Tom Oliver Lucas- Lines of Flight

Based in the UK, I am a photographer whose work focuses on landscape, portraiture, and narrative. Whilst having a preoccupation for post structuralist philosophy I create these narrative documentary images in a hope to raise questions about environmental and social awareness, in countries influenced by Western popular culture. I am currently working with a small community in Sweden, in a village with very few permanent residents, surrounded by almost untouched nature.

Lines of flight, a title inspired by 'A thousand Plateaus', is an ongoing series of images studying different ideas of escape, closely linked to the locals of a remote village in central Sweden and the villages surrounding. “Spaces and places influence or infect how we understand, engage and transform in the world.” (Küpers, 2011) Can feelings about a place change when you begin to analyse assemblages that create place? A discovery of new beauty in places of nostalgic significance. Are feelings left ambiguous as a new place offers new identity in the eyes of new neighbours. Yet we are still tourists in this place. Journeying experience is potentially construed as liminal, engendering reflection, transformation, change, and places we constructed with fellow inhabitants. Movement is fundamentally part of the process of “becoming”. “You can never step in the same river twice” as an aphorism from Heraclitus suggests. Rites of passage are formed by community events through potential construction of a new self, via means of movement, travel and journeying. These verbs may constitute a rite of passage for a community deemed as nomadically influenced. Must nomadically influenced communities be in constant cognitive mobility, physical motion, always in various directions? “the lived present holds a past and a future within its thickness. The phenomenon of movement merely displays temporal and spatial implications in a more striking way.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) Nomadically influenced communities, associated with a more contemporary concept of nomadism, related to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (1988), may offer a different radical alternative to capitalist modes of thought. We are made aware of multiple potentialities in social situations, whilst shown development through movement, organisation and cognitive mobility. A notion of two different ways of life are discovered in the motion of the locals. An attempted escape from societal norms integrated with a nomadically influenced way of living. Basic life is kept crucial in the village, in the form of mainstream western culture; phones, guns and automobiles. However the closeness is shown between the local people and nature via anti mainstream and anti capitalist behaviour, or rites of passage, within the preservation of the environment. To Gramsci, hegemony is leadership using cultural power. Hegemonic ideologies are overpowering and widespread in many cultures. Power through culture forces individuals to believe that dogmatic views are correct. However nomad, and hybrid cultures with similarities to nomad culture, are forming an escape from these oppressive structures, whilst taking an outsider perspective. They distance themselves from what is thought to be second nature and from what others have been conditioned to believe. Though not the traditional nomad community, could these communities influenced by nomadism be taking the form of small permanent settlements, and successfully abandoning the oppressive influence of cultural hegemony? Must we live under the oppression of dogmatic ideologies? Bhabha states that “hybridisation” describes a potential emergence of a third space or new culture, formed through multiculturalism. Cultures through history and those in modern society constantly intrude on one another. We must still develop a greater understanding of multiculturalism and cross-cultural relations. The village and the assemblages which the community consist of, have begun to show this notion of hybridisation or cross-cultural harmony, through a culture which is heavily influenced by historic nomadic communities and contemporary popular western communities, whilst living autonomously.

Website: www.tomoliverlucas.com Instagram: @tomoliverlucas