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Dr Hannah Hopewell Victoria University of Wellington School of Architecture

The conceptual origins and critical horizons of landscape are deeply Euro-Western. Landscape emerged as an elite discursive construction in the Enlightenment period developing visual-pictorial essence, geometry-enabled linear perspective and hierarchical representations of space. With an ideology of detached observation, the landscape idea embedded spatial appropriation. Tiffany Kaewen Dang writes, ‘landscape has been used as a disciplinary tool to facilitate the control of land, to naturalise colonial hegemonies, including the cultural framing of landscape through art and architecture’. The landscape image, the landscape way of seeing therefore ushers more than possessive spatial code—it sutures epistemological authority and ontological certitude to power, and renders this association naturalised within the cosmology of the moderns.

Given such a genealogy Hannah questions the relevance of the landscape idea to current land based concerns in Aotearoa New Zealand. Against universalising-hierarchical- coercive relations she uses anarchic and non-standard thought to open up an occasioning of dark landscape. Through recent practice Hannah reflects upon prevailing land development and ameliorative objectives.

Bio: Hannah teaches landscape-led urbanism at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington and practices design with kaupapa Māori TOA Architects. Under the banner Relational Landscapes Hannah’s transdisciplinary design research investigates manifestations of settler colonialism in urban development processes, and challenges the ontological and epistemological substrata narrating prevailing design practice.

Her practice-based PhD Notes from the Urban Intertidal developed a non-philosophical method for encountering urban landscapes subsisting under capitalist exploitation. A more recent project Hypervisibility: A Field Poetics catalogues the repeated spatial codes and inscriptions of capital.