The altered landscape as heterotopia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper considers the contemporary photographic practices of the authors, aligning their conceptual ideas and working methodology with notions of heterotopia. It argues for a positioning within contemporary altered landscape photography that considers place as a heterotopia, a networked system or process that modifies and makes an alternative ‘territory’. In dialogue with a range of relevant authors and artists, the paper contextualises heterotopia and altered landscape spaces as layers of both cultural and ecological intervention. It asserts that an artist in a state of mobility, transit and movement, can effectively employ notions of heterotopia to inform a creative photographic practice. We build on existing heterotopologies through the photographic practices of the authors, altered landscape photography by Australian artist Shane Hulbert, and the cultural investigations of expatriation by Greek artist Ioannis Galanopoulos Papavasileiou. The artists, through phenomenology, lens-based practice and noetic synthesis, approach altered landscape photography from two divergent cultural perspectives; one through the lens of postcolonial national imaging, the other through a trans-national experience of expatriation. We propose that both the cultural and geographic counter-site of an altered landscape, and the social and psychological state of expatriation, are informed by notions of heterotopia, and therefore build on existing heterotopologies.