keynote
TIM INGOLD
LANDSCAPES OF RESTORATION AND REPAIR
ABSTRACT
Does the ground divide the earth below from the sky above, or is it constituted in the meeting and commingling of the earth’s uprising and the sky’s befalling? Is it renewed by turning over, as the ploughshare turns the soil, or by adding new layers on top as old ones sink beneath? These questions have a crucial bearing on our imagination of generations and their passage, of tradition and heritage, of repair and restoration, and of the role of humans in creating landscapes of the future. To follow a tradition is to repair along the ways of predecessors, betwixt sky and earth, on the premise that descendant generations issue from the bodies of ancestral ones. The landscapes of tradition, undergoing continual repair in the passage of generations, are always ageing, but having no determinate point of origin, no one can say how old they are. But the modern mind, having pivoted on the present, relegates ancestral generations, and the grounds on which they lived, to a now superseded past, deposited in layers beneath its own. It is this pivot that converts tradition into heritage. The landscapes of heritage, irrevocably tied to a putative origin, though older with every passing year, are not allowed to age. Instead, they are kept as they were imagined to have always been, through projects of restoration. While humans can be agents of both restoration and repair, the former means taking up a position above and beyond, whereas the latter can be done only from within the midst of things. To create a truly renewable landscape means repairing along old ways, rather than restoring them as heritage for the future.
Tim Ingold is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020), Imagining for Real (2022) and The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2024). Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 he was made a CBE for services to Anthropology.
keynote
VIC MCEWAN​
SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART AMONG 30 MILLION DEAD FISH
ABSTRACT
This presentation explores socially engaged art as a generative response to ecological crisis, a relational, affective and embodied practice of care, and an intervention into the slow violence of environmental and cultural neglect. Focusing on the 2018/19 and 2023 mass fish kill events in the Lower Barka/Darling River at Menindee in New South Wales, Australia, I examine how collaborative, cross-sector approaches brought together diverse knowledge systems to address ecological and cultural grief, reconfiguring the systems that might otherwise forget, dismiss, or damage the human and more-than-human communities they affect.
Dr Vic McEwan is the Postdoctoral Research Associate in Creative Arts, Ecologies and Communities at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (USyd) as part of Professor Liza Lim’s ARC Laureate Fellowship: Resonant Earth: Music, Ecology and Climate Justice. He is also the Artistic Director of multi-disciplinary arts organisation the Cad Factory, a multi-award-winning organisation known for its cross-sector, socially engaged artistic projects. His visual arts practice is represented in NSW by Art Atrium.
Vic is interested in contributing to the development of critically and artistically informed socially engaged art practices that navigate the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. His work 'reimagines' the role of the arts, exploring how qualities such as artistic intent and affective potential can work with community, environmental, and cross portfolio concerns in meaningful, impactful ways. Vic has developed an innovative synthesis of creative research practice, environmental humanities and arts and health scholarship, community engagement, and cross sector partnerships to critically examine human and ecological entanglement across the Murray-Darling river system. His work creates new pathways for dialogue between artists, scientists, Indigenous leaders, and water managers.
Over 20 years, Vic has developed a strong reputation for leading large-scale, complex, and interdisciplinary socially engaged artistic projects that are exploratory, relational and emergent. Notably, he was the first artist to undertake an arts practice led PhD in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney. His work, driven by collaboration and interdisciplinarity, has created partnerships with diverse stakeholders and knowledge systems, with over 20 years’ experience in deep collaboration with First Nations people. He is a co-founder of The CASE Incubator, a national hub for socially engaged art practice, and is currently commissioned by Routledge as a lead author/editor for a new “Philosophy of Socially Engaged Art”. Between Nov 2025 and Jan 2026, Vic is undertaking a Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh.