Visualising Relations to Land of Traditional and Indigenous Peoples (VRL)

Visualising Relations to Land (VRL) will test the application of 3D Digital Environments (DEs) for visualising the unique relationships that Traditional and Indigenous Peoples (TIPs) have with land and territory. Through a transdisciplinary methodology, joining forensic architects, sociologists and geographers in collaboration with TIPs organisations that have been affected by the expansion of renewable energy projects into their territories, across Norway, Portugal, and Brazil, VRL will address how Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedures fail to recognise TIPs relations with land. In doing so, it will drive novel research in visual arts and in the fields concerned with the socio-environmental impacts of renewable energy production. The research addresses how the global energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is disproportionately impacting the territories of Traditional and Indigenous Peoples across the world. This is due to a growing demand for the extraction of critical materials such as lithium, copper, and cobalt, which are essential to batteries or the implementation of large-scale wind and solar farms required for producing renewable energy. However, existing procedures for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) required for the approval of renewable energy projects fail to recognise TIPs ways of life and deep relations with land, and are, therefore, unable to adequately consider potential impacts on the ways of life of TIPs. Issues raised by TIPs include the lack of recognition of their use of territories for practices that leave no significant material traces, such as hunting, herding or foraging, for practices of environmental care and maintenance, and more importantly, a lack of recognition of affective and spiritual relations to land. At the same time, TIPs' place-based knowledge and modes of knowledge transmission, such as oral histories, rituals, or artefacts, are not recognised in EIA procedures. In this context, the project will address the challenge of visualising the relationships of different TIPs to land and territory, in ways that allow their recognition during the consultation stages of EIA procedures. The project has the following objectives: . To explore the use of DEs to visualise intangible relations to land; . To explore TIPs approaches to developing DEs; . To visualise relations to land across different TIPs cultures and geographies. Working across distinct cultures and geographies will allow consideration of the different ways in which TIPs relate to the land, different environmental impacts of renewable energy production, as well as variations in EIA procedures. VRL will partner with TIPs organisations from the reindeer-herding territories of the Southern Sami in the Røros region of Norway, the agro-silvo-pastoral region of Barroso in northern Portugal, and the indigenous and ‘quilombola’ territories of the Jequitinhonha valley in Minas Gerais, Brazil. TIPs from these territories are all facing a similar lack of recognition of their relations to land within EIA procedures. VRL will directly benefit partner TIPs and similar organisations across the world. It will produce Stories of Land and a DEs Toolkit that will have a direct application in the consultation stages of EIAs, allowing TIPs to present stronger cases of their relations to land. More broadly, VRL’s use of DEs will benefit TIPs engaged in processes of territorial recognition as well as EIA practitioners. VRL will generate new interdisciplinary research agendas across the visual arts, geography, sociology, and anthropology on the contribution of DEs to EIAs, while advancing scholarship on decolonising research methodologies.