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Trilogy of a Climb 

DESCRIPTION

Trilogy of a Climb is a part of my master's thesis research. Through ethnographic field research in Tenerife, which involved rock climbing with both local and international climbers, I explored how people who climb interrelate with nonhuman* nature and how they experience nonhuman nature. The focus of my thesis is specifically on the interrelation of humans, rocks and cliffs. Drawing from my own experiences of climbing and studying those of other climbers in Tenerife I sought to unravel different perspectives of rock climbers and their experiences on their interrelations with nonhuman nature. In doing so I took a post-humanist perspective, which entails looking not only at the role of humans but also those of nonhuman specifically rock. I learned that rock and climbers interact at different moments in time, from various distances and through different activities. Climbers do not only act on the rock the rock also acts in its own way upon climbers. The rock attracts, intimidates, moves, affords, and amazes climbers, sometimes which such intensity that the interaction can stay with the climber for a lifetime. Reflections on climber rock interrelations are presented in the master thesis titled: When rock becomes life/alive.

 

What it feels like to be on the rock is hard to capture in words, it is something that one will only truly understand by experiencing it by themselves. However, as the peatlands of the Netherlands do not offer cliffs and rocks for climbing, I decided to design, in addition to the written thesis, an installation that seeks to convey the experiences of climbers during a climb. With an audio story connected to an artistic visual representation of a cliff, the visitor is taken along a climb. The installation shows three stories, with the aim to show the diversity of experiences. These stories are based on her own experiences on the experiences of Sara, Chris and Unai, three climbers whom Remke met during her fieldwork. First, it tells a story of engaging with a new style of climbing (1), succeeding in a climb after many attempts and days of preparation (2) and lastly a story of facing fear and flowing up the cliff (3).

Course: Public Intervention Master thesis Anthropology and Development Studies 

Date: June 2023

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*Following the definition as giving in Actor-Network theory, the term nonhuman functions as an umbrella term to encompass a wide but ultimately limited range of entities. It includes entities as diverse as animals (Latour 2005, 11), things and objects (Latour 1993), natural phenomena (Law et al. 2012) such as cliffs, and rocks, tools and technical artefacts (Latour and Woolgar 1986) for example climbing rope and harnesses, texts (Callon, Law, and Rip 1998) such as climbing books, transportation devices (John law and Michel Callon 1992). Perhaps it is easier to mention what the term does not include: which are human; entities that are entirely symbolic in nature (Latour 1993, 101).

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REFERENCES

Callon, Michel, John Law, and Arie Rip, eds. 1998. Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World. Transferred to digital printing. Houndmills: Macmillan.

John law and Michel Callon. 1992. ‘The Life and Death of an Aircraft: A Network Analysis of Technical Change’. In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, 21–52. The MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Law, John, W. E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. 2012. ‘Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion’. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology 1. mit Press Cambridge, MA: 105–28.

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