Auto-geography
Artist-academic Helen Angell-Preece is author of Auto-geography, a new* critical spatial practice, re-engaging the self, ‘Auto’, with geography, re-mapping British spaces of home and belonging through lived experience. Auto-geography emerges from rigorous dialogue between the artist’s embodied material mapping practice through sculptural installation, with the foundational post-colonial critique of geography, that exposed the earth-writing discipline as ‘demarcating spaces of belonging through estrangement’ (Ahmed, 2000).
Auto-geography proposes re-mapping and re-inhabiting spaces of home and belonging through bodies-materials-spaces encounter, profoundly undermining visual mapping technologies inherited through imperialism. Geometric representation of worlds naturalised the illusion of self-constitution (Hall, 1992), fixing peoples and places into binary hierarchies of belonging / strange, inside / outside, home / away (Said, 1994, 2003., Ahmed, 2006). Re-mapping through processes of configuration, instead, exposes British nation spaces as dynamically co-constituted and entangled through intermeshing arrivals and departures (Barad, 2007).
Angell-Preece engages processes of material and spatial dismantling within sculptural installation, re-materialising spaces of inhabitation. By evidencing the entangling of spaces between bodies and architecture where inhabitation occurs, dominant locative identities of inside-outside are unsettled, revealing borders to be inherently porous. By dynamically re-mapping her own contingent sense of belonging-to-place, the artist unsettles dominant mythologies of a fixed and self-constituted white identity.
Using an embodied phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty, 1994., Ahmed, 2006) and active New Material (Barad, 2007) approach to spatial re-mapping, the sculptural installation practice dismantles structures that define British everyday spaces of home – upholstery, dressmaking, furniture – re-weaving their exposed threads into alternative architectures of (re)inhabitation. Inter-meshing lines describe complex forms of spatiality that challenge notions of singular origin (Bhabha, 1994., Balibar, 2004, 2011). Processes of belonging emerge through active bodies-materials-spaces ‘intra-actions’, resisting the identification of ‘home with stasis of being’ (Ahmed, 2000).
Re-thinking space through its material configuration, Auto-geography allows a reading of Said’s re-mapping as entanglement (Said, 1994), presaging Barad’s post-humanist concept by over a decade (Barad, 2007). The concept understands Ahmed’s critical re-inhabitation of spaces (Ahmed, 2000, 2006) through Barad’s ‘intra-action’ of bodies and spaces (Barad, 2007). Auto-geography conflates mapping and geography, recognising how one maps, is not separate from the ‘world’ it seeks to chart. Rather, how one maps, produces worlds (Said, 1994., Ahmed, 2006., Barad, 2007., Yusoff, 2019).
*Angell-Preece’s Auto-geography remains distinct from Sullivan’s use of the term (Sullivan, 2015), emerging as it does from a consciously critical approach ‘within post-coloniality’. Whereas Sullivan uses the term in an admittedly non-critical approach to emphasise the geographic within autobiography, Angell-Preece instead, re-engages the self within the ‘story’ of geography to expose and unsettle its implicit power.
