PRS Australia PhD Examination - Fiona Harrisson (School of Architecture and Urban Design - RMIT University)

Landscape Is Alive: Embodied Practise and Being Alive

If landscape is alive, how can the aliveness of landscape inform design, and the aliveness of the research-practitioner be situated within the frame of inquiry? Travelling through my own cultural lineage I’ve explored embodied somatic methods that invite relational ways of knowing, while keeping Indigenous voices at my shoulder. Spending time being-with my own garden and a local forest, I came to understand that to perceive landscape as alive requires inhabiting one’s own being as alive. I coin the term land(scape) to create a slight pause, and a space, between ‘land’ and ‘scape’, within which to dwell with relational ways of knowing. This practice research, engaging my body to attune with other living beings, afforded a microcosm through which to unsettle and recalibrate approaches to design and practice in the discipline of Landscape Architecture. To acknowledge that ecological problems perceived as ‘out there’ are also ‘in here’ (she says, pointing to herself), I offer (re)orientations to practice research through practising-in-all-directions and a suite of soft principles that have manifested in my own practice and situated pedagogy. These act as an invitation and guide to others as a relational way of encountering oneself and one’s world as alive. These are offered in the context of questions emerging around human and other-than-human relations.