So pleased that my chapter in Myer Taub’s excellent collection, Forests and Fences, has now been published by Routledge.
Forests and Fences examines landscapes and environments through performance studies and practices and includes a range of different experimental forms of writing to ‘provide radical frameworks for resilience in the contemporary age of crisis’.
In my chapter, I reflect on walks through an urban woodland in Salford, UK – Kersal Dale. I focus on the ambivalent feelings evoked by encounters with the ruined houses of rich industrialists who lived here in the 19th century, and which are left enfolded in the woodland. Following a series of landslides, the houses were abandoned, fell into ruin and were overtaken by pioneer species and succession plants to form an ‘urban wildscape’ (Jorgensen and Keenan 2012). Through critical reflection, poetic text and image, the chapter evokes the felt qualities of this wildscape, particularly reflecting on the stones of the old houses as ‘imperial debris’ (Stoler 2008) and their juxtaposition with verdant, wild greenery and contemporary rubbish, left in the woods after flytipping. This particular combination of ferocious vegetal growth and abandoned human remnants leads me to characterize the space as ‘interstitial’ in that it sits ‘between presence and power, between privilege and loss, violence and growth, deprivation and dispossession’.
