Luce Choules – founder and coordinator

Temporal School of Experimental Geography is an itinerant network of artists sharing ideas and responses to landscape through fieldwork. The intention is to explore and consider the geographic potential of artist-led fieldwork, and the experience and meaning of these practices to contribute to our collective understanding of place. The aim of TSOEG is to bring together artists working across a range of disciplines and geographic environments, to discuss fieldwork as methodology, parallel activity, art form, and research. The activities of the TSOEG network are shared through presentations, publications, and exhibitions.

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Luce Choules’ work explores complexity and our relationship to dynamic earth processes, highlighting the impermanence of environmental and societal structures. Their spatial praxis, which brings together performance, photography, installation, sound and writing, responds to the pressures of maintaining stability with/in an aggregate of material continuously in motion.

Situated at the intersection of ecological, archaeological and geologic thinking, their artistic research engages with the structures of tourist mechanisms and emerging habitats of industrial detritus, social geography and the unearthed substance of cultural heritage, and the massive gravity-based movements of mountain systems to reflect on the construction of socio-environmental discourse and its relation to physical matter.

Luce Choules (b. 1968) is an itinerant artist currently based in the French Pyrenees and working extensively from field centres in the European Alps, southern Spain and London UK. Since 2013, they founded and coordinate the international artist network TSOEG.org; co-founded sonic arts collective SEL__NOIR in 2022, and curatorial collective MASS Project in 2023. They are a regular collaborator with AADK performance platform in Spain, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London, UK.

Their concept album ‘REGOLITHIC’ – a collaboration with performance artist, music producer and DJ Roisner – has been presented in numerous iterations since its inception, most recently at ALTER- Switzerland public events programme, POLLEN (Political Ecology Network) online exhibition and symposiums, PRAKSIS Oslo PDF sessions; also Raeve Party Chandolin Switzerland, Guru Dance Club and Moss Murcia Spain. Other works include the broadcasting of ‘Radio Silence’ on Arts Catalyst Radio London and Radiophrenia at Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow as part of Nastassja Simensky’s ‘Leaky Transmissions’ project.

Luce Choules has been awarded significant grants from Arts Council England, British Council, Arts Council Ireland, Acción Cultural Española, Ministère de la Culture, Canton du Valais / Kanton Wallis, Govern d’Andorra, and National Endowment for the Arts USA. They have been supported through numerous commissions and undertaken many research and process-led residencies including ALTER- Switzerland, Askeaton Contemporary Arts Ireland, Hangar Barcelona, Hablarenarte Madrid, Aqtushetii Georgia, and Rabbit Island USA. Their work has been performed, presented, screened and exhibited internationally with organisations including Arts Catalyst, Heritage Futures, Archaeology-Heritage-Arts (AHA) Research Network UCL, MIMA, Baltic 39, GroundWork Gallery, Royal Geographical Society, Biennal Internacional d’Andorra, AADK Spain, DeVos Art Museum USA, and numerous academic institutions in Europe.

Their work is in collections across the UK, Europe and US, and their practice has been written about and featured in Critical Distance in Documentary Media (Palgrave Macmillan), Topografías de lo Invisible: Estrategias Críticas entre Arte y Geografía (Universitat de Barcelona), and Form, Art and the Environment: Engaging in Sustainability (Routledge).

lucechoules.com | @luce_choules | @studio_de_laroche

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COMMENTS

“Exploring, mapping and observing our landscape and environment Luce Choules’ fascinating work develops an earthy and earthly poetics that advances debates between geography and art in intellectually invigorating, visually engaging and aesthetically challenging ways.”
Professor Harriet Hawkins, Reader in Geography
Senior Lecturer in Geography, Director MA Cultural Geography (Research)
Royal Holloway, University of London

“Bringing a new perspective to landscape through fieldwork is challenging – it is such a well-trodden path by geographers and artists alike. Luce succeeds in doing so – [their] approach to combining image and text, and sometimes voice, provides an immersive experience. [They] leave [themself] outside the frame. One doesn’t merely ‘view’ [their] landscape images – but also steps into them.”
Carolyn Black, Flow Contemporary Arts

“Luce Choules is an artist at the forefront of re-imagining traditional fieldwork by exploring both physical and emotional geographies through [their] collaborations with map-makers, writers and explorers in the landscapes where [they] live, work and explore [themself].”
Shane Winser, Expeditions and Fieldwork
Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

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FIELDWORK Q&A – May 2015

How is fieldwork part of your practice?
Fieldwork is an embedded part of my practice. I have an unfixed idea of what fieldwork is – it is multi-dimensional, has many roles, and is a variable framework within which I make work. My fieldwork involves research, performance, survey, mapping, charting, documentation, and more – it is an itinerant mode of working that is experiential, experimental, changeable and ephemeral. Fieldwork is central to my praxis as an artist – not a separate or parallel activity – it is physical and involved, rather than academic theory or exercise. As an artist I have been shaped by my experiences in the material and immaterial fields of landscape and natural environment, and through my work and activities have developed fieldwork as method and form.

How would you describe your fieldwork activity?
My activities deal with an exploration of the Earth’s surface – unfixed topographical features and fluent spatial dynamics, envisioned as the activated spaces of landscape to be surveyed and mapped. Travelling between object and situation, field trips and expeditions form a framework for an itinerant practice of fieldworking. I have developed an evolving framework for exploring different geographical environments and situations, using artist-led expeditions to encounter and enter landscape. Through performance surveys, I look at the underlying structures of the physical environment – I am interested in the form of the earth, how I negotiate the idea of form, and how I navigate place.

How are you currently sharing your fieldwork?
My fieldwork activities trace through performance and sculptural concepts, and involve documents made through still and moving image. My extensive range of fieldwork documents for projects Guide74 and Estudio de Campo, are used to take an audience on metaphysical journeys to the Alpine regions of France and mainland Spain through a series of performance lectures involving spoken word, books, maps, objects, and photographic images. Other fieldwork documents are made into a large range of publications including maps, books and folios – these are distributed through exhibitions, presentations and live events.

TSOEG TEAM FIELDWORK
We are the Weathers

TSOEG GROUP PROJECTS / RESIDENCIES
TSOEG Teams