory Perception, Telematic Performance, Performance Practice of Electroacoustic Music, Sound Design, Sound Moving Sources, Acoustic Ecology, Generative Art and Music Theory, Notation & Representation.
The promotion of musical creation through residencies and the involvement of artists in research projects are among ICST's main concerns, reflecting the growing relevance of artistic research at ZHdK, and resulting in a broad spectrum of projects, performance practices and aesthetics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The residency program of the ICST - Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology offers artists the opportunity to realize their own project and to benefit from scientific and artistic research at the ICST during a stay at the Zurich University of the Arts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The DOC Fellowship Programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences offers funding for highly qualified doctoral candidates in all areas of research. The fellowships allow young researchers to dedicate themselves to working in focused fashion to complete their doctoral thesis within a clear timeframe.

Applications for a DOC Fellowship are open to highly qualified doctoral candidates of all ages who

completed their Diplom or Master's degree no more than two years prior to applying (dated from 1 January of the year of submission),

are writing their doctoral or PhD thesis at an Austrian university,

can prove that they fulfil the admission requirements for doctoral/PhD studies at their respective university, and

submit a project exposé and a reference from their doctoral supervisor.

The basis of assessment of the applicant's academic qualifications are the course of studies (including length and marks), stays abroad already completed and the list of publications. Some international experts also require the applicant's diploma or master's thesis.
NEW 2023 Fellowships from FZÖ funds
The Fonds Zukunft Österreich (FZÖ) provides funding for dissertation projects dealing with issues related to the EU Missions within the framework of Horizon Europe (Cancer, Climate, Ocean, Cities, Soil) or the priority topics in the ÖAW's development plan (Empires and World Orders, Energy Systems, Aging, Artificial Intelligence).

Applications for funding under this framework are automatically included in the DOC selection process. Application requirements, selection criteria as well as amount and duration of funding correspond to the specifications for the DOC program.

In the case of an application for funding under this framework, the reference to one of the named subject areas must be clearly presented in the project description.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mit dem Stipendienprogramm DOC fördert die Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Dissertanten und Dissertanten mit EUR 38.000 pro Jahr für 24 bis 36 Monate für ein Doktoratssstudium in Österreich. Bewerbungsunterlagen u.a. Proposal der geplanten Dissertation und Empfehlungsschreiben des/der Dissertationsbetreuers /-betreuerin

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
4a. Cork, A Venice of North West Europe | Cork Heritage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For nearly five hundred years (c.1200-c.1690), the walled port town of Cork, built in a swamp and at the lowest crossing point of the River Lee and the tidal area, remained as one of the most fortified and vibrant walled settlements in the expanding British colonial empire. However, economic growth…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Save Cork City's plan is to build a tidal barrier now... instead of waiting for the sea to claim the city, writes

AS I write, 85% of the city of Venice is under water.

There have been two deaths and the mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, has described the flood damage as "as indelible wound". A tidal barrier to protect the city has been built, but is not yet working, due to the delays and corruption that are part of Italy's political landscape.

Huge urgency is now being attached to making the barrier functional, because Italians understand that what happened on Tuesday night is only a precursor of the floods that climate change will bring.

Cork is Ireland's Venice. I never fail to think of the Italian city when I cross the south channel of the Lee.

There's an obvious geological connection. Just like Venice, Cork is built on water, or, more accurately, on marshland, between channels in the Lee Valley.

This gives the city its special character, but makes it vulnerable to flooding, like Venice is. This is especially true as we confront this new era of climate disruption.

In Monday's TV programme Will Ireland Survive 2050? veteran RTÉ meterologist, Gerald Fleming, sent pulses racing with his computer-generated visualisations of Dublin's O'Connell St and Cork's Grand Parade under several feet of water.

You don't even need visualisations to see waves lapping onto the streets of Cork; you can look at an online video of a man swimming up Oliver Plunkett St in 2014.

There is no time to waste in addressing the city's acute vulnerability to the new floods of the climate change era.

The director of operations at Cork City Hall, Sean Lynch, picked a bad moment to announce that there will be no independent review of the OPW's "walls scheme", by which up to 15km of the city quays would be replaced or surmounted by flood barriers, despite the council's motion calling for such a review.

The walls plan is 10-years-old and unacceptable in an era when the climate is changing rapidly. Even still, the OPW's own advice says these walls may be over-topped by flood waters from 2049, in a worst case scenario, or from 2070, in a better scenario.

Being unready for 2050 is one thing; building massive infrastructure, at a projected cost of €140m to €160m, which you know won't work in the era of climate change, is plain irresponsible. The scheme might not even be completed by the time it is "overtopped".

"Overtopped" is a nice word, but it hardly conjures up the reality of river water pouring onto the quays from a 4ft-high wall.

The lobby group opposing the OPW's walls scheme, Save Cork City, provides, in its literature, a scary picture of Edgecombe, New Zealand, largely under water in April 2017 when flood walls were breached.

How much more dangerous will the Lee be if its flow rate is almost doubled, as is envisaged by walls scheme?

Neither does the walls scheme address the fact that Cork is built on wet silt and gravel (or an "aquifier" as it is described by the experts). This aquifier is not only tidal, it is connected to at least eight channels of the River Lee, which were modified by cross-cutting canals from 1090 to 1800. Sinking "cut off walls" associated with the OPW's flood barriers, and their 46 pumping stations, into a volatile groundwater foundation is "an experiment which is likely to fail", in the words of consulting geologist, Anthony Beese, in a report commissioned by Save Cork City. Among the limitations of the OPW's walls scheme is the likelihood that the entire aquifier, stretching across the Lee valley, will be flooded by rising groundwater, regardless of the walls built to protect the inner city island. Disturbing the groundwater may dry out and destabilise historic buildings. It may cause pollution from sewers to build up and discharge.

The OPW scheme envisages the 46 pumping stations counteracting groundwater swells with bored wells and/or chambers to take the excess water, but Beese says no comprehensive investigation of this mechanism has been attempted and that it remains "largely experimental". The underlying, buried glacial valley is so uneven that it would be impossible to be sure that bedrock had been reached to cut the groundwater from the river, in any case.

In short, the walls scheme disturbs a volatile aquatic environment, which the OPW doesn't fully understand.

I am not a geologist and neither are most of you.

Surely, most of us agree that a public works project, like the OPW's walls scheme, which has such massive implications for the city and about which there is much professional disagreement, must be subjected to rigorous public enquiry?

And that such an enquiry should question why such walls should be built, at huge expense to the tax-payer, when the developers themselves say they may be redundant in 30 years' time, because of climate change?

The OPW itself suggests a tidal barrier at Great Island may be necessary by that point, due to sea-level rise and storm surges.

Save Cork City's plan is to build a tidal barrier between Mahon and Little Island right now, instead of waiting for the sea to come in and claim the city.

A woman carries her daughter in a flooded St. Mark's Square, in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

THERE would then be no reason to build walls between the river and the people. There would be little ongoing disruption of the city, at this, the moment when it has had more potential than it has had in a century. One of the most beautiful Georgian riverscapes in the world would be preserved and enhanced. The most recent estimate, from TU Delft, the Netherlands, puts the cost of the tidal barrier at under €200m. Save Cork City argue that it would protect fully 16,000 people, rather than the 2,000 protected by the OPW's walls. Crucially, the barrier would protect the docklands, which are primed for redevelopment, unlike the walls.

But why should we rely entirely on information commissioned by a lobby group to interrogate the OPW's plan?

The walls scheme doesn't have to go through the planning process, because it is, ostensibly, a drainage scheme, covered under the Arterial Drainage Act (1945), despite the fact that it has been called, by UCD academics, "the greatest planned destruction of heritage in the history of the State".

All Cork City Hall has done to investigate the suggestions put forward by Save Cork City is engage in a Twitter war, rubbishing the group's ideas.

City Hall says the Minister of State for the Office of Public Works, Kevin 'Boxer' Moran, ruled out an independent assessment of the walls scheme just last year, The feeling is widespread that he will give it the go-ahead in the pre-election fever.

Such a move would be outrageous.

The threat of climate change is no reason to dump local democracy. It is only through local democracy that we can fight it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cork is Ireland's 'Venice' and just as vulnerable to climate change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Save Cork City's plan is to build a tidal barrier now... instead of waiting for the sea to claim the city, writes Victoria White

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Dutch interior designer who made mats out of washed-up fishing ropes, while quarantined on Connemara's Turbot island during Covid-19, is a participant in Ireland's exhibition at this year's Venice Biennale, which opens today (Friday, May 19).

Hanneke Frenkel's sea mats and sacks were created from her beachcombing on the small island west of Clifden and south of Omey almost three years ago.

An abstraction of Sceilg Mhichíl (Skellig Michael) off the Kerry coast made from Galway sheep's wool, and results of Mayo's Clare Island Survey were also selected for the Ireland Pavilion's theme, "In Search of Hy-Brasil".

Five architects - Peter Carroll, Peter Cody, Elizabeth Hatz, Mary Laheen and Joseph Mackey - curated "In Search of Hy-Brasil" for the International Art and Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

The Irish entry is supported by Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council.

Frenkel has described how she just began making the sea mats by accident, "Here I was on Turbot, I couldn't go home because of Covid, and I didn't know what else to do!".

She and her husband Stefan bought a house on Turbot some years ago from former islander John O'Toole. The tiny island's main claim to fame had been its sighting by trans-Atlantic aviators John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown before they crash-landed at Derrygimlagh bog in north Connemara on June 15th, 1919.

O'Toole and his family were among 60 islanders relocated to the mainland in 1978, four years after a currach capsize when three island fishermen drowned on their way home from watching the All-Ireland football final on television in Clifden.

The Irish pavilion's curators said they were responding to the theme "The Laboratory of the Future" which was selected by Lesley Lokko, curator of the 2023 Venice Biennale.

They chose to interpret aspects of Irish offshore islands, also adopting Hy-Brasil as "the mythical Atlantic island that embodies the possibility for the re-imagination of the island of Ireland and its ocean territory".

The five curators studied the island landscapes of Aran's Inis Meáin, UNESCO World Heritage site Sceilg Mhicíl (Skellig Michael) and Cliara (Clare Island) through drawing, survey, film, sound, model, mapping, and story.

Their exhibition focuses on renewable energy, ethical food production and biodiversity, "capturing the islands' sustainable methods of livelihood through drawing, models, film, sound, writing and language,"they state.

Large limestone slabs from Inis Meáin, Sceilg Mhichíl and Cliara and their related ocean floor are on display, along with various works celebrating "the use of local materials in innovative and unorthodox ways".

These include a hung linen tapestry mapping the "extraordinary complexity and rich topography of Ireland's maritime zone and beyond"; a sea of interpretive drawings "revealing aspects of unique living conditions on the islands"; a film and soundscape of Inis Meáin; and a graphite rendering of the ancient landmass of Pangaea.

The Irish pavilion will be opened this afternoon (Fri May 19) by Minister of State for Tourism, Culture and Arts Patrick O'Donovan.

Welcoming the Irish entry, Minister for Tourism, Culture and the Arts Catherine Martin recalled that the 2018 Venice Biennale was curated by Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell of Grafton Architects.

She noted that Emmett Scanlon, Alice Clancy and Laurence Lord are assistants this year to overall curator Lesley Lokko.

"The Laboratory of the Future" is an exhibition of six parts, involving 89 participants, over half of whom are from Africa or the African diaspora, Lokko says.

After its presentation in Venice, "In Search of Hy-Brasil" will tour Ireland in 2024. The curators of the installation will also publish a book of essays and contribute to a film documentary.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Resilience of Irish Atlantic Islands Reflected in Ireland's Venice Biennale Entry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Five architects - Peter Carroll, Peter Cody, Elizabeth Hatz, Mary Laheen and Joseph Mackey - curated "In Search of Hy-Brasil"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Anthropocene Curriculum → Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Published in 2022, this experimental guide to Venice forms a new, illuminating and disturbing mosaic of the water city and its Lagoon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Research proposals

Your research proposal is a key part of your application. It tells us about the question you want to answer through your research. It is a chance for you to show your knowledge of the subject area and tell us about the methods you want to use.

We use your research proposal to match you with a supervisor or team of supervisors.

In your proposal, please tell us if you have an interest in the work of a specific academic at York St John. You can get in touch with this academic to discuss your proposal. You can also speak to one of our Research Leads. There is a list of our Research Leads on the Apply page.

When you write your proposal you need to:

Highlight how it is original or significant

Explain how it will develop or challenge current knowledge of your subject

Identify the importance of your research

Show why you are the right person to do this research

Examples of research proposals

Subject specific guidance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Examples of Research proposals | York St John University

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Your research proposal is an integral part of the research degree application process. Make sure you spend time on it and make sure it is clear and effective.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Title:

Megachurch Materiality in a Post-Truth Era: Bodily Dis/Orientation and Belief
Abstract:
Examining the role of materiality in belief formation, this interdisciplinary, practice-based project seeks to understand the orienting appeal of Evangelicalism within a 'post-truth' political climate. Taking bodily orientation as key to belief formation, I examine how a body is oriented within the Evangelical megachurch (2,000+ congregants) by the materialities of: site (architecture, staging), spectacle (crowd, performance, screen) and narrative (voice, fabulation, myth). This analysis informs and is extended by my situated and performative art writing practice. Written and staged for the secular sites and audiences of contemporary art, this writing performs the entanglements of materiality, embodiment and belief. Three new art writing works in the form of participatory scripts address the audience as a diverse 'crowd' to foreground belief formation as contingent on material context and bodily orientation. In this way, the complexity of belief is materialized and a dialogic space opened to produce new, situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988) contributing to contemporary art as well as visual and material cultures.
Introduction:
The rising socio-political influence of faith-based groups - radical Islam in the Middle East and Evangelical conservatism in the US - is evidence of the global significance of religious belief. Yet the material culture surrounding religious belief lacks 'serious empirical, let alone theoretical interest' (Meyer & Houtman, 2012:1). Despite a range of sociological and anthropological research into Evangelicalism, there has been no in-depth, interdisciplinary study of the visual and material culture of the Evangelical megachurch, a world-wide and rapidly spreading movement; meanwhile, religious culture and belief remains underrepresented within Western contemporary art. This project seeks to redress this lack, utilising a situated and performative art writing practice to explore how megachurch culture produces a sense of bodily dis/orientation that is central to belief formation.

Within the immersive space of the megachurch, bodily experiences range along a spectrum from fixity to vertiginous freedom. This occurs through the repetition and reinforcement of a narrative that, intensified through scale, spectacle, emotive music and compelling preaching, creates embodied affect in the crowd. Bodily and cognitive processes comingle to create a feeling of certainty. This research will aim to explore this sense of dis/orientation in relation to a global political context of post-truth: 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief' (Oxford Dictionaries [Online], 2016).
Research Background:
Materialism, the belief that we are nothing more than matter, is typically viewed as antithetical to religious belief; yet an engagement with spirituality has emerged within new materialism. These emerging theories refuse reductive dualisms and emphasise the embodied self in relation to networks of materiality. Matter is viewed not as inert but as agentic (self-determining) (Barad, 2007) and lively (Bennett, 2010), in a dynamic interplay with human actants. This revived transdisciplinary interest in materialism has had a wide impact on contemporary art. The focus on agentic materiality has led to an upsurge of interest in animism, the occult and shamanism. Yet within Western contemporary art, organized religion remains virtually absent, deemed too traditional and conservative in comparison with the progressive and liberal values of art. Curator Anselm Franke states: 'An invisible background condition of contemporary art still valid today is that it stands outside of faith-based practices, only citing them at most. The historical break with religion continues' (2013:1).

Sociological research suggests Evangelical self-identification as one of boundaried distinctness (Strhan, 2015). The 'total institution' of the conservative megachurch (Wade, 2016) appears at odds with art world pluralism and secularism. Mirroring this polarity, recent events in the US and Europe (Brexit, the election of Trump, a rise in nationalism) point to an increasing entrenchment of opinion between conservative and progressive ideologies. Situated amidst these cultural and political divides, I draw on my own bodily experiences in 7 years of attending a megachurch and 20 years involvement in Evangelicalism, as well as my knowledge of contemporary art culture, to expose the complexity and orienting appeal of belief within the largely secular arenas of art and theory.

Beginning with the supposition that belief is produced by cognitive processes, I draw on new materialist theory and mobilise a situated and performative art writing practice to explore how belief is also created through the orientation of the body, focusing on the phenomenon of the megachurch in the UK and the US. Stadium worship services are visually spectacular. Charismatic preachers on vast projection screens enthral thousands of worshippers with a message of certainty. Conviction is experienced as a bodily dis/orientation through the perception of being grounded through an authorised narrative, being enchanted into a collective fabulation. This will be examined within a contemporary art context and in relation to the divisions of a post-truth political context, adding knowledge of the role of materiality in belief formation while contributing to post-truth discourse and fostering dialogue between seemingly opposed positions.

I will ask:

How is a body dis/oriented by the materialities of site (architecture, staging), spectacle (crowd, performance, screen) and narrative (voice, fabulation, myth) in the megachurch? What role does this dis/orientation play in belief formation?

How can understanding the ways in which this dis/orientation reinforces worldviews and creates certainty shed light on the polarities of the post-truth political context?

Exposing the entangled complexities of materiality, embodiment and belief, how can a situated and performative art writing practice complicate binaries: religious/ secular, conservative/ progressive, immaterial/ material, truth/ fiction and enable empathy across secular-religious divides?
Goldsmiths will support this project through:
- The art department's expertise in art writing.

- Prof. Kristen Kreider's research into 'material poetics' (the meaning within materiality) and her performative site writing practice will prove crucial in guiding how I develop a theory and practice of material belief formation.

- Dr. Bridget Crone's research into new materialism, embodiment and staging in art practice.

- Prof. Adam Dinham (Faith and Public Policy) and Prof. Chris Baker (Religion and Public Life) will support my research within the Faiths & Civil Society Unit (theology; sociology; anthropology).

- The Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing.

My previous art writing (internationally exhibited, performed and published) has explored the materiality of religious belief and site. My site based works 'Empathy Structure' (2017) and 'Cell' (2017) replicated megachurch conditions, foregrounding embodied belief within narrative and material structures. I have presented papers on the socio-political implications of Evangelical culture at symposia for art researchers (Goldsmiths 2016/7) and a CHASE conference (Post-Truth & American Myths, Essex 2017). My 8 years of experience in running participatory art projects will be applied to the project.
Methods:
In visits to UK and US megachurches I will consider how orientations within the culture make thinking bodies and bodies of thought (Ahmed, 2006). Combining qualitative and ethnographic research methods (interviews, participation, visual and material analysis, reflective writing) with a new materialist approach, a three-part thesis will explore belief formation through the impact of bodily orientation/ disorientation/ reorientation. I will draw on sociological research into Evangelicalism (Strhan, 2015; Wade, 2016) to link research to the current socio-political context, forming a significant contribution both to art and visual and material cultures.

Research will be extended and disseminated through my situated and performative art writing practice, enabling an embodied and tacit experience of the role of materiality in belief formation by a broad range of participants. Taking my position reflexively into account and abiding by research ethics standards, I will combine my experiences of the megachurch with my knowledge of contemporary art audiences to create three new performative and participatory works to enable a dialogic reorientation toward different beliefs. Writing will be informed by narratology and dramaturgy.

I will strengthen the shared research links of performance and writing between Goldsmiths and the Universities of Sussex (Prof. Gavin Butt) and Essex (Dr. Holly Pester) in organizing interdisciplinary workshops on new materialism and art writing to be developed into a CHASE symposium.
Timeline:
Year 1: Orientation

COMPLETED Included visits to a range of UK megachurches (Hillsongs, HTB, Kingsgate); congregant interviews; auto-ethnographic writing analysising narrative (reinforcement through preaching, bible study, public testimony, church manifestos/ statements of common purpose) and site (the believer's vantage points within the verticality/ horizontality of the vast megachurch; spectacle and embodied impact) as orienting structures; new site based works; symposia/ conference presentations.

Year 2: Disorientation

- Inquiry into embodied disorientation starting with my proposition that to be enchanted is to be particularly fixed within an orientation, with disenchantment/ loss of belief as a form of disorientation.

- Consider in relation to belief formation/ loss in the megachurch; link enchantment/ belief to post-truth; focus on spectacle, performance and voice in megachurch visits, interviews, reflective writing.

- Finish intro & chapter 1.

- Create site based work on spectacle.

- Upgrade December 2018.

- Form interdisciplinary workshops on new materialism and art writing.

- Organise symposium for CHASE institutions on new materialism and art writing.

Year 3: Reorientation

- Consider the socio-political potential of situated writing in speculative alter worlding: how it creates new knowledge in highlighting the link between material reality and embedded/ embodied thought. Evaluate how practice creates an embodied experience of belief for diverse audiences.

- Write chapters 2, 3 and conclusion: the historical confluence of Evangelicalism and conservatism in megachurch materiality for illuminating the post-truth context.

- Refine final site based work on myth for exam with feedback from workshops.

- Finish thesis.
Research Outcomes:
Thesis

Intro

How narrative creates orienting and authoritative structures for the addressee; the real: how narrative and matter enfold; overview of theories relating to the current moment of disorientation and post-truth context.

Chapter 1 Spatial & Narrative Orientation

Embodied experience within the vast crowd; church as participatory theatre (Kilde, 2002); dramaturgical structuring, affect and belief formation. Combine Bal's (1985) theory of narrative, story and fabula with Nancy's (1991) theory of myth to unpick the Evangelical narrative and its materialization in the megachurch; how the megachurch narrative appears naturalized rather than constructed; literalism and its embodied affects.

Practice 1

Narrative structure combines with the spatial conditions (movements between verticality and horizontality) of an open stairwell in a performative reading over seven floors. Multiple voices guide the ascent of the audience/ crowd.

Chapter 2 Dis/Orientation

Dis/orientating qualities of spectacle, performance and the voice; loss of belief in communicative failure/rupture.

Practice 2

A scripted participatory narrative conjures a sense of spectacle within an auditorium, moving between orientations: the vocalization of the individual and the crowd.

Chapter 3 Reorientations

Enchantment and (religious) belief in relation to post-truth; Evangelical belief in global domination and individualism within a socio-politically conservative culture (Hey, 2013; FitzGerald, 2017); the potential of situated art writing in the current moment of polarization to blur religious/ secular, conservative/ progressive, immaterial/ material binaries.

Practice 3

In a scripted reading myth is performed as a foundation upon which a community/ site is built. Antiphony (call and response) from differing perspectives creates a dialogic chorus.

Conclusion

The potential of a participatory chorus in creating embodied reorientations towards different beliefs.
Bibliography:
Ahmed, S (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press)

Bal, M (1985) Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (University of Toronto Press)

Barad, K (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press)

Bennett, J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press)

Behrndt, S & Turner, C (2008) Dramaturgy & Performance (Palgrave)

Elkins, J (2004) On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (Routledge)

FitzGerald, F (2017) The Evangelicals: The Struggle To Shape America (Simon & Schuster)

Franke, A (2013) quoted in Ed. 'Question of Faith: Is There a Return of the Religious in Contemporary Art?' ArtMag [Online] Available at: http://db-artmag.com/en/76/feature/question-of-faith-is-there-a-return-of-the-religious-in-contempo/ [Accessed: 12.12.17]

Goh, R. (2008) 'Hillsong and Megachurch Semiotics, Spatial Logic and Embodiment' Material Religion Vol. 4:3 pp. 284-305

Hey, S. (2013) Megachurches (Morning Star Publishing)

Haraway, D 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective' Feminist Studies, Vol. 14: 3 (Autumn 1988), pp. 575-599

Houtman, D & Meyer, B (Eds.) (2013) Things: Religion & the Question of Materiality (Fordham University Press)

Kilde, J H (2002) When Church Became Theatre (Oxford University Press)

Massumi, B (2015) The Politics of Affect (Polity Press)

Mcintyre, L (2018) Post-Truth (MIT Press)

Nancy, J (1991) 'Myth Interrupted' in Connor, P (Ed.) (1991) The Inoperative Community (University Of Minnesota Press)

Schaefer, D. O. (2015) Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Duke University Press)

Strhan, A (2015) Aliens & Strangers?: The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (Oxford University Press)

Wade, M (2016) 'Seeker Friendly: The Hillsong megachurch as an enchanting Total Institution' Journal of Sociology Vol. 52:4 2016 pp. 661-676

Whitehouse, H (2004) Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (AltaMira Press)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Practice based MPhil/ PhD proposal for CHASE/ AHRC funding Fine Art Research Department, Goldsmiths November 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Laboratorio Laguna is a transdisciplinary and international project run by BUrb, U5 and Florian Dombois, It deals with artistic navigation in critical zones. It explores a multitude of future forms of life, that address complex, spatial, environmental and social issues by ways of inhabiting and desi…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
John Donne, Meditation 17
Islands which have
never existed
have made their ways
onto maps nonetheless And having done so
have held their place,
quite respectably,
sometimes for centuries
Voyages of undiscovery,
deep into the charted wastes,
were then required
to move them off.
Nicholas Hasluk, 'Islands'

1Islands have always occupied a powerful place and have been a source of fascination in the literary imagination. The island, a territory separated from other lands by water, lends itself easily to fantasy and mythologizing. Folklore abounds with tales of magical islands, places where heroes go to rest and from which they may one day return, islands that draw people in and never let them leave, islands that appear and disappear. Islands are also repositories of fearful elements: accounts of voyages to the Caribbean, for example, abound in fantasies about cannibals and other destructive forces that were believed to lie hidden in island heartlands. The tale of sailors shipwrecked on a small island that turns out to be a great sea-creature and which drowns them all just as they believe they have found safety is familiar in many languages, from Greek to Anglo-Saxon. The island that serves as home to the shipwrecked sailor became a major literary theme that is still to be found in children's literature. And indeed, the idea of the island has a powerful base in children's literature. Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, both important statements about contemporary society written for adults in the eighteenth century have been transformed into texts for children, a shift of emphasis that would merit further investigation but which serves to illustrate the instability of text types across time. These works, which revolve around the idea of travel to isolated island communities, have become depoliticized, though the image of the shipwrecked sailor who finds himself isolated from his contemporaries is at the core of both. Familiar also is the idealized island, the place that sailors aspire to reach and which they spend a lifetime searching for and never find. Early Christianity established communities on islands deliberately, seeking in physical isolation a more direct channel to God. In the Arthurian legend, souls go to find their final resting place on the island of Avalon, a theme dealt with in Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur."

2Islands, therefore, are places that can be paradoxically both safe havens and sites of great upheaval. Inhabitants of an island define themselves against those who are not islanders; significantly, the Irish refer to the United Kingdom as "the mainland" or "across the water," while the English refer to Europe as "the Continent." Perhaps those who inhabit islands have a particular kind of spatial awareness, aware as they always are that sooner or later the land stops and the sea begins. Non-island cultures inhabit different spaces, where the opening or closing of frontiers acquires a meaningfulness that can never be experienced by islanders. Time and again we find the island represented as the locus of a transformation, a translation. On islands, things change or, as William Golding shows so dramatically in his Lord of the Flies, things rise to the surface and are made visible, often things that we wish we did not have to see. One may recall here how José Saramago imagined the Iberian Peninsula into a floating island in his novel The Stone Raft, and wittily put contemporary Europe and questions of cultural identity under scrutiny. As the Peninsula breaks off from the mainland, its European identity comes into question. Europe begins to make demands on the Peninsula to stop drifting:

1 As a general source for the conception of this essay, we gratefully acknowledge the 'Floating Islan (...)

European governments who in the past never showed any desire to have us with them are now trying to force us to do what they don't really want and, moreover, know is beyond our powers. Unquestionably a place of history and culture, Europe in these troubled times has shown itself in the end to be lacking in common sense. 1

3The topos of the island explores and creates bridges between the real and the imaginary as well as crossings between genres and disciplines. Islands are articulated as utopias/dystopias, loci amoeni, Edens, Arcadias, nations, metatexts, stepping stones, cultural crossroads, thus raising questions about the metaphoricity and translatability of culture, desire, displacement, solitude, isolation, exile, insularity, minority and hegemonic cultures illustrating the creative stimulus that the idea of islands has provided across time and across cultures. As islanders set apart from the continent, between or among continents and surrounded by ocean or sea, we seem to be always on the threshold of identities. The virtual spaces of islands are susceptible to translatability and articulate perspectives on the shifting relationship between self and other, center and periphery. Islands place here and elsewhere in dialogue and, in this way, serve as sites of mediation between cultures. Within a global culture marked by inequalities and differences, islands induce a contrapuntal approach for literary and cultural criticism.

4Many of the island tropes that occupy the literary imaginary today are already present in the classical literature of the ancient Mediterranean such as the island world of the Odyssey and other islands including Delos, Atlantis, and Thule.

5The first floating island found in literature is perhaps the island of Aeolia, home of Aeolus, god of the wind. Floating islands are like floating signifiers, bringing together topology and tropology in the motility that links the metaphoricity of floating or traveling islands with the translatability of culture. If we are seeking a theory of translation in floating islands, we may find it in Aeolia, one of the original floating islands found in the Odyssey, Book 10. The name Aeolia is in the etymology of aeolotropic, defined by Webster's dictionary as deriving from Greek aiolos (changeful) and trope (turn), and meaning in physics, having different properties in different directions; not isotropic. The island is now considered to be one of the archipelago of volcanic islands near Sicily, known as the Isole Eolie (Aeolian Islands) that were settled by ancient Greeks in the sixth century BC. In The Odyssey and the Odyssey tradition a tension unfolds between the island as home (Ithaka) and the fantastic 'Other' islands where Odysseus and his men so often land. To help Odysseus return to Ithaka, Aeolus encloses the boisterous energies of the wind in a pouch to guarantee him a safe journey home. Odysseus falls asleep when the shores of Ithaka are sighted, and his crew, curious to see what Aeolus had given their chief, open the pouch and release the winds, thus bringing another detour to the journey home. The short excerpt below is followed by a transliteration from the original Greek, which includes the phrase floating islands ( plôtêi eni nêsôi), plôtêi being the feminine dative form of plôtos (floating):

2 Homer's Odyssey 10.1-4. Trans. by E.V. Rieu (1946)

Our next landfall was the floating island of Aeolia, the home of Aeolus son of Hippotas, who is a favourite of the immortal gods. All around the isle there runs an unbroken wall of bronze, and below it the cliffs rise sheer from the sea. 2

3 Homer's Odyssey, W. Walter Merry, James Riddell, D. B. Monro, Oxford, Clarendon Press. 1886-1901.

â¦Aioliên d'es nêson aphikometh': entha d' enaien
Aiolos Hippotadês, philos athanatoisi theoisin,
Plôtêi eni nêsôi: pasan de te min peri teichos
chalkeon arrêkton, lissê d' anadedrome petrê. 3

4 For a discussion of the "Second Odyssey" theme, and for Stephanides' translation of Cavafy's poem (...)

6The meaning of Odysseus's digressions to fantastic other islands, as gods and destiny defer his journey to his home island Ithaka, has been explored and extended over the millennia from Homer through Anita Desai's Journey to Ithaca, to refer to a recent example. If Ithaka is both the point of departure and arrival, it may be like the source and the target in cultural translatability. It is noteworthy that in French (as in other Romance languages) the source and target cultures in translation are referred to as "la culture de départ" and "la culture d'arrivée." In the process of the journey, the boundaries between self and other continually shift, and the meaning of Ithaka grows and changes. This is a theme underlying the post-Homeric tradition of the second Odyssey. In Dante's Inferno (xxvi, 90-124), we see Odysseus after the sensual experience with Circe on her island of Aeaea, deciding that he no longer wishes to go home to Ithaka, but instead to proceed on a journey without destination and experience new worlds. This theme is also found in Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" (1842) where the thirst for travel and knowledge is greater than the satisfaction of arriving home: after arriving at Ithaka, Odysseus proposes bequeathing the reign of the community of his island home to his son Telemachus, s he can continue traveling. Also in this tradition is Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters" (1832), in which the mariners defer their desire to return to their island home after chewing the Lotos plant. The theme is taken up by the Alexandrine poet Cavafy in an unpublished poem of 1894 with the title "Second Odyssey." 4 After the joy of reaching Ithaka, Odysseus finds his island too small. Experiencing disappointment and ennui, he prepares to set off on a second Odyssey beyond the Pillars of Hercules, or beyond the boundaries of the known world, and leave the rule of his home island to his son Telemachus. In the later well-known poem "Ithaka," Cavafy suggests that the real meaning of the island is to be found in the experience of the journey. This proposes a more complex dialogic than the earlier poem of what the island home might mean. Ithaka is the source, she "gave you the marvelous journey" Cavafy says, and the journey will bring a higher order of meaning, "Wise as you have become, so full of experience." In the "detour" and "retour" of translatio, Ithaka is the promise of fulfilment.

5 Trans. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard, Online, http://ithaca.rice.edu/kz/Misc/Ithaka.html.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
You'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. 5

6 The Homeric Hymn, trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 1976, pp. 15-19

7Another contender for the first acknowledged floating island is Delos. The "Homeric Hymn to Apollon," which speaks of the transformations and names of the island. 6 Three centuries later, we also read in a fragment from the poet Pindar's (ca. 518-ca. 438 BC) processional song 'On Delos' of the island's translation from a floating to an anchored site of worship when the island agrees to harbor Leto and become the birthplace of Apollo:

7 The Odes of Pindar, Including the Principal Fragments, trans. Sir John Sandys, Cambridge, MA, Harva (...)

For aforetime, that isle was tossed on the waves by all manner of whirling winds; but, when Leto, the daughter of Coeüs, in the frenzy of her imminent pangs of travail, set foot on her, then it was that four lofty pillars rose from the roots of earth, and on their capitals held up the rock with their adamantine bases. There it was that she gave birth to, and beheld, her blessed offspring." 7

8The story of the island Atlantis, told by Plato around 360 BC in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias has prompted discussion for over two thousand years. Atlantis is an insular other world beyond the frontiers of known time and space. It is beyond the Pillars of Hercules or beyond the frontiers of the known world at the time and it had existed nine thousand years before Plato tells the story. Not only does it belong to another space, but to another distant time as well. The story of Atlantis may designate the Other within Athens, and Menmosyne (or memory) is invoked to bring back knowledge of the apparently forgotten distant past to the Athenians of Plato's day. Interestingly, it is the Egyptians who remind the Athenians of their forgotten past, the Atlanteans who survive being the ancestors of the Athenians. Egyptian priests told the story of Atlantis to Solon, who passed the tale on to Dropides, the great-grandfather of Critias. Atlantis is an idealized but imperfect world in a time before the remembered beginning. Atlantis was destroyed by a deluge and thus the story constitutes an antediluvian myth. The dialogues provide a cosmogony and eschatology of the world of Atlantis, as well as the topography and ethnography of the island and its people. The land is blessed with a wealth of natural resources and the inhabitants are proud and noble. The people are of semi-divine origin, descendants of Poseidon and the mortal Cleito, but because of hubris and the loss of the divine element, the gods punish them, and the island nation is destroyed and swallowed up by the sea.

9Also significant in the imagination and literature of the ancient Mediterranean is the island of Thule allegedly discovered at the end of the fourth century BC by Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles), the author of a geographical treatise, disbelieved by antiquity's foremost geographers and now lost. Referring to Pytheas as his source, Strabo (ca. 64 BC-ca. AD 21), in his Geography (2.4.1) speaks of Thule as a place of limited stability situated at the edge of the earth where the elements were believed to fuse into a bond that held the world together. To the early cartographers it was a kind of floating eidolon, at times shown separately in the seas around Iceland, at times identified with it. In literature Thule became a dreamland where basic distinctions, such as that between day and night, hot and cold, life and death are confused. Thule appears in the work of many writers including Virgil, Petrach, Cervantes, Longfellow, and in Poe where the nocturnal iciness of ultimate dim Thule becomes the objective correlative of the lonely soul in his poem "Dreamland" (1844).The theme of islands and dystopia is already found in classical satire. Syrian writer Lucian of Samosata (ca. 120 - ca. 180 AD), in his A True History, parodically depicts an island-world within a whale. A dialogue between the inhabitants of a fertile floating island within a whate contains a visceral discussion on the irresolvable tension between dystopia, and the dubious nature of Edenic insularity.

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds, methought, would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again. ( The Tempest, 3.2.135-142)

8 Sir Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams, New York, W.W. Norton, 1975. See also David Harve (...)

10During the Renaissance and with European expansion and the colonization of other lands there arise new cartographies and new perspectives on the island theme during the Renaissance with new literary uses of the edenic, arcadian and utopian. These islands include Propsero's island and Utopia, both of which had a tremendous impact on the history of literature and ideas. The island in Shakespeare's The Tempest, which Prospero inhabits as an exile but whose ownership is contested by Caliban, has become the archetypal island of the European colonial era, for here a kind of magic that would not be permissible in urban society is used to control the destinies of those who inhabit the island, both as its natives and as its conquerors. The island of Utopia in Thomas More's founding text of that name (first published in Latin in 1516), incited exploration of how the imagined geography of the island form is linked to the possibility of social change and history in its suggestion that utopia is a dream born out of the fallen state of history itself just as islands have their origins in ruptured continents. 8 Utopia's transformation from land to island expresses the social desire for self-containment, autonomy, and unchangeable stability.

11Real islands such as Malta and Cyprus also feature in the literature of the early modern period revealing how these Mediterranean islands have served the interests of (rival) colonial powers - Ottoman, Venetian, Spanish, English - and are caught between different myths and dreams between East and West. Marlowe's The Jew of Malta is situated in early modern Malta's historical transition from chivalric values to market ones, which determine the play's translations of the myths related to the Maltese island. The period adds its own myths to the perception of the island: of Cyprus in Shakespeare's Othello and in Cervantes' El amante liberal. Both texts, written in the beginning of the seventeenth century were inspired by the fall of Cyprus to the Ottomans in 1571. While in El amante, the captive protagonist sadly contemplates the ruins of Nicosia and the destruction caused by the Ottoman occupation of Cyprus, in Othello, whose time of action is set before the 1522 capture of Rhodes by the Ottomans, the island represents an outpost on the border between Europe and the Orient, between civilization and barbarism. Both islands have been a site of multiple translations and a generator of new meanings concerning the relationship between East and West, past and present, myth and reality. The question of collusions and collisions between centre and periphery, between metropolis and colony runs through in different ways at different moments in time.

12Islands are often represented as sites of some kind of magical transaction or exchange, places where individuals encounter different cultures and find that they can no longer relate in the same way to the places they have left. We see new variations of the island as a fantastic other world and a locus amoenus in two epic poems of the period: Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532) and Luis de Camões' Os Lusíadas (1572). Both evoke islands supposedly in the Indian Ocean with the Renaissance ideals of sensual delight in nature. Ariosto's narrative travels through the enchanted island of the witch Alcina where magical transformations take place, while Camões' epic poem The Lusiads sings the glories of the Portuguese, the first Europeans to reach India by sea by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope. When Vasco da Gama and his crew successfully reach the Indian Ocean, Venus rewards them with the pleasures of the isle of love (A Ilha dos Amores). This floating island is fixed by Venus to receive the sailors who enjoy the sensual delights of this locus amoenus.

9 Montaigne. Selected Essays, eds. Arthur Tilley & A.M. Bouse Manchester:, Manchester UP, 1948 30.

13In the genre of shipwreck stories, The Isle of Pine (1618), Thomas Neville'sfantastic tale about a man and four women (including maids and a slave) who survive and multiply in a blissful state of nature, populating the island with their descendants, combines the idea of the island as Edenic paradise and Utopian ideal. During this period we also have the re-emergence of Atlantis in a New World context as in, for example, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. While this association between Atlantis and the American continent gained currency at the time,Montaigne in his essay "Des cannibales" casts doubt on the possibility that they are one and the same: "il n'y a pas grande apparence que cette Isle soit ce monde nouveau que nous venons de decouvrir." 9

14Eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourses of travel standardized the representation of islands within an emerging rationalist and positivist framework as we see in writers not only when they visit faraway islands such as those of the South Pacific, but also in representatives of the English and Scottish Enlightenments, Dr. Johnson and Boswell encountering fringe islands of the British isles such as the Hebrides. New problems of translatability arise in this period as epistemology and writing are derivative of empirical science as it developed in this period. A question that might be raised about the rationalist 'seeing' European and the 'seen' native is whether texts actually manage to represent what they encounter, or whether they only reproduce what they expected to find when they set out. The encounter with other island worlds and peoples often upsets the epistemological system and the problem of knowledge itself becomes an anxious theme creating knew parameters for the contact zone of translatability. We see this as a theme in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), and epistemology becomes one subject of comic satire in Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726).

15Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is probably the most popular book in the canonical literature that deals with the theme of castaways on desert islands. While it is frequently discussed in the context of the rise of the novel and its links to European expansion and colonization, it has most recently given rise to scholarly discussion within the context of post-colonial studies, and to post-colonial rewritings such as Derek Walcott's play Friday, and Coetzee's well-known novella Foe. In J. M. Coetzee's rewriting of Defoe's novel, Crusoe's island is transformed into what one might call a meta-island or a meta-narrative that comments on the island narrative of Defoe's novella and for what it really represents in colonial discourse. Coetzee focuses on such issues as language as symbolic order and how it is skewed in its relationship to gender, ethnicity, and culture. This raises interesting questions of cultural translatability that may be explored in his journey from his home island to the desert island where there is a translation from source to target. Crusoe repeatedly frees himself from the constraints of his own island-nation by going out to sea, but his arrival on the Other Island is due to providence or accident (the shipwreck). The desire for translation marked in the departure is curtailed and becomes fear and anxiety at the uncolonized and opaque space of his arrival as he accidentally finds himself on "this horrid island." The wrecked ship becomes a signifier of the process of mediation in translation, which begins with Crusoe's landing on the island. Several pages of the text are devoted to registering the objects that Crusoe managed to save from the wreck of the ship that brought him to the island. The wrecked ship does not sink but remains anchored a short distance from the land, and he goes to great pains to carry the signifiers of his culture into his new habitat, which he proceeds to conquer with the tools of agriculture and tools with which to inscribe and write. The cultivation and enclosure of the land, the imposition of a temporal order is analogous with the writing process, which becomes the written text itself.

I found pen, ink, and paper, and I husbanded them to the utmost; and I shall show that while my ink lasted, I kept things very exact; but after that was gone, I could not, for I could not make any ink by any means that I could devise.
And this put me in mind that I wanted many things, notwithstanding all that I had amassed together; and of these, this of ink was one, as also spade, pick-axe, and shovel, to dig or remove the earth, needles, pins, and thread; as for linen, I soon learned to want that without much difficulty.

16It is after he has carried all that he could from the wreck and arranged it in his living space that he begins to keep a journal of his days on the island. If the island space is opaque and resistant to translation, in the process of writing Crusoe inscribes his system of values and meanings as he does by inscribing his temporal order with notches on a wooden post:

"I came on shore here the 30th of September 1659." Upon the sides of this square post I cut every day a notch with my knife, and every seventh notch was as long again as the rest, and every first day of the month as long again as that long one; and thus I kept my calendar, or weekly, monthly, and yearly reckoning of time.

17Later in the novel we find an analogous translation imperative toward the cannibals. Friday is rescued from his cannibal captors and tamed, so the translation and acculturation of Friday are marked by salvage or redemption. The translation strategy of land and people is a process of domestication where there is an effort to impose the values of the source culture.

18Book III of Jonathan Swift's great eighteenth-century satirical novel, Gulliver's Travels, sees the protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, reach a previously unknown island somewhere off the coast of Japan, having been attacked by pirates and forced off his ship. As he wonders how he will survive on a desolate piece of rock, he is suddenly aware of another island, flying above him. This is the island of Laputa, which serves as a means of transport between other islands, and we follow Gulliver as he meets the inhabitants and discovers more about the mysterious island that floats above the surface of the world, and meets the inhabitants who rule over the continent of Balnibari below. Swift's satirical translation of his floating island omits the real etymology of his invented island name Laputa (in Spanish, the whore):

The Word, which I interpret the Flying or Floating Island, is in the Original Laputa; whereof I could never learn the true Etymology. Lap in the old obsolete Language signifieth High, and Untuh a Governor; from which they say by Corruption was derived Laputa, from Lapuntuh. But I do not approve of this Derivation, which seems to be a little strained. I ventured to offer to the Learned among them a Conjecture of my own, that Laputa was quasi Lap outed; Lap signifying properly the dancing of the Sun Beams in the Sea; and outed a Wing, which however I shall not obtrude, but submit to the judicious Reader. (Part III - Chapter II)

19Swift's purpose in creating his narrative was to instruct as well as to entertain. He creates for our amusement accounts of the intellectual deficiencies of the inhabitants of Laputa and those of the continent of Balnibarbi below, who pride themselves on their scholarship but who are presented as ludicrous. The Laputans are so engrossed in disembodied speculation that they disdain the science of geometry, which means that their houses are inadequately constructed, whereas the Balnibarbi professors' method of teaching mathematics is to write a proposition on a thin wafer and give it to students to swallow, and as for the professors of politics, they appear to Gulliver to be "wholly out of their Senses." In this crazy world knowledge is an absurdity, logic is topsy-turvy and all their great learning is so hopelessly flawed it is useless. Swift holds up a mirror to his own society through the depiction of the rulers and ruled on the floating island and the continent below. The Laputian rulers of Balnibari are so removed from worldly affairs that they worry over abstractions, and thus are unable to manage the duty of protecting the interests of their subjects.

20While the rulers inhabiting Laputa possess the advantage of the elevated situation, the island is restricted by magnetic force to flying a maximum of four miles above the continent. Moreover, the 'Bottom' of the floating island is always under threat of penetration from the phallic rocks, towers, pillars and spires of the ruled continent below, and the somatic pull of the continent attracts the Court ladies who are drawn sexually by the earthliness of the footment and frequently venture off and away from the cerebral insularity of the floating island above. There is a mutual dependency between island and continent, rulers and ruled:

And the King, when he is highest provoked, and most determined to press a City to Rubbish, orders the Island to descend with great Gentleness, out of a Pretence of Tenderness to his People, but indeed for fear of breaking the Adamantine Bottom; in which Case it is the Opinion of all their Philosophers, that the Load-stone could no longer hold it up, and the whole Mass would fall to the Ground.

21The positivist scientific and rationalist discourse of the Enlightenment survived into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries especially in the discourses of anthropology, geology, botany, and zoology where islands are perceived as the sites of isolated life forms. Notably we have Darwin's scientific analysis of the evolution of life forms on islands in his "Essay of 1844," and in the work of anthropologists such as Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Clifford Geertz, and a host of others have chosen islands as the areas of their fieldwork. In contrast, the Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetics of Decadence, Symbolism and Modernism articulates different perspectives on the desire, dream or failure of an originary paradise or of an ideal society. In the course of the nineteenth century we find Byron's Romantic nostalgia in "The Isles of Greece," "Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!\ Eternal summer gilds them yet,\But all, except their sun, is set," and in Baudelaire's well-known poem "Voyage to Cythera " where Aphrodite's island becomes the expression of decadent sensuality and world-weariness.

22Byron also expresses nostalgia for an earthly paradise in "The Island" (1823),based on Lieutenant Bligh's account of the mutiny that occurred aboard his ship Bounty in the Pacific in 1789. The tale foregrounds the love between mutineer Torquil ("the blue-eyed northern child/of isles more known to man, but scarce less wild;/The fair-hair'd offspring of the Hebrides,/Where roars the Pentland with its whirling seas;") and the young native woman Neuha. Neuha saves Torquil's life by concealing him inside a submarine grotto during a chase by the British. The womblike cave becomes an island within an island, which is the true locus of security, happiness, and pleasure, and an expression of desire for a return to a state of insulated protection. From the discovery of the the Americas to the period of decolonization, European writers and artists translating insularity - Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, Paul Gauguin and others - contributed to the myth of islands in the Caribbean or the South Seas as new Cytheras, blessed islands, or exotic Edens rich with beautiful flora and fauna. The earliest indigenous writers of the Caribbean submitted to this myth and colonial portrayal until it was later challenged by post-colonial critiques in the middle of the twentieth century by such authors as Aimé Césaire.

23The island theme as a modernist response to modernity is found in fiction such as D.H. Lawrence's The Man Who Loved Islands, Conrad's Victory: an island tale, andAldous Huxley´s futuristic dystopia Brave New World, which raise questions about the relationship between islands, social criticism, and utopian thinking. The role of the island is a negative one in Lawrence's fiction, since escape into any sheltered or isolated world prevents that crucial contact with the world of human relationships, which, although frequently painful, is of central importance for the life and growth of the individual. Similarly, in Conrad's Victory, the protagonist Heyst, takes refuge from the insensitivity of the modern world by choosing to live on an island but eventually finds redemption through commitment, life and love. Huxley's work is a judgement on both the deformity of the modern world and the incurable romantic utopianism of the Savage. He draws on Shakespeare's The Tempest (from which the title of his novel is derived) for themes and motifs, and also is a satire on Well's Modern Utopia. In Wells' World State, there are prison-like islands for excluded and deviant individuals, whereas in Huxley, the deviants are the most talented and intelligent people. While the literary treatment and perspectives are different in the three authors, they are all exploring insularity as a response to the anxiety of modernity.

But all the islands have that legendary oarsman
Slapping down dominoes on a rumshop table,
Then raking the slabs in with a gravedigger's breath,
Derek Walcott, Omeros, LVII.ii

24The floating island, the unstable space that moves around in between and defies known patterns of logic was taken up in the 1980s by Eugenio Barba, founder of the Odin Theatre and the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Barba uses the idea of the floating islands not in a satirical manner, but rather to talk about a community of theatre practitioners from many lands, who move around the world, sharing their work and living in what effectively are islands, loosely connected to one another but not rooted in a mainland. He uses the metaphor of the floating island to show how in an increasingly diverse world, international creativity can move about through a network of metaphorical islands that share a common cause. His primary aim is not to lament the shortcomings of intellectuals, but rather to show how creative ways of working can interact around the globe.

25We used the metaphor in a similar way in this essay, though we have extended the idea of the floating island to encompass different kinds of island communities: geographical, spatial, psychological, and mythical. In this way, we draw in the idea of the diaspora, the linked island groups spread across the world who share a history yet who engage daily with diversity. For the floating island, as opposed to the unmovable island, is an image well-suited to the multifariousness of the contemporary world. The island that travels, that does not stay in one place is far more representative of today's world than is the island fixed, as Shakespeare puts it when describing England in his Richard II, like a precious stone set in a silver sea. The idea of England as an island illustrates both the power and the absurdity of the idea of the island in nationalist discourse. For England is not, and never has been, an island in any strict sense of the world. It is part of a large number of islands, large and small, off the northern shores of the European mainland, termed by geographers the British Isles; yet the island as constructed in England acquired symbolic status, through a desire to perceive national identity as separate from the 'Continent.'

26At the close of the twentieth century, dominant metaphors in literary studies served to draw attention to the growing significance of inter-relatedness in the world. Interestingly, many of these metaphors derive from science, both from organic and from theoretical science. Hence post-colonial discourse employs the terminology of hybridity, while translation studies uses the terminology of refraction, and everywhere there are references to webs, systems and networks. At the same time, across disciplines there is an increased interest in exploring those spaces that are not clearly delineated, hence the growing number of studies looking at liminality, in-betweenness, diasporic movement. This raises new questions of representation. The island topos is frequently linked to the critical topos of the re-presentation of reality and as such islands are a mode of mediation in the perception of culture. The idea of reality and re-presentation is raised as a major literary and philosophical theme in Bioy Casares´ exploration of the island in The Invention of Morel, in a way that may be considered a forerunner to postmodernist aesthetics and simulacra.

10 See Gustavo Pérez Firmat, The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literatur (...)

27Post-colonial writers have further prompted us to challenge the difference between a 'native' narrative and ones written by outsiders. The relationship between native and colonizer in such major texts as The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe are addressed in their post-colonial rewritings in, for example, Michael Gilkes' Prospero's Island, Marina Warner's Indigo, and J.D. Coetzee's Foe. The island world of the Odyssey has attracted a number of contemporary Caribbean writers. Most notably Derek Walcott recreates this ancient epic and the world of the Hellas archipelago in a Caribbean Creole context in his epic poem Omeros. Moreover, Enlightenment discourses and the native versus outsider perspective have been linked to the critical and theoretical discussions of how literary texts depict colonized islands asking and of how the project of empire may be translated in the post-colonial momentum. How do islands claim and narrate their independence against the former colonial centres and in the aftermath of their imperialistic practices? Writers and cultural theorists have examined islands and their significance in terms of ideological formations of identity and difference, such as in the nation/island identification, and how colonial and contemporary migrations and border-crossings may provide new perceptions on notions of identity. Post-colonial islands are often seen as cross-cultural or in-between spaces. In contrast to the approach of Western anthropologists who in the tradition of scientific positivism, have frequently seen islands as metonyms for an authentic, organic, and integrated culture, the Cuban anthropologist, Fernando Ortiz, uses the term counterpoint to situate his own island culture in relation to the European culture in the early twentieth century, and uses translation, and coins the term transculturation, as a way of affirming Cuban counterpoint. 10 More recently, António Benítez-Rojo, another Cuban, speaks of instability, impermanence, and heterogeneity in relation to the Caribbean:

11 Antonío Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island: the Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Durham (...)

not a common archipelago, but a meta-archipelago (an exalted quality the Hellas archipelago possessed, and the great Malay archipelago as well), and as a meta-archipelago it has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a center. Thus the Caribbean flows outward past the limits of its own sea with a vengeance." 11

12 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Pr (...)

28He suggests that the ultima Thule for the Caribbean could be Bombay, Canton, West Africa, a New York cafe, a Bristol pub, or a Portuguese melody. In the French Antilles, a poetics of Relation is expounded by writer Edouard Glissant who conveys the strength of Caribbean writers to recreate, to speculate on questions of identity and to find a way of expressing pluralism and diversity. The very shapelessness of the clusters of island communities that comprise the Caribbean can be contrasted productively with the monolithic nature of continental masses. Islands are sites of translation, or rewriting and transposition, of re-creativity: Glissant argues that the Caribbean is a place in the world where Relation presents itself most visibly. He compares it to the Mediterranean, which is an inner sea surrounded by land, a sea that concentrates. In contrast, the Caribbean is a sea that explodes the scattered islands into an arc, and thus like the Pacific, the Caribbean (without necessarily inferring any advantage) is a natural illustration of the Poetics of Relation. 12

29In the twenty-first century we shall see an acceleration of this same trend, though much greater care will be taken to ensure that generalized concepts of globalization do not erase the significance of literary and cultural traditions. The horrific events of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath have shown us that no culture, anywhere, can exist in isolation for long. There are no islands whose inhabitants can seal themselves off from influences from the rest of the world, no real physical islands and no metaphoric islands either. The peoples of the world have become too closely meshed together and, most importantly, have too great a need of one another to live cut off from outside influences. It is hoped that through encounters with the ideas about islands that float, readers will be made more aware of the importance of literature which, even in an age of increasing technological prowess, remains the key to understanding the world we inhabit.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,John Donne, Meditation 17 Islands which hav...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Established to banish dissidents and criminals, these islands are known for their one-time prisoners, from Napoleon to Nelson Mandela

smithsonian.com

Patmos, Greece
A tiny, mountainous speck in the Aegean Sea, the 13-square-mile island of Patmos is where, according to Christian tradition, St. John was exiled in A.D. 95 after being persecuted for his faith by the Romans and where he wrote his Gospel and the Book of Revelation. Ten centuries later, in 1088, a monk built a monastery on the island dedicated to the saint. This established Patmos as a pilgrimage site and a center of Greek Orthodox learning, which it remains to this day. In 1999, Unesco declared the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian-along with the Cave of the Apocalypse, where St. John is said to have received his revelations from God, and the nearby medieval settlement of Chora-a World Heritage site. Unesco stated: "There are few other places in the world where religious ceremonies that date back to the early Christian times are still being practiced unchanged."

Sado Island, Japan
With its dramatic mountains, lush forests and temperate climate, Sado Island is now a popular retreat. But in medieval times, the island, 32 miles west of Niigata Prefecture in the Sea of Japan, was a place of banishment for those who had fallen out of favor with the rulers of the day. More than 70 people-notably aristocrats and artists-were exiled here, beginning in A.D. 722 with the poet Asomioyu Hozumi, who criticized the emperor. Other exiles included the Emperor Juntoku, who attempted a coup against the Kamakura shogunate in 1220, and the monk Nichiren in 1271, who preached a radical form of Buddhism. Today, many attribute the island's eclectic population and cultural riches-Sado has more than 30 Noh stages and is known as the "Island of Performing Arts"-to the presence of these early exiles.

Île Sainte-Marguerite, France
Just off the coast of Cannes in the Mediterranean Sea, the small, forested island of Sainte-Marguerite-about two miles long and a half-mile wide-was home to one of history's most enigmatic prisoners. The convict, whose identity was concealed behind what was most likely a black velvet mask, was brought to the island in 1687, during the reign of Louis XIV, and locked up in the Royal Fort, then a state prison. (His barren cell can still be seen.) Later, he was moved to the Bastille, where he died in 1703 at around age 45.

The prisoner's identity and the reason for his incarceration are still not known. But over the centuries, they have been the subjects of much speculation. One popular theory, that he was an older brother of Louis XIV, became the basis for Alexander Dumas' classic tale The Man in the Iron Mask.

The Royal Fort continued to be used as a prison until the 20th century. Today it houses the Musée de la Mer, devoted to marine archaeology.

Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile
In 1704, British privateer Alexander Selkirk was marooned on Isla Más a Tierra in the Pacific after quarreling with the captain of his ship, the Cinque Ports. He lived alone on the rugged 29-square-mile island, 418 miles off Valparaiso, Chile, for more than four years, subsisting on fish, lobster, goats and seals, until he was rescued by a passing ship in February 1709. Woodes Rogers, the captain, described Selkirk upon rescue as "a man Cloth'd in Goat-Skins, who look'd wilder than the first Owners of them." Selkirk's ordeal is believed to have been the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719.

The Chilean government renamed Isla Más a Tierra to Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966, in hopes of attracting tourism.

Devil's Island, French Guiana
History's most notorious penal colony, Devil's Island actually consisted of several prisons, one on the mainland near the capital, Cayenne, and three offshore, reserved for the most dangerous offenders: Isle Royale, Isle St. Joseph and tiny Devil's Island. Napoleon III established the penal colony in 1854, and some 80,000 French convicts-criminals, spies and political prisoners-would be sent there before it officially closed in 1938. While there, most of the convicts were assigned to hard labor, either in timber camps or on the construction of a road prisoners called "Route Zero," which was nothing more than a make-work project. The penal colony was also known as the "Dry Guillotine," owing to the high mortality rate from disease, harsh working conditions and hunger. (Prisoners who failed to meet daily work quotas in the timber camps were denied food.) An estimated 50,000 inmates died.

The most famous of several well-known prisoners was Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, who, wrongly convicted of treason, spent four and a half years there in solitary confinement, from 1895 to 1899. Another was Henri Charrière, whose 1968 memoir, Papillon, recounting his escape, became a best seller and a major motion picture.

In the mid-1960s, Devil's Island, by then abandoned and overgrown, got new life when the French government chose French Guiana as the location for its space center. The space agency purchased the three offshore islands, which were under the launch trajectory, and in the 1980s decided to preserve many of the prison buildings as a cultural heritage site.

St. Helena
Located in the middle of the South Atlantic, 1,200 miles from Angola and 1,800 miles from Brazil, the island of St. Helena is among the most remote places on earth. This detail was not lost on the British, who sent Napoleon into exile here following his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The general and his 26-person entourage were lodged at Longwood House, the six-room former summer residence of the island's lieutenant general. Napoleon passed the time reading, gardening and dictating his memoirs. He was free to go wherever he wanted on the property, but had to be accompanied by a guard for outside excursions. Napoleon died on St. Helena in 1821 at age 51.

Today, the rocky, 47-square-mile island (pop. 4,250) is a British Overseas Territory and is still accessible only by water.

Coiba Island, Panama
Fifteen miles off Panama's Pacific coast and surrounded by shark-infested waters, 122,000-acre Isla Coiba is the country's largest island. First inhabited by Cacique Indians and later pirates, it was established in 1919 as a penal colony for Panama's most dangerous criminals. Political dissidents were sent there under the military dictatorships of Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega. Human-rights groups frequently reported on the harsh conditions of the penal colony, including incidents of torture and murder. One former inmate, Panamanian journalist Leopoldo Aragón, recalled that prisoners were forced to run a gauntlet, chased by guards beating them with clubs. The penal colony was shut down in 2004.

Since the island was never developed, it boasts vast tracts of virgin tropical rainforest, mangrove swamps, pristine beaches and species found nowhere else in the world. Isla Coiba is also among the last places in Panama where scarlet macaws and crested eagles still exist in the wild. In 2005, Coiba National Park-which includes the island, 37 smaller islands and the waters surrounding them-was designated a Unesco World Heritage site.

Galápagos Islands, Ecuador
Between 1946 and 1959, the Ecuadorean government used 1,790-square-mile Isabela, the largest island in the Galápagos chain, as an agriculture and penal colony. Some 300 prisoners-hardened criminals and political dissidents-were incarcerated there under extremely harsh conditions. Guards ordered them to build a wall out of lava rocks brought from a distant crater-a wall that served no purpose. A number of prisoners, slaving under the hot equatorial sun, are thought to have died during its construction. Today the wall is all that remains of the penal colony and is known as the Muro de las Lagrimas, the Wall of Tears.

Robben Island, South Africa
Located seven miles offshore of Cape Town across wind-whipped Table Bay, Robben Island has been a place of exile for most of the past 400 years. It was used as a prison by the early Dutch and British, as a leper colony and mental hospital between 1846 and 1931, and as a political prison for non-white opponents of the apartheid regime from 1960 to 1991. Many well-known dissidents-Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and current South African President Jacob Zuma, among them-were incarcerated here under brutal conditions, enduring beatings, harassment and forced labor in the island's lime quarries.

In 1997, the 1,447-acre island became a museum, with guided tours provided by former political inmates, and today it's among the most popular tourist destinations in Cape Town.
Editor's Note, August 11, 2010: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that St. John wrote the Book of Revelations. He wrote the Book of Revelation. Thanks to our many commenters for identifying the error.
Alcatraz, San Francisco, California
Named Isla de Alcatraces (Island of Pelicans) by an early Spanish explorer, the small, rocky island in the middle of San Francisco Bay was the site of one of the United States' most feared prisons. From the day it opened in 1934, "The Rock" was a prison's prison, receiving other penitentiary's most incorrigible and dangerous inmates. No criminal was ever sentenced directly to Alcatraz. A total of 1,545 people were incarcerated there in its nearly three decades of operation, including Al Capone; Doc Barker, of the Ma Barker gang; Robert Stroud, a.k.a. the "Birdman of Alcatraz"; and George "Machine Gun" Kelly. As the prison was 1½ miles offshore and surrounded by frigid waters with treacherous currents, escape attempts were few. Of the 34 people who tried, most were recaptured or killed. Five, however, have never been accounted for and are listed as "missing and presumed drowned."

Alcatraz closed in 1963 because of high operating costs. During the rest of the decade, Native Americans occupied the island twice, claiming their right to it under an 1868 treaty. The second occupation ended in 1971 with their removal by federal marshals. In 1972, Alcatraz became part of the new Golden Gate National Recreation Area and today receives more than a million visitors a year.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
smithsonian.com Patmos, Greece A tiny, mountainous speck in the Aegean Sea, the 13-square-mile island of Patmos is where, according to Christian tradition, St. John was exiled in A.D. 95 after being persecuted for his faith by the Romans and where he wrote his Gospel and the Book of Revelation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ben Myers

The remote backwoods of Alaska are not remote enough for Gary, one of the troubled central characters of David Vann's recent hit novel Caribou Island. Gary wants to retreat further from civilisation. His plan is to sail out across a lake to the uninhabited Caribou Island, build a cabin by hand and ... well, that's it. Just being on an island will, he thinks, be enough. Because that sense of detachment from mainland society - being able to view from a removed distance - is all he craves.

As with Vann's previous book, Legend Of A Suicide, which primarily concerned a man and his son relocating to a cabin on an Alaskan island (there is a pattern emerging here) and the dire circumstances that followed, the place - in this case, the island - is the star of the show. Stoic, enduring, self-contained, tough: it manifests all the qualities that the men in Vann's novels (and indeed so much of American literature, from Thoreau and Twain through to Kerouac, McCarthy and Proulx) aspire to.

Islands occupy a significant space in literature. They are more than scenic locations; they are literary devices whose natural boundaries help shape and contain narratives. Fictional islands exist as either lost paradises where poetry and contemplation happen, or places where law breaks down and conventional morality gets tested. Think of HG Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau, The Lord of the Flies, Shakespeare's The Tempest - or even Alex Garland's The Beach. Combined, these books gesture towards the the truth that underpins the draw of islands and their recurrence in literature: they offer the ultimate plausible fantasy location (obliquely backed up by a survey conducted by Psychology Today in the 1990s, where islands were deemed the most highly rated setting for men's sexual fantasies).

It is not until Robinson Crusoe climbs the mountain and realises that he is entirely surrounded by water that the true horror of his situation becomes apparent and his endurance test truly begins. For Daniel Defoe's protagonist, it is not the physical hardships that are the greatest threat, but the psychological trauma inflicted by his isolation. And the smaller the island, of course, the greater that sense of entrapment. The sense of oppression wouldn't be quite the same if the island was, say, mainland Britain (the ninth largest island in the world; discounting entire continents, Greenland is the biggest).

The island's narrow boundaries can, of course, work both ways. Tove Jansson's The Summer Book is a series of picturesque portraits of life on an idyllic Finnish island over the course of a single summer. Surrounded by the sea, happily cut off from the clamour of the mainland and with the drama of nature and the elements around them, her characters are never bored: they look inward and close-up, and operate at their own pace. It's a beautiful read, sure to make even the most sociable reader consider such a life (incidentally, the island - Klovharu - is real. Jansson lived there with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä for many years).

As the world gets smaller the literary significance of remote islands has changed. Once they were prisons for shipwrecked sailors or, in the case of the 1812 novel The Swiss Family Robinson, a device through which to explore Christian family values. But now that nowhere in the world is beyond reach, the solitude of island living becomes a prized commodity. In 2009 an advertised position for the job of caretaker on an Australian tropical island received 35,000 applicants. Perhaps as life gets noisier, more crowded and more urban, the symbolic significance of islands is merely strengthened. Their remoteness becomes increasingly appealing and the sense of distance from mainstream society allows a unique space in which to tell a ripping yarn, both old or new.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ben Myers The remote backwoods of Alaska are not remote enough for Gary, one of the troubled central characters of David Vann's recent hit novel Caribou Island. Gary wants to retreat further from civilisation. His plan is to sail out across a lake to the uninhabited Caribou Island, build a cabin by hand and ...