Fieldguide

Coverdesign printed with Risograph

Contents page

Excerpts from fieldwork photographs are placed on the inside cover alongside the contents.

Cover Inside
The BKL Museum of Suspended Objects
The BKL Museum of Suspended Objects
The BKL Museum of Suspended Objects
The BKL Museum of Suspended Objects
The Banality of the Anthropocene
The Banality of the Anthropocene
Tracks in an unfamiliar Landscape
Tracks in an unfamiliar Landscape
Natural History of the Slid Sites
Natural History of the Slid Sites
Foldout: Natural History of the Slid Sites

Foldout with Collage by Meredith Root-Bernstein

Foldout: Natural History of the Slid Sites
Foldout: Natural History of the Slid Sites
Foldout: Natural History of the Slid Sites
On Pipes and Care
On Pipes and Care

BKL a Fieldguide

Client: Meredith Root-Bernstein, Pierre du Plessis, AURA Group
Field: Environmental Humanities, Ecology, Biosciences, Archaeology

BRIEF:
A Fieldguide to Unfamiliar Landscapes and Common Types of Mysterious Objects: »Between 2013–2017, the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) group conducted fieldwork at formerly mined brown coal beds in central Jutland, Denmark. »BKL«–short for the Danish word for brown coal beds i.e. Brunkulslejer–seemed to be a banal corner of the Anthropocene. It was destroyed, homogenous, controlled—where we nonetheless learned to attend to numerous surprises, confusions, and ambiguities. We rarely found what we expected, yet we learned to attune ourselves to the strangeness of an apparently boring landscape.

Here we bring together a set of observations carried out by AURA members and guests, in the form of a field guide. This is not a normal field guide that functions as a reference for identification. Rather, it is a guide for observing things you don’t understand, rendering the seemingly familiar, strange and the strange, familiar. It is a guide not to ignorance, but to realising you need to learn; to exploring what remains unaccounted for, in excess of the taken for granted, the foretold, and the already known. This field guide aims to provide insight for the interpretation of mundane landscapes and their common types of mysterious objects.«

The AURA Group involved at BKL consists of Meredith Root-Bernstein, Heather Swanson, Pierre du Plessis, Stine Vestbo, Mathilde Højrup. They invited John Law, Felix Riede, Camilla Berner and Joshua Kim to join them.

DESIGN:
The editorial design takes its cues from the nature of fieldwork in BKL, where each participant responded to the site through their expertise and individual lens to produce short written and photographic observations. Each contribution was therefor translated into their own visual language to represent each researcher. Shorter pages and fold-outs add to the experience of ‘fieldwork’ in the making. The binding equally reflects the idea of a collection that could be expanded by new fieldwork and responses.

The publication was created in 2022/2023.