text:
Archive Select Month April 2018 January 2018 July 2017 January 2017 December 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 April 2016 March 2016 December 2015 September 2015
Some (Brexit) versions of pastoral
Blue skies, sheets of stratus clouds, rolling hills chequered with drystone walls and dotted with sheep: this is the archetypal image of the British countryside.
Narrowdale near Alstonefield, Staffordshire
Pastoral landscapes such as this one – Narrowdale in the Peak District on a Sunday morning in late April – still occupy a distinct space beyond their own material boundaries in dominant cultural imaginaries and representations of this island. This aesthetic space sustains and is sustained by practices of pastoral production and consumption, and almost unconscious ideas about land and labour, nature and society.
The pastoral also has a specific history in the British context. From the fifteenth century onwards, as feudalism shifted towards capitalism, land previously lived and worked on by peasants was gradually appropriated and replaced with sheep pastures in the process known as enclosure. Although mostly associated with the eighteenth century when enclosure became more legally formalised, this process produced often devastating effects for communities over the long period of its unfolding. Problems with enclosure and the pastoral can be seen as early as 1516, when in his tract Utopia the Renaissance humanist Thomas More uses sheep as a metonym for the new landowning class and their exclusions. He writes that sheep 'that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities'.1 Later, in Volume I of Capital (1867), Karl Marx uses enclosure as a key example of what he calls 'primitive accumulation', in which means of production are seized from labourers and privatised.2 These processes were reproduced beyond Britain through colonial expansion; as John Kinsella writes in an Australian context, pastoral works 'to recreate European, specifically English, rural power-structures, the reconfiguring of 'home' in an alien landscape'.3
Nevertheless, the pastoral remains embedded in our popular and artistic culture, and is continually being revised and revitalised. In 1935, William Empson published Some Versions of Pastoral, outlining both a critique of the pastoral's embedded social hierarchies and erasures and its diversity in British literature and culture.4 In another very important account, The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams writes that the pastoral is 'a particular kind of reaction to the fact of change' that found pronounced expression in Britain as a mode of response to the rapid transformations of the industrial revolution but also the longer-term social processes hinted at above. Williams argues that pastoral has a nostalgic feel, in which labour is subsumed and made invisible within the 'natural order'.5 Characterised in this way, the pastoral feels very apt as a way to think about the rhetorics and aesthetics of a recent change in Britain – namely, Brexit – and the feelings and actions that have contributed to it. So I thought I'd offer some (pre- and post-) Brexit versions of pastoral for twenty-first century Britain:
1) Monbiot vs sheep
Back in 2013, George Monbiot wrote about the economic and ecological problems caused by British sheep farming. Despite being integral to the British pastoral, sheep have been shown to cause severe soil erosion and cycles of flood and drought in upland pastures. In addition, Monbiot argues that British sheep farming is unproductive, propped up by significant subsidies under the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) while the food supply continues to rely on imported meat. Interestingly, Monbiot explicitly links the problems he identifies with the pastoral:
I blame Theocritus. His development in the third century BC of the pastoral tradition — the literary convention that associates shepherding with virtue and purity — helps to inspire our wilful blindness towards its destructive impacts. His theme was embraced by Virgil and the New Testament, in which Christ is portrayed both as the Good Shepherd and as Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, 'who takes away the sin of the world'. The Elizabethans revived the tradition, and the beautiful nonsense Marlowe, Spenser and others published about the uncorrupted pastoral life resonates with us still. Their eclogues and idylls, bucolics and mimes persist today on Sunday-night television, through which we wistfully immerse ourselves in the lives of hunky shepherds and adorable lambs, sheepdog trials and market days.
As someone who has been lucky enough to study English literature, I would resist Monbiot's pigeonholing of a whole body of complex, sophisticated writing as 'beautiful nonsense'. Nevertheless, the link between literary and cultural representations and ongoing relationships with land and industry is highly suggestive. And more on 'Sunday-night television' later.
In a more recent article from 2017, Monbiot considers the impact of Brexit on British farming. He identifies three key issues that make farming 'uniquely vulnerable' post-Brexit: the complexity of negotiating tariff deals without forcing farmers out of business; the dependency of the industry on migrant workers; and its reliance on EU subsidies to keep going. Monbiot suggests that the only real way forward for the post-Brexit pastoral is a kind of anti-pastoral, in which agricultural labour is recognised and supported by public money but 'accompanied by rules strong enough to ensure that farmers can no longer pollute our rivers, strip the soil from the land, wipe out pollinators and other wildlife, and destroy the features of the countryside with impunity.' This version of pastoral is undoubtedly the most strident and polemical of any I'll consider here, but it's certainly not the only approach.
2) God's Own Country (2017), directed by Francis Lee
Josh O'Connor and Alec Secareanu in God's Own Country (2017), directed by Francis Lee.
Like Monbiot's journalism, this film challenges Romantic notions of the pastoral, calling attention to the bleakness, bitterness, and isolation of farming. With notable similarities to Brokeback Mountain (2006), the film traces an emerging relationship between young Yorkshire farmer Johnny (Josh O'Connor) and Romanian migrant labourer Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), and in doing so calls into question ideas of masculinity and sexuality often embedded in rural identities and imaginaries. Unsentimental yet tender, God's Own Country intersperses tough physical and emotional labour with the intimacy between and across humans, animals, and land. Rather than a traditional, idealised pastoral representation of these relationships, Lee unapologetically foregrounds their raw material and fluid interactions; opening with Johnny throwing up in the toilet after a heavy night at the local pub, the film is punctuated by blood, placenta, saliva, semen, faeces, mud.
Not only this, but Johnny and Gheorghe's relationship unfolds against a backdrop of family and social tensions and the everyday practices and problems of small-scale farming. These tensions become particularly pronounced in the wake of Brexit; without the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and subsidy scheme, small British farms could be significantly affected, while an end to freedom movement for migrant workers like Gheorghe is likely to produce a labour shortage. In this context, God's Own Country offers a critical pastoral, sensitive to issues that Monbiot brings to the forefront, but never entirely abandoning a pastoral imaginary. In amongst the mud, the racist slurs, and the hardship, are rare moments of warmth, connection, and nurture.
3) Zeta Landscape (2005-present), Carol Watts
Zeta Landscape is an ongoing sequence of poems written from and about a particular sheep hill-farm in Wales. Different parts of the poem have been published in a number of journals and anthologies, and the first five poems can be read online in the How2 special issue on ecopoetics.6 Throughout the series, Watts experiments with conventions of pastoral poetry by introducing numbers – both mathematical and economic – to the landscape, its producers and inhabitants. We can see this in the poem '7':
do these add up are they outside subsidy or
logged in magnitudes of adjustment the value
of a warm animal less than the cost of quantifying
its warmth or inspecting animation each sixteen
days the collisions of neighbouring hillsides result
today in corpses by the river seven blown fleeces
In this excerpt, Watts refers to the 'subsidy' that Monbiot identifies as a key issue in post-Brexit British agriculture. By foregrounding numbers and economies in the poem, Watts works to 'subject the seeming pastoral ease of Romantic identification…to hidden kinds of accumulation' – in particular the accumulation of capital and its close interlinking with social injustice and environmental degradation.7 Where Thomas More used sheep metonymically to critique emerging capitalist landowners, Watts explores and resists the ways that in capitalism 'the value / of a warm animal' can become reduced to 'the cost of quantifying / its warmth'. Not only this, but this poem also calls attention to much longer histories of human intervention of the seemingly 'natural order' of the pastoral; 'sixteen days' refers to the average length of a sheep's oestrous cycle, yet the hillsides in Britain in April might lead us to believe that the annual springtime rhythms of lambing are 'natural' rather than domesticated and regulated.
4) All Aboard! The Country Bus, BBC4, 29 August 2016
All Aboard! The Country Bus through the Yorkshire Dales. Image: BBC
The BBC's slow-TV hit – two hours of real-time bus journey through the Yorkshire Dales – attracted almost a million viewers back in the summer of 2016, just over two months after the Brexit referendum on 23 June. This is perhaps exactly the kind of 'Sunday-night television' that Monbiot critiques as a means of perpetuating ideas of nature and nation that reemerged in some of the rhetoric surrounding Brexit. Nevertheless, All Aboard! is an intriguing twenty-first century pastoral, in terms of its form as well as its content.
With little dialogue or action, All Aboard! offers up the pastoral as a form of temporal and spatial retreat in the context of accelerating cultural and material consumption. The pastoral has functioned in this way since landscape tourism became popularised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, recorded in a large number of works from Daniel Defoe's A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-27) to Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1803) and extensive journal writings. Despite this long legacy, All Aboard! is a cultural product with a distinctly twenty-first century remit. Primarily conceived of as an experiment in television rather than an invitation to go out into the hills, it reconstructs the pastoral as a mode of viewing in which the object being viewed (such as the landscape) becomes almost secondary to the process of sitting and absorbing at a far slower pace than is conventional. This growing genre of television does its own pastoral work, however, in presenting itself as a new kind of 'natural order' amongst the artificial, disjunctive, and hyper-accelerative aspects of contemporary culture.
5) Alstonefield (2003), Peter Riley
Limestone outcrops and gorse above the River Dove, near Alstonefield.
I started in the fields just north of Alstonefield in the Peak District, so that's where I'll finish too. Peter Riley's book-length poem is filled with pub lunches at The George, ghosts and gods, industrial and agricultural histories. At the beginning of the eighty-page fifth section – a long philosophical meditation on an equally long night ramble around the surrounding hills and dales – Riley spends a rainy Sunday morning at a car boot sale:
…Dampening, I turn down
a plastic shepherdess at 30p and go back
to the car. And sit there waiting in the rain
for something better than pastoral, some-
thing less fairground and more circus,
something to take the truth of the west-
ern world out of its pocket and purchase
life everlasting or a well meant Friday hug. 8
From what begins as a seemingly mundane moment, Riley shifts to consider 'the truth of the west/-ern world', a 'truth' that reiterates in colonial manifestations and justifications of pastoral. He parochialises this 'truth', locating it in a 'pocket' with connotations of capital as well as limitation and enclosure, and exchanges it for either the grandiose 'life everlasting' or the humble, common 'well meant Friday hug'. However, neither outcome materialises; just after Riley finds himself 'waiting in the rain / for something better than pastoral', he writes 'No use waiting. Turn the key, go. Go where?' (24). The references to the car are important here; in his notes, Riley writes that 'it is impossible anywhere in the Peak District, even in the middle of the night, to get away from the sound of the internal combustion engine for any length of time' (103).
Interestingly, in Staffordshire Moorlands – the parliamentary constituency Alstonefield is in – 64.7% of voters voted to leave the EU, in comparison to 51.9% nationally, a fairly common outcome in safe Tory seats in largely rural areas and communities. This is not to equate the pastoral with Brexit, or either with political conservatism (my own feelings about voting Remain are complex, and the EU certainly leaves a lot to be desired). Rather, it's merely one highly contemporary example of the way that the pastoral has developed as cultural construction and lived practice across the stratified landscapes that come together to constitute some versions of Britain in 2018. Might there be something 'better than pastoral' that we could strive towards in the coming months and years? As I ponder, like Riley, 'let me wander still in the open / fields of failure' (25).
1. Thomas More, Utopia, translated by Ralph Robinson, 1551. See: https://archive.org/details/utopia00arbegoog.↩
2. Karl Marx, Capital Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976 [1867], pp. 878-79.↩
3. John Kinsella, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, p. 3.↩
4. William Empson Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.↩
5. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973, pp. 32-35.↩
6. See: Carol Watts, Zeta Landscape. The Ground Aslant, edited by Harriet Tarlo. Exeter: Shearsman, 2011, pp. 111-19; Zeta Landscape. Poetry Wales, 45.3 (2009/2010), pp. 25-29.↩
7. Carol Watts, 'Zeta Landscape: Poetry, Place, Pastoral', in Placing Poetry, edited by Ian Davidson and Zoë Skoulding. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013, pp. 281-304 (p. 285).↩
8. Peter Riley, 'Alstonefield: a poem. Manchester: Carcanet, 2003, p. 24.↩
Posted on April 24, 2018 September 29, 2018 by kslh Posted in Landscape, Politics	Tagged agriculture, Alstonefield, brexit, Carol Watts, environment, farming, Francis Lee, God's Own Country, Landscape, pastoral, peter riley, slow television	Leave a comment
Black pine, black site: cells of the garden
Just above the gardens at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 101 evergreen trees in wooden planters are arranged in rows. Hidden amongst these trees – White Pine, Black Pine, Scots Pine, Green Yew, Green Holly, Variegated Holly, and Western Red Cedar – are nine steel cages or cells, each one square metre in size. This is Alfredo Jaar's The Garden of Good and Evil (2017), now in its final week as part of the main exhibition at YSP.
Alfredo Jaar – The Garden of Good and Evil (2017)
The steel cells in the piece refer to the secret CIA prisons known as 'black sites', in which suspected terrorists are detained and interrogated, often using 'enhanced interrogation' techniques which include forms of torture. Although the US denied black sites' existence for a number of years, it has now been suggested that there are over 100 such sites around the world, with the majority in Iraq and Afghanistan. But how do such sites – and the politics surrounding them – register aesthetically in the context of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, whose conception combines eighteenth-century landscape architecture with the Land Art movement of the twentieth century?
Jaar's steel cells are symbolic, aestheticised. As has been shown by revelations of black sites around the world – from a government building basement in Bucharest, Romania to the Cobalt/Salt Pit site in Kabul, Afghanistan, which became the object of investigation after detainee Gul Rahman died there in 2002 – there is no singular aesthetic or appearance for these spaces. In Jaar's conception, the cells' form materialises the poem 'One Square Metre of Prison' by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who himself spent time in prison:
My prison cell accepts no light except into myself. Peace be unto me. Peace be unto the sound barrier. I wrote ten poems to eulogize my freedom, here and there. I love the particles of sky that slip through the skylight—a meter of light where horses race.
(translated by Munir Akash and Caroline Forché)
Locating the cells in relation to artistic traditions and practices represented in the sculpture park, Jaar notes in his video introduction to the work that they 'look like minimalist forms but…they are filled with content and this content is horrific.' Jaar's cells have visual similarities to other pieces in YSP, in particular the important American conceptualist Sol LeWitt's 123454321 (1993).
Sol LeWitt – 123454321 (1993)
LeWitt's minimalist sculpture is based on mathematical sequences and ratios, and calls attention to its own structure and materiality. Set outside in the Lower Park of YSP, it also draws attention to changing environmental conditions, here shown in the light and shadow cast on and by its simple forms, and – as time passes – its own processes of decay. Back in 2016, I wrote about YSP as an aesthetic space for the monuments of the Land Art generation (and that's also when this picture of LeWitt's sculpture was taken). Although Jaar's socially conscious art resists the kind of framing that minimalist land artists posed, The Garden of Good and Evil can still be thought about through this lens. The cells have aesthetic and material characteristics in addition to their 'horrific' content. On the day that I see them, it has rained and the orange-tinged steel is topped with a sheet of water. In the bright daylit cloud, the trees are reflected in the water, patterning the cell-tops, in some way camouflaging them further. Moving between trees and cells results in damp clothes and limbs from overhanging branches that refuse to stay within their one-metre boundaries.
What seems most interesting about The Garden of Good and Evil as a site-specific commission is what happens to the work after the main exhibition has ended, the political and ecological legacies it leaves behind. Jaar is acutely conscious of the dynamic between preservation and entropy, and between the planned and the organic, that a space such as Yorkshire Sculpture Park provides.
Plan of The Garden of Good and Evil, featuring 101 evergreen trees and 9 steel cages. Image: Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
The Bretton estate was shaped by landscape architect Richard Woods in the eighteenth century, and the gardens developed in the 1820s by renowned garden and parkland designer Robert Marnock. The Garden of Good and Evil complements YSP's picturesque beginnings; Jaar worked with experts to select tree species already present in the park so that the work can be repurposed and displayed on a more permanent basis. The exhibition guide explains: 'After the exhibition closes, as a lasting legacy for future generations, the trees will be replanted and nurtured in the historic estate.' One thing that isn't clear is whether the steel cells will remain amongst the trees. If they do, The Garden of Good and Evil has the potential to become even more insidious, as it is stripped of its regimented layout to enable its 'horrific content' to be obscured and naturalised in the organic growth and development of evergreen woodland. Black pine, for example, is notable for its fast growth, its hardiness and resistance to adverse conditions, and its longevity. At the same time, the setting of YSP calls into question precisely what appears to be 'natural'; its landscape has an aesthetics but also a poetics, shaped through human and non-human efforts.
Significantly, The Garden of Good and Evil's investigation into the naturalisation of detainment and torture can be extended to a wider public context, in which practices rather than just symbols are at stake. In March 2018, President Trump nominated Gina Haspel to be the new Head of the CIA. If appointed, Haspel would be the first female director of the organisation. However, in 2002 Haspel oversaw a black site in Thailand with a record of torture. In this sense, The Garden of Good and Evil has an ongoing strategic value. Hidden in plain sight with the possibility of appearing to be naturalised within the simultaneously aesthetic and ecological space of the sculpture park, it asks viewers not only to think through ideas and practices of freedom and confinement, but also the barely hidden violences in our own naturalised public structures and environments.
Posted on April 2, 2018 April 4, 2018 by kslh Posted in Art, Landscape	Tagged Alfredo Jaar, Art, black site, Landscape, sculpture, tree, yorkshire sculpture park	Leave a comment
Sounding place: contemporary video art and translating the city
Two recent exhibitions in Nottingham focus on sound, listening, and translation. Sounds Like Her at Nottingham Art Exchange (14 October 2017 – 7 January 2018) considers gender in relation to sound art, bringing together seven women artists working with sound, while From Ear to Ear to Eye at Nottingham Contemporary (16 December 2017 – 4 March 2018) involves a wide range of artists and practitioners working with material from across the Arab world. Individually and together, these far-reaching exhibitions surprise and sometimes even provoke, raising questions that push at the intersections of culture, technology, and power. Given that these questions are far too many to be considered here, in this short piece I'll focus on two particular works – Magda Stawarska-Beavan's Who/Wer (2017) from Sounds Like Her and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's ISMYRNE (2016) from From Ear to Ear to Eye – both of which use the video documentary as medium to think through ideas of place.
Magda Stawarska-Beavan – Who/Wer (2017)
Who/Wer is set in Vienna, and takes the form of a split screen video that documents different approaches to experiencing and working through place. A stranger to the city, Stawarska-Beavan spends time following the playwright Wolfgang Kindermann, who knows Vienna intimately.
The left-hand video shows a series of images in black and white. With a jumpy feel akin to a French New Wave film, these sequences of shots often feature Kindermann's shadow or the back of his head as he moves around the city. All the while, Kindermann narrates his journey in German. However, instead of this narration being played over the top of the images, it directs them; the images appear only when there is sound. In this portrayal, Vienna is punctuated distinctly according to Kindermann's own idioms and rhythms.
In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau discusses moving through urban geographies on foot in relation to sound and speech, as a way of practising or even enunciating space slightly at odds with its embedded structures, systems, and grammars:
The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple 'enunciative' function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic 'contracts' in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an 'allocation', 'posits another opposite' the speaker and puts contracts between interlocutors into action).1
In Who/Wer, Kindermann practises or utters Vienna, using language and body for a kind of idiomatic and pragmatic passage. This side of the screen is overtly stylised, perspectival, a visual account of situated knowledge.
The right-hand screen shows a colour video of some of the locations Kindermann covers in his narration of Vienna: a river, a theatre, amongst others. In direct contrast to the left side's jumpiness, its pace and momentum, the right side appears almost static; the camera is fixed on a particular building or landscape, interrupted only sporadically by passers-by, who enter and exit with little cause or consequence. Over the top of these scenes, Stawarska-Beavan provides an English voiceover in a calm, measured tone. In many ways, it resembles slow TV.
Despite the greater familiarity offered by the language and the colour medium, this side of the screen and its corresponding speaker are far less compelling than the left side. Perhaps this is partly because Kindermann is a man, and his deeper voice is more audible, more commanding than Stawarska-Beavan's. This possibility is explored further in Ain Bailey's The Pitch Sisters (2012) – also featured in the exhibition – an immersive sound installation that questions the 'preferred' pitch of a woman's voice. Although Who/Wer involves following Kindermann and responding to his knowledge and direction, Stawarska-Beavan remains the auteur; it is she who calls the shots and decides the modes of representation. In this sense, the piece carries resonances of Sophie Calle's Suite Vénitienne (1979), in which the artist followed (some might say stalked) a man she had just met from Paris to Venice, recording his movements and actions through a variety of media. In Who/Wer, as in Suite Vénitienne, dynamics of power and knowledge shift back and forth across the piece's visual and sonic iterations.
In aesthetic terms, perhaps this differential between competing left and right screens occurs because the juxtaposition between images and between image and empty space on the left side demand more attention, especially when matched up to the verbal narration. In addition, as someone who doesn't understand much German, I can only respond to the rhythms of Kindermann's speech rather than its content; my sense of his place is more sensory that linguistic or cognitive if the terms can be divided in this way.
Perhaps it's also because the left screen offers a stronger narrative and a character to follow, instead of a series of brief, almost unconnected and seemingly mundane encounters confined to a single location. However, precisely because of this, the right side has the potential to interest because of its invitation to speculate about the state of space and place beyond and apart from its human narrators, its own passages of time and idioms. Engaging with the work becomes negotiating and translating between these Viennas and their distinctly rhythmic, mobile, and sonic components, none of which can be captured in a snapshot.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige – ISMYRNE (2016)
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's ISMYRNE (2016) re-sites questions of place, power, and knowledge in historical events and intergenerational trauma. This 50-minute film presents conversations between Hadjithomas and the poet and artist Etel Adnan, who share a family connection to the city of Izmir (formerly and historically known as Smyrna), which is now part of Turkey. Hadjithomas' grandfather and Adnan's mother had to leave the city – an urban settlement since at least the third millennium BC – after the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922. In this catastrophic event that ended the Greco-Turkish war in the area, Turkish forces set fire to the city, killing tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian inhabitants. Hadjithomas' and Adnan's relatives survived the fire, but were affected by the loss of Smyrna for the rest of their lives. Although neither artist had visited the city herself, both grew up surrounded by memories and talk of Smyrna; 'captivated despite repetition', they experience its retold stories as both pain and joy.
In the film, Hadjithomas looks at maps of Smyrna both on her own and with Adnan, tracing its borders with her fingertips. The film documents her visiting Smyrna for the first time, following the descent of the aeroplane over a landscape unfamiliar to her, before her wanders and encounters in the city's streets. In a mode akin to de Certeau's account of walking and speech, Hadjithomas appropriates a place integral, yet alien, to her sense of identity. This enunciation seems far more multi-layered than what de Certeau is able to suggest the passage quoted above, however, owing to the complex intertwinement of present-day Izmir with historical and conceptual territory and intergenerational loss and belonging. For Hadjithomas and Adnan, the simultaneous compulsion and problem of uttering Smyrna seem to lie in an uncertainty about how exactly to speak it, like fumbling in a forgotten language. In the film, Hadjithomas and Adnan converse in French: neither of their first languages but one in which they find common ground to talk together.
Later, Hadjithomas pores over tales of Smyrna preserved in her grandfather's handwriting. These intimate moments are contrasted with beautiful shots of the sea and sky, filmed by day and by night. Lights and water glitter. In the final frames of the film, Hadjithomas overlays a shot of the mountains close to Smyrna with one of Adnan's paintings; there is a slow fade from Smyrna to the perhaps equally mythic mental landscapes presented in oil on canvas. Although Adnan has never visited, her work shows an uncanny resemblance. In these last moments, there are no words or language, but – just as in Who/Wer – the dialogic quality of place remains.
Etel Adnan's painting
In the two works I have considered here, video documentary rooted in particular locations becomes a sounding board for translations across generations and gender, media, memory, and imagination. They ask what is lost and what is gained when different visual, spatial, and sonic practices collide.
1. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 [1984]), pp. 97-98.↩
Posted on January 4, 2018 January 5, 2018 by kslh Posted in Art	Tagged Art, Etel Adnan, From Ear to Ear to Eye, Izmir, Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Magda Stawarska-Beavan, Michel de Certeau, New Art Exchange, Nottingham Contemporary, Smyrna, Sounds Like Her, Vienna, Wolfgang Kindermann	Leave a comment
Living geologically: Barns Ness, 21/07
A day stolen between the raindrops on the weather app: Scottish summer in the (Holo/Anthropo/Capitalo/Chthulu/etcetera)cene.1
Barns Ness is a short length of coast close to Dunbar, on the south-east edge of Scotland. The lighthouse at the end of the promontory has the geographical co-ordinates 55° 59′ 14.2296" N 2° 26′ 42.9864" W. However, the rocky shoreline tells a slightly different story. Dating back over 320 million years to the Carboniferous period, the rocks at Barns Ness testify to a time when the Lothians were tropical, crossing the equator from southern to northern hemisphere as part of the Pangaea supercontinent. As seas rose as a result of planetary climate cycles, desert landscapes became shallow marine environments, and layers of sediment covered earlier volcanic forms. When sea levels dropped back, swamp-like forests grew, only to be drowned again. These processes of sedimentation, growth, and resubmersion can be traced in the layers of sandstone, limestone, and coal visible in the Ness.2 My friend and fellow wanderer Vivek Santayana has written about the unsettling processes of trying (and necessarily failing) to capture this deep time through photography.
Geologists can discern past environmental conditions largely because of fossil records, and here, Barns Ness is incredibly rich. The 'macaroni-rock' and its counterpart 'spaghetti-rock' memorialise certain types of coral – Siphonodendron pauciadiale and Siphonodendron junceum – which show that the area was at that time marine. These corals went extinct in the Permian-Triassic extinction event around 250 million years ago. This was the third and most severe of the earth's major extinction events, and up to 70 per cent of land species and 96 per cent of marine species died out. Scientists have confirmed that we are currently undergoing the sixth great extinction; what is different this time is the likelihood that human activity is a major causal factor.3
Interrupting the coral remnants are shallow pools about one metre in diameter, filled with dark purple seawater, smaller rocks, and seaweed. Incredibly rare, these hollows were once the grounds for Lepidodendron, also known as scale trees, and the clay at the bottom of the hollows is full of fossil roots. These ancient forests decayed to produce the carbon that gives their geological period its name. And in this respect, although separated by hundreds of millions of years, the Carboniferous landscapes of the Ness and recent human activity are intimately connected. This same carbon fuelled the processes of rapid industrialisation and their environmental effects that climate scientist Paul Crutzen thought demanded a new geological name: the Anthropocene.4 Drawing on a Carboniferous legacy, the human (anthropos) emerges as geological agent, even 'brute force', as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it.5 Here, on the one hand, we have humanity as great power, with the collective capacity to bring about irreversible changes that will leave their own fossil record. On the other hand, we have the counterpoint: a proleptic vision of the extinguished human, left like coral in the rocks.
The problem with both of these imaginaries is their elision of the geo- and bio-politics that constitute the current period's highly intensified and uneven energy regimes.
[T]his new understanding of being as geological effects the temporal and material imagination of the capacities of the human that move beyond a conceptualisation of social relations with fossil fuels into the contemplation of the social as composed through the geologic (and thus politically constituted by it in both political and radically apolitical ways).6
Yusoff calls attention to the ways that capitalising the geological has enabled the constitution of subjects, social formations, and geopolitical relations. Noting the large disparity in life expectancies between those with access to the kinds of energy sources and forms of consumption that fossil fuels provide, and those without, she writes that 'the potential of a body to be what it is is conditioned by the fossil fuels that it can incorporate'. In this context, coming into contact with fossils across deep time is not wholly reducible to the 'disconcerting de-politicization' that Timothy Clark identifies with the Anthropocene.7
The task, then, becomes not only trying to imagine, understand, or represent deep time, but also finding ways to practise geologic life. Perhaps this can begin with the stories we tell, and the ways that we tell them. Clinging close to the shore at Barns Ness is a disused lime kiln, in which coal and lime were extracted and burned in the nineteenth century in order to produce quicklime for agriculture. This allowed for industrial and economic development in the area, inextricably linked to the rocks and minerals still visible on the shoreline.
However, these links and connections extend out far beyond the single modest brick structure and the humans who built and used it, if framed in a different way. The increased burning of fossil fuels (largely in the global North) contributed to economic growth and technological innovation, but also global warming; the increased use of lime as an agricultural fertiliser led to higher crop yields but also altered nutrient cycles and decreased biodiversity. Expanded globally and unevenly, these patterns and processes are just about perceptible in even the most ostensibly secluded locations.
Yet practising geologic life seems to require a returning and retuning to these places and their materials. As part of their ongoing project Limelight, artists Charles Danby and Rob Smith have held a series of presentations/performances/events, whose durations depend on the time it takes for a piece of lime to burn. When the lime is exhausted, the performance ends. The first of these events took place in a restored lime kiln in Llangattock, Wales, where the limelight lasted for thirty minutes and fifteen seconds. When I saw an iteration of the work in an underground lecture theatre in Edinburgh, the light didn't last quite as long. Danby was cut off midway through a sentence about quicklime and the disposal of bodies, while Smith was left hovering, holding a laptop that under the limelight had projected images onto a sheet of metal he'd painted a few minutes earlier with the hydrated lime. For the time the performance lasts, another laptop uploads what is happening to a remote server.
In this work, geomorphic capacity is framed and re-framed through the bumpy, shaky processes of bodies caught up in a host of technologies and temporalities: the burning lime, the electricity running through the trailing wires that power the laptops, the practised gestures of painting, of pouring water from a plastic bottle onto the burning mineral. These intersecting human and nonhuman bodies and energies organise in ways that manifest historical and ongoing geologic lives and their various stratifications.
Standing at the sea's edge at Barns Ness, I try to process all of these layers, attention caught momentarily by a discarded blue crisp packet weighted with shells, an abandoned yellow bucket whose own potential as an uncanny fossil made from fossils far outlasts the perceptive capacity of the human (I've written elsewhere about plastic and the Anthropocene).8 But the thing about geologic life, I think, is that it resists being caught in a moment, however much these moments might create a snag in some of our assumptions, our ways of looking and acting and interacting. Extinction – its prospect and its materiality – is in some ways invisible, but it is also a presence we make, and with which and from which we come to live.
1. The Anthropocene is a proposed (and contested) term for a geological epoch that marks human impact on the earth's systems and processes. If adopted in geology, the Anthropocene would follow the Holocene. Critics from outside geology have offered alternative terms to call attention to different aspects of our current environmental/ecological situation. For example, Andreas Malm and Jason W. Moore have developed the idea of the Capitalocene, which acknowledges the accelerated processes of environmental change and degradation under capitalism. Meanwhile, Donna Haraway has drawn together science fiction and multiple species and temporalities for a characteristically intermeshed, tentacular account of a Chthulucene. For more detail about these sometimes-competing, sometimes-complementary terms, see Donna J. Haraway, 'Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin', Environmental Humanities, 6.1 (2015), 159-165. PDF at: http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.7.pdf.↩
2. Euan Clarkson and Brian Upton, Edinburgh Rock: The Geology of Lothian (Edinburgh: Dunedin, 2006), pp. 86-87. See also the Edinburgh Geological Society's leaflet about Barns Ness, available at: http://edinburghgeolsoc.org/downloads/rigsleaflet_barnsnessa4.pdf.↩
3. The sixth extinction has been an area of concern in science for several years, and has been treated for a more popular audience by Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). However, the issue has become more prominent recently, after a new scientific paper took up a markedly urgent tone: Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo, 'Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017, http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/05/1704949114.full.pdf. The article's strident rhetoric of 'biological annihilation' was picked up by several news media outlets – see, for example: Damian Carrington, 'Earth's sixth mass extinction event underway, scientists warn', The Guardian, 10 July 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/10/earths-sixth-mass-extinction-event-already-underway-scientists-warn.↩
4. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, 'The "Anthropocene", Global Change Newsletter, 41. (2000), 17-18, http://www.igbp.net/download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/NL41.pdf. It should be noted that the Carboniferous is the name of a geological period, whereas the Anthropocene is the proposed name for an epoch within the current period (the Quaternary).↩
5. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Brute Force', Eurozine, 7 October 2010, http://www.eurozine.com/brute-force/.↩
6. Kathryn Yusoff, 'Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31.5 (2013), 779–795 (p. 780).↩
7. Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 13.↩
8. Jan Zalasiewicz, et. al, 'The geological cycle of plastics and their use as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene', Anthropocene, 13 (2016), 4-17.↩
Posted on July 28, 2017 July 28, 2017 by kslh Posted in Anthropocene	Tagged Anthropocene, Barns Ness, deep time, environment, fossils, geology, Scotland	Leave a comment
Elephants in the room
FOXP2 protein. Image: Emw, Wikimedia Commons
The corridor is dark, with only a thin strip of light marking the intersection of wall and ceiling. The day I visit, it is empty, and, as I walk along, sensors trigger and noise fills the space. 108 billion voices – the number that have existed on Earth since humans first developed 100,000 years ago – test out sounds, clear their throats, begin and begin again what we would call language. This is Marguerite Humeau's FOXP2, an exhibition first shown at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and now at Nottingham Contemporary. FOXP2 is the name of the gene necessary for human speech and language. Humeau worked with Pierre Lanchantin from the Laboratory of Voice Synthesis at the University of Cambridge to develop the sound installation that opens the show.
Next door is a Biological Showroom, in which ten elephants made of various kinds of plastic are displayed on carpeted podiums. The lighting is bright; the walls are pink. In the large window that forms a skin between the interior of the gallery and the street outside, is Echo, a 'matriarch engineered to die'. Placed at angles to this focal point are the other elephants, variously engineered to 'cry out of sadness', to 'be self-destructive – getting drunk with ethanol that comes from a masala fruit', and to 'be happy'. These familiar, unfamiliar bodies with their familiar, unfamiliar gestures and emotions are to be glorified, but also to be scrutinised. Amidst saccharine light, Humeau plays out the development of human features and cultures in nonhuman species.
Ostensibly, this anthropomorphises the elephants – anthropomorphism meaning the attribution of human characteristics to nonhumans. Humeau imagines a life without or outside humanity, but one in which human assumptions remain present at every turn. At the same time, she continually blurs binary distinctions between the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the artificial. FOXP2 draws upon anthropomorphism as a tool precisely to question what exactly constitutes the anthropos (human). By doing so, it foregrounds other kinds of agency, ignored or forgotten. The elephants, as the saying goes, never forget.
These elephants are slightly different from the ones we see on Planet Earth II, though. Some of them are connected via plastic tubes to sources that bring about – or 'engineer' – their emotions. These sources include: a 'glass artificial masala fruit' filled with ethanol (another name for alcohol); an 'artificial tear drop system and reservoir in glass' containing three drops of elephant tears collected in Thailand as well as powdered depressant hormones dissolved in water; and the podium carpets, also pink. The carpets' pigment comes from a dye made from the poisonous Datura plant – but this is not the only fluid soaked into the pile. Also present is a concoction that Humeau titles Body without Soul, or 'liquid human', made up of chemical elements ranging from oxygen (65%) and carbon (18%) all the way down to zinc (0.0027%) and minute traces of lead, arsenic, and bromine. By figuring the human as a composite of chemicals, each in a specific quantity, Humeau calls attention to the largely shared physical makeup of different species. On the one hand, she reminds us that the capabilities that enable survival, interaction, and even culture cannot be separated from their biological and chemical components. On the other, she suggests that they cannot be reduced to them. The elephants ensure that this questioning and reworking of agency is not confined to the human.
Humeau's complex, critical anthropomorphism chimes with ideas from what has been broadly categorised as 'new materialist' philosophy. In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Jane Bennett thinks through the agency of nonhuman entities ranging from a pile of debris to electricity. She argues that '[w]e need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism . . . to counter the narcissism' of human language and thought.1 Her 'vital materialism' does not assume that animals, things, and elements 'act' in the same way that humans do, but rather acknowledges their potential for self-organisation and transformation beyond a deterministic or mechanistic structure. 'In a vital materialism', Bennett argues,
an anthropomorphic element in perception can uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances—sounds and sights that echo and bounce far more than would be possible were the universe to have a hierarchical structure.2
Echo the elephant matriarch, 'engineered to die', will decay into her composite elements (although, given her plastic body, this may take a longer than a human or elephant lifetime). The other elephants' grieving – shown repeatedly in the wild – commingles human projection and conceptual 'engineering' with a new attunement to the capacity of the nonhuman to respond. The elephants in FOXP2 watch, mourn, and sing, just as the chemicals within and outside of their bodies act upon and interact with each other.
Moving around Biological Showroom, I observe small changes in what initially appear to be static, silent exhibits. Water bubbles in the glass reservoirs; sounds emerge from the elephants, close to something I could understand, yet just beyond it. Noticing is not knowing. I have to walk back along the dark corridor to leave the gallery, and the sounds surround me again. In order to recognise these 'sounds and sights that echo and bounce' from Echo and her constituent parts and the magnesium making up 0.033% of the liquid human in the carpet to the waves emitted from the speakers concealed within the walls of the gallery, I have to rethink what I suppose to be my own boundaries and distinctions. As the subtitle to Bennett's book suggests, such rethinking can be political, offering a challenge to the ways that individual and collective bodies are defined and organised in relation to each other.
Can the dark gallery space, largely cleared of its dirt and its animal populations, be political? In Jacques Rancière's account of aesthetics, it can be, because of the kinds of 'sensory apprehension' the aesthetic makes possible – its potential for a 'redistribution of the sensible':
Art is not, in the first instance, political because of the messages and sentiments it conveys concerning the state of the world. Neither is it political because of the manner in which it might choose to represent society's structures, or social groups, their conflicts or identities. It is political because of the very distance it takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space.3
When brought into contact with FOXP2, Rancière's account stumbles upon its failure to consider the nonhuman elements and bodies 'peopling' a space. But through this lack, it enables the formation of a new 'political ecology', for and with these elements and bodies, in which we have to learn to look and listen differently. In her stunning treatment of human and nonhuman assemblages, capitalists and mushrooms (although, admittedly, not elephants), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes that '[t]o listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas', an act that – in an ecological context – demands 'many kinds of alertness'.4 Living amongst others (nonhuman as well as human) requires the recognition of a commons that is fleeting or shifting or complex. The chance mutation of a gene such as FOXP2 has been vitally enabling. But elements – or elephants – in the room remain unaddressed. Humeau offers one mode of approach.
1. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. xvi.↩
2. Ibid., p. 99.↩
3. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), p. 23.↩
4. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 254.↩
Posted on January 4, 2017 by kslh Posted in Art	Tagged aesthetics, animal studies, Art, elephant, Marguerite Humeau, new materialism	Leave a comment
Plastic Art in the Anthropocene on Inciting Sparks
Earth Rise (1968). Image credit: NASA
28 November 2016 ¦ Kate Lewis Hood.
The Anthropocene is the name for a proposed geological epoch that marks the extent of human impact on the Earth's systems and processes. This impact includes the sharp increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but also other changes which are less widely discussed, such as the transformation of the nitrogen cycle, or the mass extinction of species. Although the Anthropocene Working Group only recommended that the term be adopted officially in August of this year, the Anthropocene has already been taken up as a cultural concept, with implications and possibilities for the arts as well as the sciences.
I wrote a short piece on the Anthropocene and the work of Scottish artist Karla Black for Inciting Sparks, an academic blogging platform run by Edinburgh's postgraduate arts community – read the full article here.
Posted on December 16, 2016 December 16, 2016 by kslh Posted in Anthropocene, Art	Leave a comment
Dérive & disability
Trent Building, autumn (Image: Oxymoron/geograph.org.uk)
A Thursday morning, on the cusp of summer and autumn. Cool early, but rising quickly in heat and humidity. We set out.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.1
I was breaking the first rule of dérive – I was at work. But I was supporting a person with disabilities, and we have been on many wanders together over the years I have known them. I began to think about the possibilities and challenges opened up by a discourse of dérive and disability.
Guy Debord (quoted above) was part of the Situationist International, a collective of thinkers and radicals in the mid-twentieth century who developed practices to engage critically and experimentally with urban geography. By exploring the emotions, psychic states, and behaviours produced by urban environments, they attempted to call attention to the codes underlying social and architectural organisations:
From a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
Read in the context of disability, the 'fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones' are inflected by questions of access. The 'attractions of the terrain' and possible 'encounters' are influenced not only by personal preferences and desires, but also by the ways that a society conceptualises (and polices) its bodies.
According to the social model of disability developed in the late twentieth century, a distinction can be made between 'impairment' (the physical conditions affecting a person's body) and 'disability' (the social attitudes and practices bearing upon impairment). Here, disability includes the ways that built environments limit access for people outside certain physical or mental parameters that have come to define a nondisabled 'norm'. This approach allows a move away from viewing disability in solely medical terms. However, as Tom Shakespeare points out in his short but important analysis, the social model remains problematic. On the one hand, impairment, like disability, is socially and culturally constructed, affected by a range of factors including race, class, and gender. On the other hand, disability and impairment are not merely discursive, and have real, material effects for disabled people.2 This is what feminist disability scholar Susan Wendell calls 'the rejected body': 'those aspects of bodily life (such as illness, disability, weakness, and dying), and bodily experience (including most forms of bodily suffering) that are feared, ignored, despised, and/or rejected in a society and its culture'.3 It is these aspects that both present a challenge to the dérive as experimental praxis and provide means of extending its social and political efficacy.
So we tried a dérive. Getting out of the building (a large hospital) involved memorising a set of hand-written instructions, finding lifts, following signs and a trail of yellow dots on the floor. There are practical considerations and questions here: what effect would a physical disability have on this journey? Visual impairment? A learning disability? But key to Debord's theory are the emotional states and impressions that a journey offers, as a series of 'varied ambiences' and 'terrains'. Disability can defamiliarise these ambiences and terrains, calling attention to particular elements that present difficulty or enable heightened sensation. On our walk, the noise levels changed significantly from corridor to corridor, from pin-drop quiet to loud, multilayered bustle. The shift from laminate to carpeted flooring altered the sound and smoothness of the wheelchair. Disinfectant smells mingled with coffee; sunlight blended with halogen glow. At the edge of the building, we crossed an indoor footbridge, eerily quiet over the rush of traffic on the busy road below. On the other side, we used another lift, before going outside to negotiate pavements and kerbsides of various heights, widths, and surfaces.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, landscape architects Joseph and Alfred Lowe shaped the ground for Highfields Park in Nottingham. The park, later developed by Jesse Boot (of Boots fame), sits alongside extensive university parkland. Their shared border is marked by the Trent Building, an impressive classical Portland stone structure with a campanile designed by Morley Horder in the 1920s. According to a walking guide produced by the university, D.H. Lawrence compared the building to an 'iced cake'. This description perhaps refers to the way the building sits upon layers of sandstone, in which there are small caves, blocked with gates. Through this sandstone came the Tottle brook, which was used to create the boating lake below. On the bright August-September morning, it glimmered, offering clear sightlines from the Trent Building through the Chinese guardian lion statues to the grand ornamental gate on the other side. I described what I could see to the person I support, and we listened for the sounds of moorhens and coots as they rustled in the smeuses (gaps in the base of a hedge made by small animals).
The path was well-defined, but quite steep in places, demanding different movements to prevent the wheelchair hurtling down the hill and into the lake. Where the ground was more level, we left the path and bumped across the exposed tree roots in the woodland, rustling through the first leaves of autumn. Listening to the sounds and feeling the vibrations brought a different kind of attunement, a different kind of being in a place. This could only arise from our being together, working with and against the existing terrain and our available equipment, knowledge, and feelings.
The politics of disability and landscape have been challenged not only by dérive (a kind of drift), but also by very pointed journeys. In August 2000, three wheelchair-users and two people on crutches, along with friends, family, and volunteers, embarked on a twelve-hour hike to reach the Galehead hut 3,800 feet up the White Mountains in New Hampshire. This was a response to the ridicule and hostility in the local media against the Appalachian Mountain Club's decision to make the hut wheelchair-accessible. The hikers used a range of ropes, planks, poles, as well as sheer determination, to make it to their destination. In part, this is a narrative of independence, of overcoming physical and social obstacles to defy expectations (like the 'Yes I Can' of the 2016 Paralympics trailer). But it is also an example of togetherness, of a need to acknowledge mutual interdependence, of particular importance in what Lennard J. Davis has called the 'dismodern era':
The dismodern era ushers in the concept that difference is what all of us have in common. That identity is not fixed but malleable. That technology is not separate, but part of the body. That dependence, not individual independence, is the rule.4
Disability is a possibility for everyone, even though its reality may differ vastly depending on class, race, religion, gender, and sexuality. It is precisely these intersections that need to be explored in the dérive as theory and practice. By the time we crossed the strange footbridge again, it was awash with heat and light.
(Note: This post arises partly from several part-time jobs I have had in recent years, which have involved supporting children with disabilities in their homes, schools, and communities. It is also rooted in more academic study – I did several pieces of work during my undergraduate degree, including one of my final-year dissertations, on disability in literature. However, as a nondisabled writer, I am concerned about appropriating experiences that are not mine, so please call me out if you feel I have made mistakes in writing this piece.)
1. Guy Debord, 'Theory of the Dérive', in The Situationist International Anthology, trans. by Ken Knabb (Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), p. 62.↩
2. Tom Shakespeare, 'The Social Model of Disability', in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. by Lennard J. Davis, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 270-71.↩
3. Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), p. 85.↩
4. Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. 26.↩
Posted on September 8, 2016 September 12, 2016 by kslh Posted in Landscape, Politics	Tagged access, body, disability, Landscape, nottingham, psychogeography, walking	Leave a comment


text:
Detained bloggers quit their jobs to drive across the world
Detained citizens
By Marta Pascual Juanola and Heather McNeill
September 12, 2019 — 5.25pm
Australian travel bloggers Mark Firkin and Jolie King were making an ambitious overland voyage from Western Australia to Britain when their trip came to an abrupt halt near the Iranian capital, Tehran.
They were pair arrested by security forces while flying a drone, something they often did in pursuit of the perfect photograph. This time, they are alleged to have launched a drone at Jajrood, a military area near the capital of the Islamic republic.
Mark Firkin and Jolie King, who left Perth in 2017, were documenting their travels on social media with the help of crowdfunding. Credit:Instagram
The pair, who moved from Coffs Harbour, NSW, to Western Australia in 2015, quit their jobs in April 2017 and less than three months later had embarked on a long overland expedition destined for Britain.
Until they were arrested more than two months ago, they had been enjoying an incredible journey in their Toyota LandCruiser through some of the world's most beautiful and remote locations. In their customised vehicle, they had driven across WA's Pilbara and Kimberley regions to the Northern Territory, before shipping their car to East Timor.
The pair then travelled across Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar, India and Nepal, tracing the breathtaking Karakoram Highway in Pakistan's north before travelling to Iran through Central Asia's former Soviet republics, sharing regular updates on social media.
The couple camp along the beach in Penang, in mainland Malaysia. Many of the photos on their blog were taken using a drone. Credit:Instagram
The social media posts of drone photographer Firkin show him scuba-diving in the Philippines, snowboarding in Japan, surfing, and falling out of a 'hammerhead' manoeuvre in a light plane.
Their aim, the couple wrote, was to "inspire anyone wanting to travel" and to "break down the stigma around travelling to countries which get a bad rap in the media".
"We both share a great love for being outdoors and an appreciation for the happiness that putting yourself outside of your comfort zones brings you," they wrote in their first blog post.
"Hopefully we can stretch this trip out as long as possible, as it's only so often between life's commitments that we get a chance to spend this much time exploring."
Jolie King and Mark Firkin at the brim of the crater of Mount Bromo on the Indonesian island of Java. Credit:Instagram
Manoto TV, a Persian-language broadcaster based in London, reported on Wednesday the couple had been arrested due to their lack of knowledge of Iranian laws relating to drone use, which require pilots to obtain a valid permit.
Regulations prohibit flying drones over the city of Tehran and in sensitive areas including government or military facilities and airports.
Failing to obtain a permit carries a penalty of six months in jail, followed by immediate deportation.
Jolie King and her partner's trip took them to some breathtaking locations. Credit:Instagram
A spokesperson for Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed it was providing consular assistance to the families of Firkin and King and another Australian woman who is also being detained in Iran.
The other woman, a lecturer at a university in Melbourne, was detained in October while travelling the country and has been sentenced to 10 years' jail.
Speaking at a press conference in Canberra on Thursday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the arrests as "sensitive cases".
"They are never issues that are addressed well by offering public commentary on them, and I note that in at least one of these cases that is a view that has been expressed by family members," he said.
"We will continue to pursue these matters in the interests of the Australians at the centre of these cases and we will do that carefully and we will do that in close consultation through our officials who have been part of this process now for some time.
"I will respect the wishes of the family and I will act in the best interests of those citizens."
Foreign Minister Marise Payne said: "The government has been making efforts to ensure they are treated fairly, humanely and in accordance with international norms.
"We also continue to provide consular assistance to the three Australians' families, with whom we have maintained regular contact.
"On the basis of ongoing discussions, I continue to believe that the best chance of a successful outcome for these three Australians is with Iran through diplomatic channels and not through the media."
Firkin and King are being held at the notorious Evin Prison, used to house Iran's political prisoners. It is the same detention centre where British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is being held.
In an interview with ABC's AM program, Zaghari-Ratcliffe's husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said King had met with his wife after coming out of solitary confinement, where Zeghari-Ratcliffe had spent eight months.
Jolie King cooks pancakes to celebrate Mark Firkin's birthday by the shores of Borith Lake, Pakistan. Credit:Instagram
"I know that the girl who is in now with Nazanine came through scared and disoriented and obviously had been quite intimidated by being interrogated for all that time in solitary," he said.
He said his wife was held in a cell as big as a double bed without any windows and a light bulb which was on the whole time. She had three blankets to sleep on.
Despite growing social unrest and strict dress and conduct laws, Iran is a popular destination for overland travellers moving across Asia. Its main attractions include the country's ancient cultural artefacts, archeological ruins, tiled blue mosques and unique Persian food.
It is also one of very few land routes open to foreigners linking Europe to the rest of Asia, together with the Trans-Siberian railway in Russia.
In the weeks leading up to their arrest the couple had taken a break from social media. In their most recent post they shared a picture of Kyrgyzstan's Naryn region with their nearly 20,000 Instagram followers.
Jolie King snapping a selfie with a man in the city of Jodhpur, India. Credit:Instagram
In their latest Youtube vlog, the couple recounted the first leg of their Karakoram Highway trip in northern Pakistan and how the pair celebrated Firkin's birthday with a pancake breakfast by a scenic mountain lake.
Following their stay in Iran, they were planning to travel across the border to Turkey and slowly make their way to Europe, taking a small detour to Morocco before reaching the UK.
A DFAT spokesperson urged travellers to follow their travel advice in place for Iran, which warns "foreigners including Australians could be arbitrarily detained or arrested".
Marta Pascual Juanola
Marta is an award-winning photographer and journalist with a focus on social justice issues.
Heather McNeill
Heather McNeill is the crime and courts editor at WAtoday.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Brief Description: Sales of tickets for admission to school dances and sales of t-shirts.
We wish to acknowledge receipt of your letter dated October 19, 1999, regarding the application of Kansas Retailers' Sales tax.
Please be advised that if the school would be obligated to collect the appropriate Kansas sales tax(es) on the sale of tickets to the school dances, since these respective tickets allow students admission into a facility which provides amusement, entertainment or recreation services.
The sale of the t-shirts by the school to the football players/volleyball players would be subject to sales tax, pursuant to K.S.A. 79-3603(a).
In closing, the Kansas Retailers' Sales Tax Act does not contain an exemption from sales tax on purchases made by dinner theatre groups. Therefore, any purchases made by said group would be subject to any applicable sales tax(es) in this state.


text:
Push for reforms on wage theft intensifies
Home / Press / Push for reforms on wage theft intensifies
FOR THURSDAY, JUNE 23, 2016
NOON – 1:00 P.M. EST
Contact: Darlene Lombos, Community Labor United
Darlene@MassCLU.org, 617-723-2639
Workers and advocates escalate efforts to combat $700,000,000 in stolen wages as Massachusetts legislature session nears close
"Wage Theft Counter" will debut Thursday on Route 93 and online
BOSTON, MA – Workers and advocates are ramping up their calls for the Massachusetts legislature to take action on what they see as a wage theft "epidemic" in Massachusetts.
Groups backing Massachusetts Senate bill 2207, An Act to Prevent Wage Theft and Promote Employer Accountability, will announce several escalations in their campaign this Thursday, June 23, at Noon as workers from various industries gather at the Massachusetts State House steps to share their stories and to promote statewide reforms. Approximately $700 million(1) in wages are stolen from workers in Massachusetts each year by employers who break the law by eschewing overtime, minimum wage, and other existing regulations.
WHO: Workers who have been impacted by wage theft and their community supporters
WHAT: Wage theft speak out, launch of StopMassWageTheft.org public campaign, launch of the Massachusetts Wage Theft Counter
WHEN: Thursday, June 23, 2016, Noon – 1:00 P.M.
WHERE: Massachusetts State House Steps, 24 Beacon Street, Boston, MA, 02133
Meanwhile, according to multiple studies based on US Census Bureau data, Massachusetts ranks as having one of the highest overall level of income inequality amongst all U.S. states. Boston has repeatedly been ranked as the most inequitable city in the nation.
"These basic, common sense reforms will help ensure workers are paid what they are promised and what they are owed under the laws that already exist," said Darlene Lombos, Executive Director of Community Labor United. "These reforms will also support businesses who play by the rules – businesses who deserve a level playing field and shouldn't be disadvantaged when competitors break the law and engage in wage theft."
On Thursday, Community Labor United will unveil the "Massachusetts Wage Theft Counter." Looming over highways across the state in the form of digital billboards, the counter will show a running tally of the estimated amount of wages stolen from workers in Massachusetts thus far in 2016. The counter will also continually update on a newly launched website, StopMassWageTheft.org, which will be backed by a social media and radio advertising campaigns, also launching on Thursday.
Sen. Sal DiDomenico is the lead sponsor of the legislation, which is currently under consideration by the Senate Committee on Ways and Means. Reps. Aaron Michelwitz and Kate Hogan are lead sponsors of the corresponding House legislation. Advocates say they hope to see the bill passed into law before the current legislative session concludes at the end of July. The campaign has gained momentum recently, passing similar measures on a municipal level in Boston, Cambridge, and Chelsea.
If passed, the Act would put new restrictions on businesses who have been subject to criminal or civil actions resulting from a failure to comply with the Massachusetts Fair Labor Standards Act. In Massachusetts and across the country, employers are subcontracting and outsourcing their work and distancing themselves from their responsibilities to their employees. While sometimes these practices reflect more efficient ways of producing goods and services, they are too often the result of explicit employer strategies to evade labor laws and erode worker protections.
1.) Bernhardt et al. (2009) performed a statistical survey of 4,387 low-wage workers across three cities and found 68% of lowwage workers experienced wage theft averaging $51/week or $2,634/year assuming a full-time schedule. We identified a universe of 513,611 low-wage Massachusetts workers building on figures reported by the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center (2013). We applied the 68% prevalence rate to this universe to get 349,256 workers experiencing wage theft, and then applied a more conservative $2,000/year stolen per worker to get $698,512,000 wages stolen annually.
Push for reforms on wage theft intensifies2016-06-292016-06-29http://stopmasswagetheft.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wage-theft-logo-2.pngStopMassWageThefthttp://stopmasswagetheft.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wage-theft-logo-2.png200px200px
New Regulations Crack Down on Wage Theft EpidemicPress


Break Up ProblemSolution/Break up problem ka solution is used in the direction of the life relationship with the beloved person, now that you can also avoid forever solutions that are based on the form of astrology, Vashikaran etc.Such ruptures could be caused by sensible or insensitive reasons, and all these are the various reasons or causes and factors that can be manipulated in favor of restoration and conciliation in order to carry out the happy love relationship Between the persons or the group of persons. The astrologer once in true love does not do it in false love or the point of view of love. In order to achieve the happy and concerted love relationship that is created between people as a form of lovers or couples.
Break Up Problem Solution by vashikaran is the way you can get any solution to your any question that is presented in your mind. Love is the combination of care, understanding, emotion, and so on. Each life always takes place as a play. In the room, there are parts of the head and tail, just like our work of life as similar to happiness and the sad part. Happiness is never eternal in all cases, problems and sadness are also part of it, people who can overcome all their problems or problems have the right to live without tension. But, people who indulge themselves completely in their lives to find the solution of love problems. People leave all their responsibilities and solve their love problems. For this, they feel like the worst person whose fate is so serious. Sleepless nights with a long silence on your mind and some degree of frustration with some troubling points are the symptoms of your love problem. You can solve your problem in the solution of the break problem by a vashikaran specialist related to the stability of love, your love, the problem, etc.
We all fall in love and falling in love is the easy part. Sometimes in a relationship, a couple falls in love more each day, but another falls for love. It is through astrology This leads to many fiefs, pains and sufferings for the one who is still in love. All these situations lead to a rupture and a lover makes pain. We are here to provide help to all those people who have sought something that can alleviate their break with pain. Astrology is the tool we use to help all kinds of love problems. To solve problems that relate to solving the problem of breaking love and thus, in the end, restore your love permanently, it is done or done by the astrological expert who can support you or Help you all are in the form of pride. Regardless of the native place or also in the country in this regard, common problems such as family objection, financial or social situation are confronted in the form of priorities and ambitions, etc.
If your partner wants to break with you, that is your decision. You must accept it. If you really like it, you can try to talk and explain what you feel. But it is up to them to choose. How can we change our minds? I know it is very difficult to accept change in a relationship, but I think you are holding on to something because letting go would be too difficult. And that's fine. Relationships take a lot of work and can be frustrating, but we should not stay there because we are too scared to understand what will happen if someone leaves us. When relationships end, sometimes we even think that a failed relationship is reflected in us, as if we were failures. But this is simply not true. I am sure you are an incredible and unique person. You deserve an incredible and unique relationship. Do you want to be with someone who does not want to be with you? Then, astrology is the best answer for you. Come to us our ji pandit and it solves your problem resolutely and remove the break between the bride and groom (you and your partner) You can contact our pandit ji love marriage specialist with any reason to break up. Pandit Ji will listen to your problem carefully and inform you of the best possible remedy after a thorough analysis.


He has been playing sports his whole life and started Yoga after a serious back injury in 1991. He found Hot Yoga in 2005 to help rehabilitate from yet another serious accident and loved the benefits of practicing with the heat. After relocating from one end of the world to the other with his wife and missing the heat, he certified with Bikram in Mexico 2008. He has taught all over the world and opened the 4th Bikram Yoga studio in France.


For the first time in X Factor history, the public got to decide which judge would be given which category.
We already know that Rita Ora has the girls, Nick Grimshaw has the boys, Cheryl Fernandez-Versini has the groups and Simon Cowell has the overs.
Sunday night's show saw the judges find out which category they would be guiding through the live shows.
While Rita, Cheryl and Nick were over the moon, Simon was far from thrilled.
And he didn't hold back in letting his feelings be known.
Straight after it was announced, Cowell let out a 'For f**k's sake!' before asking hosts Caroline and OIly to double check whether they had read out the right name.
By the way – everyone who had been put into the overs category could see his reaction. Needless to say they weren't jumping for joy either.
'That's really discouraging' one can be heard saying.
And Simon's sulk continued when he went back to the judges' table, refusing to crack a smile.
'That's not right' Cheryl F-V told him.
Sunday night's show saw Rita Ora and the girls take on the six chair challenge.


Posted by Lyette Reback on February 17, 2016.
When David and I got married, we both believed in Jesus but we barely knew what that meant. As we added children to our family, we quickly grew in our faith. Both of us were fortunate to have parents who modeled solid marriages for us. But somehow I felt the need to read all about what a good Christian marriage should look like.
And there were no lack of resources.
Plenty of "experts" out there in the field.
Lots of different people to tell me how my marriage should work.
If I would just respect my husband, then he would love me.
It was an overwhelming, impossible list to keep.
And then one day I was rereading Genesis.
Suddenly one little word jumped right off the page at me.
And suddenly I felt very free.
You see, there are many models of marriage and a million different combinations of personalities in those relationships. Those who have gone before us can give us advice, they can tell us what worked for them…but they aren't the ones made SUITABLE for our own husband. Many of the biggest challenges David and I have faced came as a result of me trying to fit into what someone else's expectation of marriage looked like.
So today I just wanted to encourage you that YOU are the helper suitable for your spouse. You're the one who is fit for him, his compliment, his counterpart, the one who corresponds to him. Maybe it doesn't always look the way the "experts" tell us it should, but after 23 years together, I think I am an expert on MY marriage. And since David seems pretty darn happy, I must be filling that role just fine. Don't get too wrapped up in someone else's view on marriage. Just be the counterpart your spouse needs.
Bravo! Well said….and so very wise. If more people were experts on their "own marriages" then there would be less folks being experts on everyone else's marriages…because they would be too busy with the loves of their lives!


The military's "unfunded requirements" list amounts to $31 billion.
Ever sit and ponder what you'd do with all the money in world? Well, so does the Pentagon. It just asked Congress for ships, fighter planes, and other weapon systems amounting to $31 billion. The tally includes M1 Abrams tanks, F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, and upgrades for Navy ships and submarines. This is the military's pie-in-the-sky wish list.
M1A2SEPV2 Abrams fires a live round at Swietozow, Poland. Photo by U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Timothy D. Hughes.
So what is the Pentagon wishing for this year? The list prioritizes getting new high-tech aircraft into service, as well as upgrading older planes and ships to more modern standards. Of the $31.4 billion submitted, approximately $2.8 billion would go toward buying fighter planes. The services would like an additional 24 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, including land-based, carrier-based, and Marine Corps variants, while the Navy would like an additional 10 F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighters. The request also includes Air Force tankers, MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, and new wings for four A-10 close air support jets.
The list doesn't actually include any new ships, as the Navy is prioritizing naval aviation right now. But it does request funding to upgrade four early production Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) and three Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines.
Littoral Combat Ship Independence during builder's trials, 2009.
The Army, meanwhile, wants 33 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 29 Abrams main battle tanks. It also wants 9 Apache Guardian attack helicopters, three of the newest variant of the UH-60 Blackhawk medium transport helicopter, the -V model, and nine CH-47F Chinook heavy transport helicopters.
The Marine Corps unfunded priorities list also prioritizes aviation. The Corps says it would be nice to have two more CH-53K King Stallion heavy transport helicopters, two more MV-22 Ospreys, and 7 more AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters.
President Donald Trump's first defense budget, while larger than previous years, is no doubt a disappointment to the Pentagon. His 2018 defense budget proposal comes to $574.5 billion, plus an additional $64.6 billion in overseas contingency operations funding (mostly to finance the war against the Islamic State), for a total of $639.1 billion. In contrast, Obama's defense spending projected a 2018 budget of $557 billion, not including overseas contingency operations, for a 2018 increase of just $17.5 billion dollars. The President's campaign promises and rhetoric have run into the hard wall of fiscal realities and limitations.
Read more at CNN and US Naval Institute News.


Brown's anthropomorphic Monkey returns, and this time he's not ready for bedtime.
Conspicuously absent from this book is Monkey's baby brother (from the earlier title Monkey Not Ready for Baby, 2016). But Monkey's big brother and parents are present, and they all try to help him get to sleep. Alas, soothing nighttime routines fail to do the trick, and this ends up making Monkey feel tired at school. Brown's accompanying watercolor-and-gouache illustrations in the school scenes show Monkey asleep at his desk, pencil in hand, and nodding off on a swing while a young lion friend looks on with concern. After seeing him fall asleep at the dinner table, Monkey's brother encourages him to try counting things in his mind to fall asleep. At first Monkey doesn't think this sounds very promising, but when he decides to count dinosaurs he ends up engaging in imaginative flights of fancy with many different dinosaurs, an activity that ultimately sends him to dreamland. Endpapers featuring those dinosaurs extend the story beyond the main narrative and hand-lettered text combines with a studied, childlike style to give it a friendly look, though little else feels particularly fresh about this bedtime book.


text:
Highers Brothers Savor Freedom, Reject Plea Deal Talk
Filed Under:charlie langton, Christy Strawser, Highers Brothers
DETROIT (Talk Radio 1270) This is the first summer in 25 years brothers Raymond and Thomas Highers are free to stroll in the sun.
And they're not taking a second of that freedom for granted.
"We're healthy, we feel good, we're free, we have so many wonderful new friends and family … There's been an outpouring of love and support … It's just been great, something that I never thought possible," Thomas Highers said to Charlie Langton during a Wednesday appearance on Talk Radio 1270, their first extended on- air interview since they were released.
Staying with an aunt and uncle in Roseville, the Highers are settling into a new routine, one that involves kids they haven't seen since birth, cousins, aunts and uncles who believed their story of innocence — despite the odds.
The Highers were convicted in 1987, when they were 21 and 22 years old respectively, of killing neighborhood drug dealer Robert Karey, 65, known as "Old Man Bob." Witnesses at the time said the shooting was carried out by two clean-cut young white boys. The Highers, who fit the description, were known marijuana customers of Old Man Bob and they ended up convicted of the crime in a bench trial, with a judge and no jury.
They protested to anyone who would listen, including lawyers and prison roommates, that they were innocent and hadn't even been at the scene of the crime that day.
And then a new witness came forward in 2009 based on a Facebook contact between people who were teens at the time of the slaying, customers of Old Man Bob's. Two of the new witnesses said they saw armed black men rush up to the back of Karey's house from the garage before a gunshot exploded. Other witnesses said they were in the house when up to five young black men broke in and attacked, holding a gun to the heads of at least one of the young men.
Judge Lawrence Talon held hearings with the new testimony and released the men on bond and tethers; the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office filed an appeal and wants a new trial. A pretrial hearing is set for August 29.
"We're ready for this challenge," Thomas Highers said, adding he's not interested in any kind of plea deal that would allow him continued freedom in exchange for pleading guilty to lesser charges.
"I would not take it, I wouldn't let them get it (an offer) out of their mouth," Thomas Highers added about a possible plea deal.
What did they miss most behind bars? "I miss the love and my family," Raymond Highers said.
"How about women?" Charlie Langton asked. "That's huge," Raymond Highers said. "It was about, when you're home with your family you always miss that physical touch with another person, you always yearn for that. You get used to that, the thing you never get used to is missing your kids, your mother."
Thomas Highers also missed his two children, and believes his time behind bars marked their lives in a devastating way. His daughter Nicole, who was seven months away from birth when he was convicted, was murdered in 2005.
And his son Ryan Hirth, 25, who's been in and out of trouble with the law his entire life, turned himself into prison this week on charges of removing his own tether after leaving a court-ordered drug treatment center.
So, one of Thomas Higher's first orders of business as a parent free from prison was to go back to jail to visit his son.
And he said he was happy to do it. "I thought 'This is a new beginning for him," Thomas Highers said, adding that his son should complete a short prison stint on parole violation charges and then start a new life. "I knew what it was like in there. I liked being on the other side of that glass, that's for sure."
The Highers, who finish each other's sentences, both stayed active in prison, working out and connecting with friends and family whenever they could. They were together the first seven years, until the state ruled that co-defendants and immediate family couldn't be together in jail. From 1994 on, they were apart.
"It was a battle in every sense of the word, it was a spiritual battle, a physical battle," Raymond Highers said. "Every day you're in a battle, every day when you swing your feet over, put your feet on the ground, you prepared for it, prepared to battle that day, whatever is coming at you, you have to prepare for it."
Are they bitter?
"I'm disappointed, I'm not upset, thank God we're not still sitting behind bars," Thomas Highers said. "We came to the conclusion we might die there. We're not angry, we're not bitter … That's where we're at. We're going to take care of this trial ahead of us and that's it, we're done."
Raymond Highers isn't even upset at the people who he said falsely testified that he and his brother were at Old Man Bob's at the time of the killing.
"They were just young," Raymond Highers said. "They seen something, they were real scared and I think they just wanted to get out of there. I don't think they knew someone was locked up for this … and then people started finding out."
Caller Chris from Sterling Heights said, "Too many prosecutors are more interested in getting another notch in their belt than they are in finding the truth."
Raymond Highers agreed, saying he didn't always believe it, "but today I have somewhat of that opinion. Prosecutors push cases to somehow further their careers."


text:
"use strict";

var _interopRequireDefault = require("@babel/runtime/helpers/interopRequireDefault");
Object.defineProperty(exports, "__esModule", {
  value: true
});
exports.default = void 0;
var _createSvgIcon = _interopRequireDefault(require("./utils/createSvgIcon"));
var _jsxRuntime = require("react/jsx-runtime");
var _default = (0, _createSvgIcon.default)( /*#__PURE__*/(0, _jsxRuntime.jsx)("path", {
  d: "M19 5v14H5V5h14m0-2H5c-1.1 0-2 .9-2 2v14c0 1.1.9 2 2 2h14c1.1 0 2-.9 2-2V5c0-1.1-.9-2-2-2z"
}), 'CheckBoxOutlineBlank');
exports.default = _default;

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: Pattern Matching Scala Regex evaluation Imagine you have String that contains the Ampersand Symbol &
my goal is to add spaces between the & and any character if there isn't any
e.x
Case 1: Body&Soul should be-->Body & Soul (working)
Case 2: Body  &Soul--> Body  & Soul (working)
Case 3: Body&  Soul -->Body &  Soul (working)
Case 4: Body&Soul&Mind -->Body & Soul & Mind (working)

Case 5: Body &Soul& Mind ---> Body & Soul & Mind (not working)
Case 6: Body& Soul &Mind ---> Body & Soul & Mind (not working)

    def replaceEmployerNameContainingAmpersand(emplName: String): String
    = {
    val r = "(?<! )&(?! )".r.unanchored
    val r2 = "&(?! )".r.unanchored
    val r3 = "(?<! )&".r.unanchored

    emplName match {
     case r() => emplName.replaceAll("(?<! )&(?! )", " & ")

     case r2() => emplName.replaceAll("&(?! )", "& ")

     case r3() => emplName.replaceAll("(?<! )&", " &")
    }
   }

The goal is to fix Case 5 & 6: Body &Soul& Mind or Body& Soul &Mind --> Body & Soul & Mind
But it's not working because when case 2 or 3 occurs the case is exiting and not matching the second & symbol.
Can anyone help me on how to match case 5 and 6?

A: You may capture a single optional whitespace char on both ends of a & and check if they matched, and replace accordingly using replaceAllIn:

def replaceAllIn(target: CharSequence, replacer: (Match) => String): String
  Replaces all matches using a replacer function.

See the Scala demo:
val s = "Body&Soul, Body  &Soul, Body&  Soul, Body&Soul&Mind, Body &Soul& Mind, Body& Soul &Mind"
val pattern = """(\s)?&(\s)?""".r
val res = pattern.replaceAllIn(s, m => (if (m.group(1) != null) m.group(1) else " ") + "&" + (if (m.group(2) != null) m.group(2) else " ") )
println(res)
// => Body & Soul, Body  & Soul, Body &  Soul, Body & Soul & Mind, Body & Soul & Mind, Body & Soul & Mind

The (\s)?&(\s)? pattern matches and captures into Group 1 a single whitespace char, then matches &, and then captures an optional whitespace in Group 2.
If Group 1 is not null, there is a whitespace, and we keep it, else, replace with a space. The same logic is used for the trailing space.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange