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Reflections on short-term collective fieldwork on Belene Island (Bulgaria)

December 2023


As I wobbled in and out of the small narrow boat, saw islands that didn’t exist to local eyes1 and was ravaged by mosquitoes bigger than I’d ever seen before, I felt quite at home, but also in the grip of the excitement and joy that heading toward the unfamiliar brings. This was the closest I’d been to my own mode of artist-research at an academic gathering yet! In what follows, I reflect on the experience a few months later. These reflections form part of my contribution to a co-authored think-piece article due to be published in the coming year.  

In the market-driven research environment of the contemporary British university, in which the clamour for quantifiable and monetisable ‘outputs’ can be overwhelming, what is valued as knowledge is a key marker of both institutional epistemologies and the economic structures that underpin the University’s drives and desires. Despite the proliferation of ‘practice-based’ PhDs in the arts, it often feels like the knowledges such practice-based approaches engage and produce, particularly those embodied knowledges that are not easily packageable in terms of ‘impact,’ must still be argued for as valuable. Practice-based researchers in the artistic field must often contend with the idea that what they do is questionable in terms of what counts as knowledge. It is not always easy to unpack, explain and account for the kinds of knowledges produced when we undertake, for example, a bootless and sockless walk across a peat bog just to see what this might bring. The kinds of narratives and reflections that might result from such an exercise, as ways of making sense of such an autotelic act whose meaning emerges in process—if at all—are seldom treated as ‘serious work’ or ‘serious thinking’ beyond a certain public.

In the peatlands that provide the context for my current project, what often drives the discourse is firmly rooted in the language of conservation and driven by scientists and scientific discourse. While artists are sometimes employed as part of restoration projects, for example, they never lead them. Instead, they are there to facilitate a kind of translation or illustration exercise, often in terms of shaping how a project is received by the public; artistic research reduced to questions of “effective representation, public understanding, or the cultural politics of symbolizing the earth.”2 And even then, artist-researchers are often tolerated rather than understood. Look at X over there, what are they doing? I just don’t get it! Yet the kinds of knowledge that develop from a starting point of not knowing and uncertainty, that grow and resonate through open-ended inquiry, playful experimentation and unstructured exploration that might be seen to resist dominant orthodoxies have a crucial role to play in shaping our collective futures. As Isabelle Stengers might put it, we need idiots as much as experts! By unsettling what Stengers calls ‘faithful communication’ in favour of misunderstanding and indeterminacy, we open ourselves to an ecology of practices that refuses the potent allure of Truth and the theoretical disentanglement of something from its environment.3

I was an idiot in another but not unrelated sense on the island trip when it came to the mosquitoes. I paid the price for having applied repellent only to my arms, neck, and face, as if it were an exercise in applying sunblock! Later, as I itched and scratched and cursed myself, it struck me that the mosquitoes were a good way to think about the function of fieldwork—a centre piece of anthropology, of course, but increasingly present in the discourse of artist-research. In the paper I’d given earlier in the week, I drew on the work on Melody Jue to express the necessity of (re)thinking our attentiveness to the environmental conditions in which we produce theories and in which those theories are interacted with. Jue calls convincingly for us to cast a critical eye on the terrestial bias of our thought and accompanying conceptual vocabulary, asking what kind of thought might be suitable for underwater environments. There are significant limitations when one tries to uncritically apply concepts oriented around one perceptual environment to another, she argues. Crucially, Jue’s intervention emerged through the process of learning to scuba dive. Experiencing the unsettling alterity of the underwater environment produced an encounter with previously unexamined and embodied behaviours and habits. On Belene Island, the mosquitoes served as a keen reminder that without immersion in an environment, our ability to think that environment is necessarily impoverished, perhaps impossible. The experience of standing there and being bitten by the biggest mosquitoes I’d ever encountered, while trying hard to concentrate on the presentation that was unfolding in front of me is something that description and abstraction, however rich, could never have prepared me for, nor replicate. While this is obvious, it draws attention to Jue’s point that “specific thought forms emerge in relation to different environments, and that these environments are significant for how we form questions about the world, and how we imagine communication within it.”4 Not only does this highlight the importance of paying attention to the shifty nature of the muds and sands that locate these spaces as somewhere between liquid and solid in attempting to think their thought, but the full gamut of their more-than-human actors. As I sit here, the thought of Belene island is impossible to think without addressing the smell of insect repellent, the awkward dance of batting away blood-thirsty insects, and the (unknowable?) desires of those hungry critters. Intriguingly, such more-than-human considerations necessarily turn us into idiots, in that they radically undermine faithful communication, making misunderstanding and partial communication central to our ethos and practice, directing us towards politics and ethics that hum in a minor key.


1 When one of our party pointed to another ‘island’ en route to Belene, asking questions in relation to it, the fisherman driving the boat couldn’t see it because, as we found out later, it didn’t meet the criteria (I forget what they are now) to be called an island in local understanding.
2 Russill, Chris. (2017) ‘Is the Earth a Medium? Situating the Planetary in Media Theory.’ [Online] CTRL-Z: New Media Philosophy, 7. Available at: http://www.ctrl-z.net.au/articles/issue-7/russill-is-the-earth-a-medium/[accessed 25th May 2023].
3 Stengers, Isabelle. (2005) ‘Introductory notes on an ecology of practices.’ Cultural Studies Review. 11(1): 183-196.
4 Jue, Melody. (2020) Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. Durham: Duke University Press, p.3.