Dispatch: Landscape (Post) Conflict – Mediating the In-Between

Every one an other – everyone another

This juxtaposition of letters and words with opposing meanings, both passive and ominous, underpinned my experiences of ‘Landscape (post) Conflict’, the Internationale Museum of the Commons Summer School 2025, resonating across conversations and landscapes, languages and lived experiences. In a short, intensive week that comprised site visits, talks, tours and lectures, as well as collectively exploring personal narratives, there was an attempt to understand what it means to inhabit a post-conflict landscape – physically, politically and psychologically. My fellow participants and contributors were generous, warm, and deeply engaging – a diverse gathering that encouraged reflection not just on place, but on perception itself.

Between every one an other and everyone another lies a crucial space that may be termed a kind of whitespace: a pause between oppositions, where meaning is not fixed but negotiated. In the whitespace between these two statements, every one an other – everyone another, lies what could be called a space of truce. For me, that whitespace was bordered by either green and orange or red and blue, the colours of the Irish and British flags respectively – a constant and necessary ritual of marking one's territory from one’s specific standpoint. In this space, questions echo: What is the correct view? How is it mediated? Who is it mediated by?

Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities (1972) about the nuances of migrating from one's hometown or city. ‘... the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name…’ The city you leave is never the same place to which you return.

I returned to my native Belfast in an unfamiliar role as an art tourist of sorts, seeing the city in a whole new light; visiting sites and locations that would have previously felt off limits. Here still, the landscape holds and hides conflict. Lamp posts, pavements, flags coded markers of allegiance – still punctuate public space. They act as signs of ongoing territorialisation. Though we speak of ‘post-conflict’, the landscape remains present-tense, unresolved. At Knowth, we encountered much older marks – engraved stones from a prehistoric world. Their meaning, too, is mediated by interpretation. Aesthetic? Ritual? Survival?

Marked cornerstones at Stormont, the government buildings of Northern Ireland, was a contested site I visited for the first time. These stones bore traces of another war. After the grand tour of this beautifully crafted and ostentatious building, what resonated were subtle traces from World War II. At that time, the building had been coated with tar and manure in efforts to camouflage it from destruction. It begged the question: is this a military landscape or a building militarised in times of war? As Rachel Woodward in Military Geographies (2004) states there are only ever multiple views about a single place or landscape.

Artists and researchers, like anthropologists, navigate this mediated space. We document, interpret, translate – but can never be neutral. Narratives are always politicized; every viewpoint is contextualised, situated. In this sense art becomes not only expression, but resistance – a way to hold multiple truths when dominant powers insist on singular narratives.

So, we return to the question: When can we move peacefully from every one an other to everyone another? From fragmentation to coexistence? This is not a rhetorical ideal but a fundamental human right – to live in peace and harmony, not as erasures of difference, but in acknowledgment of it.

Until we accept the power structures that shape mediation – who speaks, who is heard, who is erased – the narrative will remain conflicted. But the whitespace still holds potential. There, we might learn to see one another equally. There, perhaps, we can begin to live together – truly – as everyone another, in a neutral space free of borders.