Landscape Surgery turns 25: A Series.
By Beth Williamson, Viveca Mellegård, Eva Barbarossa, Cynthia Anyadi and Evie Gilbert
Right from the beginning, Landscape Surgery has been a space for postgraduate students, researchers and artists to share fledgling ideas and work-in-the-making about landscapes – real and imagined, material and ethereal. Social, cultural and historical geographical research projects have been shaped and sharpened by generations of Landscape Surgeons.
The following blogs consist of interviews with students from across Landscape Surgery’s history, we talk to them about their experiences within LS and how being a part of LS has impacted their careers and research. The series starts with an interview with Luciana Martins who studied at Royal Holloway as part of her PhD in Geography at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro about the visualization of the landscape of Rio de Janeiro by British travellers in the first half of the 19th century.
Martins was part of the first group of Landscape Surgeons gathered together by the highly regarded cultural geographer, Denis Cosgrove who encouraged new ways of seeing and was influential in reinvigorating geography as a discipline spanning the humanities, social and natural sciences. Landscapes and our relationships to them continue to transform and the series will end with a look to the future from current convener, Dr Sasha Englemann.
In conversation with Luciana Martins
Landscape Surgery Alumni 1996-2001
By Viveca Mellegård
Luciana Martins is Professor of Latin American Visual Cultures and Co-Director of the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Originally trained in architecture and urban planning, she specialises in visual and material culture, historical geography, and digital humanities.
Since 2015 Luciana has been working with colleagues at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and other institutions in the UK, Brazil and Germany on an interdisciplinary research programme on the biocultural collections from the Amazon and the Andes of nineteenth-century botanist Richard Spruce. As part of this research programme, she was recently Principal Investigator on the British Academy funded project ‘Digital Repatriation of Biocultural Collections: Connecting Scientific and Indigenous Communities of Knowledge in Amazonia’. She also held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to develop her project on ‘Drawing Together: The Visual Archive of Expeditionary Travel’.
Look out for the next post in the series about Ellie Miles.
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