This salon asks: How does the American landscape exceed—and alchemize—the limits of visual capture? Centering the violences, reparative imaginaries, and community desires the landscape holds, we will highlight two lines of thought: first, the distinct role of ‘the periphery’ as an empirical tool for visualizing the un-visualizable in landscapes, and second, the power of ‘the ordinary’ as an intimate proxy for macro-scale processes shaping landscapes. This presentation will also explore the types of data or evidence we can create, and re-create, from disparate parts of our respective geographic contexts. 

Ultimately, we will reflect on how each landscape can serve as an interface for moral questions, transmuting “sheer physical terrain” — with its range of materialities, scales, and rhythms — into an interpolative existential space (Casey 1996). 

The interdisciplinary mediums will include: film photography, documentary video and found footage, archival imagery, historical maps, and illustrations.