Bartlett Research Conversations: Zoë Quick

Casglu Pumlumon | Gathering Pumlumon: Performing a Welsh Upland Landscape

Speaker: Zoë Quick
Supervisors: Prof Jane Rendell and Prof Sharon Morris (UCL Slade)
Guest Panellist: Dr Iain Biggs

Abstract

This research reenacts the marginal, female Welsh custom gwlana (wool-gathering) to renegotiate the farming-rewilding binary in debate over the Welsh mountain Pumlumon. As a trope of wasteful transgression in English rhetoric, and resourceful identity in Welsh resistance, gwlana highlights gendered politics of identity and problematic distance between institutional rhetoric and Welsh upland communities. Arguing that gwlana embodies tensions underpinning debate over Pumlumon, this research develops a trans-disciplinary ‘gathering methodology’ through polypraxic reenactment of gwlana.
 
Enacting collaborative performances of gathering-weaving a blanket and ballads with, and of, Pumlumon, as a ‘multi-species gathering in the making’ (Tsing 2017), it aims to enact and give voice to relations between communities-times-species-institutions-fields marginalised by the farming-rewilding binary. Mining the multiple meanings of gather - collect-assemble-apprehend – this research draws the humanities and arts into ecology and agriculture to renegotiate the farming-rewilding binary, and ask how, through a ‘gathering methodology’, research can listen-to and write-with a mountain.

About The Bartlett Research Conversations

The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Research Conversations seminars comprise work-in-progress and upgrade presentations by students undertaking the MPhil/PhD Architectural Design and MPhil/PhD Architectural and Urban History and Theory. All current UCL staff and students are welcome to attend.

Held regularly throughout the academic year, the seminars are attended by the programme directors, Professor Jonathan Hill and Professor Sophia Psarra, PhD Coordinators, Dr. Nina Vollenbröker and Dr Sophie Read, and other PhD supervisors.

Image: Wool-gathering on Pumlumon, May 2021 (Zoë Quick)