ABSTRACT
Travelling transects made along the coastlines of Tenerife in the Canary Islands and the Newcastle and Sydney coastal pools of Eastern Australia demonstrate the adoption of a design method for documenting relational landscapes subject to Anthropocenic change, alongside revealing challenges for the design and management of these fragile places. Rocksect transects comprise transareal excursions across water-land intersections, guided by Alexander von Humboldt’s methods of landscape travel and subsequent tableau physique representations counterposed with Ross Gibson’s contemporary changescape concepts. These ancient and everyday rocky bathing pools are changescapes par excellence, characterized by fluidity, dynamism, and open-endedness in continual interaction with sea and weather, human use, and economic perceptions. The travelling transect project seeks to record and narrate a sequence of operations: pre-travel research and preparations; fieldwork armed with an itinerary open to divergence; post-travel studio works to produce annotated cartographic diaries as records of the experience; and finally publication and dissemination of these changescapes. Affective encounters with the landscapes on-site are re-presented for audiences off-site. In the manner of Humboldt, we map travel across multiple rock-water interfaces of material continuity, seeking to convey theoretical approaches to landscape and heritage studies informed by the physical and ephemeral qualities of landscapes in flux.
