The Land Behind

Peter interviews the Scottish sculptor-poet Alec Finlay, whose work explores how language shapes and intensifies our experience of place. In addition to his creative practice, Finlay is the author of numerous books including Gathering: A Place Aware Guide to the Cairngorms (Hauser & Wirth, 2018) and Not Sealions but Lions by the Sea (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).

Beginning with Finlay’s upbringing in rural Scotland and the legacy of his father, the concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, the conversation follows the early experiences and influences that shaped his distinctive approach to art and poetry. Throughout, Finlay considers how the naming, voicing and hearing of place can expand our understanding of landscape beyond what is immediately visible, drawing on Scottish poetic traditions and broader philosophical questions about the role of the poet. Reflecting on his path into artistic life, Finlay discusses the evolution of his poetry across sculpture and site-specific practice. He shares how living with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (otherwise known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) has profoundly influenced both his creative process and his thinking around land access. From hutopianism and ecological thinking to questions of illness and care, this conversation reflects on poetry as a mode of dwelling and a way of restoring connection to self, to others and to place.

Peter speaks to the Swedish photographer Maja Daniels, whose work explores how history, memory, landscape and archive transform the meaning of one another over time.

With a particular focus on the geography of Älvdalen in central Sweden, Daniels is the author of two photo books including Elf Dalia (Mack, 2019) , nominated for the Aperture-Paris Photo First PhotoBook Award 2019. This was followed by Gertrud (Void, 2024), titled after its namesake Gertrud Svensdotter, a 12-year-old girl who was accused of witchcraft in Älvdalen in 1667 during a period known as The Great Noise.

Episode image: Tenn Lars Persson (1878-1938) courtesy of Elfdalen Local Heritage Foundation, from the series Gertrud (2024) by Maja Daniels.

Peter speaks with the Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas, emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Tasmania, whose work explores the fundamental role the appearance of place plays in understanding who and what we are. Malpas is the author of numerous books and essays including Place and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and In the Brightness of Place: Topological Thinking with and After Heidegger (SUNY Press, 2022). In a world increasingly forgetful of the place where we are, Malpas invites us to attend to the “inevitable and unavoidable embeddedness in the environing world where we find ourselves and which determines what we are.”

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Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(00:53) Where is Jeff Malpas?
(05:32) Who is Jeff Malpas?
(12:26) How are Malpas’s ideas different from those of his contemporary Edward S. Casey?
(20:48) Why is Marcel Proust so important to a philosopher of place?
(24:55) Continental Philosophy vs Analytic Philosophy
(28:02) Hermeneutics vs Phenomenology
(35:43) How is place inseparable from who we are?
(45:38) Where is here? Where is the place where we are?
(49:47) The problem with associating the concept of place with the notion of the transcendental 
(58:31) The body is not the foundation of place
(1:05:41) How does our placedness precede social and political constructions of place?
(1:07:00) The problematics of place and the controversy of Heidegger’s Nazism
(1:15:46) The forgetting of place
(1:22:17) How does the problem of God fit into the question of place?
(1:35:03) The remembrance of place
(1:42:15) The temporality of place
(1:45:40) The ethics of belonging

Peter speaks to the philosopher Edward S. Casey about the philosophy of place and the ecology of emotion, drawing insights from Casey’s book Turning Emotion Inside Out: Affective Life Beyond the Subject (Northwestern University Press, 2021). Central to their discussion is the concept of eco-affectivity, the idea that emotions are deeply rooted in and shaped by our environment. Why then does place matter today? Where do emotions come from? How are our hearts and minds already embedded in the landscape that surrounds us? To what extent is an emotion an environmentally oriented phenomenon? These questions guide a broader reflection on how art can reveal the emotional atmosphere of place in ways that language alone cannot.

Patreon: ⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/thelandbehind⁠⁠

Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/thelandbehindpodcast

Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(00:35) Who is Ed Casey?
(07:32) How Casey’s upbringing influenced his ideas on place
(11:22) Why place matters
(18:24) How our sense of place is heightened by illness
(22:50) To what extent is a landscape an extension of the body?
(27:30) Where do emotions come from? 
(40:05) Remembering Mikel Dufrenne
(45:00) The extraversion of emotion
(53:41) The problem with subjective accounts of emotion
(58:22) How is the emotional atmosphere of place shaped by the artist’s state of mind?
(1:08:05) Is the pictorial view of the world the same space that our bodies live, feel and experience? 
(1:18:19) The historical dimension of emotion

Peter interviews the philosopher Erin Plunkett about the 20th-century Czech thinker Jan Patočka, exploring how his thought can help guide us through the problems of truth and beauty in the 21st century. Erin is currently Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. She is a co-editor of The Selected Writings of Jan Patočka: Care for the Soul, published in 2022 by Bloomsbury. 

Patreon: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/thelandbehind⁠

Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/thelandbehindpodcast

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:42) Who is Erin Plunkett?

(04:04) Who was Jan Patočka?

(08:40) Patočka as a philosophical hero

(12:03) The best way to think about Patočka’s thought

(17:20) Meaning as disclosure

(18:03) Patočka’s phenomenology

(21:30) Aletheia

(31:25) The Solidarity of the Shaken

(35:14) The relationship between philosophy and art

(48:48) The essence of art before it has been institutionalised

(52:21) Truth, Beauty and Goodness

(1:00:46) Beauty and the Limits of Truth

(1:07:40) How to Identify the Truth in 2024