Abstract
This article explores the complex impact of climate change on the way coastal futures are imagined, using the example of the first UK coastal community singled out for managed retreat. Drawing on site-specific, lens-based artistic research, Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism is employed to understand how the future comes to matter on a shifting shoreline. The village of Fairbourne, on the west coast of Wales, was selected for this research as it was surrounded by predictions regarding the effects of sea level rise, as well as abounding in stories and ancient legends. Over the last decade the foretelling of the future of this site was constructed and told through a synthesis of scientific knowledge, media coverage, council communication and individual imagination. The article employs insights from new materialist theories and more specifically Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism in order to understand how the material and the discursive co-produce each other, asserting the need for a better understanding of how the discursive affects the material. By collapsing traditional notions of time and space as fixed, distinct categories, this framework reveals how climate futures are actively shaped through different intra-actions on the current shoreline, revealing the future as open and pointing to how we can become responsive to the relations we inhabit. The research highlights connections between imagination, climate change and responsibility that entail a sense of possibility rather than obligation.
Climate Futures and a Gap in Emotional Concern: An Introduction
The climate crisis is expected to significantly impact the coast with effects such as land loss, soil salinisation, rising seas, increased storm surges and flooding. By 2030, an estimated 879 to 949 million people will be living in these vulnerable coastal regions. 1 Rising seas are increasingly said to impact the risk of coastal flooding and erosion in the UK, with 6.3 million properties in England alone that are located in areas threatened by flooding from the rivers, the sea, and surface water. 2 Growing awareness of these impacts has been accompanied by efforts to deliver strategies to manage future coastal risks. In the case of the UK, the Shoreline Management Plans (SMPs) 3 are frameworks for coastal adaptation that anticipate the effects of climate change over the next century. When constructing possible futures, probabilities are not always clearly distinguishable from certainties. Stefan Brönnimann argues that the discourse on climate change often combines scientific knowledge and evidence-based methods with aspects such as attitudes, value judgements and histories of public perception. 4 Martin Döring et al. introduce the concept of ‘emplaced climate imaginaries’—“socially grounded and structured images of past, present and future speculations.” 5 Alex Arnall and Chris Hall speak of “sea level rise imaginary” (SLRI), “society’s understanding of what the global phenomenon of rising seas is and how it should be anticipated and incorporated into social thought and action in specific places [. . .] an emergent, collectively produced, often dramatic and nearly always disputed set of representations about the coastline and its future.” 6 With their term they aim to highlight how future predictions both influence and are shaped by people’s thoughts, conceptions and actions. 7 In the context of this research, questions of how imaginaries influence people’s actions are of particular interest.
To grasp climate change with our imaginative capacity is challenging. In spite of the growing urgency caused by global warming, the knowledge about climate change is not matched by appropriate action or emotional concern. Claire Colebrook terms this disconnect a “hyper-hypo-affective disorder.” 8 Despite climate degradation and species extinction, there is no “apparent affective comportment that would indicate that anyone really feels or fears the sense of the end.” 9 Scott Slovic argues that “biospheric thinking” 10 requires understanding observable processes and “their implications across space and time.” 11 Therefore, he points to the limit of our sensory organs in perceiving changes in our environment as well as the implication of having to use our ability to “imagine the real connections that underlie our existence.” 12 Similarly, Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects, phenomena such as global warming that are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” 13 provides insight into why such phenomena pose challenges to our imaginative faculty. Amitav Ghosh identifies a cultural and imaginative failure as central to the climate crisis. 14 This research focuses on the different predictions, imaginaries and stories about a specific site in the context of the climate crisis and observes their material implications.
The article explores creative thinking and practice in dialogue with new materialist thought. Here, the “self-organizing (or auto-poietic) force of living matter” 15 is understood to include the psychological, social and cultural, in the form of imagination, thoughts and memories next to the purely physical and biological. 16 Specifically, it reflects on Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism when asking what insights can be gained from creative, interdisciplinary approaches to the future coast in responding to changes in the Anthropocene. In Jennifer Gabrys and Kathryn Yusoff’s quest to understand how “political possibility is entangled with aesthetic-material conditions and practices” 17 they draw on Jacques Rancière’s idea of politics and art. He describes aesthetic practices as constructing among others “relationships [. . .] between what is done and what can be done” 18 and, as Gabrys and Yusoff argue, as disrupting the sensible 19 and therefore enabling unperceived possibilities of political engagement. 20 Rancière remarks on the anticipatory faculty of aesthetic practices (of the avant-garde) that he characterises as “inventions of sensible forms and material structures for a life to come,” 21 something this research also seeks to assert.
The section on “Britain’s First Climate Refugees That Are Not Yet and Diffractions on the Coastline: Here/There, Now/Then” provides a historical introduction to the village as a sea side resort where a Shoreline Management Plan has determined that its defence beyond the mid-twenty-first century would be increasingly challenging. Furthermore, it gives a brief overview of Barad’s theory of agential realism. Their theory is seen as a means to reflect on a succinct definition of difference and connection. “Methods” presents the different research methods as well as the overall research context. “Dragon’s Teeth on the Welsh Coast” explores an object of Fairbourne’s coastline in different artistic interventions, reflected on via Barad’s theory of agential realism. These interventions explore notions of posthuman performativity through staged photography, nonlinear temporality through a video of collaborative storytelling around climate futures, and a series of documentary photography that reflects on the void as a generative force. They each explore an understanding of the active and constitutive nature of matter, challenging notions of time, space and the making of future worlds.
Fairbourne is employed as an exemplary site, where the future has been told as a foregone conclusion with demonstrable consequences in the present. In this article I argue that an understanding of the ongoing material-discursive enactments on the village’s shoreline, based on Barad’s theory of agential realism and highlighted in the different artistic interventions, reveals the future as open and responsive to our conceptions and actions. As a contested site of the future, this research perceives the coastline as a prime site to reflect on notions of boundaries and difference through Barad’s concepts of diffraction, intra-action, performativity, and agency. Future-making is presented here as a dynamic, multivalent and an open process, where the discursive and the material elements co-produce each other. The story of Fairbourne asks us to respond to coastal futures in the now by highlighting a temporal dislocation. Coastal changes are imagined yet not fully perceived by the human senses, highlighting the need for a different approach to shaping the future. However, understanding coastal change is something that starts in the present moment. The highly dynamic environment of the coastline is often perceived as a linear boundary separating water from land. The aim of the research is to reveal it as a space of transition, where both elements, water and land, are present at the same time.
The article invites the reader to imagine the creative interventions unfolding as if taking a walk along the coastline, where linear time and space disappear into the background and the space lends itself to more associative connections and reflections. We might think here of Barad’s comment about walking along the California coastline giving rise to thoughts about “diffraction and entanglement.” 22 In this landscape constant change firmly grounds us in the present moment as well as the deep past. Barad employs here the image of a grain of sand, a material residue of long-term processes that we are able to observe “condensed into here-now” as well as imagine it “diffracted/entangled across spacetime.” 23
Britain’s First Climate Refugees That Are Not Yet and Diffractions on the Coastline: Here/There, Now/Then
This site-specific investigation is concerned with the intermediary space of coastal studies of land and sea of the low-elevation community Fairbourne, on the Welsh west coast, bordering with Eryri National Park (Snowdonia). The village was built on reclaimed land during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a Victorian holiday retreat for factory workers by Arthur McDougall of McDougall’s flour. In 2014 Fairbourne was identified as the first UK community which would face managed retreat, 24 the “purposeful, coordinated movement of people and buildings away from risks.” 25 Besides sea level rise, the reasons originally given by Gwynedd Council in 2014 for designating the village for managed retreat and decommissioning by 2054 were the cost of maintaining the sea defences and the remaining threat to people’s lives. 26
Residents were termed “the villagers who could be Britain’s first climate refugees” 27 in the media. Many inhabitants found out about the Council’s decision on the BBC current affairs programme Week In Week Out without any prior warning. A government report stated concerns with how this decision was communicated to residents 28 as the “community had been affected by a major shock and had become something of a ‘demo lab’ as the first community in the UK that had been identified in policy terms as not having a sustainable future.” 29 Small, low-income communities such as Fairbourne can be considered victims of climate injustice as they are experiencing the effects of the climate crisis disproportionally 30 with both economically and socially negative repercussions such as the loss of property value and heightened anxiety levels. 31 Since the original statements on the decommissioning of Fairbourne were issued, there have been several important developments disputing this plan, including research reports, 32 the Arthog Community Council voting on a motion to reject the plans, 33 and further work to strengthen the sea defences. 34 No formal policy of decommissioning the village has been adopted or voted upon by Gwynedd Council or the Welsh Government. 35 There are still unanswered questions regarding the long-term prospects of Fairbourne. 36
In sites not yet significantly impacted by climate change, a sense of dissonance is created between scientific predictions (IPCC etc.) and people’s individual, lived experience. The inhabitants I interviewed from 2020 onwards found it difficult to understand the Council’s original statement from 2014, particularly because Fairbourne has not been affected by serious flooding in major storms such as Storm Clara in February 2020 and Storm Eunice in February 2022. 37 In collective memory, the last major flooding in the village occurred in 1927 and 1938, as documented in the collection of photographs in Fairbourne’s village hall. Jane Costlow et al. speak here of the necessity of “trans-scalar thinking” that allows one to think across spatial and temporal scales. 38 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing articulates the need for a “nonscalability theory,” a form of worldmaking that acknowledges diversity and transformative relationships, in which “contact across difference can produce new agendas.” 39 As the climate crisis disrupts and questions conventional notions of boundaries, scales and separations, Barad’s theory of agential realism is seen as centrally relevant here. 40 It is understood as a tool for achieving a conceptual shift of notions such as space, time, and materiality, leading to different, multimodal investigations of a more nuanced understanding of coastal futures in the context of global warming.
Barad’s concept of agential realism asserts the ontological inseparability of intra-acting entities, in contrast to interactions between two initially separate entities. It argues that phenomena or objects do not pre-exist their intra-actions demonstrating defined boundaries, but rather emerge and gain significance through their intra-actions, their “mutual constitution of entangled agencies.” 41 Barad describes difference and boundaries as an “exteriority-within-phenomena” or an “agential separability” 42 enacted through intra-actions. As with other feminist analysis conceptualising difference in relation to diffraction, 43 Barad elucidates how diffraction patterns visualise that “what one sees is not a sharp boundary between light and dark but rather a series of light and dark bands.” 44 If “diffraction is a dynamism of iteratively reading insights through one another” 45 then a diffractive methodology entails an understanding of phenomena as inseparable, allowing one “to trace the entanglements across all temporal and spatial scales, or rather, [. . .] to rethink the assumed natures of space and time, and indeed, scale itself.” 46 Matter in agential realism is not perceived as a fixed substance but rather “a doing, a congealing of agency,” a “stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity.” 47 Matter and meaning, according to Barad, are inseparable, something expressed in the double meaning of the term “mattering.” Notions such as nature and culture are not understood as binary, with humans instead perceived as participating within nature. The theory of agential realism further requires a rethinking of the notion of agency and its non-human dimension. Rather than representing an attribute, it is described by Barad as an “enactment,” a “matter of intra-acting” 48 and “a matter of changing the possibilities for change in their materiality.” 49
Methods
Methodologically, I draw on multi-modal research methods. Prior to being able to visit the village, I used programmes such as Google Earth Pro as well as the Coflein online database for the National Monuments Record of Wales (NMRW), a national collection about the historic environment of Wales. I draw on semi-structured interviews, informal conversations with inhabitants as well as conversations during the village’s weekly art class. Moreover, reading a local hydrologist’s reports on Fairbourne’s flood defences led to an email exchange with the hydrologist. I consulted a political geography paper, two legal papers, grey literature and 19 newspaper articles on Fairbourne between 2019 and 2023. Furthermore, I draw on my own video and photographic documentation as well as historic photographic images I was shown concerning events such as village festivals and floodings between 1890 and 2007. I organised a presentation and a workshop on two different occasions in the village hall, presenting my artistic research as well as inviting a dialogue with inhabitants. Staying in Fairbourne on the occasion of four research trips for eight weeks in total during 2020, 2021, 2023, and 2024 allowed me to gain the trust of different inhabitants. This sentiment was reflected in one individual’s comment that stated: “You really have become part of the village now” and reflects the aim of this research, to provide a holistic overview of the intra-acting forces at play.
The photographs and video stills presented in this article form part of a larger artistic research project that explores the future of two coastal sites in the context of rising seas. Different creative techniques were employed to explore the materiality of the boundary between water and land as “naturecultures,” a concept by Haraway that I use here to avoid the separation of nature and culture and to rather see them as intra-acting, or co-producing, each other. 50 Furthermore, the research narrates the future of both sites in video pieces as something already present and multifaceted by employing coastal defences as prompts for developing collaborative narratives and speculations. I conclude that the coast is a place of possibility for feeling a strong connection to the changes unfolding, encouraging the perception that “(p)articular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering.” 51
Dragon’s Teeth on the Welsh Coast
An object on Fairbourne’s coastline became a central focus of the artistic interventions presented here, focusing on three central points. Firstly, it notes the historic importance of the Dragon’s Teeth, the originally 691 concrete trapezoidal-shaped bollards constructed between 1940 and 1941 when German invasion of Ireland during World War Two seemed likely. Today they have become an iconic feature of their landscape. Since 12 December 2007 the Dragon’s Teeth have been under statutory protection, designated as a scheduled ancient monument, acknowledging them as a site of national importance. 52 Secondly, the article outlines the initial mode of this research in relation to this object and Fairbourne’s shoreline more broadly. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it was only possible to research the village virtually, entangling human agency with technological means. The specific perspective of looking at Fairbourne through the frame of a computer screen, made the Dragon’s Teeth, appear as a dominant feature of Fairbourne’s coastline.
Online one mainly comes across the Dragon’s Teeth photographed from a panoramic view, making them visible as a distant line in the landscape which adds a rhythm to the beach by their regular intervals. Coflein, the online database for the National Monuments Record of Wales (NMRW) has thirty-three site results for the Dragon’s Teeth, sixteen of which are aerial shots. 53 Photographed from above, the landscape is reduced to a topographical view of shapes and forms and their proximity and relation to each other. This permits an overview of the organisation of space such as ownership structures and borders within this landscape but prevents other elements, such as the material condition or effects of erosion and human construction efforts, to become visible as part of the landscape. This distanced view from above helped me to perform the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” 54 by initially employing applications such as Google Earth Pro as a research tool. By becoming aware of this effect, and by landing back down on earth, I argue, the relationships between space and concern are able to give rise to “the inextricably intertwined, interdependent, interpenetrating connections of the meanings of concern, of expressing care, and of being in a state of anxiety.” 55 This is strongly the case in a site where there is such a strong sense of the “existential dimension of space that must be cared for so that people can care for themselves and others in it.” 56
Thirdly, this research engages with these objects via different artistic interventions in order to demonstrate how intra-acting with the Dragon’s Teeth can assist in rendering the existential future threats to the village less evasive by the “temporality of re-turning” and the practice of “re-membering,” with reference to Barad’s material-discursive processes and practices. These concrete objects are considered as memory containers of the village’s recent history and as symbols of its future, exploring the ways in which architectural remnants can fulfil the function of pointing to where the past can help us anticipate and engage with different versions of the future. As ‘guardians’ of this site’s past and future, the Dragon’s Teeth reference the aspect of care and anxiety and raise fundamental questions: How does what we carry from the past help us care for the future? How can artistic interventions explore intra-actions with the Dragon’s Teeth and the concerns they raise?
Artistic Interventions for Future-Making: Analysing Embodied Boundaries of Past and Futures
This article focuses on three artistic interventions that were realised on Fairbourne’s shoreline. Analysis of the photographs and video stills is supported by a review of the literature on Barad’s theory of agential realism. Barad’s distinct understanding of terms such as posthuman performativity, discursive practices, agency, spatiality and temporality are set in dialogue with the creative intra-actions on the Welsh coastline.
Cutting Together-Apart: Embodied Re-membering and Performing the Virtual
As a photographic series Dragon’s Teeth aims to explore how the global phenomenon of sea level rise can be made tangible through an embodied form of re-membering the village’s past. The concrete blocks are a dominant occurrence on this coastline that serve to evoke reminiscence not only of their historical context, but also of the individuals who perished during the World War Two and those who participated in the construction efforts, as evidenced by the various name inscriptions on the blocks. This research is conducted as a situated practice, as termed by Donna Haraway, who reinstates a feminist understanding of objectivity as being about limited location 57 and embodied 58 practices. In the images I am not studying the object through distanced observation but rather recreating and directly intra-acting with it in order to simulate an encounter with the original object. This led to the perception of being intimately entangled with the theme of the research, where “[p]ractices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world.” 59 The aim of my intra-actions with the cardboard proxy was to overcome the notion of rising seas as something exterior to myself (Supplemental Figure 1).
In order to comprehend the theme of rising sea levels in a particular locale in a manner that is both comprehensive and experiential, the research highlights the importance of asking “how is climate change me?” 60 The images assemble the concrete blocks and myself side by side, providing us both with the opportunity to leave imprints on each other. In these images, understanding climate change as inextricably linked to all phenomena, entails the imaginative struggle of grasping which material and immaterial elements are transferable from one site to another, and which are not. The mental effort required to imagine a process such as managed retreat, is highlighted by the contrasting qualities of the historical object and its cardboard proxy. The Dragon’s Teeth weigh around 15 tons and are 1.7 m high at their trapezoid section. At the base they measure 1.5 × 1.5 m, tapering to 0.9 × 0.9 m at the top with a gap of 1.35 m between adjacent cubes on the ground (Supplemental Figure 2). For this photographic series, in which I am both subject and photographer, I turned these heavy objects into half-scale mobile cardboard replicas. This design choice made it physically possible for a human figure to intra-act with the object. The images hover between an imaginative struggle of ‘being weighed down by’ and of ‘being able to lift and uphold’ the concrete object. Finding new functions for architectural remnants in the existing landscape is part of the process of rapid adaptation and is shown in these images as an anticipated, but no longer, abstract struggle.
The concrete object, initially only known virtually from photographic representations, and I, are quasi cut together into one pictorial frame as a research method. Barad’s understanding of agential cuts is highly relevant here. While cuts are often understood as strict separations, Barad redefines them as “together-apart” 61 —a process that simultaneously holds together and differentiates. The aforementioned incisions manifest as a consequence of the actions undertaken, rather than being attributed to the intrinsic properties of the objects in question. It is a rupture, or an agential cut, that originally drew my attention to the Dragon’s Teeth. At the south end of the defence line several Dragon’s Teeth were tipped over and severely hit. 62 They were then moved back behind the sea wall, altering their spatial relationship to the sea as the defence line from World War Two was moved behind the current sea wall. If we think of the physical distribution of space as one where physical constructions protect the other from damage of the sea, at the most southern end, Fairbourne’s current sea wall is now protecting these memory blocks of the village’s past (rather than the other way around for the rest of Fairbourne’s beach). It is through the interruption of the linearity of both lines, and their entanglement with each other, that this research perceives them conjuring up a littoral “contact zone” 63 between the past and speculative future of this village and its specific coastal environment. The crossing of both lines symbolises the unstable nature of coastal protection, where hard borders in the landscape are modified by the environment they stand on. Rupture in space and time, as exercised in the photographs by recreating an object and translating it from virtual space (as images found online) into the photographs themselves, is understood as producing a ‘radical’ connector between the themes elaborated in the photographs, merging different timelines, historical events and discourses. Both object and human intra-act and grapple with the concerns of the village’s past, present and future. They anticipate the difficulty that lies ahead when adapting to a rapidly changing environment by enacting both each other and the village’s past and future.
Analysing the Dragon’s Teeth through embodied practices reveals the intra-acting forces of humans and non-humans. These unsettle the power relations potentially established through the gaze in knowledge and image production, as elaborated in previous paragraphs. Barad also calls our attention to the power relations set up through dominant discourse, in this case discourse relating to the future of this site. In Barad’s understanding discourse is “that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements.” 64 As these statements always originate in a field of multiple possibilities 65 what is stated, even if presented as certain and inevitable, is one possibility amongst several. Therefore, discourse does not merely describe or reproduce reality but actively produces it. 66 Language, Barad states “is no less material than an electron.” 67 Exploring a site in which predictions about the future have had serious ramifications in its present, this research aims to pay attention to our positionality within the knowledge-making process. Barad criticises notions of a physical reality “as either prior to or outside of language.” 68 This conception is prevalent within representationalism, a way of operating that has come to be taken for granted 69 in our society, “which positions us above and outside the world we allegedly merely reflect on.” 70 This is highly relevant to this research site where, over the last decade, there has effectively been a reordering of the present through a rewriting of its future. Where securing a future became dependent on predictions, narratives, utterances and statements by local politicians, international engineers, researchers and inhabitants engaged in a ‘battle of credibility,’ in which the scope of their different political agencies could be observed. When the future is told as a conclusion, many of its agents are ignored or relegated to the passive realm.
The engagement with the Dragon’s Teeth is explored here in a performative form that attempts to open up insights into a place-based understanding of a coastal community and its entanglement with its environment, highlighting past and future vulnerabilities, entropy, care and responsibility. Barad’s materialist and post-humanist reworking of performativity as part of agential realism is explored here as an important tool for dismantling the authority and dominance of language in claiming what is real, 71 as an approach that “allows matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its ongoing intra-activity.” 72 This signifies opening up a complex understanding of the web of activity and actants that each contribute to change, dismantling a human-centred view of our surroundings. The research focuses on “matters of practices, doings and actions,” 73 which can be described as walking, of being in dialogue with, of constructing narratives as well as cutting selected elements “together-apart” 74 as in the artistic interventions explored in the article. The different artistic methods aim to bring together and render the links of “important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors” 75 visually and discursively as a complex web that is enacting the coastline together.
To better understand this material-discursive production of meaning, this research asserts that the main focus here should be on how the discursive affects the material. Yusoff’s and Gabry’s definition of imagination as something “that creates the conditions for material interventions in, and political sensibilities of the world” 76 in order to grapple with manifestations of climate change, starts building the bridge from the immaterial to the material, showing stories, images and sensations impacting the material beyond their utterance in language. As a consequence, the field of agents and methods of change in physical reality expands. In official statements it sounds like humans are in control of how long the village can be protected against rising seas, rather than natural forces. A local hydrologist Graham Hall produced at least six reports on Fairbourne’s flood defences between 2021 and 2023. In these he stated that Fairbourne’s shingle bank, that likely dates back around 6,000 years, plays an important role as a natural flood defence and appears to adapt to changes in the sea. 77
Voices from the emerging field of coastal studies proclaim the importance of engaging with the ocean as a highly dynamic, material space, rather than a metaphor. 78 Philip Steinberg argues that conceptions of the ocean as a space are continually recreated by multispecies, the biological and geophysical and different temporalities. 79 On my last field visit to Fairbourne, an inhabitant recounted a pertinent story about the village’s shingle bank, which highlighted the agency they perceived it having. The story recounted a situation during the recent filming of a crime mystery Under Salt Marsh 80 in October and December 2024, where on a particularly stormy day the security person watching the film equipment by the beach had to abandon his post as the wind started hurling shingles through the air. Furthermore, the actual filming of the series on site could be said to demonstrate the effect that fiction and narratives can have. Some individuals told me they felt uncomfortable with the perceived storyline of the series, where a fast-encroaching sea threatens the existence of the village. Despite being portrayed as a fictional place in the series, Fairbourne was filmed extensively (as its inhabitants told me) and had become emblematic of a site that might be lost to the sea.
Fairbourne’s official discourse rendered the manifold phenomena and actors shaping this specific landscape invisible. Moreover, it made time appear as static and frozen. The future was told ‘as not yet here’ but ‘already certain’ instead of acknowledging that the material-discursive intra-actions are constantly reshaping the coastline. Since conceptions of time are a central element of conceiving of futures, what time then do these photographs attempt to tell?
The act of embodied re-membering, as described above, is seen as creating links to both the past and the future of the village simultaneously. Re-turning is understood by Barad not as reflecting on something already gone but rather as a “turning it over and over again – iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings), new diffraction patterns.” 81 Memory is seen not as an inherent capacity but rather as an action, “a reconfiguring/re-articulating (of) the world.” 82 Furthermore, “[t]o address the past (and future), to speak with ghosts, is not to entertain or reconstruct some narrative of the way it was, but to respond, to be responsible, to take responsibility for that which we inherit (from the past and the future), for the entangled relationalities of inheritance that ‘we’ are, to acknowledge and be responsive to the noncontemporaneity of the present, to put oneself at risk, to risk oneself (which is never one or self), to open oneself up to indeterminacy in moving towards what is to-come.” 83 The first two artistic interventions question a unidirectional relation of time in order to decolonise imaginaries and discourse about the future through a specific understanding of the act of re-membering as discussed in previous paragraphs. We will now turn to a closer analysis of the understanding of time in the second intervention.
Walking Into the Future: Troubling Time Once and Again
The conception of time has serious consequences within the Anthropocene. Barad terms time understood as a succession of short moments such as in a linear, unidirectional sequence the “time of capitalism, colonialism, and militarism.” 84 Moreover, they argue that in “our ‘post-atomic age’, time is synchronised to the apocalypse-to-come, and the present is caught in a pose of holding its breath in an attempt to forestall the onset of nuclear war” creating “a future of No Future,” 85 something that can also be observed during our times of ecological crisis. This highlights the necessity of a different understanding of time, where we are not standing on the precipice of the nearly present past that will collapse into the apocalypse of the future. The deep-rooted urgency to “trouble time” is clearly expressed by Barad as a visceral, individual and collective need. Here “collective imaginaries [. . .] undo pervasive conceptions of temporality that take progress as inevitable and the past as something that has passed and is no longer with us.” 86 According to quantum physics, a theory Barad draws on in their theory of agential realism, time is conceived of as more active, offering different possibilities such “as temporal discontinuity, temporal diffraction, temporal entanglement.” 87 Barad also draws attention to the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s conception of “Jetztzeit” (“now-time”) as a notion of time that is able to address issues of justice. “Now-time” represents “not an infinitely thin slice of time called the present moment, but rather a thick-now that is a crystallization of the past diffracted through the present.” 88 “Now-time” disrupts a notion of progress and a “continuous flow of time that leaves the past behind while moving inexorably toward the future.” 89 With the sense of time having become interrupted, a sense of urgency is created as well as the perceived possibility to investigate questions of justice. “As such, the piling up of the wreckage of history appears as a single catastrophe—a past that must be confronted—rather than a chain of events in which time keeps moving on.” 90
Barad and Benjamin are not alone in arguing that conceptions of time are closely linked to justice-to-come 91 and contain an ethical dimension, arguing for a “temporal multiplicity” 92 that does not discard linearity but opens it up to its potential. Bill McKibben criticises the distinction between the time of natural and of cultural processes, 93 which Michelle Bastian states as a core challenge of the environmental humanities. She perceives the need to transform common conceptions of time (Coordinated Universal Time) as quantitative and disembodied, as this conception causes us to fall out of sync with pressing ecological changes. 94 According to Bastian time is “a powerful social tool for producing, managing, and/or undermining various understandings of who or what is in relation with other things or beings.” 95 Barbara Adam stresses the relevance of paying attention specifically to the intersections of the in/visible and im/material in relation to naturecultures. 96 By contrast Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker offer a conception of time as “‘thick time,’ a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past, that foregrounds a nonchronological durationality.” 97
The second intervention is the 20-minute video piece I Cannot See the Future from Here (on file with author) that attempts to examine the coastal zone as a complex tapestry of “thick time,” where intertwined past and future narratives illuminate the fluidity of land-water boundaries. The selected video stills presented here focus on a performative walk along the entire sea wall in Fairbourne, from its most southern to most northern part. The village’s sea defences and architectural remnants such as the Dragon’s Teeth, serving as memory containers of its past, are juxtaposed with future predictions and residents’ imaginaries, intertwining past histories with future possibilities. In a non-linear narrative composed of anecdotes, experiences on site, interviews with local residents, scientific reports and newspaper articles in dialogue with the “enfolded materialisations” 98 of the site itself, connections are drawn between place, buildings, landscape and residents in order to build a speculative narrative.
Calling upon the village’s future to appear, awakes at the same time the different “ghosts”—“the vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present” 99 to appear along the shoreline. Anna Tsing et al. argue that in order to understand the present, we need to “return to multiple pasts, human and not human,” 100 which they term ghosts. In the video piece these ghosts appear through the reciting of myths of sunken cities lying at the depths of this sea bed, by capturing natural elements such as strong winds that are often associated with such figures as well as documenting remnants of people that have passed away through name inscriptions on the blocks themselves. Another way time is referenced and brought to the fore is via the two individuals (my daughter and myself) walking on Fairbourne’s sea wall together (Supplemental Figure 3), bringing a symbolic temporality and inherent narrative to the video work. The younger person automatically comes to reference the future by age. The relation between adult and child emphasises a notion of transition and an exchange of knowledge and experience between the two. Their performative action of walking on the defence line can be felt as a lengthy and somewhat laborious process.
The video’s narrative is neither a story of progress nor one about a fixed, chronological or conclusive story. Rather, it draws together different perspectives and shows objects, or in the words of Barad, phenomena, and how they manifest recurringly throughout different moments in time within this landscape. The past, present and future of the village are connected through a non-linear narrative which, I argue, enhances our ability to anticipate change and bring future possibilities into sharper focus. Such a narrative highlights the notion of fragments, implying the missing causal links between two elements. Furthermore, the conception of time and narrative in the video bears resemblance to diffraction where “[t]ime is out of joint; it is diffracted, broken apart in different directions, non-contemporaneous with itself. Each moment is an infinite multiplicity.” 101 Interestingly, Barad calls attention to the fact that temporal diffractions are not as widely perceived as diffraction occurring in space. 102 Diffracting a sense of the future in the video weakens a sense of inevitability and therefore, this research argues, its perceived weight. Barad links Benjamin’s notion of “Jetztzeit” to temporal diffraction: “a crystallization of times, of multiple temporalities, blasted out of the continuum of history: a superposition of times—moments from the past—existing in the thick-now of the present moment.” 103
Confronted with a narrative that consists in fragments, the audience is furthermore required to become a participant in the story. In the words of filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha “[e]ach story is at once a fragment and a whole.” 104 Fragments entail the possibility of being assembled otherwise. Similar then to what has been unfolding in the village in recent years, the narrative in the video could be retold and composed into a new story with the existing fragments at hand. It aims to avoid the sensation that decisions or the events unfolding in Fairbourne are fixed and unchangeable but rather that they will likely be revised again in the future. Furthermore, the video aims to reflect on how in the context of global warming, any site might instantaneously change through a series of dramatic and potentially destructive events, changing the course of events unfolding.
The Line as a Space of Erasure
This second photographic series of digital, colour images of the Dragon’s Teeth, shows each concrete block as a marker and monumental element of its landscape. Looking closely, it becomes evident that Fairbourne’s natural environment is no passive backdrop to the village’s activity. Situated on the frontier of two very different ecosystems, these objects are subject to daily tidal changes, land drift, and the constant movement of different sediments. As the series of photographs were recorded prior to a brewing storm, they reveal the dynamic nature of the theatrical surroundings (Supplemental Figure 4). The handmade blocks have all aged individually, depending on which part of Fairbourne’s beach they stand on. As a static element in a highly dynamic landscape, they are able to record and manifest the activity and agency of this specific environment. The photographic images capture the object in a documentary manner with a static framing, which renders the differences of the individual concrete blocks succinctly visible. The gaps between the Dragon’s Teeth and the shoreline ‘eating away’ at them makes them resemble not so much a hard border in the landscape as a permeable membrane. As a result, what was intended to protect the villagers, as an insurmountable barrier to landing crafts of a foreign army, no longer does.
Returning once again to Barad’s comments about the coastal space at the beginning of this article, Paul Virilio also confirms the shoreline as a space that allows for a shift in perception through its immensity and emptiness, devoid of clutter. “Seeing the oceanic horizon is indeed anything but a secondary experience; it is in fact an event in consciousness of underestimated consequences.” 105 The lack of clutter, symbols and objects in the coastal zone is considered by this research to render the space ‘visually quiet,’ enabling traces of personal memories, often composed of moments of intense pleasure, as well as historical moments of magnitude (world wars, the formation of landscapes, the transition of life from sea to land) to surface as quiet murmurs in the landscape. Moreover, there is an interesting tension in this coastal zone that arises from the now functionless objects of the Dragon’s Teeth. An irritation is created by the organisation of space and the manifestation on time becoming closely linked, as Virilio argues, 106 letting the themes of threat and defence linger visibly in this landscape.
Virilio’s question “Why this insane situation looking out over the ocean?” 107 that references constructions such as the Dragon’s Teeth as “the final throw-offs of the history of frontiers,” 108 is a pertinent question that resonates beyond the historical moment Virilio is referencing. While the Dragon’s Teeth have been waiting patiently as stubborn watchmen on the littoral for over eighty years now, at this precise moment in time, the threat arising from the sea is not likely to be an opponent’s army. The Dragon’s Teeth hover in a tension of a commemoration of the past, an attestation to war and violence, and an anticipation of the future. Looking out to sea, observing the waves, the tides and storm predictions, is not an uncommon occurrence on the coast, for example in case of an approaching storm. The shifting border between land and sea, intensified by global warming, will entail the increasing threat of storm surges and rising water levels, leading to increased threats from the water. In Fairbourne this sense of potential threat was already heightened by the prediction of the village’s disappearance in the future. 109 Entering a space on Fairbourne’s beach, where historical symbols overlay and dominate the present space, the visceral threats of the past appear to overflow into the present imagination. Time is out of sync here, or rather past and future meet, where the Dragon’s Teeth and Fairbourne’s sea wall, protecting the village against encroaching water, cross and intersect.
Conclusion
The article’s key contribution involved artistic research that engages with the Welsh village of Fairbourne as a coastal site where future predictions led to palpable, sometimes dramatic, changes over the last decade. The village appeared to symbolise a site without a future, as it was predicted to be highly affected by climate change. Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism provides a central understanding of connection and difference, addressing phenomena, among others, such as time. Using the analytic lens of agential realism, the research explored an understanding of the future as open and time as non-linear. Barad describes processes that are unfolding as ongoing and open and the future as “radically open at every turn,” 110 which has consequences on our “ability to respond” 111 in the now. Responsibility is defined in their terms as “a relation always already integral to the world’s ongoing intra-active becoming and not-becoming.” 112 Not so much an obligation, rather part of the relations we inhabit, responsibility shows up who we are responsive to. Furthermore, it highlights the different agents of our environment, including multispecies. Understanding, sensing and acknowledging the relations we generate, are part of, aspire to and are not able to avoid, might help us better understand our responsibilities amidst an ecological crisis. If responsibility grows out of relations, then it can be understood as an opportunity rather than a burden. An opportunity that enables us to take care of and speak up for what we are ourselves connected to.
All three artistic interventions presented in this article rely heavily on the tension between what they are able to render tangible and what they are not, either by the limits of the media employed or by the conscious choice of its author. Trinh T. Minh-ha states that the film medium “perform[s] the holes, the gaps, and the specific absences by which it takes shape.” 113 All three interventions play with the notion of gaps, voids and erasure as important elements of the work, something further highlighted by the space of the shoreline itself, a space constantly being remade by the interaction of water and land. Furthermore, the ‘gap’ between what is ‘not yet’ and that which ‘no longer is’ is prominent in the research, allowing for an awareness of phenomena which are currently becoming vibrant. Barad draws attention to this becoming when stating “[t]he void is a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming. The vacuum is flush with yearning, bursting with innumerable imaginings of what could be.” 114 The void, which ultimately creates a rupture between two elements is understood as an essential feature when thinking about the future. As an illustration of the future becoming vibrant rather than being something certain, the discourse about Fairbourne’s future continues to be revised. In late 2023 and early 2024, a cabinet member told the Fairbourne Partnership, a multi-agency board tasked with preparing the Fairbourne community for a changing climate, that “decommissioning had never been discussed, voted upon or put on the statute books at any Cyngor [Council] Gwynedd Cabinet Meeting” 115 according to a report by the Arthog Community Council.
To conclude, the ambition for this work is to ground the different artistic interventions in the Welsh village of Fairbourne’s shoreline as deeply as possible in the village’s material-discursive entanglements. These are shown as disrupting conventional notions of space and time, inviting a nuanced understanding of the coastal landscape’s evolving identity. The research engages with the site’s material, physical reality, where the stories that we tell of the cultural and future coast, are in sync with the changes induced by climate change. Reality on the coast is understood here as a story inevitably centred on the effects of global warming, where water and the many other actants of the shoreline are central characters to the plot. The aim of this research is to highlight connections between imagination, climate change and responsibility that entail a sense of possibility rather than obligation. Possibility, in the context of global warming, is perceived here not as the opportunity to continue living on the coast as if the effects of climate change did not exist. Rather, this research argues that possibility exists in the moment before urgency, where coastal imaginaries can provide the opportunity to rethink the relations we have encouraged to flourish on the shoreline together. In this way, coastal imaginaries become a means for grasping and sensing the material effect of imagining 116 and the ways different actors, such as the inhabitants and multispecies of a particular coastal site, intra-act and become the future together.
Supplemental Material
sj-pdf-1-cls-10.1177_26349817251391044 – Supplemental material for Concrete Obstacles: Intra-Acting Past and Future on the Welsh Coastline
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-cls-10.1177_26349817251391044 for Concrete Obstacles: Intra-Acting Past and Future on the Welsh Coastline by Claire Waffel in Coastal Studies & Society
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my interlocutors for their time and openness to contribute to this research as well as the funding body supporting my PhD. I also want to thank Ramona Hägele, Rozemarijn Roland Holst, Denise Largin and both of my anonymous peer-reviewers for their valuable feedback.
Ethical Considerations
My institution does not require ethical approval for reporting individual cases or case series.
Consent to Participate
For ethical reasons, the author pseudonymised all interviewees. Informed consent by interviewees was obtained before participation.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The author receives funding for her PhD research by the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Stiftung (ELES).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
Author Biography
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