Angloscenic: Landscape, Colonial Visual Cultures, and Environmental Violence

Angloscenic: Landscape, Colonial Visual Cultures, and Environmental Violence

Talk

Past event

Philip Carter Family Auditorium

Free

Arguing that the environmental agency of images is significant but under-examined, historian Dr Rosie Ibbotson explores the range of visual representations that suggest how British landscape ideals were imposed on the whenua of Aotearoa New Zealand, and the devasting consequences they were entangled with.

This talk explores connections between images and anthropogenic environmental change in nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand. While the violent transformation of land and ecologies under white settler colonialism was motivated by a range of ideological and economic drivers, imported aesthetic notions and sources also played a role in this history. In doing this, the talk takes a broad view of the artistic genre of ‘landscape’, and considers how environments themselves became forms of visual representation.