Eroding the Human/Non-Human Binary in Between Two Tides: Site-Specific Eco-Arts Performance as an Exploration of Changing Climate in a Latourian ‘Critical Zone’

Abstract

In May 2024, researchers from the University of Hull staged a site-specific performance dealing with the natural histories and human cultures of the South Holderness coast. The performance, entitled Between Two Tides, stressed the entanglement of human history/current human actions with other forms of nature in an area currently coping with the challenging effects of climate change. These shifts include: rapid cliff erosion, ongoing dune destruction threatening the collapse of many rare habitats, frequent tidal surges, and changes to sedimental transportation and deposition systems—all causing a radical reformation of the South Holderness landscape. These climate-induced effects led, in 2023, to the retreat of humans from the Spurn peninsula for only the second time in recorded history (the first being when the city of Ravenser Odd was abandoned after catastrophic storm surges during the winter of 1356–7). Our Eco-Arts performance was created for residents from the villages of Easington and Kilnsea, who are threatened by four-to-ten metre per year erosion of a coastline that is not protected by the UK Environment Agency. Our performance site, immediately adjacent to Beacon Lagoons (home to one of the UK’s few populations of rare migratory birds: little terns, a UK Site of Special Scientific Interest, and an Area of Special Protection under the Countryside Act of 1981) was chosen to demonstrate the vulnerability of such landscapes, described by Bruno Latour as ‘Critical Zones’. This essay contextualises and examines our practice research project through the lens of environmental ethics, particularly the recent works of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour.