A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships that
underwrite a physical location with layers of sedimented names. In Place
Matters scholars and artists conduct varied forms of place-based inquiry
to demonstrate why place matters. Lavishly illustrated, the volume
brings into conversation photographic projects and essays that
revitalize the study of landscape. Contributors engage the study of
place through an approach that Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick call
critical topography: the way that we understand critical thought to
range over a place, or how thought and symbolic forms invent place
through text and image as if initiated by an X marking the spot.
Critical topography's tasks are to mediate and to diminish the gap
between representation and referent, to be both in the world and about
the world; to ask what place is this, what are its names, where am I,
how and with what responsibilities may I be here? Chapters map the deep
cultural, environmental, and political histories of singular places,
interrogating the charged relation between history, place, and power and
identifying the territorial imperatives of place making in such sites as
Colonus, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Chomolungma/Everest, Hiroshima, Fort
Qu'Appelle, Donetsk airport, and the island of Lesbos. With
contributions from the renowned artists Hamish Fulton and Edward
Burtynsky, the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro, and others, the collection
examines profound shifts in place-based thinking as it relates to the
history of art, the anthropocene and nuclear ruin, borders and global
migration, residential schools, the pandemic, and sites of refuge. In
his prologue W.J.T. Mitchell writes: "Places, like feasts, are moveable.
They can be erased and forgotten, lost in space, or maintained and
rebuilt. Both their appearance and disappearance, their making and
unmaking, are the work of critical topography." Global in scope,
Canadian in spirit, and grounded in singular sites, Place Matters
presents critical topography as an approach to analyze, interpret, and
reflect on place.
